You say Obama, I say Osama.  I say Obama, you say Osama.  Obama Osama, Obama Osama—let’s call the whole thing off.

Since he became a major contender for the Democrat nomination, slips of the tongue mixing up Obama and Osama have been common—and even the current president’s first big endorser, Ted Kennedy, was not immune.

But Keith Olbermann tried to make this into a new Fox News conspiracy because of a mixup at a LOCAL Fox affiliate, assuming that his audience is too stupid to know the difference—

Fox 40 SACRAMENTO ANCHOR: “President Obama, speaking from the East Room of the White House, telling the nation and the world: President Obama is in fact dead.  I’m sorry. Osama Bin Laden is dead.”

Even better, Olbermann had earlier dusted off a standard hoary liberal myth and tweeted that:

OLBERMANN: “Mr. Bush had personally de-prioritized the hunt for Obama…”

Gee, Keith, if you are going to lie from that glass house…

Mediaite has a great rundown on this story, including this telling graphic from Keith’s Twitter feed:

This is, of course, an utterly natural and probably inevitable gaffe.  Here is the first known example:

 

Last night, Jimmy Kimmel provided this hilarious montage:

Of course, Keith found nothing suspicious in an ACTUAL MSNBC reporter making the mistake.

Then there is this guy, whose leg “thrill” was momentarily interrupted.

And administration shill Nora O’Donnell also twittered:

Nice try, Keith, but you are still irrelevant.

While leftist “feminists” sneer condescendingly at the idea of post-abortion syndrome, it does exist. And if they actually cared about women, they’d admit that fact. But, see, they can’t. If they did, it would mean that they’d have to stop encouraging women to have abortions without disclosing the trauma that can occur to the woman. Many women who abort their babies suffer intense pain and immense guilt. Their entire lives.

It’s clear that they don’t care about the dead babies, but they also need to stop insisting that they are For Women ™ , when they are anything but. Jessica Valenti’s response to an ad campaign from AbortionChangesYou.com proved once again that leftist feminists, or Femisogynists, care only about an agenda and not one whit about actual women. The Abortion Changes You ads served to aid women. Femisogynists sought only to diminish that aid. Truth doesn’t fit with their meme. So, they defaced the ad, as pictured above. Jessica Valenti called the original abortionchangesyou.com ad “heinous.” But what did she say about the defaced one, promoting abortion for convenience? She called the vandal a “pro-choice hero” who “wasn’t having it” and then said:

Love. It.

Loves encouraging abortion for convenience. Loves encouraging abortion because a baby, a human life, doesn’t fit in with one’s super fun college plans.  Loves denying the harm and the trauma that abortion causes to women. And rejoices at the thought of killing a baby who isn’t timely.

That, Jessica, is heinous.

In a follow-up response to my post, Valenti also said the following:

So yeah, I guess I would “rejoice” over women obtaining abortions when it’s convenient. (The inaccessibility of abortion for too many women makes actual rejoicing impossible.) Whether it’s for health, financial, and educational reasons – or simply not wanting to have a child yet – it would absolutely thrill me if women’s life decisions were respected, accepted and supported.  But instead, we live in a world where a woman’s desire for something as basic as education is mocked as selfish.  And we’re the ones who are “anti-woman”?  I think not.

Or simply not wanting to have a child yet. Silly me. I thought that if you didn’t want to have a child, one would use birth control or, you know, not have sex. When does that choice come into play, Jessica? It seems to me that you are the “anti-choicer” because you don’t believe that a woman can possibly be smart enough to act responsibly and make choices all on her very own. By the way, I write while also home schooling my child. You see, not only can a Mother obtain an education herself, but she can educate others. That’s a concept lost on Femisogynists  like Jessica Valenti.

While leftist “feminists” sneer condescendingly at the idea of post-abortion syndrome, it does exist. And if they actually cared about women, they’d admit that fact. But, see, they can’t. If they did, it would mean that they’d have to stop encouraging women to have abortions without disclosing the trauma that can occur to the woman. Many women who abort their babies suffer intense pain and immense guilt. Their entire lives.

