Subtle as a flying mallet, Karl:

Government skeptical of threat against NFL stadiums

A Web site is claiming that seven National Football League gridiron stadiums will be attacked with radiological dirty bombs this weekend, but the U.S. government on Wednesday expressed doubts about the threat.

The threat, posted Oct. 12, was part of an ongoing Internet conversation titled "New Attack on America Be Afraid." It mentioned NFL stadiums in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Oakland and Cleveland, where games are scheduled to be held this weekend.

The Homeland Security Department alerted authorities and stadium owners in those cities, as well as the NFL, of the Web message but said the threat was being viewed "with strong skepticism." ...

Here are the results of Google and Yahoo searches for this thread. The thread itself is down, but a Yahoo cache version of the relevant page is here. The scary prediction is posted by someone named "javness," who seems to have joined the discussion board on October 12, presumably just to post this.

I guess trying to light a fire under white male couch potatoes in the run-up to November 7 wasn't even a full day's work for one of Rove's underlings.

(Just so I'm clear: The post is in an obscure corner of the Web, but the story linked above is at the International Herald Tribune site via AP, and the AP story is also at the Sports Illustrated site. Somebody spotted this and made sure the press knew about it, and now the story's mainstream news. Mission accomplished.)

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UPDATE: I don't even want to copy and paste javness's text for fear of winding up in Guantanamo, but here's a screen capture if you care (click to enlarge):



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UPDATE: If you want a slightly less paranoid reading of this situation, let me offer this: Maybe the post was the work of an ordinary citizen. (AP is reporting that a "young adult" in the Milwaukee area is being questioned about it.) But it sure became a huge news story at an awfully convenient time. How did that happen?

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UPDATE: A twenty-year-old's prank. Never mind.

The folks at Lucianne.com note a milestone in their own special way:



Perhaps they'll post an update when the 300 millionth real American is born -- you know, one with blond hair and blue eyes.

(Lucianne's referring to one of the babies being touted in the local media as #300,000,000; actually, the mother in question is of Puerto Rican and Dominican ancestry and the father's forebears are Jamaican. By the way, #200,000,000, as declared by Life magazine in 1967, was a non-Aryan with the surname Woo. And #100,000,000, for all we know, might have been named Goldberg.)

IF YOU CAN READ THIS ... apologies for the slow service. I'm convinced it's Haloscan this time, not Blogger.

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UPDATE: I've disabled the comments for now. Seems to have solved the problem. I'll restore them as soon as I can.

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UPDATE: Back to normal.

I have a bad feeling about this:

Mike Rogers, who calls himself "the nation’s leading gay activist blogger" has just finished a nationally-broadcast interview on the Ed Schultz Radio Show in which he alleges that Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig has engaged in same-sex sexual activity....

Rogers said he has talked to three men unknown to each other who all reported in detail their sexual encounters with Craig over the last four years. The men were of legal age, Rogers said....

Rogers says that digging into the private lives of politicians who support anti-gay legislation is legitimate....

It took about ten minutes for right-wing bloggers to start talking about "liberal gaybashing" and arguing that "the Left hates gays and believes that private sexual preferences belong on the front page." If this story gains traction, how long do you think it's going to take for Chris Matthews and David Broder and David Brooks and Bill O'Reilly and George Will to start saying the same things, to start saying things like "Is this sexual McCarthyism?" Was Rogers in a coma when John Kerry's mention of Mary Cheney turned into a major gaffe?

Everyone needs to stop thinking like a cerebral liberal for a second. A huge swath of ordinary Americans are neither truly gay-friendly nor truly gay-hostile -- and they're the ones this has the potential to sway. Their rather muddled view of homosexuality is that they think -- or at least they think they think -- it's nobody's business as long as nobody gets hurt. That means they're with us on Mark Foley -- they think he was a predator. But they weren't with Kerry when he mentioned Mary Cheney's sexual orientation, because he was the one who was (as I'm sure a lot of them would put it) "waving it in everyone's face." Yes, that suggests that these people aren't really convinced that being gay is OK -- which is true. But we have to care about what these people think because they're a huge chunk in the middle of the electorate. They're swing voters who might switch to the Democrats this year. And they're not going to like this outing of Craig, if they find out about it. In fact, they're going to want to shoot the messenger -- who is going to be identified as "the left," and thus the Democratic Party.

