“I’m being very thoughtful and deliberate,” Crist explains. “I’ve got a big decision to make. I haven’t concluded anything yet, but I’m getting a lot of counsel, lots of advice, and I’m listening to it. My fellow Floridians want a public servant who puts people first over politics.”
“This is a world full of wonderful opportunity,” Crist concludes. “I love fighting for the people of Florida and will continue to fight for them. It’s always exhilarating.”
And will he call back John Cornyn? “I’ve been busy,” Crist laughs. “I’ll get back to them very soon.”
Congrats to Robert Costa on the big scoop. Of course, the fact that Crist is an untrustworthy Arlen-esque crapweasel isn’t exactly news, but . . .
My capital-L Libertarian buddy Thomas Knapp was in the comments of the earlier post with a lot of doom-and-gloom about Marco Rubio’s chances in a three-way race, but that’s just Tom being Tom. He’s one of these hard-core Libertarians who hates Republicans like God hates sin, and he can’t help it.
This is potentially a true disaster scenario, where Crist peels off just enough centrists and Republicans from Rubio to hand the seat to Kendrick Meek. I’ve blathered on endlessly about how tea partiers could destroy the GOP’s chances in November by voting independent, but lo and behold, it’s a centrist who’s now poised to do the most damage in that regard.
Absurd fears. Stop letting polls tell you what to think about a campaign that hasn’t yet been run. If you believed the polls six months ago, Crist was going to cruise to victory over Marco. Becoming “independent” isn’t going to make that dead skunk Charlie Crist magically popular, and Kendrick Meek is . . . well, he’s Kendrick Meek.
Anyone tempted to think that Marco would lose a three-way just needs to picture the televised debate between these three. Who is the most telegenic, the most attractive candidate?
Isn’t it obvious that the baseball is any national or international event, the girl with the (base) balls is Sarah Palin, and the shmuck is a Barely Halfwit Outfielder?
Gayer than the annual convention of the K.D. Lang Fan Club, but the White House was so eager to slam Ben Domenech as author of a right-wing “whisper campaign” that now the Obama administration finds itself lashed to the mast of its adamant insistence on Kagan’s heterosexuality.
Left-wing bloggers Julian Sanchez and Matt Yglesias shared Domenech’s apparently mistaken belief that Kagan was a lesbian. As Sanchez noted on Twitter, “Gay news sites treat it as common knowledge.”
Suddenly, it seems possible that the next Supreme Court pick might be a lesbian. … Solicitor General Elena Kagan is not openly gay at the moment — which, of course, may mean she’s not gay at all. But persistent rumors, an absence of denial, and some assurances from people I trust make me think that, yeah, she probably is. And she’s right now on the short list of potential Supreme Court nominees to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on his retirement this summer.
[A] White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said he complained to CBS because the column “made false charges.” I would have hoped that in 2010, in a liberal White House, the statement that someone is gay would not be considered a “charge.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “charge” as “a claim of wrongdoing; an accusation.” For many decades it was indeed a “charge,” and a career-ending one, to be identified as gay. I would hope that’s no longer true, and I’m disappointed in the White House’s language.
Of course, there are serious considerations involved here, but I’m still laughing at the overwhelming silliness of it all. The White House, in its eagerness to depict right-wingers as hateful homophobes, has staked its credibility on Elena Kagan being straight.
And she’s gayer than the audience at a Greta Garbo film festival!
If Solicitor General Elana Kagan gets the nod, conservatives will beat the hell out of her for opposing military recruitment on campus when she was dean of Harvard Law School. And liberals should concede the point; the conservatives will be right.
But that’s no fun at all, Beinart. The fun part is, Elena Kagan is gayer than the semi-finalists in a Janet Reno lookalike contest!
Top GOP officials in DC now believe it is a virtual certainty that FL Gov. Charlie Crist (R) will bolt the GOP and run instead as an independent, sources tell Hotline OnCall.
Over the weekend, Crist pulled TV advertisements that had been running in key markets, slamming ex-FL House Speaker Marco Rubio (R). Those ads, on which Crist spent close to $1.5M so far, were aimed at moving poll numbers that showed Crist losing badly.
In taking the ads down, top GOP officials have surmised both that Crist has made his decision to run as an independent, and that the attacks weren’t having an impact on the race.
