Written by: Patrick Galvin The GOP Straw Poll, which is basically the Republican equivalent to the NIT, was won this weekend in New Orleans, LA by Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. In the spirit of the Straw Poll, Captain Polemic also makes prematurely bold predictions.
Written by: Patrick Galvin Rep. Carol Shea-Porter and Rep. Paul Hodes, two New Hampshire Democrats who voted in favor of the recent Healthcare overhaul, returned to their stomping grounds to explain to voters why they voted the way they did. Their results were less than encouraging:
Written by: Patrick Galvin Oprah is going to have Rielle Hunter on her show for an interview, her first televised interview she will have.
Queen of Talk Oprah Winfrey will set the stage for Rielle Hunter – John Edwards’ former mistress – to give her first televised interview, CNN has confirmed.
Written by: Patrick Galvin 
Cindy McCain has followed in her daughter’s footsteps by openly supporting gay marriage rights, despite the obvious position of her husband John McCain.
Story from AP (Courtesy of Yahoo! News):
McCain’s daughter Meghan distanced herself from her father’s stance last summer when she posed for an ad for NOH8, a gay rights campaign seeking to defeat Prop 8. Now his wife Cindy is joining in the effort and is also appearing in an ad for NOH8……
Cindy McCain isn’t the first political spouse to do this, however. During the 2007 Democratic Primary, Elizabeth Edwards stated that she’s “completely comfortable with gay marriage” even though her husband, John, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was steadfastly against it. Michelle Obama has hinted at her support, saying in a speech that connected the gay rights struggle to civil rights: “The world as it is should be one that rejects discrimination of all kinds.”
Even Laura Bush pushed back against her husband’s aggressive advocacy of a federal gay marriage ban. In an interview with Fox News in 2006, the former first lady said, “I don’t think it should be used as a campaign tool, obviously. It requires a lot of sensitivity to just talk about the issue – a lot of sensitivity.”
Weird. It seems the wives of male politicians are more likely to support gay marriage rights than the politicians themselves, which is about in line with the national trend. According to a 2008 Newsweek study, women were about 44% likely to support gay marriage, with men hovering at 34%, a solid 10% difference. Maybe men are more afraid of seeming gay if supportive of gay rights? No, that can’t be it.
Written by: Patrick Galvin 
A Fitting Response...
The Healthcare plan is dead. But not because of newly-elected Massachusetts senator Scott Brown. The plan Democrats had in mind, the plan voters like myself enthusiastically supported, was already dead and has been for over a month. The whole losing-an-election-on-our-home-turf debacle? That was just icing on the cake. Democrats have no one to blame for the Healthcare plan’s failure but themselves.
I’ll say this: a bill will eventually pass, and it will accomplish a couple things. It will ensure people cannot be denied coverage based on pre-existing health conditions. It will set up a government exchange to help make healthcare more affordable, which should honestly reduce the number of uninsured people, especially coupled with a mandate that they must have insurance in the first place. However, these issues were not the crux of the debate. Private insurance providers and both parties in Washington supported these measures. It was the public option that was at the core of this bill. In the initial draft of the Obama-Biden healthcare plan, the public option was the ultimate device for enforcing lower costs and the ancillary private reforms. Generic drugs are a good example. Obama-Biden wanted generics to be used ubiquitously to lower healthcare costs. Having a public government-run option would enforce that. If a private insurer still used the expensive medication without good reason, people would gravitate toward a cheaper, generics-infused option from the government. Drops in profits would become motivation to change current policy for private healthcare providers, and generics would become ubiquitously used. Without a competing government-run option, now what? How would the government tell insurers to use generics? Would they simply provide the same lip service they did to the banks during the bailout? We’ve seen how well that worked in getting banks to lend more money to small businesses. Namely they haven’t. There needs to be incentive to drive change, and this public option was as good an incentive as you were going to find, if only it were sold properly.
