Romney Relying On His Looks

Mitt seems to have abandoned his miserable positions and distanced himself from his Mormonism. Now he is leaning on his so-called good looks. He didn't have to say it personally, the campaign flier did all the talking. This ridiculous turn in Romney's campaign gives another example of GOP hypocrisy (see Republican attacks against John Edwards).

From TAPPED:

HOT OR NOT? A reliable G.O.P. source sends in this e-mail from "a colleague ... in Iowa" who "just went to see Mitt Romney speak. This is from her, and a piece of campaign literature she picked up at the event:

His promotional flyer says, "In this media-driven age, Romney begins with a decisive advantage. First, he has sensational good looks. People magazine named him one of the 50 most beautiful people in America. Standing 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Romney has jet-black hair, graying naturally at the temples. Women -- who will play a critical role in this coming election -- have a word for him: hot."

I don't even know where to begin. If Democratic campaign consultants can't figure out how to have a field day with this, they all ought to just hang up their cleats and go home. My source says this was definitely from campaign literature, not from someone's personal pro-Romney flyer project.

Romney's staff may not have written this garbage, but it is just as bad that they freely hand it out at campaign events. As Crooks and Liars pointed out, John Edwards was embarrassed about his top 50 award. Romney soaks it up. It isn't hard to see which candidate dwells on the superficial matters and the one that cares about a progressive policy to help heal the deep economic wounds that America has suffered for far too long. Besides, if Romney is going to lean on People Magazine for his candidacy, he is going nowhere fast.

The Result Of Early Primaries

Bob Schieffer of CBS gives us his take on all of the primaries that have been moved up to February of next year:

NY Representative In D.C. Get Big $$$ For Environment

The headline in the New York Post hints of outrageous pork barrel politics committed by the new and improved NY delegation to the House of Representatives. The article itself is much tamer and I am glad to see these projects getting done. Cleaning up the environment is serious business and if Federal Regulatory agencies are too weak to get things accomplished, then kudos to Congress for stepping up to the plate.

From The New York Post:

WASHINGTON - New York's newly powerful congressional delegation has snagged tens of millions' worth of pork projects to aid local rivers and streams - grabbing cash to clean up babbling brooks in Westchester and combat putrid smells near La Guardia Airport.

All of the projects were "earmarked" by individual lawmakers in a water-resources bill, which is moving through Congress in a process that critics say pours taxpayer dollars down the drain by putting decisions in the hands of legislators instead of agencies.

Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Queens) got the feds to kick in $2.7 million to help flush Flushing Bay to improve the water quality near La Guardia Airport, where past practices have soiled a once-tranquil inlet.

Critics like those that the NY Post fails to cite do not mention how the EPA has gone down that drain a long time ago. If the agencies are ineffective then you need to find a better way to get the job done. You can call it pork, but if chemicals have destroyed part of the natural habitat of a particular district, it needs to get fixed. We have spent hundreds of billions on Iraq and nothing has been accomplished. So shelling out a few million dollars to improve water quality is a much smarter allocation of dollars.

Now It Is Journalism Being Outsourced

I know that journalists are slipping these days but there is no need to send their jobs to India. It is bad enough technical and customer service positions are being relocated halfway across the world to cut costs. For local journalists to be replaced with people that don't even live in the town that they are reporting the news on is just plain ridiculous.

From CNN:

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the two-year-old Web site pasadenanow.com, acknowledged it sounds strange to have journalists in India cover news in this wealthy city just outside Los Angeles.

But he said it can be done from afar now that weekly Pasadena City Council meetings can be watched over the Internet. And he said the idea makes business sense because of India's lower labor costs.

"I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications," said the 51-year-old Pasadena native. "Whether you're at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you're still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview."

No James, it is more than that. On the local level such as in Pasadena, reporters should live in the area, know the layout of the town both spatially and culturally and be able to communicate to their neighbors. That is absolutely impossible to do from Mumbai.

As can be seen in the CNN article, there are plenty of doubters because it is a stupid idea. A long time ago, the news was meant to inform, not to maximize profits of the companies that ran the news departments. It is time to take a step back and let people from Mumbai cover Mumbai, and Pasadena should do the same.

New Rules

Bill Maher sets it straight for Republicans on the war and a score of different people that have screwed up this week:

Barbara Boxer Puts Lindsay Graham In His Place

Republicans like Senator Graham waste no time telling outright lies to make Democrats look bad if they think it can help them with their degrading image in front of the American people. Graham tried to tell a whopper about Harry Reid this morning on CNN's Late Edition.

From Crooks and Liars:

BOXER: I don't know anyone who opposes this war that ever said our troops are losers. Our troopers are winners.

GRAHAM: Harry Reid did.

BOXER: Excuse me. He never said our troops are losers. Now, Lindsey, just be careful what you say. The bottom line here is, the losers are the ones who have, you know, engineered this war, made a huge mistake, Dick Cheney, we're in the last throes, the war will last six months, and all of you who have supported this escalation and have turned us away from fighting al Qaida into putting us in the middle of a civil war.

Boxer: "The loser is the Commander in Chief who has not lead our country well."

Thank god for Democrats like Barbara Boxer. Republicans can say just about anything that is false and misleading, so we need people that live in reality to set them straight. The losers are indeed Bush and his miscreants in Congress. The American people get that, now it is time for the small segment of the population that live in Washington to give up their miscreant ways and represent the people instead of the White House that is charging off the cliff.

Mary Cheney Is Worth Seven Cents

Of course you can't put a price on a human being (even Dick Cheney's flesh and blood) but if they want to sell their memoirs you need to negotiate an amount. Well Mary Cheney's autobiography is only selling for a meager $0.07 on Amazon for a used copy. Obviously no one gives a damn about the controversial figure.

