Category: Hypocrisy

And While We Are Talking About White House Spelunking…

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It looks like the White House is preparing to cave to the Conference of Catholic Bishops on reproductive rights:

A top adviser to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign suggested on Tuesday that the administration was open to working with Catholic hospitals and universities over their objections to providing birth control services to women.

“I’m less concerned about the messaging of this than to find a resolution that makes sense,” David Axelrod said on MSNBC.

“I heard earlier Joe [Scarborough] say, ‘Well, there may be compromises that can be reached.’ We have great respect for the work that these religious institutions do. … We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms, so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventative care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” he explained.

Jeebus.

It’s like capitulation is so firmly engrained in their DNA that they can’t stand their ground even when it is to their advantage to do so.

These days, the Catholic Bishops is as likely to support Democrats as the Chamber of Commerce, so all you are doing is pissing off your base.

Boycott the Susan G Komen Foundation

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You’ve probably heard how the Komen foundation created trumped up reasons to defund Planned Parenthood.

What we also know now is that their senior management is a vipers den of ‘Phant political operatives, (their founder and CEO is a former Bush appointee) and failed right wing candidates, and (only a Wiki away) that they have aggressively harassed other non-profits in an attempt to prevent them from using the term “for the cure”.

What you may not know is that their top top public-health official resigned in protest over the decision, and that the board overruled the professional staff who recommended against defunding PP.

And finally, we have a report that they aggressively lobbied against the Breast & Cervical Cancer Prevention & Treatment Act because they wanted the money to go through them, they lobbied against single payer in Obamacare, and fought to neuter the Breast Cancer & Environmental Research Act, and they appear to be attempting to use this as a wedge in order to create a Republican political opening.

That, and the fact that Republicans want women to be punished for having sex, so they oppose birth control and things like the HPV vaccine.

I’m with what Atrios says:

It’s OK To Say You Suck

Just echoing what tbogg had already said, but what Komen has done is made it ok to point out that they kind of suck. And they kind of sucked before all this, but not many people ever want to rain on the pink paradise parade. They managed to associate their brand with a cause, and to criticize the brand was to criticize the cause.

Now we all get to say: you suck hard.

I don’t think that they realize is just how much scrutiny they will be getting as an organization now that they will no longer be seen as synonymous with the fight against breast cancer.

[on edit]
Well, now that their original explanation, that they cut off any organization under an official (trumped up in the case of PP) investigation, because they are continuing to give to Penn State, home of the pedophile friendly athletic department, which is under a legitimate investigation, they have a new alibi.

Facepalm

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Just when you thought that New Jersey could not get any more pathetic, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said that civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s would have been cool with a referendum to give civil rights without regard to race:

The verbal feud over gay marriage in New Jersey got more personal Monday with Gov. Chris Christie firing a slang term [numb nuts] at a lawmaker, and a hero of the Civil Rights movement chastising the governor for a separate remark.

………
The issue also brought U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia to Trenton on Monday to take Christie to task for comments linking gay marriage to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.
Christie last week vowed to veto any gay marriage bill that reaches his desk. He instead called for the question to be put to voters in November.
“I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights, rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South,” Christie said after an event in Central Jersey.
Black leaders pounced. Newark Mayor Cory Booker said baseball great Jackie Robinson would not have had the opportunity to break the sport’s color barrier had the matter been put to a vote, and the mayor himself would not have had the opportunity, years later, to be elected to lead New Jersey’s largest city. Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver said many felt the sting of Christie’s comment.
Gusciora, who is white, said Christie would have found allies in late Alabama Gov. George Wallace and late Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox, both segregationists.

This is what qualifies as a deep thought by the ‘Phants.

God, what a repulsive person.

Twitter Goes Evil

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So now Twitter has decided to do the dirty-work of every despotic regime on the face of the planet earth:

Twitter, a tool of choice for dissidents and activists around the world, found itself the target of global outrage Friday after unveiling plans to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws.

