Jim Moran, who while accusing American troops of ethnically cleansing Iraqis is also known for his anti-Semitic statements, is my Congressman. Yes, this is the type of idiot Northern Virginia sends to Congress.

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s advertisements have been rather interesting this primary campaign. First there was “Believe” an ad that ran in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The ad caught the attention of the media because of the inclusion of the on screen title “CHRISTIAN LEADER” when it ran in Iowa, but not in New Hampshire.

In his most recent ad “What really matters” Huckabee pretends to get above the fray and issue a nonpolitical holiday greeting.

There are two problems with this. First, Huckabee’s political message has simply been that he is a Christian, and that is why you should vote for him. So in reminding you of ‘what really matters’ this season, be it holiday or political, he staying perfectly on message.

Second, there is a not so subliminal message:

In the ad the camera pans slowly from right to left, and for 19 seconds of the 30 second advertisement the brightly lit white shelves of a cabinet form a big white cross. You know who ever created this ad was well aware of this, as they added a neat pile of Christmas tree ornaments as to make it obvious that it is a shelf that just happens to looks like a cross, rather than a cross outright.

It seems to me the problem is that his ads are not political enough. We’re electing the next Commander-in-Chief, not Pastor-in-Chief.

Update: I see a few minutes after I posted this that Matt Drudge has a link to the video with the headline: “HUCKABEE AD FEATURES FLOATING ‘CROSS’… DEVELOPING…“

I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Every presidential election various media organizations rerun the same story: They find a Republican fed up with the GOP who is going to vote for a Democrat this time. (Oddly, they don’t ever seem to find any Democrats voting for a Republican.) The first such story I have come across this election cycle is from the New York Times:

Dee Vandeventer, 54, who owns an advertising firm (it does not accept political advertising) and lives in nearby Cedar Falls, was standing on a chair in the auditorium trying to take a picture of Mr. Obama after his speech. She was perched a little precariously up there, but she talked with us for a couple of minutes.

“We’re tired of being Republicans,” she said.

She said she and her husband, Dave, were keeping completely open minds this year and had no idea at this point how they’d vote in the caucuses on Jan. 3. Of the Republicans, they said they were most interested in Rudolph W. Giuliani, mainly because he is “moderate” and “was responsive” on 9/11.

But it took her 23-year-old daughter to get her to consider Mr. Obama in the first place. “I had said, ‘Obama doesn’t have any experience,’ and she said, ‘I have three words for you: John Fitzgerald Kennedy.’” That made Mrs. Vandeventer consider the possibility, she said, even though she voted for Richard Nixon (she was too young to vote in 1960, when Nixon ran against Kennedy, but she voted for him in 1968, when he won).

It is interesting that Katharine Q. Seelye, the Times reporter, could figure out that Mrs. Vandeventer was only 7 years-old in 1960, and unable to vote, but failed to realize that Vandeventer was only 15 years-old in 1968, when the voting age was still 21. It is rather impossible that she voted for Nixon, unless she lied about her age. It makes me wonder if she really is (was?) a Republican as well.

I would like good explanation from the Des Moines Register why perennial crackpot candidate Alan Keyes was included in the last debate before the Iowa caucus? Dean Barnett, of the Weekly Standard:

Keyes’s distracting presence was yet another indictment of the unworthiness of the Iowa media for the enormous role it plays in this process. Keyes isn’t just a frivolous candidate for president. He’s not a candidate at all. And yet he was allowed on the stage to toss bombs and to perversely whine about his lack of airtime.

Oddly enough, Dennis Kucinich, who has as much chance of winning his party’s nomination as Keyes, has been excluded from Register debate for Democrats to be held tomorrow. Kucinich has at least been at all of the other debates.

The Republican candidates have had, if I counted correctly, ten debates. Not a single one of them have told us anything of any import about any of the candidates. The only debate that has been close to being serious was the FOX News “First in the South” even way back in May. Something has to change.

Gallup has a poll of 1,027 “national adults” on what type of candidate they would or would not vote for, mostly looking at if Americans would vote for a Mormon. Results:

 (Keep in mind these are “adults” not “voters” or even “likely voters” so actually elections results could vary by a lot.)    

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee:

“I had to come to the conclusion that I only had one client… when I laid my head on the pillow, I’d say, ‘Lord, are you pleased?’ … even if I get voted out of office, I’ll never get voted out of heaven.”

On Kenneth Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory the week on November 25, 2007.

In an otherwise favorable article about John Edwards in this last weekend’s New York Times Magazine comes this great little snark:

[I]t doesn’t help when Edwards tries so hard to establish his affinity for the common man that it makes you wince. When the Fortress story first surfaced, for instance, he told Nedra Pickler of The Associated Press that he joined the hedge fund partly because he wanted to learn more about the way markets affected inequality. This is rather like saying you hired a stripper in order to better understand the exploitation of women.  

When even the Times see you as a phony, not many other people are buying it either.

New York Times: The Poverty Platform

I always find it amusing when someone cites an opinion poll to ‘prove’ a point. While opinion polls can be useful for tracking trends, I generally find them useless. The answers provided can sway from one extreme to another by varying the questions asked. Opinion polls also fail because most people polled do not have well formulated thoughts on the topic being polled, that is to say they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. People often only ‘know’ what they hear from the media’s drum beat. Some say that there isn’t anything wrong with that, and that it is in fact perfectly rational. A great example of this is a press release by the Pew Research Center:

Fully 65% of Americans agree with the idea that, in general, corporations make too much profit; this view is now more widely shared — and more strongly expressed — than a few years ago. While 65% agree that corporations make too much profit, 30% completely agree with this statement, about the same number as in 2003 and the highest percentage expressing complete agreement with this statement in 20 years. Yet by a wide margin, the public continues to link the strength of the country with the success of business. More than seven-in-ten (72%) agree that “the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business” — an opinion that has changed very little over the past 20 years.

(Emphasis added)

So while 72% of Americans believe that the strength of the United States is based on the success of American business, success that is measured generally by profitability, 65% think those profits are too high. Not only is this contradictory on its face, but how many Americans either directly or indirectly invest in these businesses? I would gander a great many of them. Do they think the corporations they have invested their savings in have too much profit?

As The Onion satirically says: “more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.”

Yahoo News: 65% Think Corporate Profits too High
Amazon: The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
The Onion: Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

I am not sure what I like better about this news story. That is sounds like the setup for a bad porn movie or the ever expanding list of things that are “human rights.”

Women at a prison outside Gothenburg have decided to fight for their right to a decent sun tan.

Sweden’s Justice Ombudsman has received a letter from the Prisoners’ Council at Sagsjön jail in which the women bemoan the fact that they are not permitted to wear bikinis.

“It’s a human right,” wrote the chairwoman of the council.

Since bikinis are not standard issue in jail, and inmates are not permitted to wear their civilian clothes, the prisoners consider themselves victims of discrimination, Aftonbladet reports.

“How are we supposed to be able to sunbathe at all? They answer we have got is that we can sunbathe in shorts and sports tops. In other words, we are treated differently because we are in an institution and we are disriminated against because of our gender,” the women wrote.

“We want to be able to enjoy the sun just like everybody else in Sweden, whether they are in an institution or on the outside.”

The Local: Female prisoners demand bikinis

So much for the “most honest, most open, most ethical congress in history.”

YouTube: Democrats doing business as usual