Richardson Endorses Obama

From MSNBC:

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the nation's only Hispanic governor, is endorsing Sen. Barack Obama for president, calling him a "once-in-a- lifetime leader" who can unite the nation and restore America's international leadership.

Richardson, who dropped out of the Democratic race in January, is to appear with Obama on Friday at a campaign event in Portland, Ore., The Associated Press has learned.

The governor's endorsement comes as Obama leads among delegates selected at primaries and caucuses but with national public opinion polling showing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton pulling ahead of him amid controversy over statements by his former pastor.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Just a few fact-checks on my good friend Jack Kelly. By the way, I didn't see him at "Off The Record" so whether he was armed that night is a moot point.

Anyway, his column this week. He's writing about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is, let's face it, a kook. J-Kel calls him a "diminutive despot with the big smirk." On a "writerly" note, I am proud of Jack for resisting the siren call of the double alliteration: "a diminutive despot with the smarmy smile" He just went for a sort of cross-relation [a "diminutive" something contrasting a "big" something else].

Good for him.

Now the curious part. He writes at the end of the column (one hopes he wasn't merely padding it out to the finish):

So how to explain people like Sally Kohn, who wrote on the Daily Kos Web site why she has a "little crush" on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"I know I'm a Jewish lesbian and he'd probably have me killed. But still, the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush administration that make me swoon."

This could only have been written by someone who doesn't think anything bad could ever happen to her, and who doesn't care that other people are being persecuted.

See, what he's doing here is trying to paint all liberals with this brush. The paragraph immediately preceding this one discusses how the "academic left" and its attraction to "charismatic Communists" (another alliteration) while macabre, is understandable. Here's his plan: Sally Kohn posts at the dailykos, so therefore everyone at the dailykos agrees with her (and presumably has a crush on the diminutive despot) and as the dailykos goes, so goes the American left: The American Left Hearts Ahmadinejad, it says so at the dailykos!

That's what he's trying to do. But the first question is, did our good friend J-Kel accurately quote Ms Kohn? Not by a long shot. She DID write that line about the crush - that much is true. But our Jack followed it with this:

This could only have been written by someone who doesn't think anything bad could ever happen to her, and who doesn't care that other people are being persecuted.

What did Sally follow the crush line with? Here is her dailykos posting. After continuing in the crush groove and saying Ahmadinejad reminds her of Kermit the Frog (huh??) she writes:

I want to be very clear. There are certainly many things about Ahmadinejad that I abhor — locking up dissidents, executing of gay folks, denying the fact of the Holocaust, potentially adding another dangerous nuclear power to the world and, in general, stifling democracy.

But didn't Jack Kelly just say that she didn't care about people being presecuted? Her "crush" seems to be based on the charges he's made against the Bush Administration. Charges she agrees with. For instance (this is from Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush in May):

There are prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that have not been tried, have no legal representation, their families cannot see them and are obviously kept in a strange land outside their own country. There is no international monitoring of their conditions and fate. No one knows whether they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals.

European investigators have confirmed the existence of secret prisons in Europe too. I could not correlate the abduction of a person, and him or her being kept in secret prisons, with the provisions of any judicial system. For that matter, I fail to understand how such actions correspond to the values outlined in the beginning of this letter, i.e. the teachings of Jesus Christ (Peace Be Upon Him), human rights and liberal values.

She even points out the disconnect between Ahmadinejad's "flagrantly" (yes, she uses that word) trouncing the rule of law in Iran while criticizing Bush for doing the same.

Something Jack didn't tell you.

I'm not defending sallykohn's blog post, just pointing out how Jack Kelly misrepresented it. In fact I think the silly parts of her blog post, for instance that Ahmadinejad is cuddly like Kermit, are silly enough to sully (see I can do it too!) the rest of the piece.

I'm also not going to defend Ahmadinejad himself. I think he's a kook and a very dangerous kook indeed. But I'd also have to agree with Bill Richardson on this. Ahmadinejad is not the guy in control over there. Richardson also said that while he wouldn't have invited Ahmadinejad, it's a question of academic freedom - and Columbia is free to invite whomever it wants to speak.

