The Nature of Things

Their big weekend summit in Washington is over and the "values voters" have spoken.  The next president of the United States will be ... Ron Paul! Which, frankly, brings to mind a quote I read recently from the late and sadly missed Molly Ivins.  About ten years ago Molly said, “Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.”  If Molly were still here to advise us, I feel absolutely certain that she would not be endorsing either Ron Paul or that other Texan who is in the race. Nevertheless, the voters with values, as they bill themselves, indicating that other people are without values, really, really liked Mr. Paul and gave him 37% of their votes .  The other Texan got 8%.  Obviously, these voters were not at all convinced about his "values." The straw poll vote was only one of the headlines coming out of this summit and probably not the most interesting one at that.  It was revealed, for e...

Newt Gingrich gives sleazeballs a bad name. If there is any more hypocritical, narcissistic, arrogant, and completely un-self-aware individual on the public scene today, I don't want to know about him. Even Sarah Palin pales in comparison. I've known this and I guess most of the sentient world has known it since at least the 1990s, but it has just been confirmed for us again by his second wife . You remember his second wife, don't you? She was the woman that he was having an affair with while his first wife suffered from cancer. He asked that first wife for a divorce while she was in a hospital bed being treated for the disease. This behavior was occurring during the time that Gingrich was excoriating President Clinton for his affair with an intern and leading the charge for his impeachment over that affair. He was on the television news every night talking about "family values" and how important it was for political leaders to uphold them and be a moral e...