Turning on comment verification

It's a pain, but I'm now getting comment spam for real.

Romney hates his own state. How's that for character?

The Speck is really ticking me off. Three years ago, I gave him the benefit of the doubt about his residency. At the time, the Michigan-raised, Utah-inhabiting-for-tax-purposes Mormon was trying to convince the public that he really was a Massachusetts guy. He'd lived here for decades, raised his kids here, built a business here. I wrote a newspaper column entitled "Is he or isn't he?" about the Utah residency flap, and I came down on his side. Now I've been proven a fool and he's proven himself an ass.

The title of the article in the Washington Post says it all: Massachusetts Governor Makes His State the Butt of His Jokes.

Here's a summary of the residency issue, from Wikipedia:

While Romney kept his house Belmont, Massachusetts after 1999, it is debatable whether that was his primary residence from then until 2002, as for most of that time he lived at house in Park City, Utah and worked there also.

Further complicating the issue was that in while living in Utah, Romney had filed taxes as a Utah resident, receiving a $54,000 tax break (reserved for the “primary residence” of Utah residents) on his $3.8 million home in Park City. Additionally, in 1999 his Massachusetts state tax return listed him as a part-time resident and his 2000 tax return listed him as a full-time Utah resident.

In April 2002, after returning to the state and deciding to run for governor, Romney altered his 1999 and 2000 tax returns, changing his residency status for those years to Massachusetts resident from Utah resident.

This guy is about as disingenuous as they come.

"The Speck" and the Pope are out in right field

Mitt "The Speck" Romney (he considers himself a "red speck in a blue state") proposed an utterly repulsive, wholly unethical and entirely illegal idea to the Heritage Foundation: wiretapping mosques. He said, ''Prevention begins with intelligence . . . How about people in settings, mosques for instance, that maybe are teaching doctrines of hate, are we monitoring that, wiretapping . . . ?"

It occurs to me this may be a calculated move to get the media to portray him as completely looney-tunes, which seems to be considered an important credential on the far right. You don't want to overdo it like Pat Robertson, but if you can get to a level of say Ashcroft or Bolton crazy, you improve your chances of an executive appointment.

The Pope is another matter. News reports say he's about to call for banning gay priests. Hello? Anybody home? Just on practical grounds it's a bad idea. There's already a priest shortage, and now he wants to add another group to the exclusion list. One not as large as "all women", but a traditionally strong pool for the priesthood.

Don't priests take a vow of celibacy anyway? If celibacy is the issue that's one thing--priests of any orientation make the same vow. But if it's a matter of personal identity and sexual orientation, this is a big stepp backward for an organization that is already stumbling. The message seems to be that God made a mistake when he created gay people (as he did when he created women, apparently). This institution that sought to strip all spiritual vitality out of my being over the first 18 years of my life continues to show me I was right to leave.

Let's ban lefthanded people while we're at it. God screwed up making them too. To the stake with them all!

Flashback moment

I've always been a sucker for reviews proclaiming "his best work since Band on the Run" or "their best album since Some Girls". I fell for it 25 years ago, maybe 20 or 15 or 10 years ago too, and here we go again. Thursday's payday and I might have to arrive home with a couple of new albums.

Halloween, already?

For weeks now the stores have been telling me that it's time to start buying Halloween stuff. I didn't buy anything, but it's probably a good idea to start thinking about it. I started by reading last year's Halloween post entitled, Thank God It's Over.

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia”

Nice to know a Brigadier General in the National Guard is so gung ho about taking out the New Orleans "insurgency" as it's being called by Army Times. (Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing it out.)

There are good reasons why the law prohibits active duty soldiers from performing police duty in emergencies. The National Guard is supposed to be better suited for this sort of thing; policing in a domestic emergency is a very different thing from fighting wars overseas, requiring different training, experience, and perspective.

But that was before the War on Iraq made National Guardsmen de facto active duty troops, fighting for their lives and developing a survival attitude that denigrates the enemy so it's easier to kill him. They've been battle hardened, which is not a good thing when they are sent to police our own citizens.

Interesting, though, that Brig. Gen. Gary Jones drew the analogy to Somalia rather than Baghdad or Tikrit or Sadr City. Those New Orleans looters look a lot more like Somalis, don't they? I guess that means if you're black and still in New Orleans and you run into the National Guard, it would be a good idea to put your hands up or maybe even lay face down on the ground with your hands behind your head.

Who woulda thunk...

that I'd be in total agreement with Newt Gingrich? Quote from today's Boston Globe:

"I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?"

This is exactly the line of reasoning that my favorite left-wing radio host, Rachel Maddow, presented on the Al Franken Show, where she was filling in. (Nothing against Al, but he picked a good week to take off. Rachel was perfect for the breaking news this week; she brings a high energy level and a stinging bluntness that were perfectly suited to the events that unfolded.)

The hurricane is a national crisis that pulled two other national crises onshore with it. One of these hasn't occurred yet--the next terrorist attack. The other is finally staring us in the face after years of denial: our energy crisis stemming from our dependence on fossil fuels, especially oil, made painfully obvious by the stinging price hikes to gasoline and home heating oil. Both of these crises are vitally linked to the president's favorite project, the War on Iraq, and both reveal the truth about that colossal mistake.

The obvious point about Iraq is that the National Guard troops and equipment are deployed where they don't belong, leaving us vulnerable to attack at home. The second point is a little more subtle but perhaps more devastating to Bush's political support, his "mandate" if you will, his "I've got political capital and I intend to spend it" attitude. I think a lot of the public support for the war was because of oil. No WMD's, no welcome parades for the liberators, no stability or security on the ground, no damage to al Qaeda, no functioning democracy to speak of--none of the many rationales that were offered turned out to be valid, yet people still supported the war. Why? Because the American people are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for. The unspoken rationale for the war, securing the oil supply, made sense to people no matter what the publicly stated rationale of the week. We all know that Saudi Arabia's not going to be our Sugar Daddy forever with all those terrorists ready to overthrow the monarchy. A stable, friendly Iraq would be a good thing for our oil habit, and if a bad guy dictator had to be overthrown to get it, so what? Everyone else in the world sees the war this way, and Americans by and large know it to be true as well.

Now, after months of rising gas prices 3 years into the war, prices have skyrocketed due to a crisis with origins in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Persian Gulf. Throwing Iraq into chaos has not achieved oil stability, and maybe it never will, now that the emerging democratic Iraq appears to be more interested in allying with Iran (d'oh!) than with us. Katrina has shown that oil stability has many vulnerabilities, and suddenly the policy of putting all of our resources into Iraq seems naive.

Sorry, W, but your political capital check just bounced.