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Yup, Steve Benen used to be a nice guy, before he started saying ‘darn’ and ‘dagnabbit’.

Mike Huckabee says about gay people “I don’t know whether people are born that way, but one thing I know, that the behavior one practices is a choice.”

Does that mean if someone’s heterosexual but they mimic stereotypical gay mannerisms, they choose to act in a way we should criticize? or is he referring specifically to the actual sexual practices, advocating celibacy? If so, unless we get invited in to observe, how do we know what they actually are doing? Or is it okay if someone acts like Liberace just to assume they’re choosing to have sex and condemn them when we’re basically guessing?

Boy, all this marginalizing and condemning and bigotry stuff is a whole lot more complicated than I ever thought. It might be easier to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but then we’d probably have to determine if those floaty things in dresses were really angels, Scottish or deviants behind closed minds.

Sasha Undercover has some good ones.

Me? I don’t want to think about any liberal blogger or pundit saying “I’d do her/him” or “I’d hit that” unless it’s joking among friends. I recall when one of the Young Turks on Air America said that about Ann Coulter. It wasn’t just the thought of Ann Coulter that made me shudder, but the whole notion that listeners should be privy to a DJ’s desires stated in words just as barren as that made me think: this ain’t Howard Stern. You’re supposed to be representing liberal thought.

It’s one thing to say someone’s hot or to express an attraction in a humorous way. But ‘doing’ someone just sounds too impersonal, and calling someone ‘that’ goes back to the notion that they’re naught but meat. Maybe I’m just too PC or an old romantic or just old, but like I said, I can handle it in a humorous context, but when someone’s serious and on a public megaphone, it just makes me think “geeze, what a creep.”

So what would you like to not hear in 2008?

The latest McClatchy/MSNBC/Mason-Dixon poll has Edwards leading, but the other two within 2 points. None of the others reaches the 15% threshold but Richardson could. He’s within the margin of error. And for second choice, Edwards has the edge over his rivals, too. So this suggests Edwards is surging at the right time.

On the GOP side, it’s now Romney over Huckabee, 27%-23%. McCain or Thompson will take third, several points back.

Or maybe not.

After all, the Reuters/C-Span/Zogby poll, also released today, has significantly different results, with Hillary at the top, Edwards 7 points back, Obama in between and nobody else exceeding 5%.

The first poll had half the voters. The second covered the same two day span, plus one more, through yesterday. So its error margin is smaller. But with a shrinking pool of undecideds, there’s just no way to call this one. Obama has to turn out the least reliable demographic - the young - so of the three, his GOTV effort has to be incredibly effective. And the second choice voters will likely decide this race.

This one shows Huckabee up on Romney by 1%, and McCain clearly in a distant third. Romney’s clearly caught the latest wave per both polls, so if that continues, he could eke out the win. In both parties, though, there’s 6% undecided, so they’ll both be key as well.

Bottom line: two winners from these five, but no one can call it with any certainty. The Zogby poll will especially excite Ron Paul supporters, though, as it shows him tied with Thompson and Giuliani at 8%. That’s fourth, but it’s also just 3 points back from McCain.

I presume there’ll be another poll out by Wednesday, which may add some light, but these two are among the top pollsters going based on past records. Momo favors Romney and Edwards, but the intangibles - turnout, undecideds, and second choicers - ultimately control both outcomes.

When I read of the convening of these old hands with their not-so-subtle threat of a third party Unity ticket challenge, several thoughts crossed my mind:

1) Almost exclusively, these are conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, most of them retired from elective office and most of them unable to compete successfully for higher office previously. Stymied at gaining public acceptance, most have gone to think tanks, consultancies or private business. So exactly what is the dog they have in this fight?

2) Speaking the language of ‘middle’ and bipartisan, they would seem like a natural constituency for the Obama campaign or even the McCain campaign. So I expect to hear outrage from blogging supporters of other campaigns that this is designed to keep votes away from their preferred leading candidates. Check around after dawn and see how well this prediction bears up.

3) This sounds straight out of the DNC playbook. The middle’s not such a frightening place till you recognize how far right today’s middle has become. That’s the status quo they’re after, protecting conservatism and fleshless corporatism under the false claim that they’re representing the center.

What would instigate such a large group initiative?

Fear.

The bigger question: fear of what?

