Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Part 3 of my roundup, after the fold, spans the “Good grief, is Mitt really relying on the Breitbartlets to win this thing for him?!” of early July to the plaintive “Are we there yet?” whimper of the end of September.

Part 4 will follow before the Inauguration, shoulder injury and acts of the FSM willing. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

read the whole post »

Posted by YAFB on 01/09/13 at 11:04 AM
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Thursday, January 03, 2013

Via ThinkProgress:

This unfortunate gun show ad placement isn’t even the first one that has occurred next to a story about the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.

I think John Cole was right when he said nothing would change until displaying an NRA sticker becomes as toxic as claiming KKK membership. But the NRA, even after Wayne LaPierre’s psychotic presser, has a 54% approval rating in the US. I confess I do not get that. At all.

President Obama seems serious about wanting to address gun violence. But his wording in that interview with Dancing Dave was interesting. He said:

“We’re not going to get this done unless the American people decide it’s important and so this is not going to be a matter of me spending political capital. One of the things that you learn having now been in this office for four years. The old adage of Abraham Lincoln’s, ‘with public opinion there is nothing you can’t do and without public opinion there is very little you can get done in this town.’”

I think most people do want to get military-style weapons and high-capacity magazines off the market. But already, less than a month after 26 people, including 20 first graders, were mowed down at school by a lunatic with a Bushmaster, it seems like the urgency to act is fading.

Maybe placement of gun show ads next to stories about gun atrocities means nothing more than careless editorial oversight. Or maybe guns are so embedded in our national psyche that more than half of us really don’t see much of a difference between a gun and a car, except a need to closely regulate only the one with wheels.

Posted by Betty Cracker on 01/03/13 at 05:33 PM
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Sunday, December 30, 2012

Part 2 of my roundup, after the fold, takes us from the primary fever of April to the batshit insanity of the end of June. Part 1 is here and Part 3 is here.

read the whole post »

Posted by YAFB on 12/30/12 at 10:22 AM
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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Just about every outlet runs a recap of the year at this point in the calendar, so I figured I’d join ‘em.

After the fold and in the subsequent parts you’ll find a whizz through the highlights and lowlights of the year I’ve chosen to cherrypick from the pages of Rumproast, along with some nominees for Headline of the Month. All this is obviously open to debate and I’m sure there are plenty of folks who’ll disagree with my choices in what is of necessity a very sketchy and superficial skim of 2012’s themes. If so, feel free to pipe up in the comments.

read the whole post »

Posted by YAFB on 12/26/12 at 08:29 AM
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Saturday, December 15, 2012

When the unthinkable becomes a damn-near weekly occurrence, something is seriously wrong with our society.  Four days ago, ZRM put up a post which posed the questions:

Huh?  How many times will a loosely-bolted-together near-human take an easily available weapon and large amounts of nearly-unregulated ammo to turn a random mostly-safe community space into a bloodbath of passers-by?

What the f*** does it take, Wayne LaPierre, you greedy intransigent gun-lobby whore?  How many innocent people have to needlessly die?

Yesterday, he posted the follow-up.

Unfortunately, the weasels in the government and the media are unwilling to address the “elephant in the room”, which is the easy availability of high-powered, high-capacity firearms in this country.  The gun lobby is just too goddamn powerful for the lily-livered lapdogs in the corridors of power to oppose… they merely wring their hands and whine, “It’s too soon to talk about gun control.  Think of the families!”  These families just had their young children killed, talking about gun control won’t make them feel any more grief.  Eighteen dead children?  What the hell does the ghoulish Wayne Lapierre care about eighteen dead children?  Wayne Lapierre is raking in too much blood money to be concerned with eighteen dead children.

Of course, gun fetishists will insist that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, but that is a crock of malarky… as I noted in my last post about a mass killing, the gun nuts typically omit the first clause of the Second Amendment.  In its entirety, the Second Amendment reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Here is my proposal… call it “Second Amendment strict constructionism to make Conservatives lose it:  If you want a gun, you must be a member of a well regulated militia, and not a nutbag Turner Diaries LARPer B.S. militia.  You would have to register your gun with state or local authorities, and show up for periodic (monthly or quarterly) muster, receiving training, safety instruction, and an evaluation of your fitness to bear that weapon.  No regulation, no arms.  It’s as simple as that.  Having no regulation of arms is the unconstitutional position… “conservative” distortions notwithstanding. 

