Thanks, Mike Stark

When we flew to Boulder in October, we sat next to a Virginia university professor on one leg of the trip. We chatted about politics and when I heard he was from Virgina I said, oh yes, Senator Macacaca vs Jim Webb -- he was stunned that someone from a prairie city in Canada knew about Allen, his racist history and his pro-Confederate ideology, and was rooting for Webb to win.
The reason I knew about it, of course, was because of the blogs.
The reason they knew about it -- as Steve Gilliard sees it -- is because of an ex-Marine law student blogger named Mike Stark:

Webb was going to lose this race. It was just that simple. He was underfunded, Allen was seen a presidential contender, and there had been a contentious primary. Things were so bad between Webb and black politicians that one of the leaders in the legislature endorsed Allen.
Then came Mike Stark.
Macaca set the stage. His bullying of a Webb campaign worker on video spread from the blogs to cable news to broadcast news. But Allen still had a lead and much good will.
The Webb campaign wanted no part of Stark, they wanted to fight with clean hands. And if they did, well, Webb would not be senator-elect. Even now, people are saying "oh, he was just showing off"
My simple response to that is shut the fuck up. Jim Webb is a senator because of the question he asked Allen in August. He asked him, on camera, "have you ever used the word nigger?" He said no, and then the election became a debate on Allen's racism. Not for a week, but for the entire cycle. Allen's sick racism shone through because people remembered his open contempt for blacks. He was one of those racists who called people niggers in rooms full of white people.
No MSM reporter was going to ask that, in any form. The right would have exploded. But once that was on the table, the MSM ran to daylight with it. Because there was so much to work with.
Then came his discomfort on finding out about his Jewish heritage. It really freaked out the media. The more you knew about Allen, the weirder he was. Beating his siblings, hanging a noose in his office.
Oh, yeah, then he decided to parse Webb's war novels.
Oooops.
Because it allowed other people to do what Webb wouldn't, discuss his military service, including winning the Navy Cross. Reminding people that Allen was a bully and a coward.
And in the last weekend of the campaign, Allen's goons beat Stark, then had him dragged out in handcuffs. Why? It sucked the air out of the room. As they tossed the former Marine and law student around for asking about Allen's sealed arrest record, they put the coda on Allen as bully for the world to see.
What was especially funny was the "help" the right bloggers gave......Mike. Their video and pictures proved his case. I think Cheetos rots the brain.
Webb won a tight race because the dynamics changed. And they changed because of a video and a question.

Harry Reid owes Stark a Thank You -- as do we all.

Synonyms for loser

. . . also-ran, bomb, bummer, bust, deadbeat, defeated, disadvantaged, dud, failure, fall guy, flop, flunkey, lemon, turkey, underdog, underprivileged, washout . . .

Bush, Cheney and the boys need to be hammered with a few of these synonyms for "loser real quick. Bilmon reports

The White House said today that it would seek Senate confirmation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s successor in the lame duck Congress that is about to reconvene.

And they're also talking about trying to get Bolton confirmed, for heaven's sake. Billmon asks

Will the Dems roll over (old habits die hard) or will they politely inform their Republican colleagues that if they go through with this travesty, they can expect to be assigned offices somewhere in lower Anacostia?

At least Charlie Rangel is starting off on the right foot.

Leaderless leaders

So maybe the Liberals should just cancel the convention?

A new poll suggests Alberta was the only remaining bastion of federal Conservative party support, with the leaderless Liberals leading the Tories in every other region of the country.

The Green Party, by the way, is now polling at nine per cent...

Buh-bye

So I guess the chance that the Senate will confirm John Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN just vanished down the rabbit hole -- and as of January, he is officially out of the job (or I gather, he could keep on doing it but cannot be paid.)

The Canadan example

Over at Kos, Georgia10 concludes that yesterday's election means America is becoming a progressive country:

. . . the governing ideology of conservatism is slipping out of favor with the American people. The decisive Democratic victory was a rejection of the conservativism peddled by this Republican Party
. . . When you can't get an abortion ban passed in freakin' South Dakota, America isn't trending conservative. When you can't get a gay marriage ban passed in Arizona, America isn't trending conservative. When opposition to gay marriage bans was more than 40% in 5 of the 8 bans that passed, America isn't trending conservative. When a majority of Americans choose Democrats to represent them, America isn't trending conservative.
America has changed a lot since the days of Reagan. It's changed even more since the GOP's Contract with America. Simply put, what Americans want is incompatible with what the GOP stands for today. America's appetite for the rapid, selfish conservatism of the last 12 years is waning, and the progressive ideology is becoming more attractive to more and more of its citizens.

