I Should Have Said
Ms Gillard beat back the challenge from Kevin Rudd in the Australian row by a vote of 71-31. It looks like the people who work with him don’t really like Mr. Rudd. It is a good thing that is over because the country is facing more flooding from yet another ‘big wet’ in New South Wales, the capital district, and parts of Victoria.
The Midwest of the US is preparing for storms from the same system that tore up the South.
[You have to wonder when some people will finally notice that the climate is changing.]
Under the Michigan system, the Mittster and St Santorum both got 15 delegates, but the Mittser took Wyoming today. Super Tuesday doesn’t look good for Mitt, so he needs all the cushion he can get. If Mitt just handed out the money he is spending on advertising in these states, he would get more votes than he does.
Locally, the Fox TV station has been trying to hold up the cable system for a higher fee, but the cable system is bleeding subscribers, so they don’t want to do anything that raises the price. At the moment my Mother is one of the only two subscribers on this block, and she has the minimal subscription. Everyone else has dumped cable so they could afford the gas to get to their multiple low paying jobs. I think the TV station may be in for a surprise, as the cable company decides they can’t afford them.
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The Romney also got Arizona on Tuesday. One of the striking things about both of these races: 1) The Romney has never broken 50% — ever, and 2) the turnout was abysmally low. It seems that Republicans are having a hard time getting excited about voting for either a) a candidate with a VIN number and bar-coded certification of factory origin, or b) Elmer Gantry’s reincarnation. Hrm, who coulda thunkit!
BTW, Sheriff Joke Arpaio held a press conference today where he said that the President’s birth certificate was “suspicious”. Unknown is the Sheriff’s opinion on The Romney’s VIN number and bar-coded certificate of factory origin. Fake or real? 😈
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The turn out has sucked in all of the primaries, going to single digit percentages in some of them. Gallup keeps talking about the Republicans being more motivated than the Dems, but you don’t see it in the primaries, even when all of the ‘dwarves’ were running.
Arpaio is upset about all of the Federal scrutiny of what he has been up to around Phoenix. He may be in a lot of legal trouble soon, which isn’t unusual for public officials in Arizona. Has anyone checked Arpaio’s papers? What does he know about Hawaiian birth certificates, and why? Isn’t it suspicious that his last name ends in a vowel?
Everybody who’s ever lived in Phoenix knows that Arpaio is way more fake than Obama’s birth certificate could ever be. He’s a plastic wind-up doll caricature of a blow-hard sheriff, but the reality is a blustering old man who gets re-elected by appealing to racist old Midwesterners who retired to Phoenix and he hasn’t been a real lawman for decades now (and there’s some who claim the DEA aren’t lawmen anyhow — that they’re out-of-control cowboys, especially the ones stationed overseas like Arpaio was — but that’s a different story).
The notion of journalists wasting their time asking Arpaio questions about his “birth certificate probe” was silliness. They should have been asking him about his many ethics violations, about the time he arrested Joe Arizona for caricaturing him in public, about the handicapped prisoners that he has killed by depriving of medical care in complete violation of the Constitution, and so forth. Oh wait, I’m assuming that the press is supposed to actually confront power, rather than be stenographers to power. My bad!
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin
Rmoney [sic] spent a friggin’ fortune on those two races. From what I’ve read, he’s spending it a lot faster than he’s receiving donations to his campaign… people just don’t like him very much… but I suppose if you’re that wealthy, and also have Restore Our Future (ROF! ROF!) funneling cash in your behalf, you can act like you’re swimming in money. I still expect Rmoney to be the GOP candidate.
All the media care about is that Arpaio is ‘good copy’ that attracts eyeballs so the advertisers can sell them stuff. ‘Truth, Justice, and the American Way’ is a slogan, not a mission statement for the media.
No, DEA is not law enforcement. If he was in DEA, he learned bribery and corruption, not law enforcement. No one in law enforcement who was ‘clean’ wanted anything to do with them, because they spread rot wherever they went. They are worse than the FBI for screwing up local prosecutions and losing cases because of the way they work. They are constantly trying to horn in where they don’t belong, and trying to get the scum who work with them out of prosecutions. They will never figure out that major distributors use the DEA to take out rivals, while being protected.
It is amazing that people in Phoenix still don’t get that Arpaio makes them a national joke, but then, maybe the people who vote for him are a joke … a very cruel joke.
We were posting at the same time, Steve.
The GOP power brokers are ready to do everything they can to get him the nomination, so I think that will be the result, no matter what primary voters may decide.
We can’t have voters messing with the decisions of the VSPs.
Arpaio spent 25 years in the DEA. His last posting before he “retired” (really? only 25 years in and he “retired”, when 30 years was needed for a full pension in the Federal pension system back then?) was in Arizona, which is how Arizona got saddled with him. He tried running a travel agency for ten years but it failed so he ran for Sheriff instead. So for the past twenty years or so he’s been like a plague upon Maricopa County, costing them millions of dollars in lawsuit payouts every year with his blatant disregard for the law. But the prunes love him. He plays a great caricature of a blow-hard sheriff on TV. The Mormons love him too because he made a Mormon his 2nd in command and sucked up to them (there is a huge Mormon population in the Mesa area, in fact Mesa is basically Utah South, it was settled by Mormons dispatched to the south by Brigham Young when Brigham Young was afraid the Army was about to run them out of Utah and has been run by the Mormons ever since). And the prunes and Mormons turn out in droves to vote for him every year.
Just goes to show that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, if the people you’re fooling are Midwestern racists or Mormons.
– Badtux the Former Arizonan Penguin
That sounds like a ‘retirement’ in lieu of being fired.
It will probably require his arrest for something to get rid of him, and then they will discover all of the ‘problems’ that have been hidden for years. One good audit would probably take him down immediately, but that won’t happen without a court order, if then. [We went through that down here with our last sheriff.]
‘Tribalism’ is the biggest problem with politics today. It has led us to the point that people like George Will are saying forget about the Presidency and concentrate on Congress, because no one from the Republican primaries can win an election. Probably hurt Ricky and the Mittster’s feeling, being mean like that.
I believe those groups are covered under ‘some of the people all of the time’ when talking about being fooled.
The Phoenix New Times has reported multiple instances of Sheriff Joke embezzling money — indeed, the editor and the reporter actually went to jail for a couple of days for the crime of reporting on Sheriff Joe’s real estate property transactions (how can a man whose salary is $80K/year own over $1M of property? Hrm?!) before the media outrage forced Sheriff Joe to drop that lawsuit — and it hasn’t made a dent in the Sheriff’s popularity. That was in 2007. In 2008 with the toughest opponent he’s ever faced (a popular county prosecutor) and with the Obamabots clogging the polls to vote for their Messiah he *still* got over 55% of the vote. He’s running for re-election again this year, probably why he’s catering to the teabagger birther racists — he wants their votes.
As you say, only a perp walk of Sheriff Joke is gonna get him out of there, he’s not going to retire because a new Sheriff coming in would look at the accounts and immediately throw him in jail for embezzlement. Or him falling over from a heart attack — he’s 79 years old, after all, and he’s a fat pig. So it could be any day now. But you can’t say the people of Maricopa County didn’t get what they wanted — or deserved — given the overwhelming majority who have voted for him in every election since he first ran for Sheriff.
The voters are just as corrupt as he is because they vote for his free pass. Even if they indict him, those same people will refuse to believe he’s a crook because he is one them and shares their ‘values’. He will be a martyr for conservative values, i.e. everything is the fault of poor people and non-whites.