It was a stunning role reversal for a youthful company that prides itself in promoting unfettered expression, 140 characters at a time. Twitter insisted its commitment to free speech remains firm, and sought to explain the nuances of its policy, while critics — in a barrage of tweets — proposed a Twitter boycott and demanded that the censorship initiative be scrapped.

“This is very bad news,” tweeted Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem. Later, he wrote, “Is it safe to say that #Twitter is selling us out?”

Yes.

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

They are claiming that this has nothing to do with China, but is has everything to do with China.

Obama’s War on Open Government Continues

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They are going after a CIA officer who revealed our chain of gulags and torture:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists.

The case against John Kiriakou, who also served as a senior Senate aide, extends the Obama administration’s crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets. Kiriakou, 47, is the sixth target of a leaks-related prosecution since President Obama took office, exceeding the total number of comparable prosecutions under all previous administrations combined, legal experts said.

Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Seriously, this sh%$ is just evil.

There have been more prosecutions of leakers in 3 years of the Obama administration than there had been over the prior two hundred and twenty years.

This is despicable.

Quote of the Day

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Courtesy of the The Rude Pundit:

You got that? The whore who fronts for an industry owned by multinational megacorporations like NewsCorp, Sony, and Viacom is actually attacking BoingBoing.net owners Happy Mutants LLC for using the internet for some evil agenda to steal Chipmunk movies just because they went on a one-day strike. That’s a bit like Ted Bundy accusing a student nurse of having a messy dorm room just before bludgeoning her to death.

He is, of course, describing former Senator Chris Dodd’s pimping for big media in has capacity as chief lobbyist for the MPAA.

Meh

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I just watched the Nightline interview with Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s 2nd wife, where she alleges that Newt, when caught in the affair, asked her to have an open marriage, and bedded future 3rd wife Callista in her (Marianne’s) bed:

Newt Gingrich lacks the moral character to serve as President, his second ex-wife Marianne told ABC News, saying his campaign positions on the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family values do not square with what she saw during their 18 years of marriage.

In her first television interview since the 1999 divorce, to be broadcast tonight on Nightline, Marianne Gingrich, a self-described conservative Republican, said she is coming forward now so voters can know what she knows about Gingrich.

In her most provocative comments, the ex-Mrs. Gingrich said Newt sought an “open marriage” arrangement so he could have a mistress and a wife.

I was hoping for a bit more. 

This is basically old news, and it wasn’t particularly squicky.

About the only thing that surprised me was that Gingrich wasn’t even man enough to deny it himself.  He peddled his daughters (by his first wife) to ABC to issue the denials.

In the short term, I expect it to help him in South Carolina, because the ‘wingers there will assume that it is an artifact of some sort of liberal conspiracy, as opposed to Newt just being a contemptible hypocrite.

John Stewart Goes Postal on Barack Obama

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Brutal!

John Stewart gives Barack Obama a righteous, and justly deserved, beat-down over the President’s signing of the “f%$# the Bill of Rights” indefinite detention defense authorization bill.

It’s remarkable how much eloquence he (and to be fair, his writers) gives to the absolute outrage through humor than the outrage expressed by other commentators.

If you want to show someone who doesn’t get why what happened is so wrong, this conveys it more succinctly than anything I’ve read from Greenwald, or Taibbi, or the Rude Pundit.

Stewart is a national treasure.

Damn! This Makes Matt Taibbi Look Like Thomas Kinkade!

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Mark Ames has just posted an epic take-down of bought and paid for pimp for mass murderers Joshua Foust, and by extension, his employer, Atlantic Magazine.