Just what we need twenty days before an election.

This is going to hurt Democrats in November if it becomes a major mainstream-media news story, if no one finds evidence of criminal or harmful behavior in Craig's personal life (or in the personal life of anyone else Rogers outs in the next couple of weeks), and if lefties seem to embrace the outing. (On the latter, I see that a Kos diarist and Pam Spaulding are already happy. That should be enough for pundits to declare this a trend.)

I know, I know: Craig's voting record (as the last two links make clear) is about as gay-hostile as it's possible to be. If he has sex with men after voting this way, he's the worst sort of hypocrite. In an ideal world, that's how this story would be received. But that's not how it will be received. It will be received as McCarthyism and "waving it in people's faces." It might help save the GOP's majority.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Oh, dear:


I'm not sure when this started, but a ... cross appears to have become a regular part of Hillary Clinton's wardrobe.

She wore a gold one July 20, for a speech criticizing advertising directed at children. No picture available.) And she wore the diamond-studded one pictured above to the News last week. A Google Images search doesn't seem to turn up any others, though whenever you think you've noticed something new about Clinton, her aides usually produce rock-solid evidence that it has always been thus....

Is it, perhaps, a sign that her faith may be a bit more in the foreground as 2008 approaches?...

That's from the political blog of the New York Daily News. A subsequent post does turn up several more photos of Hillary wearing a cross.

All of them were taken after 2000.

Look, this is the kind of cynical calibration that pols running for president engage in all the time, and it's a relatively trivial example -- but some can get away with it and some can't. John McCain, for instance, can oppose torture, then sell out to Bush on the torture bill, then pointedly fail to join fellow "mavericks" John Warner and Lindsay Graham for the bill signing, and it won't be read (except by some lefty grumblers) as a mark of character. That's unfair, but that's the way it is. He has a rep as a straight shooter, so he can get away with that.

But Hillary doesn't have John McCain's rep. Hillary, rightly or wrongly, has the exact opposite of John McCain's rep. Therefore, every time attention is drawn to something like this (and attention has been drawn -- Drudge picked up the story yesterday), the notion that she has no principles and acts only out of expediency is reinforced.

She should know that, but it appears she doesn't. And that's what I worry about for 2008: that she's going to win the Democratic nomination and lose in a lanslide, because she just can't stop making easily avoidable mistakes like this.

For psychological reasons I can't fathom, Brendan Nyhan is conducting a "Brendan-Hater of the Year" contest, and it turns out that I'm one of the contestants, for this post. I'm up against some stiff competition, including James Wolcott, but I'm leading in the voting right now (apparently because I'm the only person who's voted so far). So throw me a vote if you have a chance. I'll do one-armed pushups if I win.

Students, stars, media movers, academics: They are always saying they want debate, but they don't. They want their vision imposed. They want to win. And if the win doesn't come quickly, they'll rush the stage, curse you out, attempt to intimidate....

And all this continues to come more from the left than the right in America.

--Peggy Noonan, October 13, 2006

Letter falsely tells mother of son's death

A mother in Duluth, Minn., mailed a letter to her soldier son in Baghdad and although he was alive and doing fine, the letter came back stamped "DECEASED."

The Duluth News-Tribune reported on last week's shocking delivery, saying Joan Najbar, the mother who first mailed the letter, believes it was a prank and not a blunder by the military.

Fortunately, Najbar had kept in contact with her son via e-mail. She told the News-Tribune that if she hadn't, the letter may have been much more upsetting.

... the letter, which had a Duluth postmark upon its return, seems to not have even entered into the military mail system.

...Najbar, who is a prominent anti-war activist, said she thinks it might have been someone who disagrees with her views.

--UPI, October 15, 2006

Your thoughts, Peggy?

Inappropriate prosecution, according to Christian conservatives:

....In a case from Warren County, [Ohio,] Michael Carswell says that he shouldn't be charged with felony domestic violence against his girlfriend because state law conflicts with the constitution.