Later this morning, I’m going to be surrounded by dozens of children the ages of the children who were killed in the Newton, Connecticut massacre.  After our classes, everybody - children, parents, coaches, counsellors - will be assembling for a lovely party to celebrate the holidays, before the program goes on hiatus for two weeks.  While I surely hope that the kids will be blissfully unaware of the horrors that unfolded sixty miles to the northeast, I will make a point of greeting each of them by name, and bidding each of them an individual farewell before we part.  All the while, I’ll know deep down that, even though my friends and I have been giving them the wherewithal to deal with bullies, the guy whose instruction will really be helpful if they encounter a genuinely dangerous situation is Jerry, the track coach.

POSTSCRIPT:  Riddled‘s Smut Clyde, in a comment at Snark Central, posted a depressing assessment of American society, one which I, sadly, cannot refute:

When there is a thriving market in weapons specifically designed for killing lots of people in a short time, when you have the industry and its lobbyists and its affiliated political movement encouraging the purchase of weapons and ammunition, then it seems odd to label the people who buy and use the weapons according to directions as “disturbed”. It’s a form of disturbance that is in tune with your society.

I fear you nailed it, old chum… it’s this societal sickness that makes me so heartsick.

Note: I cleaned up the language somewhat, in deference to my gracious hosts.  I posted a slightly “saltier” version at my eponymous hideaway.

Posted by Big Bad Bald Bastard on 12/15/12 at 07:12 AM
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Thursday, December 13, 2012

Some Villager vignettes for your consideration. First up, Dana Milbank on Joe Lieberman’s sparsely attended farewell speech in the senate:

Joe Lieberman’s Sad Send-Off

It Was a Lonely Farewell for Joe Lieberman.

...A few more senators arrived during the 20-minute speech, but even by the end Lieberman was very much alone — which is how it has been for much of his 24-year tenure. He tried to push back against the mindless partisanship that developed in the chamber, and he paid dearly for it…

What a steaming load of horseshit. Lieberman was a highly partisan actor on behalf of the insurance-financial-military complex, which filled his coffers sufficiently to retain office long after the people of Connecticut were sick of the mewling, sanctimonious prick. Given the damage he inflicted with his war-mongering and petty spite, Lieberman deserved a much grander send-off, such as ejection from the chamber via catapult to a new home in a toxic waste dump.

Instead, he got away with his many perfidies, lionized by ignorant prats like Milbank for his non-existent integrity and bipartisanship, and he’ll no doubt land on K Street, where he’ll rake in millions of dollars. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Lieberman? Boo-fucking-hoo.

Next up: hair harrumphing and fat shaming:

With the exception of every minute of every single episode of Dancin’ Dave Gregory’s “Press the Meat,” this clip illustrates the vacuity of our fucked up political press corps about as well as anything you’ll ever see. George Stephanopoulis and Barbara Walters are discussing her recent interviews with Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie.

Wow, there’s a lot to discuss! You’ve got the Secretary of State in a tumultuous geopolitical time, what with much of the Middle East going to hell, etc., but the teaser for the segment is all about Hillary Clinton’s hair.

Walters apologetically notes that a man wouldn’t be questioned about his coif, but nonetheless, the public demands an answer, so Walters must ask. Clinton responds with the mocking tone the question deserves, but Jaysus, this is stupid. Clinton should have shaved her head on the segment and made a real statement, like Joan of Arc.

Next up, Chris Christie, possible GOP contender in 2016, governor of a hurricane-ravaged state, frequent pugnacious asshole and notorious Obama-thanker. Was the teaser to that segment about how a GOP primary candidate who is famous for his temper might navigate between the batshit crazies and plutocrats who control his party to offer a credible alternative to the Democrats? How about a bit on Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts and the looming threat of climate change to coastal areas?

Nope—it’s about fat Christie’s fat-fat ass and fat-fat-fat gut. Could voters see past his big fat blubber and consider electing such a fatty-fat motherfucker?

Again, Walters poses the question delicately, after making a joke about the “elephant in the room” in the intro. Jaysus. I half expected Christie to respond that if a woman with a speech impediment could become a top broadcast journalist, surely a fat man could aspire to the highest office in the land.

I suppose our political press corps could get even dumber, but it’s hard to imagine how unless they add Jim Hoft to the ranks. Which wouldn’t surprise me.

