links for 2008-11-14

In a statement issued after the election, leaders of the No on Proposition 8 campaign urged its coalition to take the long view. "We achieve nothing if we isolate the people who did not stand with us in this fight," the statement said.

Unfortunately, a lone statement on a Web site is not adequate. That message needs to be spread widely and loudly by all leaders in the gay and lesbian community, and all opponents of Proposition 8. It's part of the task of building enough support to ensure that Californians support equal rights for same-sex couples the next time the question is on the ballot.
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Didn't Flap tell you there would be a backlash against the gay marriage proponents for haraassing churches and donors.

Biegun is hardly the only Bushie to be tapped for Palin duty.
Matt Scully, a former Bush White House speechwriter who helped draft some of the major foreign-policy addresses during the president’s first term, is working on Palin’s acceptance speech to the convention Wednesday night.

Mark Wallace, a former lawyer for the Bush 2000 campaign who served in a variety of administration jobs including chief counsel at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and deputy ambassador to the United Nations, has been put in charge of “prep” for the debate against Biden.

Wallace’s wife, Nicolle Wallace, the former White House communications director, has taken over the same job for Palin.

Tucker Eskew, another senior Bush White House communications aide, is serving as senior counselor to Palin’s operation.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former chief economist at the Council of Economic Advisers who has been serving as top economics guru for the McCain campaign, has moved over to serve as Palin’s

I wrote a piece for the new issue on the McCain campaign, focusing especially on the endgame and the fight over Palin. I know a lot of people are already sick of this stuff, but I wanted to talk to people in the campaign to satisfy my curiosity as much as anything else.

The split over Palin, of course, poisoned everything at the end. One of the dividing lines was between her communications team and the policy advisers. The communications team seemed to consider her a dolt, while the policy people—like Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann—were impressed with her and her potential. As one McCain aide told me, "It's the difference between considering her someone who lacks knowledge and someone who is incompetent, and they [the communications aides] treated her as the latter."
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Lowry shows himself to be the Mitt Romney shill that he is. WFB must be rolling over in his grave.

For supporters of same-sex marriage, the Election Day loss in California seems to be energizing their campaign rather than ending it.

Demonstrations against Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage, have been growing, CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports.

Now the anger is moving to the Internet, where supporters of same-sex marriage are posting blacklists – the names and businesses of those who gave money to help Proposition 8 pass.

Chris Lee, an engineer who is an immigrant from China, was shocked to see his name on the Web site AntiGayBlacklist.com after he gave $1,000 to the campaign to end same-sex marriage.

"I was completely disgusted," Li said. "This sort of blacklist should only appear in communist countries, should not be found in the United States."
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Not a way to win hearts and minds to support gay marriage

So far, however, Prop. 8 opponents haven't gone out of their way to make nice with the winning side and start the education work needed to convince them that support for same-sex marriage won't end civilization as they know it.

Instead, many of the post-election comments and demonstrations by Prop. 8 opponents have characterized the 52 percent of California voters who supported the gay marriage ban as little more than ignorant bigots, haters and homophobes. They have called for boycotts of Prop. 8 supporters. They also have argued that the Mormon church and other religious groups that backed the ban had no right to get involved in politics and should be stripped of their tax-free status by the IRS.
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Another key mistake by gay rights activists – go after the churches. Even Elton John is disgusted with the No on 8 folks.

Gingrich said that the best thing the Republican Party could do right now is stop worrying about the Republican Party. “We need to worry about the nation,” Gingrich said. “Wal-Mart doesn’t get ahead by attacking Sears but by offering better value.”

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Democratic Party was going through the same kind of agonizing re-appraisals, bemoaning the fact that it couldn’t raise as much money as Republicans, build as impressive a ground operation or field as compelling candidates.

County election officials inched closer to the finish line on Wednesday, adding 14,394 ballots to the results from last week's election but leaving a handful of races still too close to call.

