Facebook can be draining at times. One of my former church 2YO Sunday School charges in Lexington is now 7 and has bone cancer. We're FB friends with his mom, and she's posting away a blow-by-blow of his progress as he starts chemo.
That's hard to read; the little squirrel deserves better than that.
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When the news of Toronto mayor Rob Ford's crack video came out, I thought that anyone smart enough to get elected mayor of that big a city wouldn't dumb enough be caught on tape toking away while talking profane trash about local politics; you have Marion Berry as a case to the contrary, but I wasn't buying that the dumb stick would strike twice in that way.
Well, yes it did. And like Berry, Ford is a political Rasputin, refusing to follow the script and resign. Can you get stupid-drunk and take pipe hits and still have the voters respect you? One would hope not, even if his replacement would be a step down on a policy level.
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Speaking of Ford, I once described him as Chris Christie with a third of the charm. The original got re-upped, giving liberals glee across the board. Not only did their favorite Republican this side of John McCain win, the more socially-conservative Ken Cuccinelli lost a tight race to former DNC head Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.
That sets up the meme of moderates win, theocons lose; but that's a simplistic take. Moderates win in blue states where a more-conservative candidate would be road kill in a general election. Conservatives can win in conservative-leaning states unless they are sailing upwind.
Cuccinelli was saddled with a scandal-laden outgoing GOP governor, a Central Casting black conservative preacher as the LG nominee, and a Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis drawing social moderate voters away, even as real libertarians like Ron Paul noted that Sarvis wasn't much of a libertarian even as he had the big-l Libertarian nomination.
Add a government lockout that made Tea Party folks look bad and a media that wanted to case the devout Catholic Cuccinelli as the second coming of Torquemada, and you had a near-perfect storm for McAuliffe. A liberal Washington insider would normally be easy pickings for a solid Republican candidate in VA, but even the Healthcare.gov fiasco didn't give enough anti-Democratic blowback to drag Cuccinelli over the line.
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