Now, I'm not sure she is correct -- after 2004, Tom Delay crowed that America would be a Republican nation for ever, and look how THAT turned out. So I would need to see a few more elections go Democratic before I could agree with Georgia completely.
But that said, I do HOPE that this is true.
And I would like to think that maybe Canada has played a small part in this -- showing America by example how a progressive country does things.
We approved gay marriage, and the churches of the nation didn't collapse.
We talked about legalizing marijuana, and the justice system didn't explode.
Our first, and preferred, option for dealing with problems is always negotiation, not force or bluster -- we don't indulge ourselves in ridiculous talk about 5,000 mile fences and flattening the UN and nuking the Middle East.
We elected a Conservative government, but we still have medicare and we still have government pensions and no one is babbling about drowning government in a bathtub.
We have lots of arguments, and lots of challenges, but most of the time Canadians are confident that we find a way to make things better.
And that's how a progressive country acts, I think.

What's funny

You know what's funny?
If Rumsfeld had been fired a week before the election instead of the day after, Bush might well have pulled it off.
He only needed a few thousand more votes in Montana or Virginia or Missouri to save the Senate -- and maybe these Republican stay-at-homes would have turned out if they hadn't been so disheartened by Bush's "stay the course" rhetoric.

Democrats take the House!

Great news

Well, that's a relief:

Even a Democratic sweep of Tuesday's mid-term elections won't undermine Canada's strong relationship with the United States, says U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins.

And here I had thought it was those dastardly Republicans who wanted to build a fence along the border and who said Canada was a "terrorist haven" and who stopped Americans from buying cheaper Canadian drugs and who are disputing our ownership of the Northwest Passage and ...

Rider Pride

Kenton Keith and the boys won big today! Next stop, the Western Final...

On, Roughriders! On, Roughriders!
Plunge right through that line!
Run the ball clear down the field,
A touchdown sure this time.
On, Roughriders! On, Roughriders!
Fight on for your fame
Fight! Fellows! - fight, fight, fight!
We'll win this game. *

Yes, it DOES look like Iraq!

Remember this?

Great line of the day

I found this linked on another blog but I apologize that now I cannot credit it -- at first, I wasn't sure whether I understood the argument here, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made as an explanation of the Ted Haggards of this world.
From Steve Schalchlin's blog Living In The Bonus Round, On Manhood, Women and Homosexuals:

. . . evangelicals, for the most part, do not believe that homosexuality, as an orientation, actually exists. For them, ALL "homosexuals" are actually heterosexuals who've been either seduced into gay sex or fallen into it because they got demasculinized by women . . . One of the psychiatrists, Dr. Paul Cameron, whom they both embrace and reject in varying ways, teaches that gay sex is way more fun than straight sex and, therefore, all straight men could turn gay if exposed to gay sex . . . Their total denial of the FACT of homosexual persons is what drives men like Ted Haggard into a marriage, and then, subsequently, into the arms of a male hustler. The drugs, IMO, were not only about enhancing the sex act itself, but they also enabled him, in those hours alone with the muscle guy, to forget the wife and kids and career as a gay-hatin' leading light of the evangelical movement. . .

Another heckuva job

So, the Bush administration thought they were being so-o-o-o-o clever by scheduling the Saddam trial verdict for two days prior to the mid-terms. They thought it would reinforce their "look how safe we've made you" theme. Instead, its going to reinforce the Democrat's "look how violent Iraq is" theme:

Many of Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs, along with some Shiites and Kurds, are predicting a firestorm of violence if the court sentences the ex-president to death, as is widely expected . . . But most Shiites, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, are likely to be enraged if he escapes the gallows.

So either way, Iraq will explode by Monday morning.

Horse rescue

BBC photos tell the story of the Dutch horse rescue, a story which has been reported around the world.


The horses were stranded at a farm north of Amsterdam when the land around them flooded.


The nearest land was only a few hundred metres away but there were fears that submerged barbed wire might hurt the horses if they tried to swim to safety.


Animal welfare officers and firefighters waded through the waters to map out an escape route.


Four women from a local riding club then led the herd to safety.


The one horse that failed to follow the herd was eventually brought to safety, but collapsed and needed attention from veterinarians. It is expected to recover completely.

Prophecy

Sorry for the lack of posts - I've been fighting a cold.
I couldn't help but notice this one -- considering today's events, Wolcott turns out to be a prophet:

. . . All Republican political figures are gay, especially the men. When President Bush insists on kissing one bald head after another, the psychosexual symbolism speaks for itself. He's planting his lips on big uncircumcised Kojak peckers. When Rush Limbaugh packs his Viagra and jets off on a tropical jaunt with the guys, it's assumed there are saucy wenches awaiting him under the sultry palms, but I wonder--I wonder if it's cabana boys making the hammock sway under the moonlight. Republican women--those masochistic saints--are more like Joan Allen playing Pat Nixon under layers of frosting, their rigid smiles forged by years of living a lie with a man infatuated with other men and too timid to take out a subscription to Details magazine, lest he be exposed. The closet in which he dwells doubles as a panic room with a convenient minibar, so that if he ever stumbles or strays, he can blame it on the creme de menthe, not the burning yearning of his heart. . .

Who's next?