Pulling the ads makes it look like Crist has come to some sort of decision — and we won’t have to wait much longer to see what it is. The filing deadline is eleven days away.
Charlie Crist: Making Arlen Specter Look Honorable by Comparison!
Remember who to thank for this debacle: John Cornyn and the treacherous bastards at the NRSC.
The smart move [for Crist], in my opinion, would be to concede defeat with grace and then spend the next few years rebuilding himself. The NRSC and the GOP establishment still like Crist. They chose him over Marco Rubio, after all. They don’t want him to leave the GOP; that tells me that even if he loses to Marco Rubio, if he does it in the right way he could still possibly have a home in the Republican Party.
No, Cassy, we don’t want Crist to make the “smart move.” He’s been stuck on stupid ever since he (literally) embraced Obama, and what we want now is for Sorry Charlie to implode like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, a flaming gasbag of ludicrous self-pitying outrage. If Crist goes independent and gets stomped, he will become an embarrassment, a laughingstock, a spectacular example of what happens to elitist Republicans who think they’re better than the people who elect them.
It was 1997 and I was a columnist for the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune when the latest copy of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Intelligence Report” arrived at the office. Looking for some local angle in the report — my editor’s mantra was “local, local, local” — I flipped to the map in the back where, with several symbols, the SPLC identified the location of various “hate” groups.
My eyes popped out of my head when I saw that one of the symbols was located squarely in our community, identifying a “patriot” group that the SPLC wished to portray as a menace to the public weal: A chapter of the John Birch Society!
It so happened that I actually knew the local JBS organizer. Gretna Fuller was the wife of a judge in neighboring Gordon County. A few years earlier, as sports editor of the Calhoun (Ga.) Times, I’d covered her son when he wrestled and played baseball for Gordon Central High. In addition to her activities with Birchers, Gretna was also an all-around conservative Republican, involved with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum among other groups and a frequent contributor to our newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor column.
And here was the Southern Poverty Law Center identifying Gretna Fuller in the same category as dangerous groups like the Hammerskins and the Aryan Nations!
Think what you will about the John Birch Society, they’ve never been associated with crime or violence, and this SPLC “hate” map included several JBS chapters, denoted in the category of “patriot” groups. In the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the SPLC had evidently begun casting a wide net to identify “patriot” organizations, creating the impression that there were Tim McVeigh wannabes lurking in every neighborhood. And among these alleged threats to society were harmless Republican moms like Gretna Fuller.
This startling discovery was my first real insight into the modus operandi of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and especially the role of Mark Potok in the transformation of the Montgomery-based center. Originally devoted to tracking violent neo-Nazi and Klan groups, in the 1990s the SPLC began expanding its purview to include all “extremists,” which has proved to be an amazingly flexible term. In 2003, for example, an SPLC report warned its readers of the dangers posed by such respectable conservative organizations as the American Entreprise Institute and the Bradley Foundation.
In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser — the SPLC’s hometown newspaper — published a nine-day expose of Dees’ empire of hypocrisy, cynicism and greed. It said in an editorial that the Klan had become “a farce.” It also agreed with the criticism that the SPLC “focuses on the anti-Klan theme not because the Klan is a major threat, but because it plays well with liberal donors.” . . .
In 2009, liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn called Dees the “arch-salesman of hate-mongering.” Under a headline that labeled Dees the “King of the Hate Business,” he said Dees thrived by “selling the notion there’s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.
It was with the addition of Potok to the SPLC’s staff, however, that Dees’ outfit began trying to connect this “massed legion of haters” to mainstream conservatism. This involves a deceptive technique that Laird Wilcox — a respected researcher of extremist movements — has called the “links and ties” method, using incidental associations between groups and individuals to create a false perception of shared ideology and purpose.
One of the big coups for the SPLC was smearing various Republican politicians, including Sen. Trent Lott, former Sen. George Allen, and former Rep. Bob Barr, for associating with the Council of Conservative Citizens. Once the media accepted the SPLC’s portrayal of the CCC as a dangerous “white supremacist” organization — a portrayal that CCC officials have always disputed — then the links-and-ties method meant that any association with that group could be construed as evidence of “white supremacist” sympathies.
No one has ever directly accused George Allen of being a white supremacist — which he most certainly is not — but the pretzel-logic of the links-and-ties method has the effect of making its targets guilty until proven innocent.