It’s clear that they don’t care about the dead babies, but they also need to stop insisting that they are For Women ™ , when they are anything but. Jessica Valenti’s response to an ad campaign from AbortionChangesYou.com proved once again that leftist feminists, or Femisogynists, care only about an agenda and not one whit about actual women. The Abortion Changes You ads served to aid women. Femisogynists sought only to diminish that aid. Truth doesn’t fit with their meme. So, they defaced the ad, as pictured above. Jessica Valenti called the original abortionchangesyou.com ad “heinous.” But what did she say about the defaced one, promoting abortion for convenience? She called the vandal a “pro-choice hero” who “wasn’t having it” and then said:

Love. It.

Loves encouraging abortion for convenience. Loves encouraging abortion because a baby, a human life, doesn’t fit in with one’s super fun college plans.  Loves denying the harm and the trauma that abortion causes to women. And rejoices at the thought of killing a baby who isn’t timely.

That, Jessica, is heinous.

In a follow-up response to my post, Valenti also said the following:

So yeah, I guess I would “rejoice” over women obtaining abortions when it’s convenient. (The inaccessibility of abortion for too many women makes actual rejoicing impossible.) Whether it’s for health, financial, and educational reasons – or simply not wanting to have a child yet – it would absolutely thrill me if women’s life decisions were respected, accepted and supported.  But instead, we live in a world where a woman’s desire for something as basic as education is mocked as selfish.  And we’re the ones who are “anti-woman”?  I think not.

Or simply not wanting to have a child yet. Silly me. I thought that if you didn’t want to have a child, one would use birth control or, you know, not have sex. When does that choice come into play, Jessica? It seems to me that you are the “anti-choicer” because you don’t believe that a woman can possibly be smart enough to act responsibly and make choices all on her very own. By the way, I write while also home schooling my child. You see, not only can a Mother obtain an education herself, but she can educate others. That’s a concept lost on Femisogynists  like Jessica Valenti.

Representative Patrick Kennedy has announced that he is not running for re-election; an unheard of event in the last generation, but it may be a sign that the magic of the Kennedy clan has faded among today’s Catholic voters.

For the past four decades, a portrait of President John F. Kennedy was proudly displayed on the walls of Irish Catholic homes, between the Sacred Heart and the Pope. In the seventies, my Irish grandmother was proud of the first Catholic President and his family, collecting coffee table books, and refusing to believe any negative press about them. Now the Catholic voter’s loyalty to the Kennedy family has declined so much that there are doubts whether Kennedy could be re-elected in Rhode Island, the most Catholic of states.  

He must be missing what the HuffPo considered the good old days which his father, the late Sen Ted Kennedy helped to create, when Catholic politicians could vote pro-abortion keeping their Democrat constituents happy without ruffling feathers among the faithful. Since the Cardinal O’Connor-Geraldine Ferraro wars in the 80′s, things had been awfully cozy for the majority of Catholic politicians who wanted it both ways.

Unfortunately for Patrick Kennedy, a new breed of bishop has come to power. Bishop Tobin, the only bishop of Rhode Island,  was unequivocal in his correction of Kennedy for his pro-abortion stance, prohibited by Canon Law 915.  The news of Bishop Tobin’s war of words with Patrick Kennedy over his support of abortion funding in the health care legislation spread far and wide from Catholic blogs to Fox news(even HuffPo had to cover it), and may have been responsible for his demise. Catholics  supported the bishops’ refusal to give Kennedy holy communion. His constituents in a recent poll gave him a 56% negative rating, with only 35% saying they  would vote for him.

Perhaps this is why we see Patrick Kennedy changing direction and becoming pensive. He told the Boston Herald Magazine that his father’s death has caused him to reflect on relationships and priorities in his life, and how at 42, he would like to start a family.

“Kennedy told the magazine he is not sure what’s next for him, but he wants to model the next chapter of his life after his late aunt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics.”

Kennedy may be able to change his priorities,  by following the noble example of his Aunt Eunice,  and for that, Bishop Tobin  and a new generation of Catholic constituents, is praying.

My sides have been hurting me for days, due to gales of laughter at the complete and utter collapse of the Democrats regarding the MA Senate race. Talk about implosion! It really does go to show that they don’t “get” it at all; they are shocked – shocked - that people are actually thinking for themselves.

