Like many others (except not as surprisingly), on-again but mostly off-again Republican Colin Powell was swept up in the wave of Hope & Change in 2008. That wave has proven to be accompanied by a severe undertow, but not severe enough to make Colin Powell rule out a repeat endorsement:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who famously crossed party lines to vote for President Obama in 2008, said today that he’s not necessarily supporting the president for reelection in 2012.

“I haven’t decided who I’m going to vote for,” Powell said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Just as was the case in 2008, I am going to watch the campaign unfold. In the course of my life I have voted for Democrats, I have voted for Republicans, I have changed from one four-year cycle to another.
[...]
Powell, the nation’s first African-American secretary of state, praised Obama’s leadership style in 2008 in endorsing him, saying shortly before the election that Obama “has a definite way of doing business that will serve us well.” He also said at the time that he didn’t think the GOP vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was “ready” to be president.

In 2008 Powell also said he thought Obama’s presidency would be transformational, and that it has been… in a “triple-A to double-A” kind of way.

Which Republican candidates will this send clamoring to lobby for the endorsement of the man who thought Barack Obama was the best choice to lead America into the future in 2008? (put your hand down, Mr. Huntsman, it was supposed to be a rhetorical question)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

They don’t actually listen to him and have no idea what he talks about day to day.

They criticize a figment of Rush in their heads, which is echoed and amplified by liberal media elites who share the same figment of Rush in their heads.

And they tell two friends, who tell two more friends. Who turn it into another endless series of liberal Republicans-complain-to-liberal journalists-about-Rush stories.

And so and so on and so on.

Each with nothing better to do, Obama booster Colin Powell and Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria take their turn lamenting a show they know nothing about:

Yawn:

“Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?” Powell asked. “Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?”

“We” will continue listening. You just continue sitting there with your left-wing friends carping in ignorance.

***

Hand in hand with the Rush-bashing, Powell tosses in some indignant Palin-bashing to boot.

The media’s in a tizzy over Colin Powell’s Meet the Press endorsement of Barack Obama this morning.

It’s not a surprise to anyone who’s paid attention to his pro-Obama murmurings over the last four months.

How will people outside the Beltway bubble respond?

Yawn.

Here’s the vid:

Powell’s embrace of Barack Obama is a triumph of hope over reality. He told Tom Brokaw that Obama’s “steadiness” and “not jumping in and changing every day” convinced him that The One was ready to lead.

Hello?

Guess Powell relied on Obama’s website after he purged his surge criticism from it.

Powell then goes on to pooh-pooh Obama’s longtime “limited relationship” with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers as an “issue that is not central” to the campaign — just as evidence of the closeness of these two very chummy “neighbors” mounts.

Judgment, schmudgment, eh, Secretary Powell?

Finally, we arrive at the real reason Powell is endorsing Obama: The party, he complains, has become too “narrow” for his tastes. Pro-abortion Powell can’t stand the thought of two more Republican Supreme Court appointments. He thinks Sarah Palin is too conservative. He shares the Obama view of our base as racist and non-inclusive — but has nothing to say about the rabid pack of America-damning preachers who helped make Obama the “transformational” figure Powell has placed his faith in.

Powell also makes reference to all the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors, blaming the Republican Party for all that. Never mind the Democrat Hillary backers like Bob Kerrey and on down to her grass-roots supporters who indulged themselves and trafficked in those very rumors Powell smears conservatives for spreading.

The orgy of Obamedia attention Powell will receive the next 24 hours is disproportionate to its importance.

The press only loves maverick Republicans when they jump in bed with Democrats.

Just ask John McCain.

***

One last note: I see in comments that many believe Powell supports Obama because he is black. Powell has said electing a black president would be “electrifying.” He is a staunch supporter of government racial preferences.

It’s a mistake, though, to attribute Powell’s endorsement primarily to some kind of race loyalty.

It’s Obama’s social liberalism, not his skin color, that attracts Powell most.