Here is a sample:

Last week, some troll named Joshua Foust attacked my article about the massacre in Kazakhstan on December 16. I really had no idea who Foust was until I started getting emails from readers telling me “some guy with a goatee is having a meltdown on Twitter.” What upset Foust so much about my article was that I dared to report a death toll number, “up to 70,” that differed from the official figure of 15 that the regime in Kazakhstan wanted the outside world to believe. Why did Foust take on the role of massacre-denier for Kazakhstan’s notoriously brutal, corrupt regime?

Foust, it turns out, has spent much of the past decade getting paid by defense contractors to front for them as one of their paid PR monkeys. One example: Last year, Foust published a hit piece in the Columbia Journalism Review attacking an award-winning Washington Post investigative series about the vast hidden defense contractor industry, without disclosing the fact that Foust was an employee of Northrop Grumman–one of the largest defense contractors in America.

Foust’s job is the opposite of journalism—he gets paid by war-profiteers to lie to the public, to cover for them while they soak the public for government contracts. That’s what Joshua Foust does for a living; and besides carrying the water for defense contractors as a “strategic communications” flak, Foust has spent the past few years talking up Kazakhstan’s despot-for-life, Nursultan Nazarbayev—and talking down the appalling human rights records both in Kazakhstan and in Uzbekistan.

This is truly epic.

It’s harsh, but perfectly justified, and it’s really a thing of beauty.

I love savage writing.

What Dan Savage Says…

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I don’t know how I missed this.

It is positively brilliant:

Bachmann and her ilk believe that woman who have sex—along with men who fail to purchase health insurance—deserve to die horrible deaths. That’s why they hate the HPV vaccine, that’s why they fought its introduction, that’s why they tell lies about it now. Because they want women to die.

Read the rest. It’s short.

It’s also true.

The majority of the people who who seek to criminalize abortion want to punish women for having sex, and anything that resembles freedom in their personal, in any way they can.

It’s an unalloyed evil that these folks see The Handmaiden’s Tale as a blueprint Rather than a warning.

Wanker of the Day

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Actually, the week, and likely the month, and possibly the whole year, is the so-called “fact checkers” at Politifact.

Basically, they declared that statements that the Paul Ryan “destroy Medicare” plan did in fact destroy Medicare was the “lie of the year.”

I get it: Reality has a well-known liberal bias, but when you are replacing a single payer health insurance system with vouchers that won’t cover private insurance, you are destroying Medicare:

This is simply indefensible. Claims that are factually true shouldn’t be eligible for a Lie of the Year designation.

It’s unnerving that we have to explain this again, but since PolitiFact appears to be struggling with the relevant details, let’s set the record straight.

Medicare is a single-payer health care system offering guaranteed benefits to seniors. The House Republican budget plan intended to privatize the existing system and replace it with something very different — a voucher scheme. It would still be called “Medicare,” but it wouldn’t be Medicare.

It seems foolish to have to parse the meaning of the word “end,” but if there’s a program, and it’s replaced with a different program, proponents brought an end to the original program. That’s what the verb means.

(emphasis original)

It’s very simple:  If you eliminate a program, even if you come up with something completely different that you give the same name, you’ve eliminated that program.

Furthermore, if you want to take 10+ years to phase it, you’ve eliminated that program.

I’m in complete agreement with Krugthulhu:

The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

And not only do they go with complete bullsh$%, but they overruled their own polling (even after a ‘Phant congressman attempted to encourage astroturfing, it still came in 3rd) to declare the truth to be a lie, so they doubled down.

Needless to day, Politifact won’t get links from me.

There are too many bastions of truthiness out there.

John Stewart Weeps

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Well, it was fun while it lasted, but Newt Gingrich’s numbers are imploding.

Seriously, this makes Rudy Giuliani’s flame-out in 2008 look look like when Saddam set fire to half the oil wells in Kuwait.

PPP notes that, “Gingrich has now seen a big drop in his Iowa standing two weeks in a row.  His share of the vote has gone from 27% to 22% to 14%.”

He’s lost almost half of his support over the past 2 weeks.