Just like Bill O'Reilly.

Gov. Richardson was In Town Tonight

Ok, so I was late. I had to work and the earliest I could get to Wholey's was about 20 to 5. But I was late. By the time I arrived Jon Delano and his film crew were packing up to go. Andy Gastmeyer and his crew were already out the door and around the corner. Luckily, Jim O'Toole was still there. He was standing at the door chatting. I asked him for directions to the Pittsburgh Room.

After getting the directions, I walked into the store, between the displays of chilled whole fish, and up one set of stairs, past a table full of big-fish sandwiches, and up a second set of stairs to where Governor Bill Richardson was holding court with a couple dozen twenty-somethings. Pitt Democrats, I later learned. Pitt Dems with a smattering of Pitt Dem Law students.

Great, so I was late and I was at least double the average age in the room. The group, I gotta say, included someone who really really really needed a shower. I couldn't tell who it was, but GEEZ pungent isn't the word. Probably not the best way to meet a guy running for the highest office in the land. But what do I know? The year I graduated college, Ronald Reagan was still President and ABC had just begun broadcasting Moonlighting.

When I walked in, Congressman Mike (did you know they call him "Mad Dog"?) Doyle, Governor Richardson, and Dan Wholey, who's running against Congressman Tim Murphy, sat, chomping on the sandwiches and chatting up the kids.

I caught the tail end of the discussion about FISA and the recent restructuring of the law. "There's no reason not to have judicial review." I heard the Mad Dog Doyle say. Good for him.

Then the conversation turned to war - both present and (possibly) future. Notably Iran. To Richardson, while Iran is a major power in the Middle East, it's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not. He's kept, according to Richardson, on a very short leash by the Ayatollahs in power. He pressed the idea of diplomacy with the moderate clerics in Iran.

Addressing the college kids in the room, Richardson ended his talk by pointing out 4 legacies that his older generation was leaving them:

• The Debt
• Greenhouse Gasses
• The Social Safety Net
• The Health Care System

And urged them to keep working to "take our country back."

One-on-one he and I discussed the last night's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, FISA, the war and the moveon.org ad. On last night's debate, he said he felt it was his best performance. He was able to differentiate himself from the rest of the pack, he said, on the war.

He said the FISA compromise was "shameful." The only eavesdropping allowed should be done with a court order, he said. The fact that the Congress let the President off the hook wasn't a good thing either. By the way, Bill Richardson is the one who pointed out that:

something is wrong when the New England Patriots face stiffer penalties for spying on innocent Americans than Dick Cheney and George Bush.

When I asked him what, if everything went his way and he's the one taking the oath of office in late January, 2009, would be the first thing he did in office, he said he'd announce a full withdrawal of the troops from Iraq. He'd proposed a Bosnia-type negotiation setup for a partitioning of the country into three parts with an all muslim peacekeeping force to keep the peace. "No one wants an Iraq civil war." He said.

While he disagreed with the moveon ad, he wouldn't have voted for its censure, he said. He still feels that moveon.org is a good organization and that it's good for the democratic process. They made a mistake, he added, and everyone makes mistakes. The outrage coming from the other side of the political aisle is just the Republicans trying to get some mileage out of the story. They want to focus on anything other than the mess they've made of things.

When he was asked later why he seems to have more success reaching out to Republicans than some of the other Democratic candidates, he said he's the best at reaching out and bringing people together. He said it's about "American solutions" not "Democratic solutions" or "Republican solutions."

Smart guy. Loved the fact he called the FISA compromise "shameless." Here's to hoping more Democrats start to feel the same way.

The Problem With Bill

Tucker Carlson (MSNBC) called the performance "cringe-worthy."

Alison Stewart (MSNBC) said it was "cringe-tastic."

Jonathan Capehart (Washington Post) said it was like, "...watching someone drown in the shallow end of the pool and than refuse a life preserver." He added, "I watched that big guy shrink in his chair as he answered the questions."

The audience groaned.

I was cringing and groaning at my TV set at home.