Barking moonbat has-been Harry Belafonte travels to Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez’s side and calls President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.” From ABC News:

The American singer and activist Harry Belafonte called President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world” on Sunday and said millions of Americans support the socialist revolution of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including the actor Danny Glover and the Princeton University scholar Cornel West that met the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday and attended his television and radio broadcast on Sunday.

“No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people … support your revolution,” Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.

Why don’t you spare us all and make your trip to Venezuela one-way-o, Harry?

***

Previous Belafonte moments:

CNSNews (with video):

Celebrity activist Harry Belafonte referred to prominent African-American officials in the Bush administration as “black tyrants” at a weekend march, and he also compared the administration to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Ronald Radosh: Harry’s hatreds

* In June 2000, Belafonte was a featured speaker at a rally in Castro’s Cuba, honoring the American Soviet spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Tears, one observer reported, “streaked down” Belafonte’s face, “as he recalled the pain and humiliation his friend [Paul] Robeson had been forced to endure” in 1950s America. Undoubtedly, he was pleased to hear Cuba presented “as an example of keeping the principles the Rosenbergs fought and died for alive.”

* In 1997, Belafonte was featured speaker at the 60th Anniversary celebration of the “Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” at which he honored these self-proclaimed “premature anti-fascists” who served in the mid-1930s as Stalin’s private Comintern army, a battalion (not a brigade) that served as enforcers of Soviet policy during the Spanish Civil War. To Belafonte, nothing had changed since the 1930s. The VALB was still representatives of “a truth that engulfed the universe . . . that fascism anywhere is a threat to people everywhere.”

He did not pause to remind the aging vets that their anti-fascism disappeared overnight after their return home – when the remaining soldiers got the news about the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, and quickly declared that the only enemy was FDR’s warmongering and Great Britain.

* Speaking in October 1983 at a “World Peace Concert” run by East Germany’s official Communist youth organization, Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored “peace” campaign pushing unilateral Western disarmament, at a time when the Soviets were putting SS-20 missiles in East Germany.

As The New York Times reported, Belafonte “attacked the American invasion of Grenada and also criticized the scheduled NATO weapons deployment” of Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany, which Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan deployed to offset the Soviet missile offensive.

Belafonte, in other words, was supporting the Soviet bloc in its Cold War with the United States. And he was doing so in full embrace with the East German prison state. Here, where the notorious secret police, the Stasi, ruled by waging a perpetual witch-hunt against the entire population – Belafonte had only love and good wishes for their success.

No wonder that the late Leo Cherne, head of the International Rescue Committee, rejected Belafonte’s being honored. “I happen to have some reservations about Belafonte,” he wrote one of the IRC’s board, “I have found him . . . beyond my tastes for the elements of left-wing predisposition. He played a significant relief role in Ethiopia at a time when Ethiopia was under the control of the left wing dictator Mengistu, at the very time that the Castro military forces were playing an active support role.”

To Harry Belafonte, Castro is a freedom fighter and Colin Powell and Condi Rice merely “house slaves.” Ever the diplomat, Colin Powell responded to Belafonte’s blast by calling the singer his “friend,” and noting that the slave analogy was from another time and place and was simply “unfortunate.” Secretary Powell should take to heart the simple adage, with friends like that…

***

Previous/related:

Keeping an eye on Spain and Venezuela
Notable quotables of Hugo Chavez
Thor Halvorssen: Hugo Chavez vs. the media

Anti-war activists and far-left organizations have been galvanized by Cindy Sheehan’s continuing protest outside President Bush’s Crawford, Texas, ranch. MoveOn.org has hopped on the bandwagon with a newspaper ad and Internet campaign. Air America hosts, all too happy to talk about something other than their own unpleasant political and financial woes, have embraced Sheehan. Dem activist Joe Trippi is plugging a “Meet with Cindy” website, which in turn plugs the Crawford Peace House. Even the “Hip Hop Caucus” has hitched a ride:

On Wednesday, a coalition of anti-war groups in Washington called on Bush to speak with Sheehan, who they say has helped to unify the peace movement.