Citizens for Community Values, which led the campaign to pass the gay-marriage ban, filed a brief supporting Carswell.

The ban prohibits state or local government from recognizing a legal status for relationships that approximate marriage....

While some appellate courts have rejected this argument, the 2nd and 3rd districts, which include six counties in the Miami Valley and 17 northwest Ohio counties, ruled the domestic-violence law unconstitutional.

The Ohio Supreme Court will hear the Carswell case in December.

Meanwhile, domestic-violence cases involving unmarried partners in the Dayton area are being charged under misdemeanor assault or other laws. Repeat domestic violence is a felony, which carries a longer sentence, and the law lets victims get protective orders....

Inadequate prosecution, according to Christian conservatives:

A spokesman for a family-advocacy group in Washington, DC, is expressing disgust with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's swearing in of an openly homosexual man as global AIDS coordinator -- and in particular, with comments she made at the ceremony....

The ceremony involved Secretary of State Rice and the swearing in of Mark Dybul, an open homosexual, as the nation's new global AIDS coordinator.... An Associated Press photo of the ceremony also shows a smiling First Lady Laura Bush and Dybul's homosexual "partner," Jason Claire. During her comments, Rice referred to the presence of Claire's mother and called her Dybul's "mother-in-law," a term normally reserved for the heterosexuals who have been legally married....

Peter Sprigg, vice president for policy at the Family Research Council, ... notes that Rice's comments defy an existing law on the books protecting traditional marriage. "So, for her to treat his partner like a spouse and treat the partner's mother as a mother-in-law, which implies a marriage between the two partners, is a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act," the FRC spokesman states....

Repeat girlfriend-beater? Let him go with time served! Condi? Throw the book at her! No gay marriage is the prime directive!!!

By the way, Citizens for Community Values is run by Phil Burress, a top backer of Ohio secretary of state and GOP gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell.

As for Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, while talking about that swearing-in ceremony he also said this:

"We have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse."

Charming.

(First link via Shakespeare's Sister.)

From the puff piece about Dick Cheney in tomorrow's New York Times, which focuses on a Topeka speech by the vice president:

He offers his standard homage to tax cuts, a warning about how terrorists are still trying desperately "to cause mass death here in the United States" and a derisive cataloging of the various "Dean Democrats," congressmen including Charles B. Rangel of New York, Henry A. Waxman of California and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, whose influence would grow if the apocalypse came and Democrats took over Congress.

The crowd boos.

"Don't hold back," Mr. Cheney urges.

The crowd laughs.

Yeah, a gay guy, a black guy, and a Jew.

Nice to know the classic right-wing material still knocks 'em dead in Topeka.

If this UPI story is true, it's kind of outrageous:

Foley's rehab paid for by taxpayers

The U.S. House of Representatives clerk's office says ex-Rep. Mark Foley's alcohol rehabilitation program is being paid for by a taxpayer funded medical plan.

Salley Collins, a spokeswoman for the clerk's office, said the Florida Republican is covered by a "temporary continuation of coverage" program that is available to federal employees who leave or resign their positions, Capitol Hill Blue reported Monday.

"Most, if not all (lawmakers), have some coverage as far as rehabilitation for drug and alcohol," Collins said....

It's not that he's taking advantage of his COBRA benefits -- it's that this alcoholism story is clearly a lie. The cost of this is spread out over 300 million citizens, so my share is a tiny fraction of a penny out of my pocket, but medical fraud is medical fraud. Did a doctor actually sign off on this? If so, that doctor should lose his or her license.

(Via Democratic Underground.)

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UPDATE: As Julia says in comments, if we're paying for his rehab, it looks as if we're not paying for much rehab.

The "banned" pro-GOP videos are beginning to pile up, and I'm starting to smell a rat.

Let's see: After Michelle Malkin managed to get a Muslim-bashing video removed by YouTube, we had an ad made by David Zucker (of Airplane! plane) that was kept off the airwaves by GOP strategists (or so Matt Drudge told us) and then (allegedly) declared "adults only" by YouTube (even though it's right here, available to everyone). And now we have Move America Forward protesting that Fox has censored a Clinton-bashing ad.

