Today, Senator Clinton got a little pissy about a couple of fliers…

There’s something really wrong with this, though. Let’s start with the facts.

Her argument with the health care flier is that it misrepresents her position by claiming she would “force” people to buy insurance. But she would, so that’s not a lie.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., this morning left open the possibility that, if elected, her government would garnish the wages of people who didn’t comply with her health care plan. “We will have an enforcement mechanism, whether it’s that or it’s some other mechanism through the tax system or automatic enrollments,” Clinton said in an appearance on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”.

The NAFTA mailer says she said that NAFTA was “a boon” to the economy. They took that from a Newsday article, and Newsday has since clarified that that is their word and not hers, but at a press conference, Obama pointed out that the mailer had been made before that clarification.

Furthermore, she’s been stumping in Ohio, one of the most economically depressed states and one of the ones hardest hit by NAFTA, by saying she’s going to scrap NAFTA. This is funny, since NAFTA is considered by Bill Clinton to be one of the shining jewels of his Presidency. Let’s see what Tim Russert had to say about it this morning:

Thus, both mailers are factual. And she’s one to talk. Remember New Hampshire?

No, the problem here is with the completely hypocritical tone. The health care mailer went out weeks ago. Her campaign complained about it then. FactCheck.org wrote about it 20 days ago. The NAFTA mailer is over a week old. Feigning outrage as though you’ve never seen them before is a bit disingenuous.

Since when do Democrats attack one another on Universal Healthcare?

Um, well, there was that time earlier this month when your surrogate pulled a Godwin and compared an Obama ad to a Nazi march. (Predicted by Jackfruit back on December 22. He wins a cookie.) You’ve also personally repeatedly accused him of having a health plan that “leaves 15 million people uninsured.” In that video you even go on to say “Just because Senator Obama chose not to present a Universal Healthcare plan…” which sounds like an attack. There’s also these four items pulled up by the Obama campaign:

2/23/08 — Clinton Attacks Obama on Universal Health Care: Clinton Said Obama Does Not have A Plan To Provide Affordable Health Care To Everyone. “I have a plan to provide affordable health care to everyone. My opponent does not,” she said. “What that means is we will continue to leave people out, the insurance companies will continue to be able to charge outrageous rates, we will not get the prevention that we need by covering everyone.” [Chicago Tribune, 2/23/08]

2/22/08 — Clinton Attacks Obama on Universal Health Care: Clinton: Obama, Unlike Edwards, Refused To Take Political Risk And Cover Everyone. “It is not enough to say, “Let’s come together.” We know we’re going to have to work hard to overcome the opposition of those who do not want the changes to get to universal health care. You know, when I proposed a universal health care plan, as did Senator Edwards, we took a big risk, because we know it’s politically controversial to say we’re going to cover everyone. And you chose not to do that. You chose to put forth a health care plan that will leave out at least 15 million people. That’s a big difference.” [Texas Debate, 2/22/08]

2/20/08 — Clinton Attacks Obama on Universal Health Care: In “Get Real” Speech At Hunter College, Clinton Asks Who Obama Would Choose To Leave Out Of His Health Care Plan. “One of us has a plan to provide health care for every single American with no one left out, no excuses, no exceptions. I believe health care is a moral right, not a privilege and I will not rest until every American has access to quality, affordable health care, and I cannot wait until I can work with the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, our own Charlie Rangel. My opponent leaves out at least 15 million Americans. The question is who would you leave out? Would you leave out he man who called me from Northern New York who had an insurance policy that wouldn’t pay for the operation his son needs. Or the woman who called me from Long Island who couldn’t get bone marrow transplant for her daughter? Or the mom who said, what am I going to do with my son who has congenital heart problems and we don’t have insurance? I don’t want to leave anyone out. I am not running for president to put band-aids on our problems, I’m looking to solve them once and for all.” [Clinton speech at Hunter College, States News Service, 2/20/08]

2/9/08 — Clinton Attacks Obama on Universal Health Care: Obama Says “No We Can’t” On Health Care. “During a rally with nurses in Tacoma — a largely female crowd — Clinton said, “When it comes to health care, my opponent is saying no we can’t. Well, I say yes we can.” Obama has used “yes we can” in campaign speeches to deflect charges his upstart campaign can’t succeed.” [Newsday, 2/9/08]

Then there’s the fact that at the rally before the press screed, she was again comparing Obama to Bush:

“He promised change as a compassionate conservative,” she said referring to Bush, “and the American people got shafted.”

The line, delivered with a passion not always seen from the New York senator, brought the hundreds at Cincinnati State College to their feet.

“Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” she continued.

And in the press screed she compared him to Karl Fucking Rove! And this is two short fucking days after she said:

And — and you know, no matter what happens in this contest — and I am honored. I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored.

Some in the press are wondering if this is her “Dean scream” moment. I’m wondering if she can pick a personality and run with it. Polite and considerate? Must be Thursday. Outraged and angry? Saturday. I liked the warm and caring Hillary Clinton that I saw on Thursday. I wish they’d let her out to play more often.

This flyer went around in New Hampshire in the days leading up to the primary there. It seems like it refuses to die. It continues to perpetuate the lie that Obama is pro-Abortion, because of his “present” votes. We’ve debunked that once, but if you don’t want to believe us, how about Newsweek or The Wall Street Journal.

