Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Family, Sports, Politics, Political Scum
Political Scum
The silly season of politics turned really ugly this week, and I mean ugly in a completely new and different manner. And who can we thank for this, the Republican National Committee and Rush Limbaugh.
First, I'll deal with Mr. Limbaugh. Michael J. Fox has participated in ads for three Democratic candidates (2 for Senate, 1 for House). As I'm sure you know, he is inflicted with Parkinson's Disease. In these ads, you can see as he struggles with involuntary body movement. But not to Limbaugh. To Rush, who I consider to be an employee of the RNC, Mr. Fox was acting. And his comments on the matter are sickening on their face. This is not totally surprising as Rush uses his pulpit to defame those who are not Republican all the time. But to call into question Mr. Fox's integrity and disease is ill-making.
Second, let's all take a bow to the RNC. Ken Mehlman, the head of said committee, is a wonderful hypocrite. His organization, in a desperate attempt to keep the Tennessee Senate race as dirty as possible. This time, by putting out an ad against Democratic candidate Harold Ford, Jr. which basically states that he is preying on white women (Cue Mel Brooks and Cleavon Little in "Blazing Sattles"). This ad is racist, trying its best to appeal to old fears of black men and white women. It is horrible. And what makes it even worse is what Mr. Mehlman said about it. In an interview with Tim Russert on MSNBC yesterday he said that many in his office looked at the commercial and thought it was just fine. When asked by Mr. Russert about Bob Corker's (the Republican candidate) request that the ad be taken off the air, Mr. Mehlman said that he didn't have the legal authority to do so. WHAT!!!!! It's his committee. It's their ad. Who's authority would it be if not his.
To say that the Republican's are getting desperate is obvious, but this is a new low in political advertising and debate. It is sickening, it is sad. It means that the RNC and Rush Limbaugh are Political Scum.
The stories from the Washington Post and MSNBC follow.
Rush Limbaugh On the Offensive Against Ad With Michael J. Fox
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff WriterWednesday, October 25, 2006; Page C01
Possibly worse than making fun of someone's disability is saying that it's imaginary. That is not to mock someone's body, but to challenge a person's guts, integrity, sanity.
To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker. The actor, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, has done a series of political ads supporting candidates who favor stem cell research, including Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who is running against Republican Michael Steele for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Sarbanes.
"He is exaggerating the effects of the disease," Limbaugh told listeners. "He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting."
Limbaugh, whose syndicated radio program has a weekly audience of about 10 million, was reacting to Fox's appearance in another one of the spots, for Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, running against Republican Sen. James M. Talent.
But the Cardin ad is similar. It is hard to watch, unless, for some reason, you don't believe it. As he speaks, Fox's restless torso weaves and writhes in a private dance. His head bobs from side to side, almost leaving the video frame.
"This is the only time I've ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has," Limbaugh said. "He can barely control himself."
Later Monday, still on the air, Limbaugh would apologize, but reaction to his statements from Parkinson's experts and Fox's supporters was swift and angry.
"It's a shameless statement," John Rogers said yesterday. Rogers, Fox's political adviser, who also serves on the board of the Parkinson's Action Network, added: "It's insulting. It's appallingly sad, at best."
"Anyone who knows the disease well would regard his movement as classic severe Parkinson's disease," said Elaine Richman, a neuroscientist in Baltimore who co-wrote "Parkinson's Disease and the Family." "Any other interpretation is misinformed."
Fox was campaigning yesterday for Tammy Duckworth, a congressional candidate, outside Chicago, when he alluded to Limbaugh's remarks. "It's ironic, given some of the things that have been said in the last couple of days, that my pills are working really well right now," he said, according to a report on the CBS2 Web site.
After his apology, Limbaugh shifted his ground and renewed his attack on Fox.
"Now people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial," Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his Web site. "All right then, I stand corrected. . . . So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act."
Then Limbaugh pivoted to a different critique: "Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democratic politician."
Limbaugh's shock at Fox's appearance is a measure of the disease's devastation, advocates say. Contrary to the charge that Fox might not take his medicine to enhance his symptoms, the medicine produces some of the uncontrolled body movements.
"Stem cell research offers hope to millions of Americans with diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," Fox says in the Cardin ad. "But George Bush and Michael Steele would put limits on the most promising stem cell research."
Fox has appeared in ABC's "Boston Legal" this season. In his scenes, taped over the summer, Fox does not shake or loll his head as he does in the Cardin commercial, but does appear to be restraining himself, appearing almost rigid at times.
A source with direct knowledge of Fox's illness who viewed the Cardin ad said Fox is not acting to exaggerate the effects of the disease. The source said Fox's scenes in "Boston Legal" had to be taped around his illness, as he worked to control the tremors associated with Parkinson's for limited periods of time.
Staff writer Frank Ahrens contributed to this report.