The nation’s not imperiled by some superpower opponent. China and Russia acting in concert could pose such a threat, but that’s never been a unity possibility. Extremist Muslims? Puh-lease. There’s not a person running with 3% in the polls who is dismissive of global terror organizations. Some may view that threat as a potential for inflicting serious pain, instead of a potential for national defeat, but no one is promoting appeasement with the likes of Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri. So it can’t be the threat of some foreign foe’s military potential that provokes such fear.

So let’s consider the major candidates, to see what they might fear there. Xenophobia, racism, greed, ego, hawkishness, stupidity. Nope, that’s standard Republican fare. Hillary. Obama. One plays the middle and nonpartisanship. The other is middle, pro-corporate, more hawkish. Still can’t see anything there to inspire fear.

Edwards. Really?

Think of it: Carter was right of middle. Mondale was middle. Dukakis, a little left of middle. Clinton, right of middle. Gore, square on the middle. Kerry, a little left of middle. Not a big liberal in the bunch. The boldest liberal proposal of any of them was national healthcare or a tax increase. And this Unity group wasn’t feeling any need to run a third party.

What would Gary Hart fear? A weak Republican field? The others might fear that, but Hart? It can’t be because Hillary’s a woman or Obama’s Black. That wouldn’t matter to Hart or Whitman, at least.

Do they fear the polarity that Hillary’s name triggers in Republicans? Or the anti-corporate populism of Edwards? Out of all the possibilities, those last two are the only possibilities for the group to consider going the third party route. On the Republican side, Rudy’s going nowhere and he’s not a real conservative. Romney’s a stiff who only has gotten extreme in his hawkishness for the campaign. McCain’s a conservative. None of those three stands out as especially different or scary compared to Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole and Bush.

Huckabee’s religiousity? Really? It’s worse than Dubya’s?

Yet, weighing all the major candidates, Hillary, Edwards and Huckabee are the only three possibilities that might provoke some fear.

I don’t understand the notion that a candidate that many people react to negatively could cause a problem to the nation that this group should fear. All but Whitman have a national security background. Do they think any in this group are going to go soft on Bin Laden, North Korea, the Taliban? Or won’t be able to get military bills passed? Sorry, I just can’t see it.

If enough of the country was feeling the economic pinch and was really fed up with status quo politics, well then, yes, the type of populist revolt that’s spread across South America could genuinely frighten this group. But if that were the case, Edwards would have at least 45% support, so that seems unlikely, too. Especially with Bloomberg looking a bit concerned about the impoverished, too.

The best I can come up with is they’re there for different reasons. The Republicans dislike all their leading candidates, but could tolerate McCain. Bloomberg and Hagel clearly want an end to the Iraq occupation. The conservative Dems must also think the Iraq occupation needs to end, but have some concerns about other factors with Hillary and Edwards. Hart? Who knows? He’s solid on fighting terror and otherwise should have no problem with healthcare proposals. His participation remains the biggest mystery.

But if this group launched a third party bid, who would they hurt? I think they’d pull far more from the GOP than the Democrats. Is that what they’re trying to accomplish?

Update: Digby goes through the history of polarity in this country, especially in recent years. I think that point’s been well-made repeatedly. That these are almost entirely politically washed up people is a point we both made. Bloomberg’s got the bucks to pull some points, but unless he goes whole hog on an immediate Iraq withdrawal - which will maintain party polarity - the major point stands: he can only hurt the GOP if he gets in. Maybe his goal is to have a Democratic winner. Maybe it’s designed to shock the GOP away from its extremist path of the last 13 years.

But there’s no way his ticket will surpass the Democrat, nor cause them as much pain as he could to the Republican.

We’ll start with this innocuously titled WaPo piece, “Bush signs child health-care extension into law“. I got all a-titter for a second thinking… did we force Bush into actually passing the S-CHIP program after all? Not exactly… the “extension” just appears to be a continuation of funding through the end of the Bush term or thereabouts, to April 2009, when presumably, Hillary or Barack can do something about it. An “extension” in a temperal sense… but heavens, not any kind of expansion… that might cause our heads to explode with a tax increase.

You see, in these troubling times of extraordinary polarization by a “no-prisoners” Republican Party and conservative movement, what is really and truly needed, sayeth Mr. Broder a/k/a the Dean of Mediocrity from the same pages of WaPo, is… wait for it… bipartisanship (”surrender now, or we’ll run Bloomberg“). I cannot hope in my lifetime to duplicate this kind of tour-de-force of clear-thinking from Digby, basically single-handedly tearing apart the entire concept of bi-partisanship (itself a creation of the most cowardly and vacuous of Village Idiots). In short… everyone, please explain why “what we need to get things done” is some kind of “bipartisanship” when Bush and the Gang (and I do mean “Gang” in the sense of “Gangland”) can get everything they want despite a 30% or worse approval rating. Must be because bipartisanship, for Democrats anyway, is another word for date-rape.

