Disagreement.

Dear Ms. Lindsay King,
Please don't worry about whom celebrities endorse. If they get any attention, it's because they're fighting a losing battle for the nomination, like Oprah with Obama and Chuck Norris with Huckabee. Lots of celebrities are behind Clinton and Giuliani, so when they come out with support for them, nobody bats an eye. Now, Huckabee's ad was infantile, but it's not going to help him win the nomination. Nobody's going to take him seriously after appearing onscreen with Chuck Norris cracking old jokes. Nobody who isn't already pulling for him is going to be inspired to learn more. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the kind of person who will be swayed by celebrities voicing their opinions is not the same kind of person who will actually DO anything about it. If a candidate is at the top of the list anyway, odds are it's because they're smart enough to not make Chuck Norris jokes in a campaign ad.
To sum up: celebrities are likely going to use their clout to pust their political views. Some politicians, if they are desperate, will take advantage of this. This will likely not go exactly as planned because it will not give them enough edge to really enter the race and the people who care about celebrity testimonial aren't the people who will be affecting the election.
Lindsay's blog
By the way, what "deep, personal issues" do you have with Oprah? Did she run over your dog?

So. Smokers. (This goes out to you, Smoking Government People 'n' Friends!)

I do not like public smoking. I know I have friends who do it (one of them is likely going to respond to this post) but, in all honesty, they shouldn't. It's really dangerous for the people around them who don't want to inhale it. They have the luxury of a filter, while the other folks outdoors have to inhale the smoke in all its carcinogenic glory. While smoking should be legal, it should be restricted to places where people who do not want to inhale it do not have to. This includes the home: if kids can't smoke, or don't want to smoke, parents should be required to abstain from smoking around their kids. As soon as those kids turn 18, if they do not like the cigarette smoke, the kids have to move. They're legally allowed to now, but the parents are still paying for it.
There should be out-of-the-way, contained, smoking areas for them to congregate. The smokers get to have their fix, and the non-smokers don't have to breathe it. If it just smelled bad, I wouldn't worry about it. The fact of the matter is that second-hand smoke is really harmful and can seriously damage people exposed to it enough.
Basically, people should only be allowed to smoke around adults who don't mind cigarette smoke.

Criticism of Tonnu's article

This was a decent post. However, there was one thing that bothered me.
She said the other Democratic candidates "picked on" Clinton. While this might be true, I can hardly fault them for it. Clinton is the front-runner and it would be foolish to deny that. By attacking her, they are doing the same thing as negative campaign ads. While the debate would have likely been better if candidates had focused on the issues more than attacking the leader, they're just doing whatever will help them win. Politics is basically a competition anyway. She even said that Bill Richardson came to Clinton's aid and said that he heard a "holier-than-thou attitude" at the debate; however, I have a hard time believing that he actually cared that rather than Clinton's ideas being attacked she was being attacked as a person. He was just playing the role of the "good guy" because he knew that would make him look better as a candidate.
She didn't cite very good examples of "ganging up" either. Her selections from Obama and Edwards don't even mention Clinton by name and sound more like their opinion of the terms of the debate, and any good debater will single out the trait the winner will have and then build their argument around that. I could understand her complaint if they implied misogyny or mentioned Clinton by name, but they did not.
Good job on catching the moderator bias. Debate moderators should be nothing but objective, and any favoritism (or in this case anti-favoritism) is inexcusable.
Source: An Attack on Clinton

Colbert is serious, but so was Reagan.

Okay, so according to a story in the New York Times Caucus, Colbert is actually serious about running for President. He is trying to get onto both the Republican and Democratic tickets, but he's apparently not important enough to appear on either of the little sidebars.
He announced his intentions of considering running for President, and then he actually announced his entry into the race 15 whole minutes later. The Democrats are receptive to the idea, but the Republicans are hesitant. It probably has something to do with his consistent criticisms of the Bush administration and conservatism. Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, is suspicious and seems to think that it's a bad idea, but he grudgingly admits that if Colbert can pay, he can play. It costs $35,000 to put your name on the Republican ballot, but it's bound to generate huge publicity for Colbert. The South Carolina Democratic Republican Chairman (You know you're important when your title has 5 capitalized words in it in a row), Joe Werner, "[looks] forward to his paying the filing fee," but that might be because he wants the $2500, rather than him wanting to see Colbert on the ballot.
Could we have President Colbert? Right now it looks like he's running only in South Carolina, but that could mean he's going to see how he does and then go from there. Maybe if he does well, he would go beyond South Carolina and SWEEP THE NATION!!!