“Cindy Sheehan has become the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement,” said Rev. Lennox Yearwood, leader of the Hip Hop Caucus, an activist group. “She’s tired, fed up and she’s not going to take it anymore, and so now we stand with her.”

And they’ll follow her wherever the cameras take them. According to one Democrat blog report:

Cindy is scheduled to appear in Italy, Colorado, Louisiana, and Washington, DC for the September 24th mass rally. But for now, she seems content to make her stand in the Lone Star State. When we spoke this evening, she said that she has a few questions for the president and that she’s heading to Crawford to get the answers. “I am not leaving until George answers me or I am arrested. I may stay there the entire month of August.”

Mrs. Sheehan has made a splash with the far Left and in the MSM. Her tenacity is impressive. But the dishonesty and disingenuousness of her benefactors and cheerleaders is intolerable. David Brock’s Media Matters and others, for example, have attacked Bill O’Reilly and me for “lying” and “smearing” Mrs. Sheehan, when any sane person can see that’s not the case. I’m re-posting the link to the video of our discussion (here) and the full, un-Dowdified transcript below in the extended entry. [Update: Cindy Sheehan responds here and also posts on her good friend Michael Moore's site.]

Meanwhile, MSM reporters continue to ignore the glaring contradiction in Mrs. Sheehan’s accounts of her meeting with President Bush. Reading comprehension-challenged leftists can’t seem to grasp that the issue is not whether Mrs. Sheehan was anti-war before her son died in Iraq (she was), but why she has completely changed and embellished her account of Bush’s behavior and her and her family’s impressions of him. Patterico spells it out for the slow wits at the Los Angeles Times.

Speaking of slow-wittedness, the Cindy Sheehan juggernaut has resulted in an uptick in profanity-laced moonbat hate mail from Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers incapable of rational debate. Here’s just a sample. Excuse the language.

An e-mailer named Dan Opacki, whose name appears on this anti-war manifesto, writes:

X-Originating-IP: [206.190.38.172]
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 03:54:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: dan opacki danopacki@yahoo.com
Subject: oriental dolls
To: malkin@comcast.net

Didn’t you pose for Oriental Dolls magazine a couple of years ago? You look just like one of those little fuck sluts with her wide open legs and sloppy cunt – Oh no excuse me, that’s your face.

Sincerely,
Dan

[Update: A different Dan Opacki with a comcast account sent the following e-mail this afternoon to clarify...]

From: danopacki@comcast.net
To: malkin@comcast.net
Subject: What’s going on?
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:35:51 +0000
X-Mailer: AT&T Message Center Version 1 (Dec 17 2004)
X-Authenticated-Sender: ZGFub3BhY2tpQGNvbWNhc3QubmV0

Hello Michelle,

A friend of mine called me and told me that she was e-mailed by someone else telling of my name on your web-site. I’m not sure what’s going on but I can assure you that I did not write such crass words as what appears attributed to my name. I’m a real person with a real profession and a reputation and while yes, I singed a petition, I did not call you those nasty names. I have hardly little time to read ANY website, let alone yours, and I’d appreciate that you also post this letter too. Or, take my name off of your website immediately. I am tempted to seek legal recourse about this if you don’t. Any idiot can open a yahoo account free of charge and apprently someone did, using my name – why? I have no clue, but it was NOT the real Dan Opacki. While we disagree politically we share common decency. I hope you respond so. And I am not selling a sofa. I don’t know what’s going on here.
Peace,
D

E-mailer Williams cuts to the chase:

X-Originating-IP: [68.142.206.95]
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:42:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: William us96143@yahoo.com
Subject: TIP

To: malkin@comcast.net

Here’s a tip for you, I hope your entire family perishes in a war of your liking. Fucking cunt.

And Patrick Mitchell, who works [Update: he has been canned. Please don't bother the company anymore. Thanks] at the Los Angeles office of Ogletree and Deakins, writes from work:

X-Originating-IP: [216.105.154.202]
From: “Mitchell, Patrick” Patrick.Mitchell@ogletreedeakins.com
To: “‘malkin@comcast.net’”
Subject:
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 11:41:22 -0400
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2657.72)

YOU STINK you nasty CUNT! Eat Shit and DIE bitch!!

