In The Times’ hinterlands
: The Times doesn’t get Jersey, never has. See below and see this by Adam Nagourney in Sunday’s paper:
Voters seem willing to accept, to a certain extent, gay people as television characters and even as next-door neighbors. Yet for politicians, there are limits, as Mr. McGreevey made clear.
Listen to the voters about the voters, man, not to McGreevey about the voters. Go read forums and blogs and comments and see that you’re just not listening.
Blog contest
: Gizmodo is holding a contest with a gadget giveaway. Enter by midnight Sunday.
Garden State
: Zach Braff has a Garden State blog and just as his movie opens, his state gets the biggest news in at least a decade:
Wow,First a movie about the state, now a Gay Governor… what’s next- the World’s Fair?
What an exciting time to be from New Jersey. Why’s he quitting? Hell even Marion Barry hung in as Mayor of D.C. after he got caught taking a sip of the crack rock. A gay affair is nothing. When I was president of my elementary school student council I once purposely peed outside the urinal as an act of civil disobedience for being scolded for sniffing fruit scented markers. What did they expect? They were fruit scented! If you don’t want kids to sniff markers, make them smell like ass, not grapes.
Bon Appetit
: If PBS had any class, they’d preempt all their programming for a day — say, tomorrow — to run 24 hours of Julia Child, who brought taste to America and class to PBS and fun to Saturday Night Live. Instead, my PBS station was running frigging infomericals for painting kits this morning.
: Here’s Julie’s tribute to Julia.
Down and down we go…
: Golan Cipel is looking so bad he’ll make McGreevey look good. The latest:
A man who said New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey sexually harassed him was pushing for a cash settlement of up to $50 million before the governor decided to announce he is homosexual and had an extramarital affair, sources said.Golan Cipel’s demands also included a last-minute push to have McGreevey’s administration approve development plans for a private medical college in the state, two senior members of the administration said Saturday. Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity….
The school’s board members include Charles Kushner, a real estate developer who gave millions to Jewish organizations and politicians, including Mr. McGreevey and former U.S. senator Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.).
: Cipel says he never did it with the gayGuv and that he’s straight.
The Chinese Wonkette
: Wendy Cheng is the hottest blogger in Singapore.
Our new head of homeland security: Oprah
: This is getting absurd. First, John Kerry makes this numbnutty statement on terrorism that was the perfect Daily Show punchline: “I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history.” Proactive is bad enough. Sensitive is just plain laughable.
So then Dick Cheney laughed. Hell, so did Jon Stewart. So did I. Sensitive? Come on! Said the Veep:
Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge he would fight a “more sensitive” war on terror. (Laughter.) America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was ever won by being “sensitive.” (Applause.) President Abraham Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive wars. President Roosevelt and Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur did not wage a sensitive war. A “sensitive war” will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans on the morning of 9/11, and who now seek chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more. The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity. (Applause.) As our opponents see it, the problem isn’t the thugs and the murderers we face, but it is somehow our attitude. Well, the American people know better. They know that we are in a fight to preserve our freedom and our way of life, and that we are on the side of right and justice in this battle. Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed. (Applause.)
It should have ended there: You say something stupid. It passes. But now John Edwards is defending Kerry’s Birkenstock moment: “He took that word and distorted and tried to use it to argue John Kerry will not keep the American people safe,” Edwards said. “He’s talking about a man who still carries shrapnel in his body. He’s talking about a man who spilled his blood for the United States of America.”
So now he’s playing the shrapnel card? That not only draws attention again to the dumb Kerry quote, it keeps playing Vietnam.
I’d rather see both sides outdoing each other with how they’re going to go get Bin Laden and islamofascists: I’d hunt ‘em down…. Well, I’d bomb ‘em… Well, I’d nuke ‘em… That’s what I want to hear.
The Jersey anti-defamation league
: In the op-ed pages of The NY Times, Eric Denzenhall essentially accuses New Jersey of being homophobic:
Yet perhaps the most important variable sealing Mr. McGreevey’s fate was the setting for his drama. While New Jersey leans Democratic, these are not the Democrats of the Upper West Side or Malibu. These Democrats are still loyal to the “Three I’s” of Garden State politics – Ireland, Israel and Italy. These are the union boys, the tradesmen, the enlightened professionals who remember their parents cut stone in Newark and stirred great vats of soup at Campbell’s in Camden.With the Three I’s, one can weather corruption charges, as Mr. McGreevey did until this week. In Jersey politics, rolling with the punches of graft has long been a shibboleth of manhood. Being gay, however, is not. It’s one thing for a governor to sell a political appointment. It’s another for him to have sex with the guy he appointed.
Crap. Look at the forum posts on NJ.com or the comments on this blog or listen to even the most neanderthal talk radio (i.e., NJ101.5) or listen to conversations around here and you will hear that people really do not object to McGreevey’s homosexuality. What they object to is the cardinal sin in this state, the sin of sins, the misstep that always kills governors here: Wasting taxpayer money. If all McGreevey had done was shtupped a guy named Golan Cipel, he would not have resigned. He resigned because this now explains why he put the guy on the state payroll at a high salary for a job he never should have filled. He wasted our money. Off with his head.