I'm talking about Governor (and Presidential hopeful) Bill Richardson's performance on LOGO TV 's Visible Vote ‘08 Presidential Forum Thursday evening.

First, some background. If you're not familiar with LOGO, it's a LGBT oriented cable channel and this was billed as the first Presidential forum on gay issues. Each candidate who agreed to appear got 15 minutes on their own from a panel of questioners which included the aforementioned Jonathan Capehart, journalist Margaret Carlson, singer/activist Melissa Etheridge and the Human Rights Campaign's Joe Solmonese. The candidates appeared in the following order: Barack Obama, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton (Dodd and Biden had scheduling problems). Naturally, no Republicans agreed to appear in a separate forum.

So what was so wrong with Richardson's performance?

In a word: everything.

Let me state up front that while I don't have a favorite candidate yet, I really liked Bill Richardson and have stated that on this blog before. I also kept saying back in 2004 that Kerry should have picked him for his running mate.

Here's a sample of Richardson's sorry performance:

MS. ETHERIDGE: Thank you. Do you think homosexuality is a choice, or is it biological?

GOV. RICHARDSON: It's a choice. It's --

MS. ETHERIDGE: I don't know if you
understand the question. (Soft laughter.) Do you think I -- a homosexual is born that way, or do you think that around seventh grade we go, "Ooh, I want to be gay"?

GOV. RICHARDSON: Well, I -- I'm not a scientist. It's -- you know, I don't see
this as an issue of science or definition. I see gays and lesbians as people as a matter of human decency. I see it as a matter of love and companionship and people loving each other. You know I don't like to categorize people. I don't like to, like, answer definitions like that that, you know, perhaps are grounded in science or something else that I don't understand.

It's not just that the content is bad, it's like he wasn't even prepared for the question -- at an LGBT forum! After the broadcast, he released a statement saying, "I do not believe that sexual orientation or gender identity happen by choice." Then he repeated that he wasn't a scientist.

[sigh]

But it didn't stop there.

While he said he was for civil unions because that was achievable and he's a guy who gets things done, when Joe Solmonese asked him if he would sign a gay marriage bill if it was presented to him by the New Mexico legislature, he just wouldn't answer the question directly no matter how many times it was put to him.

And then they brought up something that I hadn't heard before. Bill Richardson had used the word "maricón" on the Imus show. For those of you, who unlike me, haven't lived in NYC for 15 years that word is Spanish for "faggot."

GayNewsWatch.com describes the Imus incident:

Almost exactly one year before Imus was to lose his show for using a slur to describe the Rutger’s women’s basketball team, the shock jock used the Spanish word “maricón” in an on-air exchange with Richardson.

“Bernard on the staff here has been claiming you’re not really Hispanic so-- that you're just claiming that for some sort of advantage or something,” Imus said to Richardson, tongue clearly in cheek. “You can just answer this yes or no and this will answer that question. Would you agree that Bernard is a maricón?”

Without missing a beat, Richardson replied in Spanish, “Yo creo que Bernardo, sí — es un maricón si él piensa que yo no soy hispano. [General laughter] Was that good enough or what? [General laughter]”

“That’s good enough for me,” Imus replied.

Most gay Latinos interviewed for this story agreed with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation that the word “maricón” means “faggot” in Spanish. So, translated to English, Richardson had replied: "I believe that Bernard, yes – he’s a faggot if he thinks that I am not Hispanic."

By the time Richardson left the forum stage, my support for him had entirely shriveled up and gone the way of the wind.

[sigh]

You can see Bill R opine on "choice" here (it's about two and a half minutes in):


You can read Pam of Pam's House Blend's wrap up here (she does have a link to good things that Richardson has done for the LGBT Community) and Sue of Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents weighs in here.

You can also view clips of the entire forum at LOGO's website here and the forum will be rebroadcast Monday at 7:00 PM ET.
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Bill Richardson's New Ads

Democratic candidate for President and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has two new ads out. The first ad is running exclusively in Iowa, the second ad is web-only. Both can be seen here:



I think they're pretty cute -- let me know what you think.