Democrats are so flabbergasted that they are thinking even less clearly than normally. While they never think rationally, at least they used to be able to spin without sticking their donkey hooves in their mouths every time! No more:

Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said THIS about Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat…“Why would you hand the keys to the car back to the same guys whose policies drove the economy into the ditch and then walked away from the scene of the accident?” “For the Republicans to say vote for us and bring back the guys who got us into this mess in the first place, I don’t think it’s a winner.”

You mean like the LAST GUY who held that seat? Only he did it metaphorically and literally. Also, he, you know, then left a woman to suffocate to death.

Oh, please do keep talking, Democrats. It is helping immensely! Thanks!

Read the original article at iowntheworld.com

I was going to say Croak-ley, as that is what her senate campaign is doing, but I assumed that liberals would start screeching about how Republicans “want people to die” and stuff. Sheesh, for such an allegedly cosmopolitan, open-minded bunch, they sure do get their lattes in a foamy tizzy an awful lot.

The latest polling data, just released by the Boston Herald, has Scott Brown up by four points.

Riding a wave of opposition to Democratic health-care reform, GOP upstart Scott Brown is leading in the U.S. Senate race, raising the odds of a historic upset that would reverberate all the way to the White House, a new poll shows.

Although Brown’s 4-point lead over Democrat Martha Coakley is within the Suffolk University/7News survey’s margin of error, the underdog’s position at the top of the results stunned even pollster David Paleologos.

“It’s a Brown-out,” said Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center. “It’s a massive change in the political landscape.”

He’s doing incredibly well with women (told you. Knew my ladies wouldn’t let me down), garnering 45 percent to Coakley’s 50 percent. Where he is really besting her, however, is with independents, where he is getting 65 percent of that vote. Perhaps Massachusetts has finally decided that they don’t want corrupt, elitist, arrogant Senators any longer? Coakley sure didn’t do herself any favors there; let’s take a look at the revelations over just the past couple of days, shall we?

First, one of her campaign aides assaulted a Weekly Standard reporter. Coakley, the Attorney General of the State — the head law enforcement person — not only did nothing, but claimed to know nothing about it. Huh. Let’s go to the video tape! (well, picture. But still.)

Read the rest of the article here

The Daily Caller , Tucker Carlson’s newly launched site, reports “It’s For Real; Democrats fear disaster in Massachusetts.”

Oh, say it is so, Joe! Err, Tucker. Whatever! I’m too giddy with excitement at this development to think straight (is that homophobic? Probably, since I’m conservative, right?) Not only would it be sweet, sweet justice to have a Republican take over the Senate seat the Democrats like to erroneously call “Teddy’s seat”, Brown is super hot. OK, that’s not really important, but, come on. Would you rather look at Scott Brown on C-Span or continue to have only the likes of Senator Harry Reid as eye candy? (Reid is actually the opposite. He’s more like eye ipecac) Think please, will you, ladies of Massachusetts?!

In a sign of serious worry about the increasingly tense battle for Ted Kennedy’s seat, the Democratic National Committee and the Martha Coakley campaign have blasted a private memo to top national Dem donors claiming internal polling shows the race is “very tight” and making an “urgent” appeal for donations.

The memo, which was sent over by a source, is the latest sign that the campaign surge of GOPer Scott Brown has caught the Dem establishment off guard. It admits that the mobilization by big national conservative groups for Brown is “working” and acknowledges that the Dem campaign is “having trouble moving independents.”

“Our internal polling shows the race to be a very tight race that means we must do everything we can to ensure we are victorious,” reads the memo, which was written by Coakley’s finance chairman and sent to top donors late yesterday by the DNC.

On a private conference call with top Dem donors today, Martha Coakley acknowledged that Scott Brown’s surge has been “frightening.”

THAT is what we need to still be wary of — “everything they can do to be victorious.” Does ACORN have a huge presence in Massachusetts? Likely so. In tandem with all the other voter fraud, SEIU and their finger biting and various other election stealing tricks that the Democrats have up their sleeves, Brown is going to have to be very far ahead in order to cover the fraud-spread and pull out a victory. As of now, I’m feeling rather optimistic. Based on the most recent polling, he is surging. And surging big time. He also leads with independent voters by a margin of 71-23. No, really.

