Vermin Supreme for president

Newt avoids confrontation with Occupy protestors



Quote from above-linked account:

The protesters waved signs and chanted, supporting two competing candidates in the Republican primary: Ron Paul and an individual named Vermin Supreme, who wore a rubber boot on his head and danced while speaking through a megaphone.

Is this a great country or what?

Friday links of interest

DEAD AIR presents Friday linkage for your perusal, on this eve of the first New Hampshire primary debate.

First up, Senator Rick Santorum, family man, is another morally-bankrupt fake. (Nah, go on! Say it isn't so!) Check out Politico's Santorum: Ultimate D.C. insider:

Rick Santorum received a troubling email in 2009, when he was working as a Fox News analyst — an aggrieved husband was accusing Sen. John Ensign, Santorum’s friend and former Republican colleague, of having an extramarital affair with the aide’s wife.

Santorum quickly tipped off Ensign that the man was threatening to go public with the scandal, a move that set in motion a chain of events that allowed Ensign to get ahead of the news by presenting his version of the story first.

For anyone who knows Santorum, his decision to protect Ensign was not surprising. During his 16 years on Capitol Hill, Santorum developed close personal ties with Republican lawmakers, became immersed in the inner workings of the Senate, climbed the ladder of leadership and embraced earmarks.

As Santorum tries to seize the tea party mantle and paint Mitt Romney as the ultimate establishment candidate, the reality is that Santorum became the ultimate Washington insider.

Interesting! Faithful, moral Catholic daddy of seven, makes sure to protect an adulterer from the ire of his constituents. How is this moral?

Answer: it isn't. Santorum is Mr Morality when it suits him, but not when it doesn't.

Radio show host (and former Fox News talking head) Alan Colmes got in considerable trouble for criticizing the behavior of the Santorums, after Karen Santorum had a miscarriage: They brought the fetus home to show the kids.

No, I could never make that up:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has evoked squeamishness and ridicule for retelling the story of the death of his son, Gabriel, at 20 weeks gestation and the family's unconventional response -- taking the body home from the hospital and allowing their other children to cuddle the corpse and say goodbye.

The Internet lit up with comments this week after Santorum's meteoric rise to second-place in the Iowa caucuses, nearly tying him with presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Some described Santorum's story as "weird" or "horrifying."

Gabriel was the couple's eighth pregnancy and he survived only two hours. In her book, Karen Santorum wrote about bringing the body home to their other children.

''Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness," she wrote. "Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, 'This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.'''

But some mental health experts believe the Santorums may have been ahead of their time by ritualizing their son's death in order to exorcize their grief, though they say taking a body home is unusual and not recommended.

In the context of the times -- the year was 1996 when the family buried Gabriel -- their behavior was understandable, according to Dr. David Diamond, a psychologist and co-author of the 2005 book "Unsung Lullabies."

Helen Coons, a clinical psychologist and president of Women's Mental Health Associates in Philadelphia, said couples are not encouraged to bring a deceased fetus home.

"If a couple chooses to do a burial or memorial service for a third-trimester loss, funeral homes will assist in a caring manner," she said.

Everyone jumped on Colmes for his insensitivity, but I think he simply verbalized (accurately) what the rest of us were thinking.

And Santorum is running for the highest office in the land, Saints preserve us.

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More stuff:

FBI Changes definition of rape (Mother Jones)

Illinois Lottery Checks Bounce For 85 Winners (Huffington Post)

Doggie survives avalanche! (UPI)

David Bowie turns 65! (UK Guardian)

Employees of big companies fill Ohio's Medicaid, food stamp rolls, report says (Dayton Daily News)

Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (Psychology Today)

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And I profusely apologize to everyone for not writing a much more fascinating blog post... but I confess I have spent my whole day babbling ON THIS INTERMINABLE THREAD instead.

And don't forget to TUNE IN TOMORROW! 9am EST, 1600AM and 94.9FM in upstate South Carolina!

GOP still snoozing in SC

From Politico, comes the best non-story of the upcoming election season:

GREENVILLE, S.C. — In the first two presidential states, the GOP picture is clear enough: Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann top the polls in Iowa and Romney is the candidate to beat in New Hampshire.

As for South Carolina, the other critical early state, it’s anybody’s guess.

The first-in-the-South primary couldn’t be any more unsettled. By this point in the 2008 campaign, the Republican contenders had the state’s top consultants locked up, expansive staffs on the ground, and extensive rosters of endorsements. Voters had already been inundated with TV ads. A variety of pollsters had been in the field for months.

This time around? Crickets.

There’s been very little polling, no ads have been aired, and the campaigns are barely staffed up. Just one of the state’s top consultants — who play a unique and exaggerated role in Columbia’s political culture — has signed up with a major candidate. A Fox News debate in May turned out to be a dud, since most of the best-known presidential prospects skipped it.