Few people in mainstream journalism or politics undertakes a critical examination of the SPLC’s labels because to do so would be to risk the charge of defending a “hate” group — and then, through the magic of the links-and-ties method, you will be named in the next indictment.
Since the arrival of Potok at SPLC, the links-and-ties smears have multiplied to the point of transparent absurdity. A few years ago, the SPLC began smearing immigration-control groups in such a way that Michelle Malkin would qualify as a “white supremacist.” Jim Antle recently busted that smear:
Advocates of reduced immigration levels and stronger border security are high on the SPLC’s list of targets because of the obvious racial component of the immigration issue.
Locating cranks who have made ill-tempered remarks about immigrants is not terribly difficult work for highly trained members of the thought police. But Morris Dees’s marauders have not been content to stop there. In late 2007, the SPLC labeled the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a hate group. This troubling designation by extension tarred organizations like CIS [the Center for Immigration Studies] and Roy Beck’s NumbersUSA—and quickly achieved its intended chilling effect on the immigration debate. The SPLC’s smear became the centerpiece of the National Council of La Raza’s “Stop the Hate” campaign. “Hate” was loosely defined as any position that differed from La Raza’s advocacy of loose borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants. La Raza used the SPLC’s “findings” to try to silence its critics, and the mainstream media, always eager to portray conservatives as racists, cheerfully repeated the slur in its woefully biased coverage of the amnesty debate. Stop the Hate claimed its biggest scalp when Lou Dobbs stepped away from his microphone at CNN—by most accounts, a voluntary move, but one hastened by the network’s growing discomfort with the controversy surrounding Dobbs’s outspoken views on immigration. FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA are far from hate groups. They are wonky, white-paper-generating organizations committed to nothing more controversial than cutting back immigration from its post-1965 high of 1 million new immigrants a year to the more traditional level of 300,000. They shy away from the more racially charged aspects of the debate, which reflects their roots in the wing of the immigration-restrictionist movement animated primarily by environmental and economic concerns rather than blood and soil.
But such facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of a good fundraising mailing—or a malicious attempt to drum certain viewpoints out of polite society. In its fevered writings about immigration reformers, the SPLC has concocted conspiracies so elaborate they would raise eyebrows within the John Birch Society.
It comes full-circle, you see? The SPLC’s fearmongering about the Right — where America is always just one Tea Party rally away from that dreaded moment when the brownshirts come goosestepping down Main Street — is at least as irresponsible as the Birchers’ fearmongering about the Left. Unlike the JBS, however, the SPLC is treated by mainstream journalists as respectable and authoritative. And among those abetting this smear operation is Geraldo Rivera:
Militias are right-wing and angry and tea partiers are right-wing and angry, ergo tea partiers want to blow up the Murrah building. No need to directly accuse them of it, either. Just warn the public vaguely about the danger of “anti-government rhetoric” and let swing voters make the connection themselves.
One of the unintended consequences of the election of our post-racial president is that the “racist” smear has now become so ubiquitous that more and more people have begun to question the labels that liberals like Potok so blithely affix to their political adversaries. Ask the PUMAs like Hillbuzz how it felt, during the 2008 Democratic primaries, to be labeled “racist” for supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Courage is the indispensible virtue. At some point, conservatives have to stop being frightened by smear artists like Mark Potok. Remember: There are five A’s in “raaaacism.”
Politically connected staffers in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department twisted arms to steer a $5.4 million contract for crystal stemware to a tiny interior-design firm without putting it out for bid . . .
Two senior State Department contracting officials, Randolph Bennett and Tandra Jones, successfully pushed for the contract to go to a firm run by Denise Mathis-Gardner as a no-bid minority “8(a)” contract, the source said — an action that one shut-out competitor complained cost taxpayers an extra $1 million.
The contracted firm, Systems Design Inc., based in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, had no experience making glassware, and its owner had only recently emerged from bankruptcy proceedings, the source said. . . .
“These two [Bennett and Jones] went down to the small-business office and insisted that we have an 8(a) company — have this company SDI do our contract,” the source said.
“They [SDI] don’t know how to make glass. The glassware is being made in Sweden.” . . .
Records show Bennett gave $1,000 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, $2,000 to the Obama Victory Fund and $2,300 to the Democratic National Committee for the inauguration.
The Obama administration: Transparent as Swedish crystal!
