NOW they like the speech.

This is almost too funny for words.

After jumping all over President Obama's speech last week and doing everything they could to encourage kids to not see it (and with at least some success too) the right is suddenly doing everything they can to get kids to at least read it.

Unlike the Marxist indoctrination they all thought he was going to give, he gave a speech that frankly hits some pretty conservative values. He talked about studying hard. He talked about staying in school. He talked about his own and his wife's experiences and how they learned to keep moving forward and never quit. He talked about listening to parents and teachers. He said that no matter what one's personal circumstances were, that was not an excuse for not trying. He finished with "God bless you, and God bless America."

So now that they got millions of kids to not watch the President, how is the right reacting? Well, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that every child should read the speech. Here in Arizona, superintendent of instruction Tom Horne, who just last week urged kids to boycott the speech, claiming it would be 'messianic' in tone, is now saying that he liked the speech.

So now that the opportunity is over, they want kids to go back and see the speech they wanted them to miss earlier.

Well, just like the right always is. Always a day late and a dollar short.

Ensign won't resign but he deserves to be called a hypocrite

After admitting an affair yesterday, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) resigned his leadership position as Chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee (the number four spot in the house GOP leadership) but declined to resign from the Senate.

As a matter of fact, I will say that I support his decision not to resign. That's because it is up to the voters of Nevada to decide whether they feel that whatever he may have done in his personal life disqualifies him from serving. I'm not endorsing his affair, but let's be honest here-- if all the adulterers in Congress were caught and resigned, it would be sort of like baseball without steroid users; the number of faces that'd be missing would likely be massive. However, I've never felt that what people do in their personal life has, or should have, any affect on how well they do their job. I disagree with almost everything that Senator Ensign stands for but that's a completely separate issue from his personal life.

However, where he does deserve a box on the ears for this is in the personal hypocrisy department. In fact, (as Nate Silver points out) Ensign has in the past called for Bill Clinton and Larry Craig to resign after they got in trouble for their sexual exploits.

Not that Ensign is the first Republican to engage in this kind of hypocrisy of course. Remember that the impeachment charge against Bill Clinton was led in the House by Speaker Newt Gingrich and pit-bull hatchet man Dan Burton. As we now know, both Gingrich and Burton were covering up their own affairs at the same time they were moralizing about Bill Clinton's. And let's not forget Republicans like Larry Craig and David Vitter who got where they were precisely by preaching about morality.

Yes, Democrat Eliot Spitzer became Governor of New York the same way, but he got what he had coming-- Spitzer could have ridden out getting caught doing a one-night stand with a prostitute but the hypocrisy of a guy who had run on his record as a prosecutor of sending other people to prison for the same thing pretty much guaranteed that he had no other option than to resign.

Ensign hasn't sent anyone to prison but he has certainly preached about morality and for that he deserves to be branded as a hypocrite.

Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but at least he never criticized anyone else's sex life.

Newt's latest attack on Sotomayor: Same as the last one, except with an appeal to nazis and klansmen

Last week Newt Gingrich referred to Judge Sotomayor as a racist. That didn't sit very well with his fellow Republicans, so he took the word back.

Then today on CBS's 'Face the Nation,' Newt added an extra syllable.



He called her a 'racialist,' apparently having read an anti-Sotomayor article in the right-wing National Review by Kathryn Jean Lopez that appeared last Wednesday.

To the uninformed it might have sounded like he was calling her a racist again, and in fact he was, but with a clear message by using a coded term for it.

If you look into the word, 'racialist,' it isn't just a mispronunciation (though its origin is that it is the British term for the word, 'racist.')

If you go to various white supremacist sites you'll see that they've been using the term as an alternative to 'racist' for years, such as on this neo-nazi website or this transcript of an interview from 'the Klan Show' on White Pride TV.

Among committed white supremacists the term 'racialist' is used and recognized by each other as meaning, 'racist' and in particular 'white nationalist' but being in less common usage (though Newt seems to want to change that) it is more specific to the extreme right.

Now, I can understand how Newt recognizes that the Republican Party's base of old, white conservative fundamentalists is declining and he needs to reach out beyond the party's collapsing tent and bring some new people inside, but I don't think he will save the GOP if the people he's reaching out to are skinheads, nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Before Haggard, there was this Newt guy.

Ever wonder what Newt Gingrich was doing in 1998 after a long day of Clinton-bashing at the office, over the Lewinsky scandal?

Well, now we know. Newt was having a little extramarital affair of his own.

His excuse? He says that:

as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."

Just wondering if that at least includes Scooter Libby, or if he will find some other reality-bending excuse to be able to excuse Republicans for the same thing he is grilling a Democrat for.