His campaign isn’t doing a Dorian Gray, it’s a face melting Raiders of the Lost Ark thing that he has going.

FWIW, I think that the cause of his numbers dropping is not that he is saying batshit insane stuff, but because people are starting to realize that he is doing so as a sacrifice at the church of Gingrich, and that there is nothing that he wouldn’t say to sate his own ego..

One wonders if RuPaul Ron Paul starts getting some coverage of his decades long history of explicitly blatant racism if he wins Iowa.

I’m sick and tired of the press ignoring this, because he gives good article.

I Know that this is Stating the Obvious……

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Barack Obama did not “Keep his promise” to get out of Iraq.

We still have thousands or armed mercenaries contractors, and Obama did not pull the troops out voluntarily.

The Iraqis kicked us out, and Obama wanted to stay.

He wanted thousands of troops, a number of bases, to remain in Iraq.

As I’ve said before, Obama claims to oppose “stupid wars”, but he refuses to acknowledge that any war can be stupid.”

Yeah, I Believe Him

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Newt is pledging not to commit adultery for the 4th time:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich this week signed a pledge to uphold conservative values from the Iowa-based group The Family Leader and vowed to restrict federal dollars from paying for abortion overseas, uphold the Defense of Marriage Act and stay true to his wife, Callista.

“I will also oppose any judicial, bureaucratic, or legislative effort to define marriage in any manner other than as between one man and one woman,” Gingrich wrote in a letter to The Family Leader announcing his support of the group’s pledge. “I also pledge to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.”

That would actually be the fourth time Gingrich has taken a no-adultery pledge. He took the first one in 1962 when he married Jackie Battley, and then again in 1981 when he married Marianne Ginther and made a third one to Callista Bisek (now Gingrich) in 2000.

Gingrich, whose first two marriages ended because he was having an affair a woman who would later become his wife, addressed his history of infidelity at the ABC News/Yahoo! Republican debate on Saturday, where he said that he has sought forgiveness for his mistakes.

So the big lies were:

  1. I’ll respect you in the morning.
  2. The cheque is in the mail.
  3. I will not come in your mouth. 

And we can now add #4:

  1. This time, Newt is serious about his marital vows.

    What Digby Says

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    Her comments on the Obama’s administration craven capitulation on Plan B contraception:

    If Democrats cared as much about getting young women to the polls as they care about getting ideologically incoherent swing voters, they’d win in a walk. They are progressive and they are hostile to the GOP agenda on nearly every level. They have been the most loyal Democratic voters but they are demoralized and need to be reassured that the Democrats give a damn about them. The Plan B decision says the opposite.

    This is patently clear to anyone with a brain, but, unfortunately, Barack Obama isn’t.

    He got into the Senate because his rich primary opponents cut each other to bits, and then his opponent in the general self destructed (wanted to have sex in public with his wife) and was replaced by the craziest person in the Republican party (Alan “WTF?” Keyes).

    He won the White House because the press hated Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush so thoroughly trashed the Republican brand, and then faced a doddering old fool who selected the stupidest f%$#ing person in Alaska as a running mate.

    It’s better to lucky than smart, but stupid is always bad news, and I see absolutely no sign of any sort of political savvy here.

    It’s sad when a politician seizes on a load of crap (Post Partisan Unity Schtick) as a “special sauce,” and then believes it.

    Of course, this describes the Republicans too, and they all add a hefty dose of batsh%$ insane.

    I miss the calm sanity and liberalism of Richard Milhaus Nixon.

    Another Core Democratic Party Value Betrayed

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    This one isn’t a surprise. Barack Obama has a long tradition of ambivalence to women’s reproductive rights.

    He’s been uninterested in women’s issues since his days in the Illinois legislature.

    Most recently, we have the ruling by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruling the FDA’s decision to make the Plan B morning after pill an over the counter medication.

    Let’s be clear here. This is the first time ever that an HHS Secretary has overruled the FDA.