And if he does win? I will dance a jig, Chivas in hand, and laugh like I’ve never laughed before. Don’t worry, Teddy Kennedy. I’ll look down and toast you!

Read full article at iowntheworld.com

Chris Matthews is known for loudly demanding answers of guests, then talking over them and supplying the answer he wants from them, himself.  But last night on Hardball, he outdid himself, berating Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence for withholding communion from Patrick Kennedy over Kennedy’s insistence on including abortion in government health care.

This hit Matthews’s two biggest hot buttons:  First, he considers himself the new guardian of the Kennedy legacy.  He was on MSNBC around the clock for the funeral of Mary Jo Kopechne’s chauffeur, while his special on the Kennedy brothers ran simultaneously with the week’s festivities.  Matthews, with leg a-tingling also proclaimed that week that Barack Obama was the new Kennedy brother.

But I think it was the remnants of Chris Matthews’s conscience that sent him over the top last night.  Bishop Tobin’s stand that Catholics must not be advocates for abortion hit close to home for Chris, who still claims to be a Catholic.  Perhaps he was afraid he might be next?

I’d call it a heated exchange, except all the heat was on one side, while the Bishop calmly tried to instruct him, and Chris did 80% of the talking, so there wasn’t much exchange.

In a moment of priceless contradiction, Chris told the Bishop if he did not propose exact penalties for abortions, he had no right to try to outlaw them, and it wasn’t the Church’s role anyway.  In other words, if he wasn’t willing to actually legislate, then he shouldn’t propose general moral principles for legislation!

That would be like saying in order for the Church to demand the state enforce “Thou shalt not steal,” that the Bishops must also draw up statutes differentiating between grand larceny and petty theft, between armed robbery and embezzlement.

The exchange really must be seen to be believed and to capture the frantic intensity of Matthews’s rant.  It should be noted, that the only “authority”that Matthews quotes is John F. Kennedy, perhaps giving new literal meaning to the term “political idol.”

After an aggressive grilling in which Chris did only his usual overtalking of his guest, Matthews pretty much lost it on camera:

MATTHEWS: I think you’re intervening. I think you’re getting into law here, and you don’t like Congressman Kennedy’s voting record in Congress. That’s what you’re really going after, where he stands on the law. A lot of catholics agree or disagree in every poll I’ve seen about what the law should be. They generally accept the teaching authority of the church, the magistar (ph), your teaching authority, your excellency.

Where the disagreement is where the law should be, what the penalty should be. I’ve never heard of anybody in the church, in the laity, in the clergy, or in the hierarchy saying a woman should be put in prison for having an abortion. And then I said, wait a minute, if you think it’s murder, there’s an inconsistency here.

And if there is a hesitancy to punish a woman for having an abortion, maybe that’s instructive to you, sir, your excellency, because when you realize you don’t really want to punish a woman for having an abortion, under the law, then maybe you should step back from using the law as your tool in enforcing moral authority.

Maybe your moral authority comes from the pulpit and from teaching, and a congressman has a totally different role, which is to write the law. Now, I’ve asked you three times, your excellency, to tell me what the law should be. And if you can’t do it, maybe you shouldn’t be involved in telling Congressman Kennedy how to write the law. You say you don’t know how to do it. Well, you ought to try before you tell him what he’s doing wrong. That’s my thinking.

Because when it comes to the law, it’s a secular question. It has not to do with the moral-we do a lot of things in this country we don’t like, we think are immoral. But the question is, what sanction do you apply to it? And I’m asking you again with respect, because you are here on the show of your own free will, at our request. What should be the penalty for a young woman or a girl, even, to have an abortion? And if there is no penalty for it, are you really outlawing it?

TOBIN: Sure. And it can perhaps be different degrees of penalties, depending on the involvement of the person. There might be some penalty for the woman having the abortion.

MATTHEW: What would be appropriate?

TOBIN: For a doctor performing-

MATTHEWS: No, let’s get to the woman. No, you have no idea, and it’s not your area. And yet this is the very area you’ve transgressed in. You’ve gone into the area of lawmaking, and condemned the behavior of public officials who have to write public policy. And I get back to what John Kennedy said when he was under pressure to explain the separation between church and state, the difference between rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar, which is the law, and rendering to your flock and people like me what is right and wrong.

