Questions For Huckabee

Ken AshfordElection 2008, Sex/Morality/Family ValuesLeave a Comment

In his GQ interview, Huckabee says:

I don’t think the issue’s about being against gay marriage. It’s about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that’s important. You have to have a basic family structure. There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it’s one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that’s their business. But when you want to redefine what family means or what marriage means, then that’s an issue that should require some serious and significant debate in the public square.

What were those civilizations that "re-wrote" marriage and died a horrible death as a result?  Was it any of those Asian societies that did away with pre-arranged marriages?  Was it the Mormons who decided marriage should be polygamous?  Was it the Jewish religion that decided that brothers should marry their brothers’ widows, and then decided they didn’t have to?  Was it the American civilization, when it decided people of different races couldn’t marry, and then decided it was okay if they did?

The truth of the matter is that every society and civilization writes and rewrites, both legally and culturally, its "definition" of marriage.  And any president worth his weight should know that.

Shorter Mitt Romney Speech

Ken AshfordElection 2008Leave a Comment

Put bluntly:

"America loves all Gods; hates everyone who is secular".

Kevin Drum explains why…

When Kennedy, as a presidential candidate went to the voters and spoke of his Catholicism, he assured them that no religion, even his own, will govern his presidency.  Romney, on the other hand, said today that all religion, including his own, will govern his presidency.

He was, of course, sucking up to the Christian conservatives.  But his views, while politically prudent (if you want the vote of the religious right) are simply unAmerican.  We separate religion and politics in this country.  Yes, we tolerate all religions, but we also tolerate no religion as well.  Romney, unlike Kennedy, forgot that last part.

Right Wing Blogs Mindlessly Parrot White House Talking Points

Ken AshfordRight Wing Punditry/IdiocyLeave a Comment

So says Dan Bartlett, former Bush White House Director of Communications:

That’s what I mean by influential. I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

The rightwing blogs are not happy about Bartlett’s quote.  The rest of us have known it for quite some time though.

The Omaha Massacre

Ken AshfordCrimeLeave a Comment

Yikes.

I was following the story at work, and when I tuned out, it seemed under control.

Just found out the guy killed eight people.

I was born in Omaha; my father is buried there; many relatives are there as well.  It’s why Omaha is on my "Live Webcam" stream on the righthand column.

Mom reports all the rels are okay.  My Aunt Mary was driving by the mall as was happening and saw the police cars.  Not that I was worried — it’s a big little town (at least how I remember it).

Terrible news though.

Broadway Openings

Ken AshfordTheatre1 Comment

A bunch of them, now that the strike there is over.

I’ve been curious to hear about two plays: Aaron Sorkin’s latest — The Farnsworth Invention — starring Hamk Azaria (about the invention of the TV), and Tracy Lett’s latest — August: Osage County.

As for Farnsworth, the New York Times was luke-warm:

This information-crammed, surface-skimming biodrama about the creators of television suggests nothing so much as a classroom presentation on a seven-figure budget.

The show certainly deserves high marks for all those traits that exacting schoolteachers hold dear: conciseness, legibility, correct use of topic sentences, evidence in defense of two sides of an argument and colorful examples to support the main thesis.

***

And yet you’re likely to leave “The Farnsworth Invention” feeling that you have just watched an animated Wikipedia entry, fleshed out with the sort of anecdotal scenes that figure in “re-enactments” on E! channel documentaries and true-crime shows. This two-hour play is a fast-moving sequence of reflex-stimulating information- and emotion-bites. It never pauses long enough to find depth in any of them.

As for August, how can you beat this review from the New York Times?

A fraught, densely plotted saga of an Oklahoma clan in a state of near-apocalyptic meltdown, “August” is probably the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Oh, forget probably: It is, flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Fiercely funny and bitingly sad, this turbo-charged tragicomedy — which spans three acts and more than three blissful hours — doesn’t just jump-start the fall theater season, recently stalled when the stagehands went on strike. “August” throws it instantaneously into high gear.