    And Obama is fine with this:

    President Obama, who took office pledging to put science ahead of politics, averted a skirmish with conservatives in the nation’s culture wars on Thursday by endorsing his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of an after-sex contraceptive pill to girls under age 17.

    The administration action inevitably raised questions about whether politics was trump in this instance — especially from disappointed supporters in the scientific and women’s rights communities. Mr. Obama, who had criticized how his predecessor made decisions on issues like contraceptives, sought to dispel that idea in remarks to White House reporters.

    “I did not get involved in the process,” he quickly asserted.

    Yes, while Barack Obama is getting his faux populist cred on for the upcoming election, he had nothing to do with this decision.

    In the control freak factory that is the Obama administration, the idea that this decision was not thoroughly vetted by both the policy and political wonks is simply not believeable.

    In fact, if the head of HHS made this decision without passing it up the chain, it justify their firing.

    Mr. Obama said the decision was made by his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius. On Wednesday, in a rare move, she overruled the Food and Drug Administration, which had recommended that the morning-after pill Plan B One-Step is safe and should be sold without a prescription to people under 17, just as it is now to those who are 17 and older.

    “I will say this, as the father of two daughters: I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine,” Mr. Obama said.

    “And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

    Bullsh%$.

    This is just too dangerous, but acetaminophen, which causes, “over 56,000 injuries, 2,500 hospitalizations, and an estimated 450 deaths per year,” kids can buy that at the drug store.

    And of course the whole, “Using his daughters as political human shield thing,” is contemptible.

    First, he is putting a barrier in that will likely force some girls to ask their rapist’s permission, second, even a couple of hour delay to get a prescription makes the drug less effective, and third, it’s a couple of orders of magnitude (at least) safer than pregnancy.

    Once again, I am glad that I don’t live in a swing state, so I don’t have to vote for this hypocritical ratf%$#.

    Yeah, not primarying him was such a good thing.

    Obama Sides with the 99%, and Goes After ……… Food Stamp Fraud

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    No seriously, on the same day that Barack Obama gives a speech declaring his populist cred, we read this story about how his administration is going full Jihad over food stamp fraud.

    So we have this:

    Laying out a populist argument for his re-election next year, President Obama ventured into the conservative heartland on Tuesday to deliver his most pointed appeal yet for a strong governmental role through tax and regulation to level the economic playing field.

    “This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share and when everyone plays by the same rules,” Mr. Obama said in an address that sought to tie his economic differences with Republicans into an overarching message.

    Juxtaposed with this:

    The nation’s struggling economy and an uptick in major natural disasters in recent months mean more Americans than ever are using federal money to buy food.

    More than 46.2 million people received a total of $75.3 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, in fiscal 2011, according to Agriculture Department statistics released Monday. Officials said participation spiked in the closing days of the fiscal year as Hurricane Irene caused destruction across a dozen East Coast states.

    Year-to-year, the program gained more than 6 million new participants and distributed $7 billion in additional funds, officials said.

    With more Americans relying on the program, the Obama administration on Tuesday plans to announce new steps to crack down on SNAP fraud amid estimates suggesting as much as $753 million in federal food aid is spent fraudulently each year.

    Some “populist”.

    It’s campaign time.  If you want to know who Barack Obama really is, don’t look at what he says, look at what he does.

    And what he does, while talking about the 99% is that he goes after poor people who might be selling food stamps so that they can buy shoes for their kids, while allowing rich people who did steal trillions skate.

    And our alternative will be Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich.

    I think that I am writing in Angela Merkel in 2012.