[X-posted at Balloon Juice]

Posted by Betty Cracker on 12/13/12 at 09:09 AM
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

During Day 35 of the GOP’s “WTF? We Lost” inquest, testimony was given by Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, a TEA Party Senate-wannabe who managed to lose a long-time, in-the-bag Republican Senate seat by ousting its long-time occupant, Sen. Dick Lugar and proceeding to make a World Class Ass of himself in a televised public debate. 

Mourdock scored this coup by sharing his deeply held belief that rapes only happen because God wants them to, ergo the victims of rape should feel honored to carry their “little blessing” to term. (I paraphrased: BN)

Today, Mourdock explains that he lost his election, not because of the insanely idiotic thing that he said about rape, but because the dirty conniving ratbastards of the Librul Media reported it.  Poor Richard is now left with no Senate seat, the scorn of his own party and a mountain of unpaid campaign bills.  As a result, he was forced to go back to the well, one more time, for some post-campaign funding.

This is the Palin-esque little missive that Team Mourdock sent to supporters:

After a bitter, hard-fought campaign, many Republicans all over the country were forced to accept defeat rather than celebrate victory. In our case, we found our campaign caught in the liberal media crosshairs. Never has Indiana seen a more obvious example of media bias by reporters more interested in defeating conservatives than reporting the news.

We fought back and invested heavily in a last-minute push to combat the slew of false accusations Democrats and the liberal media churned up to distract voters.

“The slew of false accusations?” “churned up to distract voters?”  Really??

You said it, Champ, that’s all there is to it.  If the press wasn’t hanging around to catch every pearl of wisdom that fell from your lips, you’d be screaming “bias.”  You said it, they reported it.  Granted it was idiotic, but you said it.

And it’s not as if this was the only stupid thing you said . . . there was also this, after you won the primary to oust Dick Lugar, who was not stupid:

the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else.

Wow! close call Hoosiers.  Maybe someone could sit Mourdock down and explain what it is to be “hoist by one’s own petard.”  Not that he’ll be running for any other office in the foreseeable future . . . and if you received one of those fund-raising letters, it probably means that you were clueless enough to donate to this chucklehead in the first place, so you can ignore all of the foregoing.

Posted by Bette Noir on 12/12/12 at 10:27 AM
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Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Three middle-aged-to-elderly white conservative men recently discussed ways to broaden the GOP’s appeal. Here’s a key insight from their confab:

I see that the way we will get the Hispanics and the other groups, the Asians, as part of the Republican Coalition is to get them first part of the great American Coalition. Make them think of themselves, not make but, persuade them to think of themselves primarily as Americans.

Oh. Ma. Ga. I don’t think they can hear themselves, friends. Bless their hearts.

[H/T: TPM; X-posted at Balloon Juice]

Posted by Betty Cracker on 12/04/12 at 04:41 PM
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Saturday, December 01, 2012

Marindenver’s previous post, with its link to the “Mitt Romney Style” video has convinced me to post a “tightened up” version of a post I put up at my eponymous blog about the appalling, unintentionally hilarious, critique of Gangnam Style by Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and “Pyschology Contributor” Dr Keith Ablow.

Who better to weigh in on an international pop sensation than an angry, stupid old white guy?  I have to admit that my exposure to the song Gangnam Style came pretty late in the game, and was entirely due to a post by Interrobang.  My knowledge of K-pop is slightly more substantial than bubbles but less substantial than rain.  Of course, being ignorant about a particular subject may cause me to eschew criticism of said subject, but Bill O’Reilly has no such qualms about flaunting his dumbassitude.  Yeah, Bill just had to weigh in on Gangnam Style and, in a masterstroke, brought on somebody even more ignorant than himself to contribute his two cents.  Bill could have brought on a smart, perceptive Korean-American to break down this cultural phenomenon, but he’s not really trying to understand it, he’s merely stoking the bigotry of his audience.

read the whole post »

Posted by Big Bad Bald Bastard on 12/01/12 at 05:24 AM
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Friday, November 30, 2012

A HUGE WASTE OF FIREWORKS!!

Noam Scheiber at TNR relates the sad but true story of how Mitt and his advisers relied on the results of flawed internal polling almost exclusively in the waning days of the campaign to confidently predict that Romney would win by a comfortable margin.

Scheiber charts out the predicted outcomes in swing states from the internal polls, which were composed of 2 day averages taken over the weekend before the election, compared to the actual results in those states.  The contrast is head shaking.  The polls underestimated Obama’s vote totals from 2 points to as many as 7 points in these states, all of which were won by Obama and not, as the campaign expected, by Romney.

