Mark Casey Online

Should we cross the border from Afghanistan and run anti-terror missions in Pakistan, where Bin Laden lives?

It’s a fair question, and a delicate foreign policy area.  Barack Obama said he would in a debate many months ago, and McCain called him out on it during Friday night’s debate.  So a kid asks Palin about it in a cheesesteak hut, and she says Obama’s right.

Today, McCain gets angry, cancels his town hall meeting, and yells at George Stephanopoulos about it.  Pretty funny.

Click here for video.

When Hollywood D-lister and political wonk Ben Stein released “Expelled,” his confoundingly misguided movie attacking the whole of Western science, and Evolution in particular, theories abounded as to whether he had always been as crazy as that movie suggested. If not, people wanted to know, what made him go over the edge? Eric Jensen, critic for Melted Reel Online, suggested that it might be the fact that he wanted more attention, since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was made 20 years ago, and Ben Stein wasn’t on TV anymore.

Today, I can conclude that Jensen is undoubtedly correct. Stein’s pseudo-celebrity status and history of being a part-time speech writer for Republicans 40 years ago apparently earns him the right to be interviewed by CNN.com, and what he had to say was pretty revealing.

First, he said that John McCain needs to hire Karl Rove. Yes, the man responsible for the collapse of the current Republican party. The man credited with not only cheap campaign trickery, but inspiring his candidates to employ a king-to-servants relationship with their supporters. The man who continues to expand the power of the executive branch to such a degree that most constitutional analysts doubt it will ever go back. The man who essentially doomed the Republican party by convincing red staters that voting was about culture, not about governing. The GOP’s own version of Larry the Cable Guy — phenomenal success… through short-term gimmickry.

But that’s not important. What’s actually important is, Stein used this opportunity in a national interview (which he apparently held in a special, super-creepy room filled with past GOP yard signs), to call for a sequel to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Mystery solved. The guy just needs some love.

Very interesting stuff coming out of the McCain campaign today. I’m not really sure what it means.

First, John McCain’s top media adviser stepped down yesterday because he’s been saying for months and months that if Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, he wouldn’t want to run against him. Now, surprisingly, he’s actually made good on his word, choosing to resign rather than trying to stop an Obama presidency. He said:

“I just don’t want to work against an Obama candidacy. [Having him as president] would send a great message to the country and the world.”

But that’s not all. A friend of McCain’s, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, had some choice words in response to McCain and Obama’s manufactured foreign policy arguments about Iran and Palestine. This, from CNN.com:

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel … said Tuesday he is “very upset” with some of the things the party’s presumptive presidential nominee has been saying as he campaigns for the White House.

“We know from past campaigns that presidential candidates will say many things,” Hagel reportedly said. “But once they have the responsibility to govern the country and lead the world, that difference between what they said and what responsibilities they have to fulfill are vastly different.”

Like I said, very strange.

Why is everyone treating Obama with kid gloves again? After months of hard-edged fighting with Hillary Clinton, we’re back to that point in time where people seem to think that attacking Obama will only hurt their public perception. And hey, maybe they’re right. But it almost makes me miss the days of Karl Rove.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t.

One is good, the other is bad.

President Bush, obviously heartened by all the “principled” successes of his White House career thus far, is getting a little veto-happy in his last summer as president. Maybe he resents all those GOP congressmen who have distanced themselves from him in this election year, but after spending six years as the president who didn’t even know what the word “Veto” meant, constantly signing anything the Republican congress sent him, he now is threatening to veto anything he hears about.

Two examples, relatively bipartisan, couldn’t be further apart in terms of reason.

One is a recently passed mortgage crisis relief bill for families in jeopardy of losing their homes. This is right. After bailing out Bear Stearns, the sinking investment bank whose practices played a big role in creating the housing market crisis, it only makes sense to try to help the homeowners they swindled. A shrewd President Bush has smugly called the bill “a bailout,” which it is. It’s almost the exact same sort of bailout that Bear Stearns got.

Read more…

He was a Danish journalist, just hanging out near President Bush’s Texas ranch for a story. He decided to take a stroll, and didn’t know that he had inadvertently wandered into Bush’s neighbor’s front yard. But he realized it pretty quickly, because a woman came barging out of her house with a pistol in her hand, screaming at him to get off her property.