So let’s keep score, shall we… Bush manages to get “credit” for killing the actual expansion of a law that made sure children got adequate health care, and as it becomes clear that Democrats will not only expand their current majorities in both houses of Congress (with which they are accomplishing so much… see above) but win back the White House as well, the usual Washington Village Establishment says “surrender now”. Got it. Let’s move a bit up Interstate 95 and take a look at what the Grey Lady is up to…

Whoa! TBogg sums it up best… (hint: “legacy hire”)… that’s right… the New York Times has hired Bill Kristol to join its staff of op-ed page Village Idiots, a cast that already includes David Brooks.

Is nothing sacred? I mean, I’ve lived well over two-score years now by the simple credo that when someone suggests that you be prosecuted for treason, don’t put them on your own payroll. Of course, that would involve taking anything that Bill Kristol says seriously… and why should we do that?

Oh, these pearls are tightening… I think I’ll need the smelling salts… can’t someone step forward who represents those virile and manly values of standing up for what they believe in? YES. There IS such a man. And (speaking of legacy hires) he is campaigning hard for a restoration of all that he stands for, trying to show that after the better part of a decade since his moment, he is still relevant. Bill Clinton Osama bin Laden has just released another audio-tape (no reference to the Bhutto killing, which you’d think he’d want to take credit for), in which he gives a pep-talk to his supporters in Iowa Iraq and suggests an expansion of activity to New Hampshire the Palestinian territories.

And so the world is back where it belongs: just as it becomes Kristol crystal clear that the conservative movement has disgraced itself so sufficiently that the public will finally and overwhelmingly reject its candidates at the polls, the Democrats have determined once and for all to circle the wagons, and make sure that balanced, rational voices like Bill Kristol’s can scream at us from the pages of the New York Times. Fortunately, we still have that remarkably successful model of centrist triangulating to draw from. And OBL just wants to remind us he’s there. Yup. Got it.

This has been… “bid’ness as usual.”

Years ago, I used to hear Birchers (more widespread then than now) talk about the evil master conspiracy trying to rule us all. They were convinced that anyone who understood would oppose those vicious schemes. I, naturally, reacted differently. If these plotters were winning so efficiently, shouldn’t we try to join them and be among the winners ourselves? Hence my own political efforts, helping in their small way to rachet down control over the clueless masses.

I was reminded of this today when I read P. Z. Myers’ insightful item about torture:

“I’m going to surprise some people and agree that torture is an extremely powerful tool. It’s just useless for gathering information. …

Here is all that torture is good for: inspiring fear in a population.”

Exactly! That’s why I’ve been advocating it for years. This should be added to other counterintuitive conclusions that are obvious when you look behind the rhetoric. Such as:

The purpose of war is not foreign conquest — it is domestic political leverage.

The purpose of “elections” is not giving voice to the people — it is stifling dissent.

The purpose of “trials” is not finding the truth — it is changing the subject.

The purpose of common stock is not enriching investors — it is depriving them of control.

Orwell, who was one of the last millenium’s two most misunderstood satirists (Rand was the other), claimed that the object of torture is torture. No, George, that’s just a symptom of psychic wear among your minions, and a sign they need to be replaced with new tools. When your inquisitors begin loving their work they lose sight of the bottom line and start engaging in overkill (or in this case, overpain).

Let the hoi polloi know that it’s available — with an occasional random victim, just to keep them worried — but when it becomes routine it numbs the effect. To paraphrase She Who Must Not Be Named, torture should be unsafe, legal, and rare.

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Norm Jenson passes on a list of the worst people in the world in 2007 and one was Time’s person of the year not long ago.

Iraq’s Kurdish north is viewed by our government as the one area of Iraq reasonably stable and economically advancing. The trouble is, imported workers face indentured servitude and outright slavery due to too little oversight.

This is democracy? Or the success of Bush’s war escalation? Maybe it’s free market capitalism.

It is classism and bigotry, fraught with sexual violence.

If that was Bush’s goal, he can rightly claim to be winning.

Any way he tries to spin it, George Bush just upheld that message. He killed a military spending bill passed by Congress and lowered the raises troops would get. And now, per his own words in November, there’s no money to continue military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shifting funds around to keep his wars going, he has to start laying off civilians.