And almost all of the state’s key endorsements — Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Jim DeMint, almost all of the state’s congressmen, most of its state lawmakers — are still sitting on the sidelines.

If that doesn’t sound like the South Carolina of GOP primary lore, that’s because it isn’t.

In four short years, the Republican scene here has been dramatically reordered, leaving the state’s political class and the GOP field uncertain about the South Carolina electorate—and what kind of candidate is best suited for it.

In just the last election cycle alone, the state has emerged as one of the nation’s tea party’s strongholds, electing a conservative African-American to Congress in Charleston, ousting an insufficiently conservative GOP House incumbent Upstate and putting a female Indian-American in the governor’s office.

“It’s wide open — and there’s a big question mark about [Texas Gov. Rick] Perry getting in, among the infrastructure types and the activists,” said Katon Dawson, a former state GOP chairman.

DeMint, a tea party standard bearer who endorsed Romney last time around in January 2007 , has spent the early primary months calling his state’s congressmen, big donors and state legislators to explicitly ask them to wait until after Labor Day to pick a candidate. DeMint’s supporters are privately calling themselves the “Keep Your Powder Dry” caucus as they organize a candidate forum scheduled for Labor Day weekend.

Read the rest here.

Cry me a River

Left: photo from New York Magazine.

I wasn't going to write anything about Hillary's so-called meltdown, including her now-legendary teary moment, until the New Hampshire primary was over. If the girlie-tears hurt her campaign, that would be a pretty predictable story.

But they didn't. They DIDN'T! I'm actually quite stunned.

On Politico.com, Mike Allen writes:

Senator Clinton on "Good Morning America," from Chappaqua, on whether the teary moment in Portsmouth made a difference with older women, who went for her 57 percent: "Well, I think it could well have been. Certainly people mentioned it to me."

"WHO'S CRYIN' NOW?" asks the New York Daily News. "Hillary slows Obama Express with stunning N.H. victory."

It would seem many Democratic votes were undecided until fairly late. The tears were definitely a factor, in that case:

AP on the exit poll: "The New York senator went from narrowly losing the women's vote in Iowa to Barack Obama to swamping him in New Hampshire among females, 46 percent to 34 percent. ... Independents were a strength for Obama, the young senator from Illinois, who won 41 percent of them in both Iowa and New Hampshire. But while Clinton attracted less than one in five of them in Iowa, she garnered nearly a third of independents in New Hampshire, eating into his advantage. ... People who chose their candidate in the final three days were also kinder to Clinton in New Hampshire, where she and Obama each got more than a third of their vote. In Iowa, the late-deciders had favored Obama by 33 percent to 22 percent."

What does it mean that shedding a few tears helped Hillary? Would similar tears help a male candidate? Is it because of her ice-queen persona?

Frankly, I found the tears rather calculated, although my co-workers thought she just looked tired and frazzled. A female caller on local talk-radio said that Hillary has always seemed guarded and finally appeared emotionally accessible, ending with the statement, "You just can't trust a woman who holds her emotions in. Hillary finally looked human!" Interesting that men are expected to hold THEIRS in, but a woman politician who does the same, is seen as calculating and guarded in a way that a man is not. I found the tears calculated, whereas it appears most people find her usual presentation calculated, and the tears genuine. (I just find her very wonky and somewhat boring.)

Pat Buchanan (who won the GOP New Hampshire primary in 1996), commenting on MSNBC, believes that the Iowa/New Hampshire early-primary rivalry also made a difference; people in New Hampshire will often vote contrary to Iowa voters, in an "Oh, yeah?!?" sorta way. Also, they habitually prefer underdogs, and Hillary shedding tears obviously tapped into that.

Domenico Montanaro at FIRST READ, writes:

Here’s the question that has to be on everyone’s minds: Did Clinton tearing up on Monday change the dynamics of the race? One thing is for sure -- women flocked to her in droves. The fact is, Clinton partisans had just as little clue about their actual chances as the rest of us. They are pointing to the choking up moment, as well to the ABC debate in which Edwards ganged up on her. We noted yesterday the anecdotal evidence from our mini-focus group of professional Democratic women, who were not happy with how quickly this race was ending. Well, apparently, these anecdotes were telling. Clinton pointedly noted in her victory speech that New Hampshire helped her "find her voice." The more emotionally open Clinton is probably the Clinton we'll see for the rest of this primary. Are we looking at a battle between Clinton and her army of women versus Obama and his army of independent crossover voting men?

Again, I repeat, I am stunned the tears helped. And it was women who made the difference. Is this a feminist moment? I'm not sure.

Discuss.

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Real or calculated? You decide.