I'm scared too.

Immigrants: learn English. Americans: put up with bad English.

To succeed in America requires some understanding of English. Why, then, do some people just refuse to learn it? I'm not saying that it's an easy language (far from it, actually) but putting forth no effort is foolish and arrogant. If I were going to live in, say, Japan, I'd work on my Japanese. Even though gaining fluency in a language is difficult, learning enough phrases to survive is easy. Anyone can learn "where is the bathroom." If you enter a country, it's a sign of respect to try to assimilate. After all, you're already using the protections and benefits granted to you. Plus, why wouldn't you want to? You can't even find your way around when all the signs are in a language you don't understand.
However, while we must expect the immigrants to do their best to learn English, we must be supportive. It makes me very mad to see somebody trying their best to express himself in an extremely foreign tongue while his audience acts much more frustrated than they actually are. It's unfair to be discouraging, and it hurts in the long run. If somebody isn't speaking English well, but still speaking it, it's practice. How would you like it if every time you missed an answer on a test, the teacher mercilessly made fun of you? You wouldn't be willing to try to learn the material, now would you?
I'm not asking for flawless English or even GOOD English. I'm just asking for effort from those who don't speak it and understanding from those who do.

Giuliani + abortion = 180.

I'm pretty sure that it's common knowledge by know that Rudy Giuliani isn't exactly the most conservative Republican out there, in favor of both abortion and gun control. I've often wondered what makes him a Republican, considering that he sides with the Democrats on two issues that people get really angry about, but that's a topic for another time. One of Giuliani's supporters decided that it was a really good idea to make all of Guiliani's supporters look like morons, and said that if the mayor were in Congress he'd be pro-life. This is a scary statement: it either demonstrates idiocy or duplicity, and I like to believe that my fellow Republicans are, on the whole, pretty free from these qualities.
Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report made a post about this story, and I think he hit the nail on the head. It's ridiculous to try to change your stance (a pretty radical one, if I say so myself) on such a sensitive issue so suddenly. He didn't just say, "it isn't my place to say what a woman can and can not do with her body" and leave it at that, he was in favor of partial-birth and state-funded abortions. Benen posted videos of him voicing support for these positions.
I'm not saying that being pro-choice automatically makes Giuliani a Democrat, or even that it would be a deal-breaker for most Republicans. But for a candidate who's supposed to be conservative, state funding of a procedure that flies in the face of the Republican Party platform is pretty... well, pretty liberal. I think Republicans would do well to swallow their pride and call Rudy on it. If nothing else, it would get some respect from Democrats: they jumped on John Kerry's "flip-flop", but they should also jump on Rudy Giuliani's. They aren't being partisan, they're criticizing willful inconsistency. They would demonstrate the confidence to be able to transcend party lines and be the objective voice of reason.

George Bush doesn't like MoveOn.org

MoveOn.org, an anti-war group, ran an ad in the New York Times criticizing General Petraeus' ineffectiveness and selective truth-telling. The ad states that he fails to report vital statistics--"death by car bomb doesn't count" and assassinations only count if you're "shot at the back of the head, not the front." He reports the good over the bad. At the end, they speculate that he might end up being General "Betray Us."
George Bush, Dick Cheney, and other Republicans condemned the ad, and the sole Democratic candidate with harsh words about it was Joe Biden, although John Kerry said that he doesn't “like any kind of characterizations in our politics that call into question any active duty...” I find it interesting that the Senate passed a resolution formally "expressing the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces."
I believe the Republicans only attacked it out of duty to the party. They're probably just as tired of the war as the Democrats, but they have to get elected, and so they make the best move politically. "They're liberal! That's bad!" The Democrats got lucky and got to support something they actually believe in. Joe Biden got some publicity by speaking out against it. Everyone wins!
I find it telling that Bush didn't actually criticize the ad. He just lashed out against it. He didn't do much other than say that Petraeus and the army deserve our support, which everyone already knows and expected him to say. Although I do think the name "General Betray Us" is something my 2-year-old sister could've come up with. That is all!
Link to the article
Link to the ad