You tell me who the hate-mongers are.

***
Other views:

Debra Saunders has a sane column available at Real Clear Politics.

Instapunk gets brutally candid.

Other members of the Sheehan family apparently do not share Mrs. Sheehan’s views. The Anchoress takes a closer look. [Update: Drudge is now headlining the family's e-mail.]

More from Brainster’s Blog.

***
Update, 1:50 pm eastern time: I have just received an e-mail and phone call from
Gray L. Geddie of Ogletree Deakins. Here’s the e-mail…

Dear Ms. Malkin,

I am the Managing Shareholder of the law firm of Ogletree Deakins with offices located across the country. I was very disturbed to learn today that a legal secretary in our Los Angeles office sent you the vile e-mail referenced on your home page. Such remarks are clearly inappropriate in any context and an e-mail such as this certainly should not have been sent during working time using our firm’s equipment. The comments of this employee are not reflective of the views or opinions of the firm and are directly in violation of our e-mail policy. As Managing Shareholder, I wanted to extend to you our apologies and let you know that this serious violation of our firm’s work rules has resulted in the discharge of this employee.

Once again, let me offer you our deepest apologies for any discomfort that the referenced e-mail has caused. It will not happen again.

Sincerely,

Gray Geddie

Thanks to Mr. Geddie and to all who wrote.

***
Update II: The New York Sun editorializes on Cindy Sheehan’s Crowd…

It’s easy to see why Cindy Sheehan, the 48-year-old mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, has become the new face of the anti-war movement, featured in a New York Times editorial on Tuesday and a Maureen Dowd column yesterday morning. Camped out in Crawford, Texas, near President Bush’s ranch, she’s a more sympathetic face than a lot of the alternatives. But as sad as Ms. Sheehan’s loss is – and we don’t belittle it – she has put herself in league with some extreme groups and individuals.

For starters, Ms. Sheehan has been posting on Michael Moore’s Web site, writing, “We have such a strong coalition of groups. GSFP, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out and the Crawford Peace House. I talked with John Conyers today and he wrote a letter to George signed by about 18 other Congress members to request that he meet with me. I also talked to Maxine Waters tonight and she is probably going to be here tomorrow.”

It turns out that the Crawford Peace House Web site includes a photo depicting the entire state of Israel as “Palestine,” and it carries a link to a report that when Prime Minister Sharon visited Crawford, the “peace house” greeted him with an “800-foot-long banner containing all of the United Nations resolutions that Israel is in violation of.” The Crawford Peace House site also features a photo of Eugene Bird, who has suggested that Israeli intelligence was responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out all have representatives on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war umbrella group. They share that distinction with the Communist Party USA. UPJ organized the march during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York, at which a New York Sun poll of 253 of the protesters found that fully 67% of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement “Iraqi attacks on American troops occupying Iraq are legitimate resistance.” In other words, Ms. Sheehan’s “coalition” includes a lot of people who think the persons who killed her son were justified.

Read the whole thing.

***
Update III: More info on the Sheehan family’s dissenters here.

President Bush responds.

Greg at Deep Down in Texas photoblogs the protest site.

Update IV:

Paul at Power Line shares thoughts on the nation’s fortitude.

The Astute Blogger shines light on more insanity.

Jeff Goldstein spots a moonbat celebrity equating Mrs. Sheehan with the Chinese protester who ran in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square. Really.

The Vacaville Reporter files a new story on the split between Mrs. Sheehan and other members of the Sheehan family.

***
Previous:

“The Grief Pimps”
The friends of Cindy Sheehan

TRANSCRIPT FROM O’REILLY FACTOR, TUESDAY, AUGUST 9

Hi, I’m Bill O’Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight. The fascinating saga of Cindy Sheehan. That is the subject of this evening’s “Talking Points Memo”.

Mrs. Sheehan is protesting in Crawford, Texas, trying to convince Americans the Iraq War is wrong and the president should be impeached. She is doing so because her son Casey, an Army specialist, was killed last year in Iraq.