Ultimately, lack of marketing-consistency is what caused this bill to deteriorate. The 100% medicare expansion free for the state of Nebraska, the caving on abortion-related policy, etc. were all allowed to happen because Democrats never kept a stalwart position on the public option. Obama initially championed it, so did Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Howard Dean and others. Then Blue Dogs publicly debated how cost-effective it would be, stating they would not support a bill with the public option, directly contradicting claims made by Obama and others that it would save money in the long term. The Congressional Budget Office studies later validated these claims, further embarrassing the President. He was also resisted in his claims that the public option would not lead to a single-payer plan, when Barney Frank called the option a great “gateway” to a single payer plan (I would’ve called this the Democrats’ gaffe of the year, were it not for Senator Reid’s “negro” comments). Sensing confusion and loss of the plan’s political momentum, Obama decided to concede on the public option in the hopes of retaining the private reforms. So he stated the option was not 100% essential, and could be dropped to preserve the other private reforms, only to have Nancy Pelosi heroically claim that there “will be a public option,” in the final plan. Even when Pelosi and others hopped on board, finally sacrificing the public option, factions within the party resisted melodramatically, and again publicly, stating they wouldn’t support a bill without the public option. They never once truly aligned, and this constant contradiction fed into Republicans’ hands.
The Republican party held a firm position the entire time, which was that the government-run public option, and the healthcare reform bill in its entirety should be opposed. Consistency can cover for so many other sins in a political race. It is absolutely crucial to winning long-term debates. The steady, constant “Hope and Change” mantra that bolstered Obama’s campaign helped overcome slip-ups such as the “guns and religion” comments, as well as public attacks on his character and capability ranging from “terrorist” to “elitist” to “inexperienced” all the while. On the opposite end of the spectrum, just look at Bush vs. Kerry from 2004. Kerry’s “flip-flop” reputation was political cyanide. Uncertainty is to politicians what alcohol is to Mel Gibson. When the Democratic party proposed the public option, they needed to stick to it. Any internal fusion should have been kept INTERNAL. This was again, done beautifully by Obama’s campaign team in the Presidential elections. But Obama picked his campaign team. You don’t get to pick Congressmen and Senators, who are far more intractable and truculent than campaign advisors.
This confusion and miasma of mixed messages made even liberals too confused to truly support anything, option or no option. Republicans representing moderate states felt zero pressure from their voters to support this bill as a result. Meanwhile, they had been unanimously and consistently recruiting people to oppose the bill, with success. As time wore on, even Republicans who initially wanted to support the healthcare bill, such as Olympia Snowe (R-ME) were forced to decline. Now with only 60 votes to work with, Democrats fell victim to leeching. Realizing that they were the “C” variable in the median voter theorem, the one who pits A against B such that they are now in a position of power, people such as Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) used their vote as fodder for Medicare provisions for Nebraska and specialized abortion legislation. Other moderate Democrats began interjecting their own provisions for farm-friendlier states so they could bring bacon back home to their voters and brag about it. By the time it was done, healthcare supporters felt more like whores than like politicians, if there’s any difference. But to be fair, this was unusual even for them. They’d just bought off more people than Frank Lucas.
At least something was being passed though. It was precariously built on buyouts and failed promises, but at least some of the private reforms would still be enacted. Until January 18th, 2010 happened. Until Scott Brown won that Senate seat in Massachusetts, replacing the late Ted Kennedy and killing the Democrats’ filibuster-proof 60-40 majority, thus inevitably rendering the Democrats’ healthcare-bill even more impotent in effectiveness, as they’d have to further scale back their ambitions in order to obtain a passable bill. The Democrats’ fumbling while selling the public option, and then the Healthcare plan entirely, has now lead to an inconsistency in their brand, a brand they’d so magnificently built in the wake of Obama’s Presidential election. And that brand-inconsistency is coming back to haunt them, as clearly evidenced in the Massachusetts loss, in a state that is supposed to be the Democrats’ home turf.
I voted for Barack Obama last year, and in doing so I implicitly voted for his Democratic allies, the 60-40 majority of Senators and Congressmen that would bolster his domestic and international power. I supported healthcare reform from the beginning, and with a Senate, Congress and President all in agreement, sailing would be smooth for people like me. But I was painfully reminded why Democrats can be so unbearable at times, why South Park has made a killing lampooning their leaders and celebrity supporters for over a decade. Democrats try to portray this higher sense of dignity and intelligence, this help-the-poor, hope-for-all optimism. They claim to be on the leading edge of social equality and fiscal opportunity. And at many times they are. But for all their high-fiving over their similar ideals, for all of their collectively progressive-minded chutzpah, they seem to have had a damned time cooperating on one stinking goal, especially when that goal was at the absolute domestic forefront of social equality and fiscal opportunity.
Republicans of late have usually had bad ideas. From the Patriot Act to Iraq to the 5% capital-gains-tax, they’ve set the bar about as low as it could go. But give them credit. At least they executed their bad ideas.