***

The play has the zip and zingy humor of classic television situation comedy and the absorbing narrative propulsion of a juicy soap opera, too.

In other words, this isn’t theater-that’s-good-for-you theater. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote an immortal line from a beloved sitcom.) It’s theater that continually keeps you hooked with shocks, surprises and delights, although it has a moving, heart-sore core. Watching it is like sitting at home on a rainy night, greedily devouring two, three, four episodes of your favorite series in a row on DVR or DVD. You will leave the Imperial Theater emotionally wrung out and exhausted from laughing, but you may still find yourself hungry for more.

It’s a Steppenwolf production, so you know it’s going to be the best in ensemble-style acting, with no-name (but soon to be known) actors.  Apparently it is as funny as it is harrowing.

Gotta get me some tix.

My Year Of Being Sybil

Ken AshfordPersonal, TheatreLeave a Comment

What I have been in the past year:

  • Jewish floor shop owner (Little Shop of Horrors)
  • Army psychiatrist or possibly a hallucination (Bug)
  • Oily nightclub owner (The Full Monty)
  • Unemployed steelworker and bad stripper (The Full Monty)
  • Irish priest (The Full Monty)
  • Repo man (The Full Monty)
  • Gay latino dance instructor (The Full Monty)
  • Bespeckled messenger from God (God’s Favorite)
  • Loutish southern redneck (Daddy’s Dyin’ — Who’s Got The Will?)
  • Racist southern redneck (The Foreigner)

I’ve had my wife walk out on me, been eaten by a plant, stabbed to death and set on fire, smoked crack, had a fireplace crash down on my head, done the macarana and led a conga line.

Hmmm.  Sounds like a song cue….

The Huckabee Surge And L’Affaire DuMond

Ken AshfordElection 2008Leave a Comment

Like him or not, I think it’s time he gets moved from the also-ran category to the candidate-to-be-taken-seriously category.  Check out the surge (Huckabee in green):

Austopreps201

He’s leading in Iowa, and the new LA Times/Bloomberg poll now has him in second nationally, surging past Romney.  [UPDATE:  Rassmussen poll out today has Huckabee in first nationally!] Not bad for a guy who was polling only 5% a few months ago….

Sadly, even if you’re a Republican, you have to be concerned about his lack of foreign policy experience.  He doesn’t even know about the Iran NIE, which has been the top story for at least two days now:

Reporter: I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday …

Huckabee: I’m sorry?

Reporter: The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it –

Huckabee: No.

Reporter: Have you heard of the finding?

Huckabee: No.

Yikes.

He’s also got a Wille Horton issue.  As governor of Arkansas, he parolled and released a convict who had raped a relative of Bill Clinton.  The rapist, Wayne DuMond, became a political pawn back in the Clinton Administration, with anti-Clinton forces claiming that he was "framed" by the eeeeeevil Bill Clinton.  Apparently suffering from Clinton Derangement Syndrome, Huckabee became convinced that DuMond was "railroaded by the former governor" and was therefore innocent. 

“Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote in a letter to DuMond. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”

That freed convict subsequently molested and murdered two women.  Full detailed story here.

Lying Or Incompetent?

Ken AshfordIranLeave a Comment

Joe Biden, on the President’s line that he wasn’t briefed on the new Iran NIE until last week:

“Are you telling me a president who is briefed every single morning, who is fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ’03?” Biden said in a conference call with reporters.

“That’s not believable,” Biden added. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in … modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

He’s got a point….

UPDATE:  BarbinMD weighs in…

Moments ago, speaking in Nebraska, George Bush said:

It is clear from the latest NIE, that the Iranian government has more to explain about its nuclear intentions and past actions.

No, what is clear from the latest NIE is that the Bush administration has more to explain on what they knew and when they knew it. Less than two months ago, when Bush said:

…if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. And I take this very — I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.

…did he already know that Iran had suspended their nuclear weapons program in 2003? 

U.S. News reports:

Bush said the new intel “contradicting earlier US assessments…would not prompt him to take off the table the possibility of pre-emptive military action against Iran.”