No one has the right to intrude on Mrs. Sheehan’s grief. That’s number one. She’s entitled to her opinion on a situation that has deeply affected her. And she’s angry at the White House.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CINDY SHEEHAN, SON DIED IN IRAQ: Because Joe Hagen, the deputy chief of staff said that I can tell you the president really cares. And I said you can’t tell me that because I met with him and I know that he doesn’t care. And I told them that I feel that my son didn’t die for a noble cause.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Well, here’s something very strange. Two months after her son died, Cindy and her husband Patrick did meet with President Bush, as she said. After that meeting, Cindy was quoted by a California newspaper as saying, “I now know [President Bush] is sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis. I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss.”

So Mrs. Sheehan has apparently changed her mind about the president. How did that happen? Well, for some reason she’s teamed up with Michael Moore and a man named Sam Husseini, both anti-war radicals. Husseini said this on “The Factor” just two days after 9/11.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAM HUSSEINI, INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY: What sickened me was the act of what happened and that people would kill so many innocent people. But now I hear a drumbeat of having our soldiers kill women and children.

Colin Powell advocated, apparently, during the build-up of the Gulf War of flooding Baghdad and killing possibly four million people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Now that kind of lunacy is what Mrs. Sheehan is associating with. You would think the media would be cautious here with obvious inconsistencies and radicalism in play, but no.

In an editorial today in The New York Times, it says, “Mr. Bush obviously failed to comfort Ms. Sheehan when he met with her and her family. More important, he has not helped the nation give fallen soldiers like Casey Sheehan the honor they deserve.”

Well, let’s go back to the California article. Cindy Sheehan quoted as saying, “that was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together.” It sounds like comfort to me. What say you, New York Times?

Finally, honest people could disagree about the Iraq War. Most Americans now oppose it. That could turn around with some progress. And “Talking Points” hopes it does.

But remember this. For every Cindy Sheehan, there’s a Sergeant Leroy Scott who’s recovering from the terrible wounds he received, attempting to go save a soldier’s life while serving as a medic in Iraq. Sergeant Scott is proud of his service, proud of his country. I talked with him today. I sense no bitterness at all.

I don’t know what is driving Mrs. Sheehan, but I do know she’s being used. And maybe she knows it as well. And that’s the Memo.

Now for the top story tonight. Another take on this. Joining us from Washington, FOX News analyst Michelle Malkin. Cindy Sheehan says she will appear on “The Factor” tomorrow. We shall see, Michelle.

This is a tough one, because you know, a woman lost her son, can’t — you got to be sensitive to that. But now she’s — I think she has been hijacked by some very, very far left elements. What do you think?

MICHELLE MALKIN, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, I do want to emphasize what you said, Bill, which is that losing a child in any situation, whether it’s in a war, from an accident or disease, is one of the most painful of human experiences. And Mrs. Sheehan deserves compassion and sympathy.

And apparently, according to the accounts from last year when President Bush met with her, that’s exactly what she got. I don’t think that anybody should demonize her, but I do think that she has turned her private personal pain into a public circus.

And just look what it’s like down there in Crawford, Texas. You’ve got people surrounding her, people who are all too happy to help push her over the edge, yelling and screaming that the president was the one that killed her son.

No, it wasn’t. And it’s a shame that she doesn’t have anybody to help bring her back down to reality to remind her that it was Iraqi terrorists who ambushed her son on a roadside and killed him and many, many other of his colleagues in the military.

She has aligned herself now with Michael Moore, who considers those very Iraqi terrorists Minutemen. That’s what he calls them. He’s likening them to the American revolutionaries and considers them heroes. I can’t imagine that Casey Sheehan would approve of such behavior, conduct, and rhetoric.

O’REILLY: Well, I have to say that she obviously does because she’s the lead story on Michael Moore’s Web site on an almost daily basis. And she knows – I mean, Michael Moore isn’t a subtle guy. Everybody knows where he stands.

So I mean, I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility for this, and also for the responsibility of other American families who have lost sons and daughters in Iraq, who feel that this kind of behavior borders on treasonous.