The Malkin incident seems to have been legit (even though her video is back up at YouTube), but now I think these guys are trying to be the victims of censorship, in order to make the point that The Force Of Evil Will Stop At Nothing To Defeat The GOP -- and if no one will censor these right-wing ads, well, right-wingers will (reportedly) do the censoring themselves.

Oh and there's another element to this. The link I gave you for the Move America Forward story was to a Free Republic thread. It leads you to MAF's Web site -- which immediately asks for money. The thread was posted by "WND" and contains a huge notice pointing out that the complete story is at WorldNetDaily.com. And the Freep thread itself contains a fund-raising ad for Free Republic. Everyone's trying to make money off this alleged outrage.

Fox, too, I'm sure. Fox probably wants to pretend to be "fair and balanced" again when it's quite possible we'll have a Democratic House, and maybe Senate, come January; also, Rupert Murdoch, like all right-wingers (and absolutely no one else), probably thinks Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. But that's clearly not all that's going on. Right-wingers are reading about "the viral video revolution" and the huge sale of YouTube to Google and concluding that the slickest way to draw eyeballs to one's message is to put it in a "banned" ad. I think this is a miscalculation, but hey, they're kinda desperate these days.

JUST TO RECAP

Them in the Bush years:

...the profits of Standard & Poor's 500 companies more than doubled from 2001 to 2005, according to Zacks Investment Research. S.& P. 500 profits now stand at 8.6 percent of gross domestic product, a high-water mark in Commerce Department data reaching back to 1947. And analysts predict that the median S.& P. 500 company will enjoy 12.8 percent profit growth this year and 12.9 percent in 2007, according to Zacks.

You in the Bush years:

...the share of the economy devoted to workers' wages and benefits has eroded in the United States over the last five years.

...this economic slice, including wages, health insurance and pension benefits, declined 2.5 percentage points from 2000 to 2005, to 56.5 percent of gross domestic product, according to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis.

What an astonishing coincidence:

BAGHDAD, Iraq A verdict against Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants charged with crimes against humanity in connection with an anti-Shiite crackdown in the 1980s will be announced Nov. 5, a senior court official said on Monday.

Sentences for those found guilty will be issued the same day, chief investigating judge Raid Juhi told The Associated Press....

Saddam, his cousin "Chemical" Ali al-Majid and five other co-defendants could face death by hanging if convicted....

Election Day in the U.S. is November 7.

We learned a couple of weeks ago that Ben Stein thinks the typical gay man is a sex criminal. Today we learn from his column in The New York Times that he thinks anyone who's upset about the shrinking middle-class paycheck is a filthy commie who doesn't want anyone to make more money than anyone else:

THERE is extreme income inequality in this country. It is hard to say whether it's the fault of President Bush, since there was also extreme income inequality under former President Bill Clinton, and in fact there has always been extreme income inequality....

There are a number of ways to respond to this situation. You can become indignant and say that it's a violation of American democratic principles. This is a good way to put yourself into a sanctimonious mood, and it offers some psychic satisfaction.

I'm not sure that there is any historical basis, though, for believing that the founders of the nation wanted everyone to have equal wages....

Got it? "Equal wages." If you want the gap between the rich and everyone else to narrow somewhat, you want communism and 100% income flattening. There's no middle ground. And in case you missed the message, Stein repeats it:

...if you feel better making pottery or teaching school or policing the streets ... you can have a fabulous life, too. In fact, from what I have seen, you can have a better life if you just stop thinking that everyone is supposed to make the same wage and just feel happy with who you are.

I'm not even quoting the rest of the column -- Stein's advice is, in effect, go work on Wall Street with an eye to becoming a zillionaire or cede your right ever to complain about how the economy is organized. What a jerk.

In today's New York Times Book Review, Virginia Heffernan sneers at a biography of Doug Kenney, one of the founders of National Lampoon -- which is fine until you get to this:

Moreover, during the glory days of National Lampoon, roughly from 1970 to 1975, the pricey warehousing of bright American adolescents at bacchanalian four-year colleges became a joke with seemingly infinite possibilities. This is how prestigious colleges, notably Harvard, Kenney's alma mater, came to function as comedy schools that offered immersive lessons in life-defining irony: America's would-be laureates wasting their brains on panty raids and toga parties. (By introducing date-rape culture, coeducation dampened the comedy, replacing it with sadder genres, like the college melodrama and the P.C. procedural, including "Oleanna," "The Human Stain" and the trials of Larry Summers.)