It really begs the question of whether they ever even wondered why their poll results were so out of line compared to other polls being taken over the same periods by independent sources.  The differences appear to be misguided assumptions about the demographic make-up of voters who would turn out combined with a belief that Romney was experiencing a surge of momentum in several of the states (helped on, no doubt, by all the people clapping hard for it to be true).

But before you schedule the fireworks display and invite all your big donors to fly their private jets in and help celebrate (to the extent that the airport was apparently in danger of running out of plutocrat jet parking spots) and decide to forego the concession speech, wouldn’t you want to, you know, nail down your figures a little more?  Take a hard look at the assumptions and reconcile them to the assumptions being made by the pollsters who weren’t projecting a Romney landslide?  Question things just a leeetle bit more?  So poor Tagg didn’t have to melt down and Egg didn’t need to cry?  No stiff upper lips for the gob smacked after all.

Not if you do things Mitt Romney Style I guess.  Which brings me to the central point.  What a bullet we dodged!  Someone who is so ready to believe in the complete veracity of their polls when all the other polls are saying “no, no” (well, not all, exactly; Faux News was still out there, but still) wouldn’t even have to try and fake the WMD stuff to take us to war with Iran.  He’d just send the troops in with that smirk on his face.

And we never did see his tax returns, did we?

Posted by marindenver on 11/30/12 at 05:40 PM
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Saturday, November 17, 2012

It’s starting to really shape up that the criticism of the Obama Administration regarding the attack on the consulate at Benghazi is a lot of outrage about….the Obama Administration even existing. I was astonished that then-Republican candidate for the presidency, Mitt Romney, chose to opportunistically seize on the deaths of four Americans because it was the sort of flail a losing campaign with a candidate who neither seemed to know or care to understand much about foreign policy might launch. Astonished that no one called it off—not astonished that it occured. The point being—I could remember exactly that sort of fail-flail occuring with a candidate who attempted to grandstand on an issue—the economy, which was not his known strong point, in exactly the same point in his campaign;

The candidate was Senator John McCain, and the event was the nonsensical suspension of his campaign and the further subsequent flail of calling together a group of his peers to try and hash out a plan. From then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s version of the events:

It was brilliant political theater that was about to degenerate into farce. Skipping protocol, the president turned to McCain to offer him a chance to respond: “I think it’s fair that I give you the chance to speak next.”

But McCain demurred. “I’ll wait my turn,” he said. It was an incredible moment, in every sense. This was supposed to be McCain’s meeting—he’d called it, not the president, who had simply accommodated the Republican candidate’s wishes. Now it looked as if McCain had no plan at all—his idea had been to suspend his campaign and summon us all to this meeting. It was not a strategy, it was a political gambit, and the Democrats had matched it with one of their own.

...

Finally, raising his voice over the din, Obama said loudly, “I’d like to hear what Senator McCain has to say, since we haven’t heard from him yet.”

The room went silent and all eyes shifted to McCain, who sat quietly in his chair, holding a single note card. He glanced at it quickly and proceeded to make a few general points. He said that many members had legitimate concerns and that I had begun to head in the right direction on executive pay and oversight. He mentioned that Boehner was trying to move his caucus the best he could and that we ought to give him the space to do that. He added he had confidence the consensus could be reached quickly.

As he spoke, I could see Obama chuckling.

McCain had nothing, then, and got called on it, just like Mitt Romney had nothing when, during the second debate, he stepped into the trap (“Please proceed, Governor”) that invited the moderator to actually perform an act of journalism and check the factual record, acknowledging that Obama from day one did consider the Benghazi assault an act of terror.

How is it then, that right after Mitt Romney’s notable shellacking in the election, that Senator John McCain decides to jump on the Benghazi bandwagon with both feet, so eager to publically smear Obama that he calls a potential nominee for Hillary Clinton’s replacement as Secretary of State “none too bright” whilst he is literally blowing off a briefing to potentially get the kind of answers that he was seeking?

How does one shriveled human actually contain so much bitterness?  I don’t even know. In his wake, the wingnuts who were in mid-flock are caught spouting gibberish by journalists who smell a rat.