Written by: Patrick Galvin 
Google may be dropping their “google.cn” in China altogether, citing frustrations with restrictive Chinese laws regarding content.
Story from AP (Courtesy of Yahoo! News):
BEIJING – China tried Friday to keep its censorship row with Google from damaging business confidence or ties with Washington, promising good conditions for foreign investors but giving no sign it might relax Internet controls…
If a compromise isn’t worked out within the next few weeks, the company intends to shut down Google.cn and pull out of China. Rubin said Google hasn’t set a deadline for breaking the impasse…
Images from the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests cropped up in Google.cn’s search results Thursday, leading some Web surfers to conclude Google had begun to defy censorship rules. But Rubin said Google.cn is still censoring its results to comply with China’s law and protect its employees there.
As is well known, China has a strict set of censorship rules for all content within its borders. One example of this is obviously… porn. Just last year alone, over 5,000 people were arrested by Chinese authorities for pornography-related offenses. While Americans certainly love their porn, turning it into a multi-billion dollar industry, it could be argued that porn itself could be done without. At the very least, if a country had a moral opposition to porn, American businesses could learn to operate within China on those terms. It’s not like porn-related concerns are really going to interfere with other ventures, right?
In 2008 “The Dark Knight” became an astronomical success, heightened by a cunning performance from Heath Ledger before his death. Currently the film has a domestic gross of over half a billion dollars. Think of the business opportunity available in China, the world’s largest population. Now remember that opportunity was stanched before ever getting the chance to flourish.
Quoted From CBC News (full article here):
It did not elaborate on what it meant by “cultural sensitivities,” but the New York Times speculated that the Hollywood studio may have been concerned Chinese censors would be offended by scenes shot in Hong Kong, including those in which Batman, played by Christian Bale, nabs a Chinese money launderer.
Another potential point of conflict, it noted, was a brief appearance by Edison Chen, the Hong Kong singer and record producer who appeared in sexually explicit photographs posted on the internet in 2008.
“Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Brokeback Mountain” were also banned citing similar reasons. So it’s clear that huge opportunities for both creative expression and financial prosperity are losing their legs in China for the sake of hoarding information. As a result, Google has grown tired of China’s restrictions, and has threatened to drop “google.cn” from its operations and pull out of China entirely. Keep in mind Google is a company that believes information should be free, and information should be freely accessible, so it’s not entirely unrealistic to see Google do this.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact Google believes they, as well as other U.S. companies were attacked by Chinese hackers. Specifically, human rights activists were targeted.
From Official Google Blog: (full story here)
…we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
I agree with Google’s take on this, as most Americans probably would. It is time for American companies to show China that when it comes to free information, there are firm rules. Either all of it goes, or none of it. Right now Google is one of the few companies with the international fame and domestic success to both embarrass China with its withdrawal while thriving economically. More power to them, and hopefully other companies follow suit until China changes the way it handles or hides information.
Written by: Mike 
A Vodka filled AK47, Missiles filled with Vodka. I NEED THESE THINGS!
[President] Medvedev in June told Health Minister Tatyana Golikova that Russia’s alcohol consumption is “colossal” and asked the government by today to find ways to fight excessive drinking and bootlegged vodka production.
Whenever your country’s leader describes a problem as colossal you know it might be something you’d want to fix. But lets be honest for a second, the rest of the world (and by this I mean a random sampling of a few people I’m friends with) LOVE the fact Russians drink copious amounts of vodka. Just how much Vodka does the average Russian drink? Glad you asked
Alcohol consumption in Russia should fall to as low as 5 liters per person a year by 2020 from about 18 liters now, according to a plan published on the Alcohol Market Regulation Federal Service’s Web site today. The World Health Organization estimates 8 liters as an “accepted volume of consumption,” according to the service.
EIGHTEEN LITERS!? Even in college I don’t think I approached that number. Doing some quick math, that’s 24 750mL bottles of Popov Vodka in a year, or 1 entire bottle per person about once every two weeks. That’s mind boggling when you think about that figure as being an average for it’s citizens. There are probably people who will drink a 750 bottle once a week.
I sincerely hope this doesn’t happen. For one, we probably won the Cold War based on an ill-advised decision made after a marathon drinking session at the Kremlin. We’d also need to find a new villain for movies; the cagey yet alcoholic Russian just wouldn’t resonate with us in a world where Russian’s drank vodka at an “accepted volume”.