Tennessee ad ignites internal GOP squabbling
Corker calls for own party to pull spot some Republicans denounce as racist
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 8:33 p.m. ET Oct 24, 2006
With their majority in the Senate potentially hanging in the balance, Republicans were bickering among themselves over an advertisement in the particularly nasty campaign in Tennessee that even some Republicans have denounced as racist.
The dispute pitted former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, the GOP candidate for the seat held by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, against his own party leadership Tuesday after it rebuffed his call to pull the ad, which lampoons Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s reputation as a man about town.
In the ad, a young white actress playing the stereotype of a “dumb blonde” talks about meeting Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor who is black, “at the Playboy party.” At the end of the ad, she winks and says to the camera, “Harold — call me.”
The ad brought immediate criticism from the Ford campaign and the NAACP, whose Washington office called it “a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.”
Ford told MSNBC-TV: “I know that they are a little desperate and doing the things that you do when you get desperate in a campaign.”
Corker himself called the ad “distasteful” Tuesday, telling MSNBC-TV, “I think it ought to come down.” Meanwhile, Bill Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine, criticized it in an interview on CNN as “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.”
Mehlman: Ad’s fine, and it’s not our faultBut Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Tuesday that he saw nothing wrong with the ad.
“After the comments by Mr. Corker and former Sen. Cohen, I looked at the ad, and I don’t agree with that characterization of it,” Mehlman told NBC’s Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, in an interview as part of MSNBC-TV’s daylong Battleground America report.
“I think that there is nothing more repugnant in our society than people who try to divide Americans along racial lines, and I would denounce any ad that I thought did,” said Mehlman, who addressed the NAACP last year, apologizing for the Republican Party’s race-tinged “Southern strategy” during the 1970s and ’80s.
“I happen not to believe that ad does,” he said, adding that even if he wanted to pull the ad, he couldn’t.
Even though a woman’s voice discloses that “the Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising,” Mehlman said the RNC was not, in fact, responsible. He said the ad was produced by an independent group contracted by the RNC, with whom he is prohibited from communicating.
“The way that process works under the campaign reform laws is I write a check to an independent individual and that person’s responsible for spending money in certain states,” he said. Beyond that, he said, the RNC is out of the loop.
Ford dismisses GOP explanationBut Ford said Republican leaders were being disingenuous.
“I do know that if my opponent wanted this ad pulled down, he could get it pulled down,” Ford said. White House press secretary Tony Snow appeared to support Ford on that point, telling Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” that “if he wants it to come off [the air], it’ll come off.”
But MSNBC’s chief Washington correspondent, Norah O’Donnell, reported that Republican strategists told her that they had no intention of pulling the ad and were looking forward to its running right up to Election Day in two weeks.
For his part, Corker noted that Ford drove up in a bus to confront him at a press conference in Memphis over the weekend, an incident that he said “called into question whether he has the temperament, the comportment, if you will, to have the statesmanlike qualities that people look for in a United States senator.”
New headache as Corker strugglesThe controversy comes at a bad time for Corker, who is struggling to hold on to what had been considered a safe Republican seat in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in 18 years. But the new MSNBC/McClatchy poll released Tuesday shows the race as a virtual tie, with Corker’s 45 percent-to-43 percent lead falling within the statistical margin of error.
Corker’s lackluster campaign has vaulted Tennessee to the top of the list of too-close-to-call races that both parties believe could tip the balance in the Senate, along with vise-tight races in Virginia and Tennessee, where Democratic challengers are neck-and-neck with Republican incumbents.
Mehlman predicted Tuesday that the Republicans would hold onto both houses of Congress, but Sen. Elizabeth Dole, chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, acknowledged that her party was in a fight for its life.
“It's a very tough cycle,” Dole said on MSNBC-TV. “You know the midterm is always tougher when a president has been re-elected — tradition, history shows you it makes it even tougher.
“So we’ve known for well over a year ... that this was going to be a very tough, tough cycle — maybe the toughest in 20 years,” Dole added, saying she thought the party would just pull through in the end.
Democrats cautiously optimisticDemocratic campaign leaders were less willing to predict outright victory, but they said on MSNBC that the picture was looking good for them.
“I think we have a good shot in a lot of states that formerly voted for the president and his party,” said Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
“I think people want to change, particularly, interestingly enough, in the more traditional states — the rural states,” he added. “I think we’ve got a great shot in Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia, to be honest with you. I think we can win all three of those.”
Rep. Christopher van Hollen, D-Md., co-chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, likewise refused to go out on a limb, but he said all the trends were favorable. Traditionally, he said, races tend to shake out in the last few weeks of the campaign, but this year, races in reliably Republican districts are falling one by one into the undecided column as Election Day approaches — 58 of them now, by his count.