From Michael Petrelis:

It has been about a year since Mary Cheney, lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney and his wife Lynne, and a tedious apologist for the Bush administration, published a boring book.

She was rumored to have received a large advance from the publisher, close to $1 million, but Cheney's book never found an audience either among the GOP base or in gay circles. Her memoir never hit any best-seller lists and it will probably be best remembered as her shameless grab for a fat check.

Unfortunately, many trees were felled for Cheney's book and you can now purchased the damn thing for a mere $0.07. That's seven cents, folks, for a used copy. A new one could set you back $1.89. Heck, it's going to cost more for shipping charges than the price of the book.

So a new copy will set you back for about the price of a medium coffee at Starbucks, my apologies. I agree with Michael, that book was a waste of paper and time, not to mention the huge hit her publisher took on her six figure advance. Can we finally forget the hunter's daughter now?

Happy Mother's Day

Have a great day celebrating your Moms and remember where it came from in the first place:

Rupert Murdoch: The Environmentalist?

In one of the strangest turn of events the world has ever seen, arch-Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch addressed climate change in a big way. He now wants his entire company to go green. He got himself a hybrid Lexus and is set to turn News Corp. carbon-neutral by 2010. That is an enormous amount of carbon reduction due to the massive size of his empire. It is great news of course, but what led this enemy of change to wake up to the world's reality?

From The UK Independent:

In one of the most unexpected conversions since Saul of Tarsus hit the road to Damascus, Rupert Murdoch is turning into a green campaigner. He is making the whole of his worldwide operations carbon neutral and setting out to "educate and engage" his readers and viewers about global warming.

He believes his companies' "global reach" presents "an unprecedented opportunity to raise awareness and to stimulate action around the world". A former sceptic who confesses to having been "somewhat wary of the warming debate", he laid on his first global webcast for all his employees on Wednesday to tell them that he was "changing the DNA of our business". He added that he had started with himself, buying a hybrid car.

Mr Murdoch's conversion, which may surprise employees like Jeremy Clarkson, was heavily influenced by his son James - who took BSkyB carbon neutral a year ago this week - as well as by Tony Blair and former US vice-president Al Gore. All three attended his annual meeting for senior executives in Pebble Beach, California, last year where he was convinced to take the lead on the issue.

Well if this is the new thing to do for media moguls, I am all for it. Murdoch is planning an array of solutions that help lessen the impact that News Corp. has on the environment. Everything from using recycled paper for books to producing TV programs that advocate a new way for society to combat the problem. The one thing that will be amusing to watch (if this really isn't just a dream) is the conversion of all Fox's conservative "journalists" going from spinning for neo-cons about the fate of the planet to speaking actual, dare I say it, truth.

PoliticsTV Top Ten Of The Week

I love that they post this every week. The internet video revolution provides us plenty of opportunity, and this is one of them:

Brownback Blows It In Wisconsin

The worst thing a politician could possibly do while in the Cheesehead state would be to diss the Green Bay Packers. The fact is they are a great team and have a had a lot of successful players over the years. I personally think that the public ownership of the team is an incredible and unique situation that really gets the crowd involved on a level that no other pro-team can compare to.

So what does Sam Brownback do that gets him completely blown out of the water (and not to mention Lambert Field)? He talks up Peyton Manning to the crowd and then it gets worse from there. It's okay to like your home team while running for national office but this is completely unacceptable.

From Yahoo News:

The GOP presidential hopeful drew boos and groans Friday at the Wisconsin Republican Party convention when he used a football analogy to talk about the need to focus on families.

"This is fundamental blocking and tackling," he said. "This is your line in football. If you don't have a line, how many passes can Peyton Manning complete? Greatest quarterback, maybe, in NFL history."

Oops, wrong team to mention in Wisconsin, once described by Gov. Tommy Thompson as the place "where eagles soar, Harleys roar and Packers score."

Thompson and Brownback may agree on some controversial issues but when it comes to Football Thompson knows his stuff, especially since he was Governor of the state. The situation became even worse for Sam when he mentioned Bart Starr. Once he finally got to Green Bay favorite Brett Favre, he had already sunk himself. Not only are his chances for the Republican nomination in the toilet, so are his hopes for being allowed in to watch a Packer game in Wisconsin.

Limbaugh Gets Face Painted

Someone in Baltimore, Maryland broke the law recently by doing the world some good. A Rush Limbaugh billboard was vandalized by having tons of paint thrown all over that giant blown up face of his. The person that called it in to the Baltimore Sun was none other than a spokesman of the city's vandalism department charged with cleaning that stuff up.

From The Baltimore Sun:

In a town so tough that most murders get just a few paragraphs in the paper, somebody called The Sun about 8 a.m. yesterday with a tip about a vandalized billboard.

By noon, the story was all over the Internet, Rush Limbaugh was kicking off his national radio show with it, and City Hall was fielding calls from as far away as California. By 5 p.m., the story had become one of the three most popular individual articles in the history of the paper's Web site, with nearly 200,000 page views.

There's a reason the story had legs. The paint-splattered billboard featured Limbaugh's mug. And the tipster was a spokesman for a city agency - the one responsible for cleaning up graffiti - who let it be known that he was no "dittohead."

Although graffiti is usually a bad thing to condone, seeing a picture of Rush covered in paint has to one be the funniest things I have seen this weekend, save for Jane Fonda sitting on Colbert's lap and kissing him on his show. The billboard will be cleaned up eventually, but having the opportunity to get photos of the sign while it is still up is good enough for me.