New Jersey Assembly OKs Gay Marriage Act

Well today the state of New Jersey became the latest state to join the exclusive club  of states that permit gays and lesbians to marry one another. This Reuters piece affirms that the vote was decisive at 42 for and 33 against. The bill awaits Governor Chris Christie’s signature, one that won’t be forthcoming, and the vote margins in either of New Jerseys houses are insufficient to override his veto.

Chris Christie, a self-avowed anti-big government governor, apparently isn’t anti-big government when it comes to legislating morality. When it comes to deciding that the love of one’s life cannot visit their loved one in his or her hospital room, or be included on his or her health insurance policy.

But Christie is clever. Or so he thinks. Christie wants to put the question to a popular vote. That is, representative government is not qualified to decide what the people want – a key principle in representative democracy. This issue, it seems, is so important to Christie that he thinks it should be put on a referendum.

Christie thinks it’s clever because he can duck out of being the Republican governor who bent to the will of the people by signing this legislation into law. But here is the key flaw to his logic.

New Jersey residents overwhelmingly support gay marriage. It’s in all the polls. Passage of a referendum on this issue is all but assured. But here we have Chris Christie on the one hand complaining about excess government spending and on the other demanding additional expense of public funds to hold a referendum on a settled issue.

An issue whose only additional expense, at this point, is the price of the ink that would have been used to sign the bill into law.

Chris Christie is rapidly becoming a poster child for Republican hypocrisy.

Mitt’s Not Itt Anymore

Doggy despoiler Mitt Romney has fallen out of favor with Republicans it seems. But not because he is a tormenter of canines, and he is that, but because he has finally been accused of the sin of not being unable to woo the Republican base. A base whose values are SO foreign to the American mainstream, that this cannot be better news to the Obama Re-Election Team.

Rick Santorum, who lost his own US Senate seat by 16% in the ’08 election, is now the front runner.

And why not? Everyone else, with the exception of Ron Paul, has led the polling at one point or another. If there is one thing Republicans agree on, it is that Ron Paul is a likeable enough fellow, but he is just a total maniac when it comes to policy.

Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum is the current Republican front liner in the race to the nomination. You know what they say in that regard? It is from the Holy Bible: The Last shall be First.

That is, the last one in the lead is the winner.

O praise Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and Allah (and the spirit of the baobab tree) we have the answer to our prayers in Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum will boldly lead the Republican Party over the proverbial cliff.

Want to lose an election? Come out against a woman’s right to protect herself against conception. Thank you, thank you, thank you Pope Paul VI.

Adele, Ma Belle.

Well the Grammy Awards is over for another year and I got a pleasant surprise. The British pop singer Adele came away with 6, count ‘em 6, Grammys.

Whenever one of her songs comes on the radio, or Pandora, I stop and just listen to it. My blood pressure goes down. My life is extended.

Adele has a very soulful breathy voice that packs a punch when she wants it to. For someone so young she sounds so mature. A less raspy Norah Jones, the pop equivalent to Diana Krall.

I was happy to see good work rewarded by her peers.

If you haven’t heard Adele, you are in for a treat. The song “Rolling in the Deep” is the record of the year and she really belts it out. But this is the one that I like, “Someone Like You.” It has meaning for me.

President Pwns the Religious Right

If this latest foray in the area of guaranteeing access to free contraceptives to all American women wasn’t a fully planned out trap for religious conservatives, it should have been.

In making his “compromise” to the Catholic clergy, and indeed to any religious person opposed to contraception, President Obama surely set for them the perfect trap. He forced religious conservatives to own up and admit that they were opposed to women getting contraceptives, free or otherwise, on religious grounds.

Owning up to an idea that is anathema to a majority of Americans, and a grand majority of women.

And real irony of it is that the idea is to decrease the number of abortions performed on women – a hot-button issue with the religious right – by making birth control more available, especially to the poor.

And the whole beauty about this affair, and the timing of it is just this. The typical Republican meme on the economy got kyboshed in a hurry as soon as the numbers started to improve, forcing conservatives to return to their comfort zone of social issues, only to have the rug pulled out from under them.

Sometimes Democrats get to win on social issues. Doesn’t happen often but when it does the win is a sweet one.

It’s Mitt by a Nosehair

The Maine Caucuses are history, the votes are counted, and Mitt Romney won the day by 194 votes.

That is face-saving for the Romney campaign, but a victory it is not. Ron Paul, Ron Paul was his chief competitor and he just barely edged him. Ron Paul nearly won a New England state, a state that should have gone to Mitt Romney in a romp. Ron Paul, a southerner, a Texan, nearly carried Maine.

And get this, it’s even worse. A caucus was cancelled in one county, a very conservative county, on account of bad weather. The margin could have been even tighter.

So for Romney, it’s a victory, and a defeat all rolled up into one.

Uh Oh…Mitt’s In for Another Bruisin’

Maine has been conducting its caucuses all week long and the results will be announced tomorrow. I predict  Barack Obama will get the Democratic nod.

But that’s not news. What is news is that there are indications that Ron Paul, Libertarian Ron Paul, has a good chance of winning in Maine this time around. Winning in a state that Mitt Romney won easily in 2008 against John McCain – and Ron Paul.

Because unlike Mitt, Rick, and Newt, Ron has been actively campaigning in Maine. Paul needs a win at some point and Maine, “Live Free or Die” Maine, is his best shot and he darn well knows it.