Say what?

If I were from another planet, or another country, or half my age, the list of things are utterly untrue that I would derive from this paragraph would include, but would not be limited to, the following:

1. Harvard is a party school.
2. National Lampoon in its heyday was all about college life.
3. As a result of National Lampoon and its ancillary products, panty raids became a regular feature of American college life.
4. The separation of the sexes up through the 1970s at certain elite colleges (Harvard/Radcliffe, Columbia/Barnard, etc.) kept males and females apart as successfully as the segregation at a traditional madrassa.
5. And, of course, it's too bad those goddamn women barged into men's colleges after that, because if they'd just stayed where they belong, poor Larry Summers would still have a job.

The gender stuff is true obnoxious -- what is "date-rape culture," anyway? That's a rhetorical question, of course; we all know the answer. It's that whining women are always doing about how victimized they are when someone slips them a roofie and sexually assaults them in their sleep, or assaults them while skipping the roofie. Why can't they just shut up about that, hunh?

(And, of course, no college boy ever raped a date at an elite school prior to full coeducation.)

The rest of this is equally absurd -- Lampoon back then was about pop-culture bashing (the John Lennon parody on the 1972 Lampoon LP Radio Dinner is awe-inspiring) and Nixon-bashing far more than it was about college life.

Ah, but the review isn't through gobsmacking us. Here's the last paragraph:

And that's where P. J. O'Rourke comes in handy. Along with the brilliant Bruce McCall, O'Rourke is probably the most resilient comedy writer to come out of the early National Lampoon. He saw through the anarchists' narcissism, and has been satirizing it for years in "Rolling Stone" and elsewhere. But the conservative O'Rourke was reviled by the Lampoon staff, who saw themselves as consummately left-wing -- or disorganized, or real, or drunk, or something. For his pains, O'Rourke, who was more professional than they, and more reliably funny, won the indignation of his colleagues, whom he later left in the dust. If anyone "changed comedy forever," it was O'Rourke.

O'Rourke "changed comedy forever"? At most O'Rourke changed politics forever -- by providing a template for Ann Coulter. Beyond that, his influence on comedy seems limited to ... er, James Lileks. Lampoon bred and/or inspired (partial list) SNL, Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, David Letterman, The Simpsons, Jon Stewart ... Need I go on? Game over?

I've added a link (below right) to my post from Thursday night, "Is It Christopher Hitchens -- or Is It Dwight Schrute?" Hell, I liked it (and thanks to everyone who linked it and/or said nice things about it).

THE BUSHIES ARE AFRAID

I went out last night around 7:30 and walked by a bank that had a TV in the window tuned to CNN. Wolf Blitzer was delivering "BREAKING NEWS" -- CNN had learned from U.S. officials that a test had detected radioactivity in the vicinity of North Korea's nuclear test.

Curious timing for this leak.

When the Bushies don't want you to pay attention to a certain bit of news, that news gets released late in the day on Friday. When they really don't want you to pay attention, they release it on Friday after the network news.

That's when this news came out.

The Bushies are afraid of this story. They're afraid it makes them look inept and weak. Forget what you've heard about Republicans being grateful for a national-security story that bumped Foley from the front page -- they don't like this. They desperately want to downplay the nuclear risk. Why do you think a story by a complaisant reporter for the White House's favorite newspaper, The Washington Times, declared on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence officials didn't think the blast was nuclear? Why do you think the WashTimes story was leaked to Matt Drudge before publication? Why do you think President Bush went ahead with his school safety conference on Tuesday? Don't you think that, if the Bushies thought this story was an electoral winner for Republicans, this event would have been canceled and the White House would have announced another Series of Speeches by the President on the Grave and Gathering Threat?

