Morning News Round-Up

Mark Sanford, the disgraced former governor of South Carolina for egregious marriage infidelity, going AWOL while on the job and lying about, won his race for the 1st Congressional District against Elizabeth Colbert Busch. 

It's nice to see that the very Red, family values state has shown how important family values actually are to them.  At least when the other person is a liberal.

Also, after being down 9 point in a PPP poll just two weeks ago, he was up by one point in a Sunday poll, and won the election two days later by nine points.  PPP is a very good polling outfit.  Not here.  Gots to work on those metrics, folks.

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The stock market closed over 15,000 for the first time in history.  Just imagine how high it would be if there was a real president in office who supported big business.

To be clear, the stock market is not an indication of the economic conditions in the country.  But it is an indication of importance to the finances of big big business.  What wonders when corporations will begin to realize that Republicans are not inherently good for them, and Democrats bad.  And when the public grasps that, as well.  History has shown this time and again. 

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The Huffington Post just announced that they are opening a bureau in Japan.  No word yet if the Japanese are aware that they won't get be getting paid. 

In related news, the dollar hit a four-year high against the yen last month.  So, with the conversation rate, Japanese bloggers won't be hurt as much as if they were actually receiving income.

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Yesterday, Texas lawmakers spent their first full day debating House Bill 650.  The bill would require that all presidential candidates prove that they are natural born citizens before being allowed on the Texas ballot.  Not surprisingly, it has drawn great support from "birthers" who still think that President Obama was born in Kenyan.

The bill was first introduced in January, which as whimsy would have it, is when Ted Cruz was elected to the senate to represent Texas, long before the far right has decided he is already their beloved choice (after just four months in office) to be president in 2016.  Given that Barack Obama is not eligible to ever run for president again -- and that Ted Cruz was born in Canada and lived there for the first four years of his life -- I'm going to guess that this is a really good example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Sometimes when you're really screwed up, you end up screwing yourself.

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The swami Mike Huckabee predicted on his "Fox News" show that President Obama would be impeached over Benghazi.  Forgetting for a moment all his non-existence reasons, other than that havng something to do with lying to the American public -- because, y'know, no president has ever done that -- his faux-outrage culminated in declaring Benghazi as worse than Watergate (which, let's be clear, was about subverting the Constitution and abuse of power) because, "as bad as Watergate was, because it broke the trust between the president and the people, no one died. This is more serious because four Americans did in fact die.”

I believe the polite response is, "Spare me."

George Bush lied not only to the American public but also Congress -- and as a result of the latter got the United States into war with Iraq, where 4,500 Americans did, in fact, die.  And he additionally ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing that resulted in the Twin Towers being destroyed on 9/11 and 3,000 deaths. 

So, we've got 7,500 deaths and not a single peep of a hiccup of criticism from one of the most gut-wrenchingly hypocritical people in America.

And Mike Huckabee says...the Black guy is worse.  Worse than them all.  Well...to the Mike Huckabees of the world, he probably is.  But then, that's why they're the Mike Huckabees of the world.