“I’d rather be holding the hand that the Democrats have right now than the Republicans,” van Hollen said.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
The silly season of politics turned really ugly this week, and I mean ugly in a completely new and different manner. And who can we thank for this, the Republican National Committee and Rush Limbaugh.
First, I'll deal with Mr. Limbaugh. Michael J. Fox has participated in ads for three Democratic candidates (2 for Senate, 1 for House). As I'm sure you know, he is inflicted with Parkinson's Disease. In these ads, you can see as he struggles with involuntary body movement. But not to Limbaugh. To Rush, who I consider to be an employee of the RNC, Mr. Fox was acting. And his comments on the matter are sickening on their face. This is not totally surprising as Rush uses his pulpit to defame those who are not Republican all the time. But to call into question Mr. Fox's integrity and disease is ill-making.
Second, let's all take a bow to the RNC. Ken Mehlman, the head of said committee, is a wonderful hypocrite. His organization, in a desperate attempt to keep the Tennessee Senate race as dirty as possible. This time, by putting out an ad against Democratic candidate Harold Ford, Jr. which basically states that he is preying on white women (Cue Mel Brooks and Cleavon Little in "Blazing Sattles"). This ad is racist, trying its best to appeal to old fears of black men and white women. It is horrible. And what makes it even worse is what Mr. Mehlman said about it. In an interview with Tim Russert on MSNBC yesterday he said that many in his office looked at the commercial and thought it was just fine. When asked by Mr. Russert about Bob Corker's (the Republican candidate) request that the ad be taken off the air, Mr. Mehlman said that he didn't have the legal authority to do so. WHAT!!!!! It's his committee. It's their ad. Who's authority would it be if not his.
To say that the Republican's are getting desperate is obvious, but this is a new low in political advertising and debate. It is sickening, it is sad. It means that the RNC and Rush Limbaugh are Political Scum.
The stories from the Washington Post and MSNBC follow.
Rush Limbaugh On the Offensive Against Ad With Michael J. Fox
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff WriterWednesday, October 25, 2006; Page C01
Possibly worse than making fun of someone's disability is saying that it's imaginary. That is not to mock someone's body, but to challenge a person's guts, integrity, sanity.
To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker. The actor, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, has done a series of political ads supporting candidates who favor stem cell research, including Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who is running against Republican Michael Steele for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Sarbanes.
"He is exaggerating the effects of the disease," Limbaugh told listeners. "He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting."
Limbaugh, whose syndicated radio program has a weekly audience of about 10 million, was reacting to Fox's appearance in another one of the spots, for Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, running against Republican Sen. James M. Talent.
But the Cardin ad is similar. It is hard to watch, unless, for some reason, you don't believe it. As he speaks, Fox's restless torso weaves and writhes in a private dance. His head bobs from side to side, almost leaving the video frame.
"This is the only time I've ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has," Limbaugh said. "He can barely control himself."
Later Monday, still on the air, Limbaugh would apologize, but reaction to his statements from Parkinson's experts and Fox's supporters was swift and angry.
"It's a shameless statement," John Rogers said yesterday. Rogers, Fox's political adviser, who also serves on the board of the Parkinson's Action Network, added: "It's insulting. It's appallingly sad, at best."
"Anyone who knows the disease well would regard his movement as classic severe Parkinson's disease," said Elaine Richman, a neuroscientist in Baltimore who co-wrote "Parkinson's Disease and the Family." "Any other interpretation is misinformed."
Fox was campaigning yesterday for Tammy Duckworth, a congressional candidate, outside Chicago, when he alluded to Limbaugh's remarks. "It's ironic, given some of the things that have been said in the last couple of days, that my pills are working really well right now," he said, according to a report on the CBS2 Web site.
After his apology, Limbaugh shifted his ground and renewed his attack on Fox.
"Now people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial," Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his Web site. "All right then, I stand corrected. . . . So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act."
Then Limbaugh pivoted to a different critique: "Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democratic politician."
Limbaugh's shock at Fox's appearance is a measure of the disease's devastation, advocates say. Contrary to the charge that Fox might not take his medicine to enhance his symptoms, the medicine produces some of the uncontrolled body movements.
"Stem cell research offers hope to millions of Americans with diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," Fox says in the Cardin ad. "But George Bush and Michael Steele would put limits on the most promising stem cell research."
Fox has appeared in ABC's "Boston Legal" this season. In his scenes, taped over the summer, Fox does not shake or loll his head as he does in the Cardin commercial, but does appear to be restraining himself, appearing almost rigid at times.
A source with direct knowledge of Fox's illness who viewed the Cardin ad said Fox is not acting to exaggerate the effects of the disease. The source said Fox's scenes in "Boston Legal" had to be taped around his illness, as he worked to control the tremors associated with Parkinson's for limited periods of time.
Staff writer Frank Ahrens contributed to this report.
