We must protect the sanctity of marriage!

You have to love politicians like Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina. This guy might be king of the idiots in the way he tried to get away with his extramarital affair--by running off to Argentina without telling his staff where he was going, causing everyone to wonder what the hell happened to the governor of South Carolina. Here is what he had to say about that. AP:

"I've let down a lot of people, that's the bottom line," Sanford said at a news conference. He said he's known the woman about eight years, but their relationship turned into something more a year ago while he was on an economic development trip to Argentina.

I don't want to be unfair to Republicans. Democratic politicians have had their own share of cheating on their wives. But gosh darnit, it just feels good to say to them, "GOTCHA!"

Because for people like Sanford, protecting the sanctity of marriage has nothing to do with having a working marriage of your own. It has nothing to do with respecting the values of monogamy in a two-person setting of a relationship. No, for Mark Sanford, it means making sure that gay people can't get married, can't get civil unions, and can't adopt children.

As I said before, Sanford is an idiot. Who else would do this:

A former three-term congressman, Sanford most recently snared headlines for his unsuccessful fight to turn aside federal stimulus cash for his state's schools. His vocal battle against the Obama administration -- and libertarian, small-government leanings -- won praise from conservative pundits. Ultimately, a state court order required him to take the money.

Oh, believe it or not, the dolt also said this once: "It is my personal view that the largest proclamation of one's faith ought to be in how one lives his life."

Nice, Sanford, nice.

This is not surprising.

So The New York Times just wrote an article about some newly-released audio from former President Richard Nixon. Like always, he's a jerk. But this time, he's being a really, really racist jerk. Really racist.

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster "permissiveness," and said that "it breaks the family." But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

"There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white," he told an aide, before adding: "Or a rape."

I wouldn't put it past Nixon to think that he associated interracial love with the old, hateful notion that black men were always after white women.

Oh, Tricky Dick. When will history ever vindicate you?

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Let's try out a micro blogging platform.
Nobody reads this, but I'll still post on here.

Or does it explode?

"Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Over the past two days, I'm pretty sure the world exploded. Or at least Iran did. If you've been following (at least as best as reporters can in a counry that went to hell in a day), then you've seen that the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president, was most likely a sham. So that's when crowds supporting the opposition candidate Mousavi started burning everything.

Ahmadinejad didn't exactly make it hidden that he planned to disrupt democracy. Mousavi's text messaging networks were jammed hours before the election. He even had to migrate his website to a Google Sites address to avoid censorship in Iran.

Israel's government's reaction to this hasn't been stellar, to say the least. Via The Australian:

However, in the run-up to the Iranian polls, Mr Ahmadinejad's re-election has come to be seen as a strategic advantage. "There is no one who has served Israel's information program better than him," wrote columnist Ben Caspi in the daily Ma'ariv yesterday.

Israeli security officials note that decisions regarding major issues such as the nuclear program are made in Iran not by the president, regardless of who he is, but by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a small group of senior clerics.

They have a good point in that last sentence. Khamenei is the man behind the curtain for every political move in Iran, which is a theocratic republic (emphasis on theocratic). The only way to overcome such an oppressive state of affairs is for an internal people's revolution, which is why regardless of who wins the elections, the Iranian people need to take a stand against the Supreme Leader. Easier said than done, but it has to be done if they want progress.

Biden "doubts" the election. Hopefully the U.S. will do more diplomatically to see that this thing resolve itself peacefully. But hopefully we take a hard stand against theocracy. That most likely will not happen though.

On a different topic, a far-right terrorist shot and killed George Tiller, the late-term abortion doctor who saved countless women's lives. Everyone immediately, and rightly so, pointed their fingers at Bill O'Reilly, the man who helped provoke the violent acts by going on long and often nonsensical diatribes about Tiller, who he calls "The Baby Killer."

Joan Walsh went on The O'Reilly Factor to debate this, and I think it's safe to say that Bill O'Reilly almost collapsed near the end under his own denseness.

It's important to note that no matter how often O'Reilly says that Tiller has "blood on his hands," it is really O'Reilly that is an accomplice to murder. Walsh points that out numerous times throughout the debate.

More right wing violence happened at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which is a tragedy, plain and simple. But the shooting can be linked to right wing media pundits showing their anger and coaxing their viewers into dangerous and insane actions. Shephard Smith, of all people, points this out:



The left needs a Michael Moore film right about now.
Wait, there's one coming out soon! Yay!