Heel of Fortune

From The Boston Globe:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is worth between $190 million and $250 million, his campaign said yesterday after filing a personal financial disclosure statement with the Federal Election Commission.

That dollar figure would likely make him the wealthiest candidate in the 2012 White House race, far and away eclipsing President Obama. His only possible GOP rival is former governor Jon Huntsman of Utah, who has yet to release his disclosure form and is among the heirs to the Huntsman Corp. fortune.

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The Devolution of the Rethuglican Party

From Maureen Dowd at The New York Times (Op-Ed):

Christine O’Donnell doesn’t understand why monkeys can’t turn into people right before her eyes.

Bill Maher continued his video torment of O’Donnell by releasing another old clip of her on his HBO show on Friday night, this time showing one in which she argued that “Evolution is a myth.”

Maher shot back, “Have you ever looked at a monkey?” To which O’Donnell rebutted, “Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?”

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Stinky & the Brain

From New York Magazine:

“American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains,” warned Delaware senate candidate Christine O’Donnell on the O’Reilly Factor in 2007.

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Christine O’Donnell Isn’t Foolin’ Around!

From Sam Stein at THE HUFFINGTON POST:

Long before she became the latest fascination of the political press and the cause-of-the-moment of the Tea Party movement, Christine O’Donnell (R-D.E.) was appearing on news outlets large and small extolling the sins of not just sex but masturbation.

The Delaware Republican, who is challenging Rep. Mike Castle in the state’s Senate primary and has earned the financial backing of a portion of the Tea Party movement, made an appearance in the MTV series “Sex In The 90s.” Entitled “The Safest Sex Of All,” the episode was ostensibly geared towards understanding the importance of abstinence. But O’Donnell’s guidance went a bit further. Masturbation, she argued, is not a moral substitute for sex. “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.”

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“The reason that you don’t tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue,” she extrapolated. “You’re just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun.”

The president of Saviors Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), O’Donnell was, at the time, just becoming a visible voice in the pro-“chastity” movement. Her organization, a youth-based group started in 1996 with a focus on establishing conservative Christian values in college-aged kids, made frequent appearances on television in addition to lobbying Congress.

…snip…

In November 1998 […] she wrote a piece for an outlet called the Cultural Dissident, discussing why simply being abstinent was not a lofty enough goal.

Yes, I am a Christian. Yes, I do seek to surrender my entire life to the will of our Father. That is precisely why I don’t talk about abstinence or secondary virginity when I am asked to speak about sex. Abstinence is a physical discipline, not a calling. It makes our physical condition the goal.

Years later, she was part of a group of outraged religious conservatives who criticized President George W. Bush for allowing continued research on 60 stem cell lines that had already been developed (Bush’s position was considered restrictive in its own right). More recently, she suggested that age-appropriate sex education, even for kindergarteners, could convince children that strangers with candy were “not so creepy.”

…snip…

The Castle campaign pledged on Thursday to launch negative advertisements against O’Donnell — a remarkable and undoubtedly unexpected use of funds from a candidate who was supposed to coast to victory.

There’s no cure for selfishness

From Joe Conason at Salon:

Sept. 11, 2009 | In the lyrical conclusion of President Obama’s speech on healthcare, he talked about the emotions and experiences that drove his late friend Sen. Edward Kennedy to work so tirelessly and passionately for universal coverage. He tried to describe what Kennedy must have felt as two of his children suffered through bouts of cancer. Ordeals such as those, said the president, had helped Kennedy to understand the “sheer terror and helplessness” of parents whose children are stricken by serious disease, and lack the means to save them.

Reaching out to his opponents, the president tried to emphasize that such empathy toward other human beings “is not a partisan feeling,” but is instead an aspect of our national character.

…snip…

To support that reassuring observation, he cited the landmark bills that Kennedy’s Republican colleagues have co-sponsored in years past to extend healthcare to children and protect hospital patients. As he said, Americans of all parties (and none) surely possess the capacity for compassion.

But why then do nearly all of the Republicans in Congress find it so difficult to empathize with the tens of millions of their uninsured and underinsured fellow citizens — and so easy to contemplate the ruin of reform yet again, even though that means condemning hundreds of thousands to sickness, bankruptcy and even death? Why would they still insist, after 40 successful years of Medicare, that government must have no further role in ensuring decent healthcare for every American?

Perhaps the problem is that a certain kind of Republican — often with a connection to the White House or Capitol Hill — will only endorse government action to remedy the adversity they have experienced for themselves.

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Is there a doctor in the House? Yeah, 14 of ’em!

From the Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — In the struggle to overhaul the nation’s health care system, 16 physicians have ended up in ringside seats — as members of the House and Senate.

But they have taken different lessons from their experiences in medicine, and they do not agree on what a bill should look like.

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Holier than Thou

From CBS News:

President Barack Obama’s planned commencement address at Notre Dame has prompted outrage from students and activists upset that the Catholic university has invited a pro-choice politician to its campus. The controversy has generated headlines and with them consistent debate in the media about whether or not the president should show up at all.

But the situation is less controversial than it may seem from all the chatter over the past few weeks. Indeed, it seems that the most vocal opponents of the president’s visit only represent a small minority of the college community.

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Primary Dolors

From The Dallas Morning News:

AUSTIN – As the GOP struggles nationally to redefine itself, the debate over what it means to be a Republican is playing out in Texas, too, through Kay Bailey Hutchison’s challenge to Gov. Rick Perry.

Hutchison says the “core principles” that will help the party grow are not social, but economic: smaller government, lower taxes and free enterprise.

Perry’s appeal is to a GOP base that sees social issues such as abortion as a litmus test of party purity.

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