I guess it’s nice to know that when Bush retires, he’ll be well taken care of and with “his own people.” That is if he even keeps “the ranch,” which he bought to market himself to people for the 2000 election — a fact which has been widely lampooned.

Anyway, it’s pretty funny. Especially when you consider that lovely law in Texas which allows homeowners to legally shoot people who are trespassing on their property.

Gulp.

Sure, “classic” conservatives like Ann Coulter and Bill Cunningham might have a lot of fun bandying about Barack Obama’s middle name, but John McCain certainly didn’t stand for it.

Now, the Republican National Committee is following suit, saying after a cell in Tennessee put out a slanderous press release about Obama’s middle name and trips to Africa, “The RNC rejects these kinds of campaign tactics.”  And while that historically hasn’t been true, this is certainly a refreshing turn for the party of small-tent traditionalists.

Let’s see if the non-politically employed members of the conservative movement can grow up and follow suit.

Everyone’s favorite “acting” Governor (hah–see what I did there?), Arnold Schwarzenegger, has just released his new budget plan. If he had released the details in a speech, it would’ve went something like this:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to announce that I’ve come up with a bold new plan to improve our state and enrich all of our lives.

As part of this groundbreaking initiative, I promise to shut down one out of every five public parks. And, rest assured that nothing but the most mediocre education is good enough for Cali-fornia’s students, because I’ll make it my personal business to slash the education budget by ten percent–that’s four billion dollars that won’t be holding back our kids any longer!

But wait, there’s more! Our streets have never been safer than they will be after today, because I’m flooding them with 22,000 newly released state prison inmates. It is my firm belief that this powerful plan will result in lower crime, because these inmates will obviously scare all the other criminals out of their lives of crime. I say, why overpopulate the prisons when we can simply overpopulate our streets?

Read more…

Just two days after winning in Iowa, the spotlight appears to be getting to Mike Huckabee. For one thing, the increased scrutiny that comes with being a frontrunner has thrown even more attention onto the candidate’s troubled son, who’s just run into some more poorly-timed trouble–an early-morning car accident.

Now, whispers have already begun suggesting that John McCain is primed to supplant the new leader for the GOP nomination.

The New York Times is reporting that the politicos of the Republican party are stepping away from the populist preacher candidate, fearing that he doesn’t have the chops to win nationally in the general election. I guess something about a Southern governor and religious fanatic seems a little too familiar to the GOP elite.

Oh, and did I mention that Mitt Romney just took Wyoming?

Remember Mark Foley, the guy who was in charge of a senate committee on prosecuting sexual predators and pedophiles, who was embroiled in his own scandal last year for soliciting sexual conversation with his teenage staffers?  He claimed that his problem was “alcoholism,” promptly resigned and disappeared into rehab.

Well, Newsweek reports that one year later he’s openly gay and living happily in a Florida mansion with his longtime partner.  He’s said to be considering a new career in real estate.  It’s a suitably happy ending, but it’s still such a shame that he was hounded his entire time in office.

Since he first ran, he was badgered constantly about whether or not he was gay–since he was–and he called the questions “Revolting and unforgivable.”  It’s not the being gay that was a  problem, it’s that he felt he had to repress his identity and lifestyle.  It’s easy to blame the fact that he was a Republican, but the Dems who ran against him were also big fans of the flames against him.   I’m glad he’s happy now, and I hope he’s decided to stick to men his own age.

Click here for a newspaper clip of this article.

By now, there aren’t many people who haven’t heard of Mike Huckabee’s swift (and possibly temporary) rise to the top of this year’s Republican candidates. And similarly, there aren’t many who haven’t heard of Oprah’s recent stint campaigning with Democratic hopeful Barack Obama.

What you may not know, however, is that Obama’s endorsement from the iconic Oprah Winfrey pretty much fizzled, without any increase in public support, even as Huckabee’s success was immediately preceded by a high-profile celebrity endorsement of his own.

So why such a difference between the campaign strategies? Two words: Chuck Norris.

Read more…