And I would contest that your problem is you haven’t gotten people to obey your moral code through teaching, and you have resorted now to use the law to do your enforcement for you. And the problem with that is you are hesitant, even here, your excellency, to state for me now what the punishment should be under the law for having an abortion, because you know, deep down, if you said one minute in prison, you would be laughed at, because the American people, catholic and non-catholic, do not think it’s a criminal act to have an abortion.

They may not like it. They may think it’s immoral. But they don’t think it’s criminal. And yet you are here bringing the force of the law, the authority of the police, and the bench, the law, the judiciary. You want to bring it all to bear, including the Constitution, to enforce your moral beliefs, which are very valid, and I happen to share them. But how do you do it under the law, your excellency?

Whew!

But here was the main point the Bishop made that Matthew refused to accept; and it seems pretty unarguable to me that one cannot be a Catholic and deny the Church this role:

TOBIN: But the point is that any Catholic in public office, his first commitment has to be to his faith, not just for a Catholic, but for a member of any religious community. No commitment is more important than your commitment to your faith, because it involves your relationship with God.

And if your faith somehow interferes with or your job gets in the way of your faith, as I have said on other occasions, you need to quit your job and-and save your soul. Nothing can become more important than your relationship with God.

Patrick Kennedy is perfectly free to become an Anglican, I’m sure the current Archbishop of Canterbury would welcome him with open arms.  If he chafes under even that, he could become a Unitarian and just define for himself what he wants his religion to be.  But if he finds his “Irish Catholic” cultural label to be politically useful, he’s going to have to deal with some standards every once in a while.  Tough luck.

As for Chris, he might want to carry a lightning rod around for a few days…

UPDATE:  I’ve just learned that the conversation Bishop Tobin had with Patrick Kennedy was 3 YEARS ago, according to the Bishop.  It was on the issue generally, not on the health care debate, obviously. Kennedy released the info during the health care debate for obvious political reasons, proving he can be just as sleazy as anyone in his family.

Is this the face of a conservative?

Imagine writing hundreds of words about the death of Abraham Lincoln, without mentioning the name of his assassin.

Or writing about 9/11 but putting the word “hijackers” in scare quotes… (Oh wait: if you endorse that kind of writing, you might actually earn yourself a short lived White House czarship. So scratch that…)

Last night I stumbled upon a post at Media Matters — or, as I like to call it, the George Soros Steno Pool. Media Matters is a leftwing “media watchdog” that monitors conservative talk radio and FOX News, then refutes their daily “lies.”

So Media Matters is supposed to be all about facts and truth and “telling the whole story.” Got it.

Apparently, though, telling the whole story about, say, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 means leaving out one itty bitty detail that doesn’t fit the doctrinaire Media Matters narrative: the name and political affiliation of JFK’s assassin.

In a typo-riddled post entitled “A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this,” Eric Boehlert bemoans the “increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama,” and the “unvarnished hate and name-calling [sic] passed for health care ‘debate’ this summer.”

Boehlert writes:

The radical right, aided by a GOP Noise Machine that positively dwarfs what existed in 1963, has turned demonizing Obama–making him into a vile object of disgust–into a crusade. It’s a demented national jihad, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times.

But I’ve been thinking about Dallas in 1963 because I’ve been recalling the history and how that city stood as an outpost for the radical right, which never tried to hide its contempt for the New England Democrat.

Now, Boehlert’s depiction of the hostile atmosphere in pre-assassination Dallas matches those of primary sources I’ve read before: there were indeed “WANTED” posters of JFK and “Impeach [Supreme Court Justice] Earl Warren” billboards around the city. Kennedy really did mutter to his wife that fateful morning, “We’re heading into nut country today…”

Depressing, sobering stuff.

More depressing, however, is what Boehlert leaves out of his post. For instance, large, friendly crowds lined the President’s motorcade route for miles, as now-familiar film footage attests. So much for the notion of an entire city gripped by palpable, murderous “right wing” rage.

So it’s no wonder Boehlert leaves out the identity of Kennedy’s assassin, too. For instead of being gunned down by a “Bircher” or a Klansman or even a garden-variety Republican, history records that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was in fact murdered by… “a silly little communist.”