You know, you got to think about those people as well. What about their feelings?

MALKIN: Of course.

O’REILLY: What about the sergeant I talked about? What about his feelings, you know, that this woman is now saying that the U.S. government are murderers and all this crazy stuff?

So I think we have to be compassionate, as you said, toward Mrs. Sheehan, but I do believe that she has to take responsibility for her actions.

MALKIN: No question.

O’REILLY: Now she’s being used by The New York Times and other, you know, people who have an agenda. Don’t you think she’s being used?

MALKIN: Well, it must be mutual exploitation, because clearly, I believe that she believes what she is saying now. And when she writes op- ed pieces for far left groups like the Common Dreams Web site, accusing the Bush administration of being the worst and biggest terrorist outfit in the world, I don’t think anybody is putting those words in her mouth.

I do think that there are a lot of free riders in the anti-war, anti-military left, who are getting a lot of mileage out of her grief. And I would hope that there are other members of her family who find this very unseemly.

You mentioned Sam Husseini, who’s with the Institute for Public Accuracy. This is the outfit that sent Sean Penn to do pro-Saddam propaganda before the invasion of Iraq. There’s a larger group involved here, a coalition called the United for Peace and Justice Coalition.

And among them are a group called Code Pink, which is headed by Madea Benjamin, who’s a terrorist sympathizer, dictator worshipping propagandist. And Mrs. Sheehan has hooked up with her at various counterdemonstrations. And these people have an agenda of basically undermining the military.

O’REILLY: She has thrown in — there is no question that she has thrown in with the most radical elements in this country. That is — now, it happened before. Some of the 9/11 families also took this road, you’ll remember, and are still active to this day. There’s a big controversy about the 9/11 Museum down at the World Trade Center.

And you know, there are some people who hate this government, hate their country right now, and blaming Bush for all the terrorism and all the horror in the world.

Here’s a question, Michelle. Do they have a right to this opinion without being scorned?

MALKIN: No, without being scorned, no. And I wouldn’t call it scorned. I would call it scrutiny. And the mainstream media is not doing it.

I mean, The New York Times editorial board is all too eager to prop her up as some sort of martyr and to buy her line when clearly her story hasn’t checked out.

O’REILLY: Yes, her story hasn’t changed.

MALKIN: And so I think – and I think that angle you’re emphasizing is absolutely right here, which is the mainstream media just lapping this up and perpetuating myths and inaccuracies when they know it’s not the truth.

O’REILLY: Yes. They don’t identify — in The New York Times editorial today, it was obvious they did not say her story has been inconsistent. And they did not pinpoint that she is in bed with the radical left.

Michelle, thanks very much as always.

Mark this down as a milestone moment when I side with the likes of Soros and Democrat Rep. George Miller, who asks:

Why should politics have anything to do with who owns the team…So Congress is going to get involved in every baseball ownership decision? Are they next going to worry about a manager they don’t like? I’ve never seen anything as impotent as a congressman threatening the baseball exemption. It gets threatened half a dozen times a year, and our batting average threatening the exemption is zero.

Joe Weedon at The Yellow Line has it exactly right:

It’s the Congressional Republicans that are making this a political issue, not George Soros or his ownership group. If Congress wants to be fair, perhaps the ownership groups that include ex-Senator Peter Fitzgerald and ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell should also be barred from owning the team. In fact, maybe President Bush should be asked to return the millions he made from the sale of the franchise formerly known as the Washington Senators (Texas Rangers).

It’s about time faux fiscal conservatives in the GOP got called on for their longtime championing of publicly financed sports palaces and special government exemptions, which have enriched many private individuals on both sides of the political aisle. This stupid anti-Soros stunt is blowing up in Republicans’ faces.

As well it should.

***

Ed Morrissey adds:

What the hell?

This is what concerns our GOP caucus at the moment? What happened to Social Security reform, trimming pork from the budget, and supporting the war effort? Why do two Republicans in the House have anything to say about the ownership of the Nats?