Ventura County has now counted 294,736 ballots, or about 88 percent of those cast. The remaining 41,000 or so are absentee ballots handed in at the last minute, or provisional ballots, cast by voters whose registration status couldn't be clearly determined on Election Day.

Because election officials don't know where the uncounted ballots were cast, it's impossible to know just how many votes are left in each race.

The county plans to release more results Friday, but the final tally won't be known until next week at the earliest.

Bolstered by another good showing in late ballots counted in Ventura County, Republican Tony Strickland widened his lead Wednesday to 1,560 votes over Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson in the 19th Senate District.

The margin is by far the largest held by either candidate, as the lead has ping-ponged back and forth since election night. Strickland is likely to build a still larger lead later in the week after more late mail-in ballots from Ventura and Los Angeles counties are tabulated.
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Flap worries about transporting ballots for a manual recount. Who is the brain donor here?

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.
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Not a shock to Flap

A week after California voters approved Proposition 8 and decreed they wanted to end same-sex marriage in the state, details are emerging of an opposition campaign that was in disarray.

Key staff members – including the campaign manager – were replaced in the final weeks as polls turned dramatically against the No side. Their replacements say they found an effort that was too timid, slow to react, without a radio campaign or a strategy to reach out to African Americans, a group that ultimately supported the measure by more than 2 to 1.
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The No Campaign was attempting to hide the ball and not put homosexuals in the tv ads. Proposition 8 would have lost no matter their turmoil. The Yes campaign had a superior message and financing.

"The recent vote on Proposition 8 and the reaction by some of those who opposed it make it very clear that there is a fundamental difference in the understanding of marriage between those who voted ‘yes’ and those who voted ‘no.’

“We believe that marriage, which predates both Church and government, is an institution that arose from the reality that the union of a man and a woman is necessary for the continuation of the human race. Those opposed to Proposition 8 believe marriage to be a ‘civil right’ analogous to the right to vote.

“As we said in our original statement of support for Proposition 8, same-sex unions are not the same as opposite-sex unions. The radical change in the definition of marriage to include same-sex partners discounts both history and biology and ignores how deeply marriage—as the union of a man and a woman—is embedded in our culture, language, and laws and how foundational it is for the well-being of children and the flourishing of society..
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Indeed….

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.
Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt…
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Shocking….NOT.

Another part of the lengthy postmortem on the McCain-Palin campaign contends Sarah Palin refused to go on stage with Sen. John Sununu and former Rep. Jeb Bradley when she was in New Hampshire on Oct. 15.
Duprey said he "saw no evidence" of that, despite being with Palin the entire day. A spokesman for Sununu had no comment and Bradley could not be reached.
The Newsweek piece is among the many post-election stories about disarray in the McCain-Palin campaign.
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You mean the MSM is wrong about Sarah Palin and the rumors swirling around her?
What a surprise?
NOT……

Gay rights groups in California plan to ask voters to overturn the ban on same-sex marriage they approved last week if legal challenges to Proposition 8 are unsuccessful.
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Gay marriage proponents have lost every election where the question has been on the ballot.
In an e-mail to supporters, Equality California executive director Geoffrey Kors said Wednesday that he and other gay marriage advocates are aiming for a ballot initiative to reverse the ban in two years.

Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that overruled the California Supreme Court that legalized same-sex marriage, passed 52 percent to 48 percent.

Updated vote totals in Ventura County on Wednesday expanded Republican Tony Strickland's lead to 1,560 votes over Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson in a cliffhanger race for the 19th District state Senate seat.
Election officials said they may be busy for weeks more counting remaining ballots and then doing a “manual tally” to ensure the accuracy of the results. Because the race is so close, the state probably will require that all 19th District ballots be manually recounted to ensure the accuracy of the results, an election official said Wednesday.
The only votes still uncounted in Santa Barbara County, election officials said, were about 6,000 provisional ballots and 1,100 “emergency ballots” issued during the final week to voters who couldn't make it to the polls but hadn't signed up as absentee voters.
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If it is true that there are so few Santa Barbara County votes yet to be counted, Tony Strickland is looking good to win this seat.