I was wondering about this as I read earlier this week that even Ron Paul agreed that he would have to, at some point, win one of these races and was concentrating on caucus states. Now he seems “cautiously optimistic” that this is going to happen tomorrow.

So the news shouldn’t be that Ron Paul finally won one in the primary season, the news should be that this will deal Mitt Romney 4 defeats in a row, something that should have a huge deflating effect on things like support and fundraising.

And the news isn’t that Ron Paul has possibilities as a nominee, that is ludicrous. Nor The Newt. The news is that a Ron Paul win in Maine spells opportunity for Rich Santorum.

And that is good news indeed.

For Democrats.

Will Texas Have a Significant Primary or an Inconsequential One?

Before last Tuesday I figured that a delayed Texas Primary, delayed from Super Tuesday to April….or May….or June meant that the Texas Primary was going to be an inconsequential one.

Inconsequential in that I was thinking that the supposed nominee-to-be, Mitt Romney, was going to have his 1,144 delegates that would secure for himself the nomination at the Republican Convention.

Now after last Tuesday, I am not so certain. Romney keeps making these horrible gaffes exposing himself as a rich snob with no heart. It would be like electing Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons” to run our country.

And Republican primary voters are turning out in droves to vote for anyone but Romney, a vote that has swung heavily toward Rick Santorum as The Newt implodes in public.

So Texas could be a player, even late in the game.

A true disappointment for me because I was hoping for it all to be over in the Republican race so that only the truly agitated Tea Party faction of the Republican Party would care to show up at the primary polls to vote for their extremist candidates who are primarying mainstream Republicans across the state.

Because after the horrible behavior of the Texas Legislature in the 2011 session, Texas voters will be offered more of the same after experiencing 2 years of cutbacks in public services including education and police and fire protection. Who knows, maybe Texans will come to their senses and vote for the candidates who support the public services that Texans used to be proud of.

Democratic candidates, that is.

Rick Santorum’s Hat Trick

As I type this I am (in my mind, anyway) rubbing my hands together in eager expectation of total chaos in the Republican primaries this year. Rick Santorum swept the field in yesterday’s Colorado and Minnesota Caucuses, and the Missouri Primary.

Swept. The Field.

In the Colorado Caucus, Santorum bested Mitt Romney be nearly 6 points. This is a state that went for Romney in 2008 to the tune of 60% of the primary vote. Clearly, this year’s primary voters have either swung wildly to the right or, equally plausible, they’ve always been right wing, but didn’t know Romney as the right of center Republican as they do now. Or maybe it was the dog…

In the Minnesota Caucus, Santorum blasted by Romney by  28.4%. That is significant. Minnesota’s conservative Republicans, also known as primary voters, are obviously fired up about the right to work movement there and came out in droves to defeat Romneycare.

And in the Missouri Primary Santorum did even better, trouncing the well-financed Romney campaign by 29.9%. Missouri is pseudo-south and results there should bode well for Santorum’s chances in the southern primaries.

Why am I so gleeful? Who was the candidate that Richard Nixon wanted as his opponent in 1972? That would be Senator George McGovern. Who is the candidate that President Obama’s campaign like to face in the fall? Rick Santorum.

In a Rasmussen poll taken in mid January, they report that President Obama would win in a hypothetical race with Rick Santorum by 10 points – yeah, better than he did McCain in ’08. Now Rasmussen is a right-leaning polling group so I am guessing that that is a low-ball figure.

Rick Santorum scares the bejesus out of moderate Republicans and Independents. Rick Santorum is so classically under-funded that he is having difficulty getting his message out, which for him is probably a good thing. Rick Santorum is Jesus Christ’s gift to the Democratic Party.

Democrats and Jesus. We be mates.

Abbott: Seven Out of Ten Ain’t Bad

Texas district attorney Greg Abbott has just announced that he has come to substantive agreement with 7 out of 9, actually ten, groups enjoined in a lawsuit to throw out the 2011 redistricting maps. That’s good enough I guess he must be thinking.

After all, these are minority groups and you can’t hope to please them all, can you? They are so unreasonable after all.

So while seven litigants have signed on to an interim deal, two, and the NAACP, a not insubstantial minority group, have not.

From the Austin American-Statesman:

“…but the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, the Black Legislative Caucus and the NAACP have not agreed to support the proposed maps.”

The 2011 maps were obviously drawn to deprive minorities of representation due to them because of their contribution to the growth in Texas’ population between 2000 and 2010. Lawmakers ignored that just as Abbott is ignoring the demands of 3 significant groups who have been discriminated against.

No, in ethnic discrimination, you don’t get to have a majority rules outcome. You satisfy everyone, or you satisfy no one.

Dogs Against Romney

It was inevitable. It was inevitable that someone come up with a Facebook page about the now infamous Romney family vacation to Canada. You know. The one where Mitt Romney strapped a dog kennel, essentially a crate to the roof of his station wagon and put in it the family dog, an Irish Setter named Seamus. And drove like a bat out of hell for 12 hours on the interstate.

As the story goes, as retold by one of his sons years later, the children noticed a stream of brown fluid going down the back window of the station wagon. The poor animal was so upset that he became physically ill.

So what did Mitt Romney do? He pulled over into a gas station and hosed off the dog and the crate. Then put them both back on the roof of his car and drove on.

Word has it that while vacationing in Canada Seamus made a break for it and ran away from these crazy heartless people.

So now there is a Facebook page that you can find here.

As we say in Facebook, LOL.

UPDATE: They also have a Blogger website. Fantastic!