There was a debate about Iraq once.  The issue was whether the intellengence on WMD was flawed and Bush followed it, or whether the intelligence on WMD was mixed and Bush ignored it because he wanted a war anyway.  Looking back on that debate through the prism of Bush today (ignoring the intelligence estimates of the Iran NIE and keeping his war-drun-beating stance), it looks like Bush doesn’t really care about what our intelligence agencies say — then or now.

Tweety On The Stand

Ken AshfordCourts/LawLeave a Comment

Daffy5213How come I never get a case like this?

Tweety may get a chance to take the witness stand and sing like a canary.

An Italian court ordered the animated bird, along with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and his girlfriend Daisy, to testify in a counterfeiting case.

In what lawyers believe was a clerical error worthy of a Looney Tunes cartoon, a court in Naples sent a summons to the characters ordering them to appear Friday in a trial in the southern Italian city, officials said.

The court summons cites Titti, Paperino, Paperina, Topolino — the Italian names for the characters — as damaged parties in the criminal trial of a Chinese man accused of counterfeiting products of Disney and Warner Bros.

Instead of naming only the companies and their legal representatives, clerks also wrote in the witness list the names of the cartoons that decorated the toys and gadgets the man had reproduced, said Fiorenza Sorotto, vice president of Disney Company Italia.

Women Are Wimps

Ken AshfordSex/Morality/Family ValuesLeave a Comment

Although primarily a law blog, there is an interesting post up at The Volokh Conspiracy about the psychological differences between men and women. 

Well, actually, most of it is unsurprising.  First we learn that women are more risk-averse than men (duh!), that men are more aggressive than women (duh!), and that women are more nurturing and empathetic than men (duh!).

But then it pops the balloon to the adage that women are more pain-tolerant than men:

Although it is commonly asserted that women have a higher tolerance for pain than men – a belief apparently resting on women’s endurance of painful childbirth – a large body of data refutes that argument. Instead, women generally withstand pain less well than men. A major review of pain studies found differences of over one-half a standard deviation for both pain threshold (the level at which a stimulus is perceived as painful) and pain tolerance (the level at which pain is no longer bearable).

I’ve always thought so.  Nice to see it verified.

Omnibus Post Because Frankly My Plate Is Full

Ken AshfordElection 2008, Godstuff, Iran, Local Interest, Sex Scandals, TheatreLeave a Comment

Ugh.  So much to discuss:

(1)  White House egg-on-the-face: After months of beating the war drums to invade Iraq, it turns out that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear bomb program after all.  As Matt says: "Meanwhile, how outrageous is it that the best twelve months of alarmism from Bush & Cheney have come in the context of an environment where they’ve long had access to the intelligence community’s assessment? Answer: Very outrageous."

(2)  Hillary’s drop in the polls:  Look, it’s early yet.  She’s got money, name recognition, etc.

(3)  The stunning CNN expose on bad kissers aka "news of the obvious"

(4)  New England:  The no’reastern and the Pat’s winning last night (only by virtue of the Colts really losing)

(5)  Silly local news

and perhaps best of all…

(6)  The Catholic Church tries to show how anti-child abuse it is . . with a coloring book.  Apparently, it’s easier to teach a child to flee from a priest than to teach a priest to not improperly touch a child.

…but there’s too much on my plate. 

So instead, I’m just gonna plug my show, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever — with performances at the Main Street Baptist Church, N. Main Street, Kernersville, NC; Thursday December 6, Friday December 7, Saturday December 8 at 8:00PM and Sunday December 9 at 3:00PM.; Box Office open 10:00AM-2:00PM, Monday-Friday – Phone 993-6556.

We filled the church for last weekend’s shows.  Expect more of the same this weekend.  Audiences seem to be enjoying it, and I’m getting some well-received praise (well-received by me, natch) for the stage direction (from people who I trust to tell me if it sucks).  The kids worked hard, so come and see them.

Also, I might be filling in for one of the small adult roles on Thursday.  Possibly other performances, too.  But come anyway.