    Why You Should Tell Your Local Public Radio Station to Go Pound Sand During Pledge Week

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    In the latest case, we have Warren Olney, the host of “On Point,” equating homosexuality with child rape:

    Allegations of child sex abuse have destroyed the carefully cultivated image of Penn State’s football team and brought down the university’s administration. They’ve also exposed once more the vulnerability of children, when a sexual predator can hide behind the façade of an institution bent on protecting its reputation. Foster children were assigned to former coach Jerry Sandusky’s care, even though charges against him were investigated for years. Today, Penn State’s Board of Trustees expanded its probe into the cover-up. With 500,000 children desperate for loving homes, we look at efforts to widen the pool of available parents. Should gays and lesbians qualify?

    That’s Olney’s lede from his show on gay foster parents.

    And then he lets an anti-gay bigot, Jerry Cox of the Arkansas’ Family Council, which has been designated as a hate group by the SPLC, spew his filth without challenging his cherry picking and outright lies.

    But Warren Olney still has a job, while Lisa Simeone, an entertainment reporter, got fired for being a spokesman for a Occupy Wall Street Group, and now NPR has dropped its distribution of World of Opera produced by WDAV in an attempt to get her fired from that show.

    Yep, you got it. They are trying to get an entertainment reporter fired, and shut down an opera show.

    To be fair, On Point is distributed by PRI, not NPR, though PRI was weaseled big time on this, “Thank you for contacting Public Radio International. We share your concern. Although PRI does not have editorial control over the show -we distribute the program and KCRW produces-once we heard the program yesterday, we began having discussions with the editorial staff of To the Point, and those discussions will continue.”

    The problem is that public broadcasting suffers from Barack Obama syndrome:  It sees liberals as a captive audience to be belittled and scorned in an attempt to suck up to to right wingers who will hate them anyway.

    If you give, they will continue to do this, so when they call, write back, and say that balance does not involve sanctioning hate speech and leaving outright lies unchallenged.

    As it stands today, Warren Olney is still secure in his job, and NPR is still trying to get Lisa Simeone fired, so public broadcasting is not is not an institution for “mindful human beings,” to quote Ronald Reagan, Jr. on Dick Cheney.

    I’m not saying that these people are inherently evil, but they are so weak that they are willing allies of evil.

    I’m Beginning to Wonder if This is all Anti-Mormon bigotry

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    It seems that the Republican base is determined to find an alternative to Mitt Romney, and they seem to cycle through a series of brain dead clowns who are destined to fail. So, after cycling through Bachmann, Perry, and Cain, it looks like the ‘Phants are truly scraping the bottom of the barrel, with Newt Gingrich rising in the polls:

    It’s come to this.

    In the wake of Herman Cain’s multiple sexual harassment accusations, the media narrative of Romney-the-Inevitable has continued to grow. But it seems the anti-Mitt crowd is continuing to grasp for other choices. The latest alternative?

    Newt Gingrich.

    Months ago, many declared Gingrich’s campaign dead barely after it had begun, when he criticized Paul Ryan’s medicare-killing house budget, and lost his top campaign staffers in a major shakeup. But polls released Friday suggest growing momentum.

    Let’s review the mounting evidence, shall we?

    A national CBS News poll shows Gingrich as the choice of 15% of GOP voters, tied with Mitt Romney and three points behind Herman Cain, who is slipping.

    A national McClatchy/Marist poll shows Gingrich in second place with 19% of the vote — four points behind Romney. Also notable is that 43% of Gingrich’s supporters say they are firmly committed to his candidacy — compared to 30% for Romney, and 31% for Cain. In total, only 30% of voters supporting a candidate say they are firmly committed. Gingrich’s higher-than-average floor of support could prove significant moving forward.

    This is a guy who served his 1st wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer, and dumped his 2nd on Mother’s Day when he knew that she had MS, and conducted a years long affair with his current wife while pursuing the impeachment of Bill Clinton for a blow job.

    That and the fact that he’s a smarmy bastard.

    The base is thrashing around for a non-Mormon and non-Catholic alternative to Romney, so the hapless Huntsman and the batsh%$ insane Santorum* are not viable alternatives.

    I’m wondering who the Republicans next “Great White Hope” will be.

    *The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.