This leaves me with the happy thought, espoused by Booman, that just like this was a non-story, maybe this means John McCain is finally persona non grata.  I, too, have longed for the time when McCain inserted his platinum card to draw from the old Bank of American Trust, and finds it declined (hell, he should get a bill with penalties for being well and truly overdrawn). But I treat this non-story as a bloggable event in much the way a doctor is interested in symptoms—“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”  I’d like to see the symptoms abate—and yet, I am watchful in the event that the screamers on the right will try to actually get their “Watergate-style” hearings—facts be damned!  They see the ghosts.

They need them. Or they would have to face the idea that maybe, just maybe, the Obama Administration’s greatest success is in not really being fuck-ups.

(X-Posted at Strangely Blogged.)

Posted by Vixen Strangely on 11/17/12 at 12:10 AM
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Thursday, November 15, 2012

My brilliant co-bloggers have covered the Petraeus affair with their characteristic brilliance.  The one thing I have to add to the commentary concerns the role of the Republican party’s resident Iago/Starscream...

Consider, if you will, the strange case of General David Penetraeus.  When he was heading up the counterinsurgency in Iraq, Petraeus was the fair-haired boy who stood up to quisling Democrats regarding war policy, any criticism of him was considered treasonous by right wingers.  To the Republican true believers, General Petraeus was seen as the great hope for Republican party since Bush was a failure (for a hilarious sample of butthurt, check out this fawning video).  The hero-worship for Petraeus wasn’t limited to his biographer/comare.

The most bizarre feature of the current Petraeus adultery scandal is the source of the leak.  A teabagging FBI agent got wind of Petraeus’ affair and concocted a theory that the press was conspiring to hide the affair to, get this, protect President Obama.  The teabagger contacted fellow teabagger Eric Cantor, who informed the director of the FBI.  The conspiracy theory is now that Petraeus was forced to resign before he could testify about the attack on the consular office Benghazi.  Yeah, this is an Obama Administration scandal, even though all of the principals are Republicans.  Now, the conspiracy mavens on the right just might impeach the president for another man’s infidelity (the specter of Clinton’s penis yet again looms over the office of the presidency).

If Eric Cantor stabbed David Petraeus in the back in an attempt to embarrass President Obama, it would not be the first time that he stuck it to a fellow Republican.  During last year’s debt ceiling negotiations, Cantor bucked Boehner’s authority as Speaker of the House.  Eric Cantor is a false-friend worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy or a mafia movie.  Part of me thinks that he might be engaged in a deep-cover Alinskyite plot to undermine the GOP from within (and then I come to my senses).  It would be fun to spread this rumor in order to undermine Cantor, the man who single handedly prevented David Petraeus from rebuilding the Republican Party and taking it to victory (bonus hilarity at the link- d00d thinks Scott Brown should run in a 2013 special election if John Kerry becomes Secretary of State).

Posted by Big Bad Bald Bastard on 11/15/12 at 11:55 AM
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Let me open this by saying that I have nothing in particular against Charles Krauthammer.  Indeed, I have a lot of respect for his career achievements—the man has racked up most of the “serious journalist” credentials that any writer can.  But, Mr. K is human and, as such, subject to emotion and occasional error and, apparently, the results of the 2012 Presidential Election were shocking enough to derail even a “serious man” like Charles Krauthammer.

Krauthammer’s first foray into the post-election “light” was to reassure Republicans that they had gotten nothing wrong outside of subtlety, perhaps, and that their candidate, Mr Willard Romney was a generally swell fellow who would have made a generally swell Chief Executive.  Seriously?  Mr. K has also hastened to reassure the GOP that President Obama’s win means nothing, in the grand scheme of things.  Obama has no mandate, he has no plan and he’ll be over before they know it. SNAP!

Close on the heels of that nugget of political “good advice,” came Mr Krauthammer’s rather patronizing opinion that Hispanics are just a big happy crowd of wanna-be-Republicans in brown-face who will follow you anywhere if you shout “Amnesty” at them.  The basis for Mr. Krauthammer’s estimation that Hispanics are “natural Republicans” is that they are hardworking, family oriented people with “traditional” values, unlike the rest of us.  His conceit is that the Republican Party holds the moral high ground in the country and therefore should be the tent that “all the best people” flock to.

