Freedom of choice

He says of (Ukraine) today, as former Orange prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko stands trial, that everyone watches the news "as if it were a soap opera. We recently had elections of which someone said we had a choice between a sports car without brakes, or brakes without a car. Since Ukrainians are never in a hurry we chose the brakes with no car."

from a profile of writer Andrey Kurkov
in the Guardian, 29 July 2011

Xtian nutbag fails in Congress bid

Dave Daubenmire, the Chistianist nutbag I wrote about last month, placed fifth in the Republican primary for the Ohio 18th district this week. I was going to link to the Ohio Sect'y of State's website with the results, but today Daubenmire posted his own post-mortem including the results. Short version: he came in 5th in a field of eight. His version:

80% of the voters did not vote for the standard bearer. The top three are all Republican hacks. The bottom five ran against the machine. With no Tea Party endorsement the votes were spread out among the "citizen" candidates. The Tea Party candidates win the most votes... except the Tea Party wanted to remain neutral. Because the Tea Party votes were spread around the voters get to choose between Bob Dole and Zack Space in November.

Still under the impression that the "Tea Party" is an actual organization that can endorse or nominate someone, I see. (His reference to "Bob Dole" is to his opinion that the top two vote getters, who finished in a virtual tie, are "Bob Dole clones" and thus worthy of his contempt. And Zack Space is the Democratic incumbent, who won the seat several years ago after the long-time incumbent, Bob Ney, resigned after being caught in the Jack Abramoff scandal. So there's more to this apparently conservative district than meets the eye.)

Why he is so contemptuous of Bob Dole, he doesn't say.

But anyway, like most losers, he is turning over the returns and feels cheated:

Less than 20% of the registered voters turned out to vote. Only 51,421 votes were cast. If only 4733 Evangelicals had turned out and voted for me I would have won. Do you suppose there were 4733 Christians among the 205,684 who didn't go to the polls?

I should have won this race in a romp.

You and each of the other seven candidates, all of whom are making the same calculations today.

But the weirdest scene is at the end of the column, or essay, or rant, in which a man who is identified as a Lutheran pastor comes by to commiserate and does everything but give him a mercy fuck. It's moments like this that make me embarrassed to be a Lutheran, but I'm hoping Coach got that part wrong.

Focus on the Fundies: Dobson 'jubilant' over anti-gay election wins

Focus on the Family head James Dobson was "jubilant" over passage of gay marriage bans in Florida, California and Arizona, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported. While Dobson praised the election of Barack Obama as "historic," he also said he was concerned that Obama is "in favor of much of the homosexual agency" (sic -- don't know whether this is a typo in the news story or just a brain fart by the sexegenarian Dobson; he undoubtedly meant to refer to the well-known, if non-existent, homosexual agenda).

Dobson's group contributed half a million dollars to help pass California's Proposition 8, which intends to amend the state's constitution to disallow gay marriage. Pro-marriage groups sued Thursday to keep the vote from being enforced.

technorati: James Dobson, Focus on the Family, gay marriage