All because Iraq could be held financially liable for the actions of Saddam, just as other countries have been held liable. And rather than negotiate a compromise on that one point with Congress in December, He’s chosen to grandstand, no matter how many US soldiers and civilian government workers are affected.

Instead of defending American workers, instead of supporting troops and terror victims, instead of defending the Constitution he took an oath to uphold, we now discover who Bush will defend and support first: the do-nothing Iraqi government that has demonstrated it’s being run by Moe, Larry and Curly.

Rather than work with Congress. Rather than justice.

With Bush, it’s all about the money of a broken government that doesn’t give a damn about Americans except to protect their asses from getting shot.

So who speaks for Americans? Cheney?

Bush is going to hear from a lot of angry Americans for this sell-out and well he should.

It’s quite moving, really, though it quoted too little of the content where Steve’s knowledge was greatest: military history. His partisan views aside, that depth of knowledge helped shed light on why certain foreign policies were likely to falter or fail. To make a mention of his strength without a visible demonstration of it is the biggest weakness in this reflection.

As to how he lived, and died, and pondered his own destiny, it doesn’t strike me as that much different from other well-regarded writers or artists, with their own demons to confront.

The internet provided a means where his intelligent voice could be heard. Without it, one wonders if Gilly would ever have found another soapbox and how many people would have remained less informed.

It does say something about our country that people have to worry his gravesite might be defaced because he had the temerity to take on a partisan tone on matters political. And that’s not just a reality about conservatives. There were a few contentious situations that arose in the wake of Steve’s passing. Things Steve’s political enemies got quoted, taken out of context, misunderstood by people who were grieving the death of this very decent young man.

Battle lines got drawn by some bloggers and commenters and everyone went away mad. That perhaps oversimplifies the nature and scope of the disagreements that occurred in a few places. But with the passage of some time, it would seem that - especially in Gilly’s honor - such rifts should be mended, especially among his supporters and peers.

“Geeks live in an eternal conflict between their love of topic and love of people,” he wrote. “I wonder if people substitute fascination with things they can control over things they can’t — other people. You start to wonder if you’ve created a world so limited that you can’t really reach beyond it.” He lamented that he didn’t know what it was to “wake up naked in a strange bed,” but, he wrote, “at 35, I’ve figured out that this is it, at least for now. Anything I do, any life I make, is going to revolve around words and computers and strange, bright people.”

In the political world of blogs, all are not geeks, but there remain a lot of “strange, bright people” who cared for the very bright Steve. Raised in Harlem, he could easily have found his life diverted by gangs or biased police or any number of woes that afflict urban inner cities where black men grow and evolve. Instead, he offered knowledge within a too short life, a sharp wit and a gregarious personality.

Maybe we all can evolve a little bit more, settling differences with people who really aren’t our enemies, online and off. In a year where we had to bear the loss of Steve and Molly Ivins, it is necessary to mourn, but if we’re to be ready for important fights ahead, it’s necessary to cherish all the good they did, to heal, make amends and move forward.

I think Steve would like that a lot.

Update: At the Group News Blog, Jesse Wendel dispels the notion of Steve as a lonely man, providing corrections and clarity.

And Drifty adds a nice touch, too.

Clearly this displays that the NY Times can no longer be considered a major paper in the country if by ‘major’ the definition of ‘real journalism’ is applied as the standard. Hiring a controversial ideologue representing a pro-war ideology that has backfired wherever it’s been applied, is not the action of a paper devoted to pursuit of evidence. It’s solely into creating controversy to stimulate sales.

Editorial balance does not require the hiring of extremists that bat zero in their policy prescriptions. That’s like saying if they hire Einstein, balance requires that they hire a Special Olympics winner.

Following Newsweek’s decision to hire Karl Rove, this demonstrates clearly that the corporate media is more interested in circuses and profits than in meaningful debate.

With 5 days of campaigning left, John Edwards has jumped to tie Obama at 29% with Hillary at 28%…. by any measure, it’s now a three way tie. And most of the momentum this past week favored Edwards.

What this means, of course, is some nasty infighting from now through Wednesday. Nobody’s going to call the winner here.

I will make a very prominent call, though: if one of these candidates beats the second place candidate by 3 pts or more, they’ll be the nominee and the next president. New Hampshire will not likely pick the same winner, and I believe Iowa will prove the better predictor.

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