One might expect that Krauthammer could have worked out most of his Obama-animus with those screeds and exited with a portion of dignity still intact, but he wasn’t finished with Obama by a long shot, because his nose for a “BIG story” led him right to the Petraeus Affair—and his absurd little conspiracy theory about how the Obama administration blackmailed and then sacrificed the god-like Petraeus to cover up Obama’s “incompetent” handling of the Benghazi attack.

read the whole post »

Posted by Bette Noir on 11/15/12 at 07:55 AM
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Sunday, November 11, 2012

Well.  We’ve had three days to absorb the messages and lessons of the 2012 Election—some of us (in fact, a majority of us) are vindicated; others are nursing exploded heads. I give the “exploding heads” crowd generally forty-eight hours to get their shit together and rejoin the human race.  Usually that’s enough, with football and weekend activities for a distraction.  [I’m willing to grant one tiny subset of the EHs a few days extra—namely, Team Romney—because (Mean Mitt) they had their credit cards cut off before they could get a taxi home or even buy a post-election beer to cry in.]

Anyone old enough to have lived through eight or more US presidential election cycles could pretty accurately guess what a Republican reaction to an Obama re-election would look, smell and sound like, because the same geniuses that came up with supply-side economics, trickle-down theory and preventive war are still calling the shots and winding up the rusty old clockworks that make the GOP tick.  For better or worse, those good old boys appear to be more long-lived than their base which is dying off in droves, these days. 

Even the gang at The American Conservative, not famous for their funny bones, posted up a number of humorous pre-election predictions of the GOP’s likely reaction to an Obama win.  Those “serious conservatives” were not taken in by Unskewed Polls or gut feelings that Republican electoral exuberance would usher in the Age of Romney.  The TACs consider themselves “true political conservatives,” Burkean conservatives, not to be mistaken for “movement conservatives.”  They suspected that Romney would not win the election for a number of thoughtful and well-articulated reasons.  And they were pretty much right on the money.  So perhaps the GOP establishment might want to reconnect with them sometime soon.

And the Old Guard Republicans have not let us down.  From Karl Rove’s apoplectic meltdown on Fox News’ Election night coverage to hating-for-dollars Rush Limbaugh’s insight that:

It’s just very difficult to beat Santa Claus.  People are not going to vote against Santa Claus, especially if the alternative is being your own Santa Claus.  He continued that Obama supporters “think the Democrat Party’s gonna punish the people who have unfairly gotten stuff that they shouldn’t have. They got more stuff than other people have stuff and that stuff’s gotta be redistributed.

And let’s not forget The Donald’s twittermanic call to arms for the “torches and pitchforks crowd” . . .

But the hands down winner of this year’s GOP Exploding Head has to be Old Guardian Mary Matalin’s on-air tantrum bound to become a classic.

read the whole post »

Posted by Bette Noir on 11/11/12 at 08:06 AM
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Saturday, November 10, 2012

Comically obvious arch-villain Florida Governor Rick Scott doesn’t understand why you people are so upset about waiting until one o’clock in the morning to cast a ballot and STILL having no official outcome five days later:

“Look, it was a close race. We want to make sure every vote gets counted. Every vote’s important, so I think the secretary did the right thing,” Scott said. “Here’s what people should feel good about: We have a diligent and thorough process, and every vote’s getting counted.”

Here’s what people should feel good about: Even if the Dems tap an Everglades python that has just swallowed a litter of puppies on live TV to run against Scott in 2014, Scott will lose. Here’s what people should feel queasy about: The Florida Democratic Party is dumb enough to blow this opportunity.

Right now, the name being bandied about the most is former GOP Governor Charlie Crist, who got booted out of the Republican primary in favor of Marco Rubio when he ran for US Senate, then switched to independent to take Rubio on and got his ass kicked.

Crist wasn’t an awful governor, and he’s been a stand-up guy for President Obama—ever since Crist realized his former party had turned into a freak show, which just happened to coincide with its rejection of himself. I’m sure he’d be perfectly willing to morph into a Democrat to run against Scott. But in a state where disgust with Republicans is at its highest level in years, maybe we don’t have to settle for a Blue Dog. This ain’t Missouri.

Former Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, who knows how to handle the clowns at Fox News, was one of the few Supervisors of Elections who didn’t embarrass the state back in 2000. She was an excellent and popular mayor of a key Florida city.

Now she’s speaking out on the still-unfolding 2012 voting debacle. Unlike Crist, Iorio actually is a Democrat. I know it’s crazy, but I’m hoping the Florida Democratic Party will nominate a Democrat to take on Scott.

[X-posted at Balloon Juice]

Posted by Betty Cracker on 11/10/12 at 08:42 AM
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