That’s how the President’s widow described Lee Harvey Oswald, the young man charged with killing Kennedy. A former Marine, Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian girl, then moved back to America. He took part in pro-Castro leafleting and “street agitation” (to use his words) and even described himself matter of factly as a “Marxist” on a local tv panel show.

In fact, Oswald had previously tried to murder Major General Edwin Walker, one of the most notorious of all the rabid “right wingers” Boehlert blames for stoking local anti-Kennedy feeling.

There are still those who don’t believe Oswald killed Kennedy. But Oswald’s Communist sympathies, defection to the Soviet Union and pro-Castro activism are all matters of public record.

Even if Boehlert is a conspiracy nut who thinks Oswald wasn’t the killer, even the craziest “buffs” feel obliged to mention the fellow’s name in their screeds, if only to declare his innocence. Not this Media Matters scribe.

And why should he? Last year, James Piereson penned a fine book called Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. His thesis: liberals were so traumatized by the idea that JFK’s assassin was a man of the left like themselves, that they literally wrote Oswald out of the story by concocting conspiracy theories surrounding the crime.

Piereson blames much of the subsequent turmoil of the 1960s on what I’ll call this “original sin” of omission, and the cognitive dissonance required to keep believing it.

As described in a profile of Piereson by Ed Driscoll:

…the actual causes of liberal disorientation regarding Kennedy’s death and the motives of his killer predate his assassination by several years. It was during the 1950s and early ’60s that that liberal elites declared America’s nascent and disparate conservative movements to be a greater threat to the nation than the Soviet Union, as illustrated by films of the day such as Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And the subtext of those films was very much based upon “a vast literature that developed in the ’50s and early ’60s about the threat from the far right,” Piereson says, specifically mentioning Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and Daniel Bell’s The Radical Right. (…)

[Following the assassination], a sense of collective guilt is imposed on the nation through its liberal elites and media. “And this is really the first time that you get on the liberal-left this idea that America is guilty. But this however now becomes a metaphor for the left for everything that happens moving on in the 1960s.”

Boehlert is just sticking with this narrative, decades later. So are the likes of Ed Schultz and Rachael Maddow, who’ve both mused over the airwaves that American conservatives are plotting “assassinations,” and liberal radio host Mike Malloy, who declared after the death of Edward Kennedy that the late Senator’s brothers had been “murdered by the right wing in this country.”

(Which doesn’t help explain why radical leftwing terrorist and Obama supporter Bill Ayers dedicated one of his books to RFK’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan. That must be an example of the “nuance” we right wingers are always being scolded for not appreciating….)

I go along with Boehlert in this respect: the raw truth really is hard to accept sometimes. But for me, it’s the truth about the left and what it’s become that saddens, and yes, even scares me.

Senator Tom Harkin, with Barack Obama

On his most recent MSNBC program, Ed Schultz assessed the merits of the healthcare speech Barack Obama had delivered Wednesday before a joint session of Congress. In somber tones, Schultz characterized the President’s reference to the late Senator Ted Kennedy as “the most moving part” of the address. Schultz then turned to his guest, Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat-Iowa), who now carries the torch Kennedy once held as chairman of the Senate Health Committee. Harkin made it clear that he would passionately lead the fight for what Kennedy termed “the cause of my life” – socialized medicine. “We’ve got to have a public option, and believe me, we’re going to have one,” said Harkin.

Inspired by Harkin’s resolve, Shultz drew the Senator’s attention momentarily to the now-infamous verbal outburst of South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson, who, during Obama’s speech, shouted “You lie!” in response to the President’s assertion that the Democrats’ healthcare proposal would not cover illegal aliens. “Have you ever seen that before?” Shultz asked Harkin regarding Rep. Wilson’s action. “Ever? Anything like it?”