Life must truly be perfect if this is what gets Sweeney and Davis perturbed.

The Agitator:

This is absolutely unacceptable behavior from a public official. Perhaps it’s to be expected from a guy like Davis. But it’s despicable. Davis is making a public threat to sanction a private industry for doing business with a political opponent.

Gerry Daly sez: [T]hreatening sanctions to a private enterprise because one disagrees with the politics of a prospective owner is a blatent abuse of power.

***

Previous:

Bush’s baseball tax fetish
The mother of all stadium boondoggles
Playing hardball with taxpayers
Stadium sanity in DC
Porkwatch alert

Here are a few mainstream media rules of thumb:

Minority Democrats in public office are inspirational role models. Minority Republicans in public office are embarrassing sellouts.

Minority Democrat politicians are principled. Minority Republican politicians are misguided.

Minority Democrat politicians represent the hopes and dreams of all Americans. Minority Republican politicians are traitors to their “communities.” These rules are unwritten, of course, but the minority politician double standard is glaringly obvious in the national media fawning over newly elected U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

After Obama’s Democratic National Convention address this summer, the New York Times exulted: “As Quickly as Overnight, a New Democratic Star Is Born.” A headline in the Christian Science Monitor echoed: “A Star is Born.” USA Today panted: “Rising star brings Democrats to their feet.” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell enthused: “I think the real breakout tonight is Obama. I mean Teresa is a fascinating story, but Obama is a rock star!” And Newsweek’s Howard Fineman proclaimed: “He is the best argument for the American dream that’s around in politics.”

…Obama isn’t the only example of “the American dream that’s around in politics,” however. At least two other noteworthy minority politicians won unprecedented election victories last week. But you won’t hear Andrea Mitchell or Howard Fineman swooning over their success stories — because these invisible American Dream candidates belong to the wrong party and believe all the wrong things…

…Doubt that such media bias exists? The next time “objective” journalists gush about Democratic Sen.-elect Obama, drop them a note and ask them to name a single minority Republican public official (besides pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, dovish Colin Powell) that they truly admire.

Don’t expect a reply.

The whole thing’s here.

And LaShawn Barber has much more.

Last night it was Kerry’s lie about meeting all the members of the U.N. Security Council.

This morning I mentioned Kerry’s alarmist claim that 95 percent of cargo coming into the U.S. is uninspected.

Now Robert Novak brings us another Kerryism to add to the list: Kerry’s tendency to quote Richard Lugar, the conservative Republican Senator from Indiana, in support of his position(s) on the Iraq war (“Kerry’s Republican friend“).

It is true that Lugar criticized the Bush Administration’s management of reconstruction efforts in Iraq. So this Kerryism isn’t a complete fabrication. On the other hand, Lugar remains a strong Bush supporter and continues to support Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Novak explains:

Kerry’s campaign attempts to avoid the liberal stigma and assume a bipartisan image. In doing so, he implies support from such Republicans as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Sen. John McCain, Sen. Chuck Hagel — and Dick Lugar. That puts Lugar in an uncomfortable position of being used by the Democratic nominee for president.

Lugar, age 72 and ending his 28th year in the Senate, is no Republican heretic. Congressional Quarterly rates him as Bush’s most faithful Senate supporter at 99.2 percent (with 251 out of 253 votes). The National Journal rates him tied, along with 12 other senators, as the chamber’s most conservative member. He is Indiana co-chairman of the Bush re-election campaign and supports the Iraq war….

Lugar’s problem is one word: “incompetence.” He used that word in the Foreign Relations Committee when informed that only $1 billion of $18 billion appropriated for Iraqi reconstruction had been spent. Asked why on ABC’s “This Week” broadcast Sept. 19, Lugar repeated his verdict: “This is incompetence in the administration.” Lugar’s conclusion was correct but his wording injudicious.

Since then, quoting Lugar as critical of his own administration has become a staple of Kerry’s campaign oratory. On Oct. 9, the day after the second debate, Kerry cited Lugar twice in the same speech at Elyria, Ohio (“Dick Lugar stood up and said that the delivery of the way that it’s been administered by this administration has been incompetent.”)

