Monthly Archives: May 2012

John McCain, doing a feeble impression of the old and reasonable John McCain, says that Barack Obama's name will definitely appear on the ballot in Arizona. He's stating the obvious but it's nice to hear him say it.

David Weigel explains about all the "Birther" lawsuits and beliefs. By the way, the McCain campaign lawyer he quotes in there, Trevor Potter, is the gent you've seen occasionally on The Colbert Report advising Stephen Colbert about his Super PAC.

While we're on this subject: Dennis Donohoe wrote me to say…

I also am confused by what the Arizona Secretary of State is doing. However, I beg to differ when you say that people who questioned Bush's victory over Gore in Florida have dropped the matter. Many public figures (Democrats) still complain about and question the results of that election. I also seem to recall you referring to Bush's "alleged" victory over Gore. However, it may have been a joke or my memory may be bad. Just this past weekend we had a barbecue with friends and one of them brought up the Florida issue and still didn't accept that Bush had won and clearly has not dropped the matter.

You're right. There are Democrats who still moan about Bush/Gore but it's not the mainstream. You never saw Democratic leaders fanning the flames to anger their base the way many elected Republicans still do about Obama's citizenship. I also think there's more to complain about there, not about the count itself but about five Supreme Court Justices who many of us think threw the law and logic aside to just install the guy they wanted.

My own feeling for what it's worth is that we do a sloppy job of counting votes in this country. The banking system would collapse if it was as bad at counting your money as the election system is at counting your vote. I don't think people are stuffing ballot boxes. I think the folks opening them are doing a clumsy job at tallying what's in them. That bothers me as does this mindset of "If we won, the election was fair." I didn't see one Republican who said, "I'm glad Bush won but I'm real uncomfortable with how the counting was done…and how it was stopped."

But getting back to what I said: I should have remembered the Internet Rule that I made up long ago, which is that you need to avoid most absolute statements and stick in a "most" or other qualifier. If I write here that "No one in the world believes that John Quincy Adams is alive and running an Arby's on the planet Neptune," I'll eventually hear from someone who'll write, "That's not so. My uncle believes he has proof of that!" I should have just said that Democrats were more accepting of the loss to Bush than Republicans have been of the loss to Obama.

This is another one of those "I don't get this" matters. The Secretary of State in Arizona, a man named Ken Bennett, is now saying he might not allow the name of Barack Obama on the ballot in the upcoming presidential election; not unless he has some solid proof that Obama was indeed born where he says he was born. I don't get why he's making a public issue of this.

Bennett says he's not a "birther." Well, of course not. He can't afford to be because he's going to have to accept proof.

We all know who the birthers are. They're people who desperately want to believe that Barack Obama was never really President of the United States. They're not like those of us who didn't like George W. Bush. We liked the idea of Bush not getting a second term but we only briefly indulged our fantasy that proof would come out that Gore had gotten more votes in Florida. Once it was apparent that no such proof would be forthcoming — not that Bush had won fairly but that it couldn't be proven he had — we dropped the matter. Birthers are still demanding recounts of the recounts of the recounts.

Birthers never give up. No matter what proof comes out that indicates Obama was born where he says he was born, they just say "It's an obvious forgery" and it emboldens them to demand something else they can claim is fake. They demand Obama play their game while at the same time fixing the rules so he can never prove what they demand he prove.

Mr. Bennett doesn't have that luxury. At some point, his opposite number in Hawaii is going to send him the kind of affirmation that Secretaries of State always accept from each other. He'll be told Hawaii stands behind Obama's birth certificate and what's Bennett going to do then? Challenge the right of Hawaii to verify its own documents? Argue that the Secretary of State there really isn't the Secretary of State there?

So what I don't get is why he went public with his "Obama might not be on the ballot" thing. He may earn some points from the Birthers in his state today but before long, he's going to disappoint them and be condemned as a sell-out who's joined the conspiracy to keep a Kommie Kenyan in the White House. Not one of them is going to say, "Well, I guess if Ken Bennett accepts Hawaii's word for it, we ought to."

Maybe we oughta start a movement claiming that Ken Bennett isn't eligible to be Secretary of State. And whatever proof he provides of birthplace or residency, we'll just say it was obviously created last Tuesday in Photoshop…probably by the same group that's trying to convince us that Jan Brewer is governor there.

Mitt Romney's plan for Medicare is vague, probably deliberately so. The less you divulge of a plan some people won't like, the less likely you are to lose the votes of those people.

Patrick Caldwell summarizes what we know of it. It pretty much comes down to privatizing the system so that the government-run system loses strength and the funding it would get goes to privately-owned, for-profit insurance plans. And the elderly would have to pay a lot more out of their own pockets to get comparable care and coverage. Okay, so Grandma might not be able to afford all her prescriptions but we do have to help the insurance companies make more money and keep taxes low for the wealthy.