Tennessee ad ignites internal GOP squabbling
Corker calls for own party to pull spot some Republicans denounce as racist
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 8:33 p.m. ET Oct 24, 2006
With their majority in the Senate potentially hanging in the balance, Republicans were bickering among themselves over an advertisement in the particularly nasty campaign in Tennessee that even some Republicans have denounced as racist.
The dispute pitted former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, the GOP candidate for the seat held by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, against his own party leadership Tuesday after it rebuffed his call to pull the ad, which lampoons Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s reputation as a man about town.
In the ad, a young white actress playing the stereotype of a “dumb blonde” talks about meeting Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor who is black, “at the Playboy party.” At the end of the ad, she winks and says to the camera, “Harold — call me.”
The ad brought immediate criticism from the Ford campaign and the NAACP, whose Washington office called it “a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.”
Ford told MSNBC-TV: “I know that they are a little desperate and doing the things that you do when you get desperate in a campaign.”
Corker himself called the ad “distasteful” Tuesday, telling MSNBC-TV, “I think it ought to come down.” Meanwhile, Bill Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine, criticized it in an interview on CNN as “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.”
Mehlman: Ad’s fine, and it’s not our faultBut Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Tuesday that he saw nothing wrong with the ad.
“After the comments by Mr. Corker and former Sen. Cohen, I looked at the ad, and I don’t agree with that characterization of it,” Mehlman told NBC’s Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, in an interview as part of MSNBC-TV’s daylong Battleground America report.
“I think that there is nothing more repugnant in our society than people who try to divide Americans along racial lines, and I would denounce any ad that I thought did,” said Mehlman, who addressed the NAACP last year, apologizing for the Republican Party’s race-tinged “Southern strategy” during the 1970s and ’80s.
“I happen not to believe that ad does,” he said, adding that even if he wanted to pull the ad, he couldn’t.
Even though a woman’s voice discloses that “the Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising,” Mehlman said the RNC was not, in fact, responsible. He said the ad was produced by an independent group contracted by the RNC, with whom he is prohibited from communicating.
“The way that process works under the campaign reform laws is I write a check to an independent individual and that person’s responsible for spending money in certain states,” he said. Beyond that, he said, the RNC is out of the loop.
Ford dismisses GOP explanationBut Ford said Republican leaders were being disingenuous.
“I do know that if my opponent wanted this ad pulled down, he could get it pulled down,” Ford said. White House press secretary Tony Snow appeared to support Ford on that point, telling Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” that “if he wants it to come off [the air], it’ll come off.”
But MSNBC’s chief Washington correspondent, Norah O’Donnell, reported that Republican strategists told her that they had no intention of pulling the ad and were looking forward to its running right up to Election Day in two weeks.
For his part, Corker noted that Ford drove up in a bus to confront him at a press conference in Memphis over the weekend, an incident that he said “called into question whether he has the temperament, the comportment, if you will, to have the statesmanlike qualities that people look for in a United States senator.”
New headache as Corker strugglesThe controversy comes at a bad time for Corker, who is struggling to hold on to what had been considered a safe Republican seat in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in 18 years. But the new MSNBC/McClatchy poll released Tuesday shows the race as a virtual tie, with Corker’s 45 percent-to-43 percent lead falling within the statistical margin of error.
Corker’s lackluster campaign has vaulted Tennessee to the top of the list of too-close-to-call races that both parties believe could tip the balance in the Senate, along with vise-tight races in Virginia and Tennessee, where Democratic challengers are neck-and-neck with Republican incumbents.
Mehlman predicted Tuesday that the Republicans would hold onto both houses of Congress, but Sen. Elizabeth Dole, chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, acknowledged that her party was in a fight for its life.
“It's a very tough cycle,” Dole said on MSNBC-TV. “You know the midterm is always tougher when a president has been re-elected — tradition, history shows you it makes it even tougher.
“So we’ve known for well over a year ... that this was going to be a very tough, tough cycle — maybe the toughest in 20 years,” Dole added, saying she thought the party would just pull through in the end.
Democrats cautiously optimisticDemocratic campaign leaders were less willing to predict outright victory, but they said on MSNBC that the picture was looking good for them.
“I think we have a good shot in a lot of states that formerly voted for the president and his party,” said Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
“I think people want to change, particularly, interestingly enough, in the more traditional states — the rural states,” he added. “I think we’ve got a great shot in Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia, to be honest with you. I think we can win all three of those.”
Rep. Christopher van Hollen, D-Md., co-chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, likewise refused to go out on a limb, but he said all the trends were favorable. Traditionally, he said, races tend to shake out in the last few weeks of the campaign, but this year, races in reliably Republican districts are falling one by one into the undecided column as Election Day approaches — 58 of them now, by his count.
“I’d rather be holding the hand that the Democrats have right now than the Republicans,” van Hollen said.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
# posted by Kevin @ 8:58 AM 
