Politics

Here are my two recommendations for returns watching tonight.

I hope I won’t have to make use of my book that arrived from Amazon today.

From a Reuters story, titled Foley singled out “hot” boys: report:

Another former page said he felt he had to flirt with Foley, who has said he is homosexual and an alcoholic and that he was abused by a priest as a child.

“I didn’t want to piss off a member of an institution that I really revered,” the former Republican page said.

“I figured maybe someday I will want to be involved in Congress,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “I didn’t want to make an enemy.”

So I can’t carry more than 3 ounces of toothpaste onto a commercial flight, but I can arrange for a small private plane to fly up the east river next to the UN, high rise apartment buildings, and not too far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art? That’s a brilliant way to run security.

… go read today’s Manhattan User’s Guide.

We never had Welch’s Grape Juice in the house growing up because Robert Welch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, and that organization, still with us, opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.

Which brings us to a piece of jewelry we mentioned recently in MUG, available, as we noted, at Anthropologie. A reader better informed than we are pointed out that both Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters are owned by Richard Hayne.

Jonathan Valania wrote an excellent piece on Hayne in the Philadelphia Weekly a few years ago in which he reported that Hayne had donated $13,150 to Rick Santorum and his PAC over the years. (Santorum, as you’ll recall, is anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and in favor of teaching intelligent design.)

…

My friend Sean Bonner’s Metroblogging unit in Bangkok is a good place to get some “person on the street”-style reporting on the military coup in Thailand.

Related: There is already a Wikipedia entry of course.

If you’re voting in the New York Democratic primary today, and still undecided on Hillary Clinton versus Jonathan Tasini, just choose based on your beliefs:

Gay Marriage
Tasini: for
Clinton: against

PATRIOT Act
Clinton: for
Tasini: against

Iraq War
Clinton: for
Tasini: against

Death Penalty
Clinton: for
Tasini: against

Cluster Bombs
Clinton: for
Tasini: against

I realize he has little chance to defeat her, but a big turnout for Tasini would certainly help put some fear into her plans to win elections by moving ever rightward.

Gay City News has two good articles on Tasini:

• Endorsing him for the Senate
• Why Tasini Matters

From the endorsement:

On a shoestring campaign, Tasini has raised critical questions—most prominently about this nation’s disastrous policy in Iraq. Not incidentally, he is also a supporter of same-sex marriage.

Clinton has ducked fair dialogue on where she stands on the most pressing foreign policy question facing the nation. Just because she can get away with it does not make it the right thing to do. Clinton has also bobbed and weaved this year on gay rights. Activists have pressed her on her opposition to gay marriage—and come away disappointed that did not even speak out on the dignity of gay families on the Senate floor when Congress debated the ugly Marriage Protection Amendment.

Note that I’m not saying the gay issue overrides all. I think the fact that both of New York’s senators voted for the Iraq War, when the overwhelming majority of their constituents were opposed to it (and millions demonstrated on the streets), should be enough reason to get rid of both as soon as possible. The Democratic primary is really our only chance to have a say in this.

From Jonathan Tasini’s campain blog:

To get on the ballot in New York, you need 15,000 signatures of registered Democrats. We blew past that number with ease, gathering 40,000 signatures from people throughout the state who, by putting their name to our petitions, said they want the opportunity to vote for another candidate, or, at least, hear what I have to say. Unlike most petitioning campaigns in New York that rely on paid workers, the overwhelming majority of our signatures were gathered by volunteers-a grassroots network of people spread across the state who braved the heat and rain to corral voters at fairs, festivals, markets, stairwells of apartment buildings or at the doors of voters’ homes.

The first poll published in the race affirmed their hard work. Marist found that 13 percent of the voters would vote for me on Election Day-really an amazing number given that we spent very little money and that, to put it mildly, I was not a household name when I entered the race. Compare that to the Quinnipiac University poll released on February 16 that showed Joe Lieberman leading Ned Lamont by 55 points: 68 to 13. In other words, early in that race, Ned Lamont was polling at exactly the same number I am polling at now

More important, the poll found that 70 percent of registered Democrats believe that the Iraq War should be a major campaign issue; 62 percent of the voters say they will vote for a candidate who is against the war and only 9 percent said they will vote for someone who supports the war. In other words, my position is embraced by a majority of the Democratic primary voters, while the position of my opponent has very little support.

Yet, NY1’s position is that the people should not hear me. The network’s political director tells us that NY1 has set a criteria for participation in the debate that it is sponsoring on August 22nd: a candidate has to poll at least 5 percent and s/he has to have spent or raised at least $500,000.

That’s right, in our democratic system, half a million bucks is the ante to get your voice heard. We have raised about $150,000 since the beginning of the campaignóbut, though weíve done An excellent job reaching out to voters given our resources, we are being penalized for not having raised enough money.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for Atrios or Daily Kos to mention this, since they’ve never even mentioned his campaign. They seem to have plenty of time for every freakin’ detail of Ned Lamont’s campaign. The former is more like a Gawker-esque link blog than ever. I wish I could get away with that and charge $3000/month for an ad.

I can understand why Billmon feels so disillusioned. I hear people tell me all of the time that things will be so much better if Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer and the like are in charge. Did you notice the statements they made condemning the deaths at Qana? Of course not. There weren’t any.

Two items from other blogs:

• James on all of the Democratic politicians in New York saying Israel can do whatever it wants to Lebanon, including its civilians
• Tom Moody on Daily Kos saying he’s not interested in writing about what’s going on in the Middle East

The former are “old school” politicians, and people like Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos are supposedly the next wave. If acting as if our government’s foreign policy in the Middle East has nothing to do with our lives is considered an appropriate position for Democrats, I don’t see much point in getting involved to help them get elected. As Tom Moody says, New Yorkers who were here for 9/11 have a bit of trouble acting as if our lives have nothing to do with our government’s activities in foreign countries.

If they win, we get people like Hillary Clinton as leaders? Some win. Even Rupert Murdoch is throwing fundraisers for her.

The only person whose campaign interests me right now is Jonathan Tasini. He is challenging Hillary in the New York Democratic primary. People like Atrios and Daily Kos are all over Joe Lieberman’s challenger, but have been silent on this one. Appararently they think Hillary Clinton — pro-Iraq War, pro-PATRIOT ACT, anti-gay marriage — is just fine.