Mike Huckabee will not be our next president. He will probably never be president. But just in case you encounter anyone suffering from Huckabee fever, familiarize yourself with the name Wayne Dumond. Dumond is a serial rapist who had his sentence commuted by Huckabee at the urging of anti-Clinton freaks. Bear with me, this is fairly sordid. See one of Dumond's victims was a seventeen year-old named Ashley Stevens. Because Stevens is a distant relative of Bill Clinton, Dumond is innocent.
Did your brain just make a TWAAANG sound like a rubber band stretched aaall the way across the kitchen? Good. You're still sane and not a conservative activist. See, Dumond became a cause celebre among right wing types. As a new governor Huckabee was petitioned by many anti-Clinton types to grant Dumond parole. Huckabee was also advised by the parole board and several of Dumond's victims not to release him. Guess who he listened to? I need to know nothing else about Mike Huckabee.
Read the articles. I apologize for dragging something so depressing here, but I don't really see who the Republicans will eventually stagger behind. It really could be Huckabee and everyone should know the name Wayne Dumond. You've probably already guessed but yes, when released, Dumond raped again and this time murdered one of his victims.
Bonds
I guess it was only a matter of time before the indictment came down. Now it has. I don't like Bonds. Don't know if anyone outside of his immediate family and San Francisco does? But is it really the result of a "witch hunt" as Sir Charles claims? I don't know. I hope that he wasn't the "big fish" the government has been after, as has been discussed by guys like Stephen A. Smith on ESPN. A user, no matter how prominent, shouldn't be the big fish. The suppliers, the doctors who write bogus scripts so guys can get them -- these are the guys that should be the big fish. I'm hoping that the roll of Bond's personal trainer (as it appears) turns into Bonds rolling over on someone else, someone up the supply chain.
You know it's sad, I don't even know what the number is. In my mind it's still 755. (And 61 for that matter.)
I knew it wasn't Vitter, because he was totally straight with his prostitutes, and I knew it wasn't Ted Haggard, because that guy's a Reverend, not to mention he's totally cured of his gayness. I also remember the name Foley (because of the catheter) so I knew it wasn't him. I also remember Jeff Gannon, the gay prostitute who posed as a White House reporter on behalf of the totally straight Karl Rove, because it's one of the most mind-bending examples in the game "How would this scandal have played out for a Democrat?"
See how easy it is to get confused? Anyway, which excuse is worse:
1) "I have horrible luck. There's always been these rumors that I cruise for guys, even though I'm totally straight. Then I wind up in a bathroom where this kind of thing goes on and I happen to have a medical condition that causes me to give the signal for 'I want some sex,' even though I really don't AND I'm cursed with an easy-going nature that made me plead guilty to the thing I didn't do." - Larry Craig
2) "I offered to give him $20 and a blowjob because he was black and I figured that's what he wanted." - Bob Allen
I get a double shot of depression from the Michael Vick story>. The first shot is obvious - the stupid brutality of dog fighting. The debate around this story also depresses me. The question should not be "Should the NFL suspend him?" The question should be "Should the NFL suspend him after he gets out of jail?" (And the answer is yes.)
We're already hearing - for those who couldn't figure it out - that we will fall far short of the goals Bush laid out for the surge/escalation, meeting "not a single goal." First Bush rejects anyone else's (already low) standards or expectations and, in fact, sneers at them. Then he proposes his own (corrupt and artificial and lower) goals as superior. Then he fails to meet them and will probably retroactively creat a third set of goals that he will have to lie to pretend to have met better than expected. I couldn't come up with a better motif of the W years.
Who wipes away Libby's prison time? The accountability president. The "restore integrity to the White House" president. The Fitzgerald prosecution, already sort of empty in my book because it did not charge as criminals Rove and Cheney, just got a little emptier.
W and Libby partisans will moan about how he still has the guilty verdict and the fine and lost his job, etc. Still, it occurs to me that Valerie Plame lost her job through the actions of Libby, Cheney and Rove and her job - helping to keep the country safe from WMDs - was a hell of a lot more important than Libby's job of propping up the worst administration ever.
Anyway, only complete scandal fatigue and the absolute fanatical devotion of the right-wing base can keep W above 25% now.
I met a guy at the barber shop last night, an older gentleman, who (as the discussion in the shop made it's way to moneymaking schemes and pyramids) claimed to be Charles Ponzi's nephew. Yeah, that Ponzi, of Ponzi Scheme fame. Frankie the Barber is quite a character in his own right, and I hear a bunch of interesting stories every time I'm in there among the North End's Italian element. Fioremonkey's people. I keep going back as much for the atmosphere as the convenience of having a barber who knows what I want so I can just sit down without having to try to describe a haircut ... not to mention he only charges $10. Anyways, in the course of learning way more than I probably needed to about Frankie's credit situation, past bankruptcy, gambling problems, battles with drug addiction, etc. the guy next me perked up when Frankie started giving his pitch on some miracle drug he and some of his hustler buddies were peddling.
I got the whole story of how this product has been mentioned on Oprah, how Papelbon and Clemens are selling it, how it helped his buddy recover from cancer, how it battles free radicals in your body and is (ostensibly) the "number one food source" in the world -- I let that last bit go, having no idea what that could possibly mean. I couldn't catch the name of this wonderful snake oil pill ... Motiv8, or something like that? So as Frankie's giving the pitch and describing how you get involved in selling it and recruiting other sellers to work under you, this guy cautions Frankie how you don't want to get involved in these pyramids because his uncle invented them and they're a scam. I'm sitting there thinking, "What? You're going to tell us now you're uncle was Charles Ponzi?" and no sooner do I think it than he says, "my Uncle Charlie screwed a lot of people, people in my family, with his stamp scam."
He then described how Ponzi tried to take over the Hanover Bank and outlined roughly what's outlined in the Wikipedia article linked above. I didn't press him for names and dates or anything, but I think he really was Ponzi's nephew. Not exactly a brush with fame, but I thought it was kind of cool anyways. Mildly relevant given Cianci's release into halfway house today. It's Italian Heritage Day here at TC.