Lugar is a gentleman of the old school, not inclined to call up Kerry and tell him to knock it off. Speaking Oct. 15 in Carmel, Ind., Lugar said it is “very, very unfortunate” that Kerry is “trying to stir up waters when we, in a very bipartisan way, on the Foreign Relations Committee support our troops.” In Culver, Ind., Oct. 17, he said: “It does infuriate all my friends, and they wish that somehow or other I could seize Sen. Kerry and tell him, ‘Don’t do it.’”

Lugar was more blunt with me last week. “The use of my remarks is an attempt to shore up a weak position on his [Kerry's] part,” he told me, adding that Kerry “has tried to extend the failing of reconstruction to a more general criticism of the war.”

I am not going to call for a boycott of Rall’s work. No. I want Universal Press Syndicate and the Washington Post and all his other “mainstream” media outlets to keep publishing his pathetic scrawls and scribbles.

Ted Rall, you see, is a very useful idiot. Whereas most on the Left attempt to conceal their liberal racism in the drapery of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” Ted Rall is an ideological streaker. His impulsive naked bigotry is so butt-ugly, you can’t help but gawk. It is raw and it is real and it is, quite helpfully, all hanging out there for the world to see.

Show us more of your assininity, Ted. Keep dropping your rhetorical pants. Which other minority public figures do you want to mock for having straightened hair? Colin Powell’s wife? Beyonce? Coretta Scott King? Which other independent-thinking, unorthodox minorities do you want to defame for not thinking “white” enough? You wanna send Bill Cosby to “racial re-education camp,” too, huh? Which other minority conservatives are you just itching to tar as “HOUSE NIGGAS” or “HOUSE CHINKS” or “HOUSE SPICS?”

(It’s also valuable, by the way, to see Rall’s mainstream media clients such as the Washington Post continue to stand by him…while at the same time, moan about the lack of civility in public discourse.)

Rall is not the far Left fringe. He gets away with this pen-and-ink-stained excrement because he reflects the closet thinking of mainstream media editors across the country and their mainstream liberal audiences. His work is reportedly carried in 140 newspapers. He and his ilk are everywhere. I grew up with his kind. I went to school with his kind. I work in the media with his kind. I have been getting contempt-filled, profanity-laced, “You-are-a-traitor-to-your-race/You banana/coconut/Aunt Tomasina/white wannabe” diatribes from his kind in my mailbox for the past 12 years.

I’m just glad to see Rall’s kind crawling out from under their rocks and exposing themselves to sunlight. Bask in the glow, miscreants. Ain’t 21st century liberal bigotry liberating? It’s soooo much easier to breathe without those hoods.

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A special request for you enterprising graphic designers/creative types: How about designing “TED RALL THINKS I’M A HOUSE NIGGA,” “TED RALL THINKS I’M A HOUSE CHINK,” and “TED RALL THINK’S I’M A HOUSE (BANANA/COCONUT/SPIC/FILL-IN-THE-RACIAL-EPITHET) etc., t-shirts? I would also love to see an “I’M NOT ‘WHITE’…I’M RIGHT” t-shirt for all of us minority conservatives who have been Rall-ed by leftist bigots.

If you get something up for sale quick at CafePress or the like (doesn’t need to be fancy, just the plain text slogan would be fine), let me know and I’ll buy ‘em, I’ll wear ‘em, and I’ll plug ‘em.

UPDATE: Wow! My peeps work fast! Rachel Jurado, who blogs at Banana Republican, has launched the “Uncle Tom’s Outreach Initiative” at CafePress with a few of the suggested t-shirts and some of her own original work. (I’m going with the cute pink “I’m not ‘White.’ I’m RIGHT” shirt and one of those “Self-loathing race traitor”” cotton t’s. Also gonna do some early Christmas shopping and snatch up some of those ash-gray “RALL THINKS I’M A HOUSE NIGGA” t’s!)

UPDATE: These aren’t for sale (too bad!), but Allahpundit has designed some great Rall-wear, too.