And of course Harkin dutifully delivered his predictable, self-serving response: “Not in all my years here. I’ve been to presidential speeches there since Gerald Ford. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Ah, yes, the gentlemanly Tom Harkin’s delicate sensibilities evidently were offended by Rep. Wilson’s low-class heckle. After all, any well-bred gentleman like Tom Harkin understands quite well that it’s bad form to blurt out disrespectful taunts while someone else is trying to deliver a speech. Too bad poor Joe Wilson hadn’t taken etiquette lessons from Harkin, the gentleman. Had Wilson done so, he could have avoided all the public controversy that his Wednesday-night outburst subsequently sparked. He would have understood that the proper way to express disagreement with what a speechmaker is saying, would be to do what Tom Harkin himself did during a speech by his Republican opponent in a 1972 congressional election campaign. On that occasion, Harkin, who had been urged to run for public office by the Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist-oriented “think tank” that has long supported Communist and anti-American causes around the world, did not stoop so low as to interrupt his opponent’s speech by blurting out any pithy, unfriendly remarks from a distance. Instead, he did precisely what any other gallant statesman would have done: He forced his way onto the stage and shouted, from the top of his lungs, that his opponent was polluting the air with “a pack of lies.”

So much for the Gentleman Tom Harkin (Hypocrite-Iowa).

Some promising, surprising and ludicrous names are popping up in 2010 election conversations. In the coming weeks, I will be writing briefly about these names/people, what they are saying, and what is being said about them.

♦ PROMISING ♦

Carly Fiorina

Republican, U.S. Senator for California

Although Fiorina hasn’t officially declared her candidacy, it’s all but certain that this former Hewlett-Packard CEO will duke it out with Sen. Barbara Boxer for the California Democrat incumbent’s seat in the U.S. Senate. The Republican announced in mid-August that she filed papers to “start exploring a candidacy.”

Fiorina has been steadily increasing her presence in the political sphere the last couple years, most notably as an adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. It was then that talk of her future in politics began at a moderate buzz, as seen in this interview with FOX News’ Chris Wallace in the spring of 2008.

She’s an unabashed fiscal conservative who hasn’t been afraid to call out the Obama Administration, particularly on their arbitrary decisions regarding executive compensation.

Given California’s dire economic condition, it will be interesting to hear her campaign proposals for remedying the state’s spiraling fiscal crisis.

♦ SURPRISING ♦

Curt Schilling

Independent, U.S. Senator for Massachusetts

When I think of the Great 38, I see the man standing on the pitcher’s mound, bloodied sock (single tear running down my cheek), leading the Red Sox to a win in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees – forcing a Game 7. That was his first year playing for the Sox. It was also the year the Sox finally brought an end to the Curse of the Bambino.

I try not to let my undying affection for Schilling as an athlete, and what he did for my team (GO RED SOX) cloud my assessment of his potential in politics or the likelihood that he can win the seat left vacant by the passing of Sen. Ted Kennedy as a Republican in a true-blue, Democrat state. But if he tackles important issues for America with equal, unwavering dedication and fortitude, I am confident he will do well.

Schilling is well known among political wonks, and Red Sox fans, to have been an ardent supporter of the Bush 43 administration. And in 2008, Schilling threw his support behind John McCain. He even went so far as to publicly criticize McCain’s opponents – particularly Democrat Hillary Clinton for her continual swipes at Republicans on the handling of the Iraq War.

Although he hasn’t listed any specific campaign platform issues, he certainly isn’t afraid to let folks know what angers him about modern politics.

How in the hell has a state with supposedly as intelligent a voter base as Massachusetts allowed itself to be run into the ground by entrenched and often times corrupt ‘me first’ politicians?

– Curt Schilling, from his blog “38 Pitches”

♦ LUDICROUS ♦

Eliot Spitzer

Democrat, hasn’t yet decided on an office

This “hooker-happy ex-governor,” as he’s been dubbed by the press, may actually have the audacity to consider running for elected office again, after his shameful resignation from his post as New York governor in March 2008.

Spitzer has always possessed a profound arrogance. Honestly – where does his excessive over-confidence come from? He has been heard bragging his poll numbers as governor were substantially better than current NY governor David Paterson. But Paterson’s time in office, thus far, has hardly proffered any results worthy of meaningful comparison.

Neil Cavuto had some fun with this rumor, along with his four-member guest panel, on FOX Business News.

Just when viewers became exhausted by TV’s gavel-to-shovel coverage of Ted Kennedy’s funeral, along came former Vice President Dick Cheney to stir the pot. Cheney gained national attention with his spirited attack on Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to investigate charges that CIA interrogators allegedly tortured suspected terrorists.

It’s an opportune time, then, to glance back at the careers of both men, who have spent their lives in public service.