You can't blame them for wanting to downplay this, of course -- there aren't a lot of good options here, and the U.S., as I write, can't even seem to get a UN resolution passed, despite having made several compromises to please Pooty-Poot in Russia and our economic overlords in China.

But they failed their way into this mess, and Democrats shouldn't be afraid to say so. If the Bushies don't want to talk about something, that's a sure sign the Democrats should.

Apparently you can say pretty much anything to the GOP base and they'll believe it:

What if the Liberals Win in November?

(CNSNews.com) - A conservative advocacy group is not only asking the "what if" question, it's answering it - in an email message that urges conservatives to get out and vote in November....

The AFA [American Family Association] offers the following list (verbatim) of what conservatives can expect if Democrats regain control of Congress:

... -- A push to make homosexual marriage and polygamy legal in all 50 states.

-- Only liberal judges will be appointed. They will create laws to implement the social agenda liberals cannot get passed through the legislative process....

-- Liberals will continue to try to rid our society of Christian influence, including any reference to God in our Pledge and on our currency....

The American Family Association is warning conservatives that the liberals' strategy is to disgust and discourage Values Voters (about the Mark Foley scandal, for example) to the point where conservatives will stay home rather than vote.

"If that happens, the liberals will have achieved their goal and they will be running our country," AFA Founder and Chairman Don Wildmon said....

(Click the link above for the full list.)

So there you have it: We're going to take "In God We Trust" off the money and push for legalization of plural marriage (catering, I suppose, to that huge Democratic voting bloc in Utah). And we're going to get the whole agenda passed, including a complete takeover of the judicial nominating process, on the basis of, at best, a one-seat majority in the Senate (and that'll probably be Joe Lieberman) plus a tiny plurality in the House. (Because, as you recall, we did such a great job getting our agenda passed when we controlled the White House and both houses of Congress right after Clinton was elected.)

By the way, what does it say about multinational corporations when even the Chinese government starts to seem more tolerant of the labor movement than they are?

China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers' rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980's.

The move, which underscores the government's growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here....

The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce -- which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike -- against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization.

..."You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms," said Tim Costello, ... a longtime labor union advocate. "This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world." ...

It's not clear whether how much real reform there's going to be -- though you have to assume something is going to change if the companies are so upset.

There's more in a related article about the fact that workers at all the Wal-Marts in China are now represented by unions (albeit government-sanctioned unions):

Labor unrest is common these days in China, particularly among the 150 million migrant workers, and some specialists suggest that an improved network of official union branches could assist the authorities in defusing protests that could potentially pose a threat to Communist Party rule. The heightened unrest is one reason that the Chinese government has announced plans for greater worker protection, including a crackdown on sweatshops.

"They are afraid that public protests or strikes might get out of hand," said Robin Munro, research director of the China Labor Bulletin, a workers' rights group in Hong Kong. "Hence, the big drive to impose unions and provide greater union coverage; I think this is seen as a way of crisis management."

So this is nothing to get too excited about, but at least the government is bending a little bit. The corporations don't want to do even that much.

Another Republican who just pretends to care about the welfare of kids:

In Sex Arrests Hailed by Pirro, Little Jail Time

In press releases she issued over six years, Jeanine F. Pirro, the Westchester County district attorney, trumpeted the arrests made in Internet sex stings that her office ran.

...Now, as the Republican candidate for [New York] attorney general, Ms. Pirro has made her pursuit of these sex predators a central theme.

... a review of the cases shows that the overwhelming majority of people received sentences that let them avoid extensive jail time.

...Only eight of the [111] men prosecuted by Ms. Pirro were given outright prison sentences by judges, according to records from the district attorney's office....

Other district attorneys' offices ... seem more resistant to bargaining with defendants.

The Nassau County district attorney, Kathleen Rice, said that of the 40 individuals charged by her office since 2001 for trying to sexually entice minors over the Internet, 34 pleaded guilty to the initial felony charge and only one pleaded to a lesser count, harassment. Of the others, one was found guilty, one died and three cases are pending.

"When we have someone arrested on the top count, my general position is, absolutely no pleas," Ms. Rice said....

Pirro, as I've pointed out before, was Karl Rove's choice to run against Hillary Clinton.