Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Martin Frost for DNC, Judd not on poster

No, that is not an endorsement of former Congressman Martin Frost for DNC Chair. Byron (sorry for the misspelling) over at Burnt Orange Report writes his displeasure at the blogosphere.
I'm no Martin Frost hack, but I do think that the many of the blogosphere attacks against him have not been intellectually honest. Throwing up a picture of Frost and a Republican doesn't prove that Frost endorsed a Republican. It doesn't even prove that he's a conservative or a Blue Dog. It only proves that he was fighting like hell to win a seat where he should have gotten 35% of the vote.

It especially annoys me that the same people that attacked Tim Roemer for not standing up and fighting in 2002 when he would have had a tough reelection are attacking Martin Frost for doing exactly what Tim Roemer did not do - standing up and fighting the race of his life.
Actress posed problem for UK poster:
For the first time since Ashley Judd graced it in 1998, there will not be a UK hockey poster this year, general manager Ian Ward announced.
The model picked for this year's installment of the poster - Rebecca Budig, a local actress on the soap opera "All My Children" - and her publicist did not perform the traditional UK hockey jersey pinup pose, and the team realized the poster would not do, Ward said.
Since the correct poster would not have been available until late into the season, the team decided to do without. But Ward said the team will be ready next year.
"We've already got the model, and she's a beautiful local girl, 100 percent local," he said. "While we can't say who she is yet, we can guarantee that the poster will be ready for the first regular season game next season."
John Kerry resumes his criticism of the Iraq war. Now was that before or after he voted for and against the 87 billion dollars?
"You know, we went in to rescue Iraq from Saddam Hussein," Mr. Kerry told Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's nominee for secretary of state, at a confirmation hearing. "Now I think we have to rescue our policy from ourselves."

While Mr. Kerry told Ms. Rice that "you are going to be confirmed, and everybody knows that," he said his own vote was not assured. "I have reservations, and they are not personal in any way whatsoever," he told her, early in the hearing, adding that he was especially disturbed by Ms. Rice's assertion that she would not have changed the number of troops in the region.

"You sat there this morning and suggested it was the right number of troops," he said, "contrary to the advice of most thoughtful people who have been analyzing this."

For Senator Kerry, who told voters repeatedly that he could do a better job than President Bush of managing the war, the confrontation was both poignant and strangely triumphant. It was his first Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing since September 2003, and he was questioning a woman he surely would have replaced had he won the election. He returned to the Capitol as Republicans prepared for Thursday's ceremony to swear in the man who beat him; during a break in Tuesday's hearing, his Democratic colleagues clustered around him, as if to provide a cloak of comfort.

He was asked how he felt about being back. "Would I rather be somewhere else on Thursday, Jan. 20 at noon?" Mr. Kerry replied. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, chimed in with a reply known to parents everywhere: "Duuuuh."

It was Ms. Boxer who, two weeks ago, challenged the 2004 Electoral College results, an episode Senator Kerry missed while on a two-week tour of the Middle East and Europe. Mr. Kerry met with leaders in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Germany, Britain and France, and he wasted no time working that fact into his questioning of Ms. Rice.

"President Mubarak said to me, 'We're only training 146 officers,' " he said at one point. Moments earlier, he had told Ms. Rice, "Every Arab leader I asked 'Do you want Iraq to fail?' says 'No.'"

If it looked as if Mr. Kerry was laying the groundwork for a 2008 presidential bid, his spokesman, David Wade, demurred. "It's wildly premature to be talking about the next presidential election before we've even had this inauguration," Mr. Wade said.

Indeed, on Tuesday, the last presidential election still seemed on the Massachusetts senator's mind. When colleagues welcomed him, he replied with a halfhearted endorsement of Senate life: "I guess it's sort of good to be back." When Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, who is chairman the Foreign Relations Committee, said he was "proud that a member of our committee was a candidate for president of the United States," Mr. Kerry was wistful.

"I wish we could have translated your pride into some votes," he said, evoking laughter, "but thank you anyway."
I'll update again after my mathematics class, that will be in the 10:00 period if I don't take a much-deserved nap.

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