The trouble is that in politics, “the facts” alone don’t always make things clearer. Take Obama’s abortion votes. It is true he voted present several times between 1997 and 2001. But it was part of a strategy designed by Planned Parenthood. Republicans in the Illinois Senate had repeatedly tried to pass bills restricting abortion. This put Democrats in a difficult position. They wanted to vote against the bills, but worried they would be smeared by Republican opponents for opposing legislation with names like “The Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” So Obama and a group of Democrats and moderate Republicans cut a deal with Planned Parenthood. The politicians would vote present as a bloc. The bills wouldn’t get enough votes, and the pols would have political cover. Everybody would win.

Luckily, the forces of Truth and Justice and fluffy bunnies are starting to win, as a backlash comes against this flyer. Check out the video below to see how this little dirty campaign trick turned the Former President of Chicago NOW against the Clinton campaign.

By now you’ve heard that there’s a kerfuffle about race. You may be confused as to who started it and what’s been said, so let’s break it down.

OK. Saturday, January 5, there was a debate, where Senator Clinton told Senators Edwards and Obama that “we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.” Obama, the next day, began to incorporate this in to his speeches:

How have we made progress in this country? Look, did John F. Kennedy look at the moon and say ‘Ahhhh, it’s too far. We can’t do that. We need a reality check.’ Dr. King standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. ‘You know, this Dream thing,it’s a false hope. We can’t expect equality. False hopes.’

Let me tell you something about hope. I do talk about hope quite a bit. Out of necessity. There is no odds maker who would have said that I would be standing here when I was born in 1961. My parents come from different corners of the planet. They separated when I was two, My father left my mother. Single mom raised me with my grandparents. Could only offer me love and education and hope.

Then Hillary was asked about it.

“I would point to the fact that that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done.”

This comment sparked a fervor. Voices in the African-American community found the remark disparaging of Dr. King. Now, I don’t think Senator Clinton in any way meant it the way it came across. I do not think she intended to dismiss Dr. King or the civil rights movement. But, for someone campaigning on “35 years of experience,” she should know to choose her words more carefully. Here’s my problem with what she said:

Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do…

She’s correct here. However, Johnson was able to get this pushed through a still shell-shocked Congress only because Kennedy had been assassinated. In that case, I guess it really took a Communist sympathizer with a crazy accurate shot, or the CIA and Mafia, depending upon whom you believe, to bring about equality.

That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives, because we had a president who said ‘we’re going to do it,’ and actually got it done.

Uh huh… So, what you’re saying is the women’s suffrage movement had nothing to do with giving women the right to vote. That dream became a reality because Woodrow Wilson was President, right? It had nothing to do with a 60 year movement, or with the amendment coming up every year in Congress for 41 years, or with the admission of Wyoming (which allowed women to vote) as a State, or Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912 becoming the first national political party to have a plank supporting women suffrage. None of that matters, because Wilson was president when it was passed and ratified.

What a totally bizarre argument for the first serious female contender for the Presidency to make.

People were still smarting over the comments made by Bill Shaheen, so piled on to this came the MLK/LBJ gaffe (and let’s be honest, that’s what it was), and this quote by Bill Clinton:

This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.

Meant as a blanket dismissal of Obama’s standing, it pissed off a string of bloggers, radio hosts, politicians, and cable news shows. Bill even made a call to Al Sharpton’s radio show to “clarify.”

But feet just keep entering mouths in this case, with Andrew Cuomo saying of Iowa and New Hampshire:

You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.

The Guardian prints this quote from an anonymous Clinton “advisor:”

If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.

So that takes us from January 5 through January 10. There has been no response from the Obama campaign regarding this at this point. On January 11, we finally get a quote from spokesperson Candice Tolliver:

A cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements. There’s a groundswell of reaction to these comments–and not just these latest comments but really a pattern, or a series of comments that we’ve heard for several months. Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this really an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?

On January 13, Hillary Clinton went on Meet The Press, where she stated this:

Clearly, we know from media reports that the Obama campaign is deliberately distorting this.

And we’re off! Without a shred of evidence to back up this ludicrous claim, the media begin reporting that Obama and Clinton are now having “A Race War.” Obama speaks in a conference call with reporters on this issue for the first time:

Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t make the statement. I haven’t remarked on it. And she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that.

Later that very same day, at a rally in South Carolina, Bob Johnson, founder of BET, says the following when introducing Senator Clinton:

Bill and Hillary Clinton… [were] deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that… I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.

Which brings us full circle back to what Bill Shaheen was fired for a month ago. On January 14 it’s reported that the two campaigns “call a truce,” which is stupid, because Obama was never at war.

Ridiculous.

You can follow thew whole timeline here.

Obama gave an interview regarding the McClurkin debacle to The Advocate, the leading gay rag. Some points of note (although the entire interview is worth reading):

How did this happen? Was Mr. McClurkin vetted?

Obviously, not vetted to the extent that people were aware of his attitudes with respect to gay and lesbians, LGBT issues — at least not vetted as well as I would have liked to see.

Having said that, we viewed this simply as an opportunity to have a gospel concert as part of our overall outreach, and since he was singing at a concert along with a number of other artists, as opposed to being a spokesperson for us, probably it didn’t undergo the same kind of vet that someone who was serving as a surrogate for me might have.

Does this tour mark a turning point in the campaign where you’re more focused on wooing voters than fund-raising?

I recognize why this has attracted attention in the LGBT community, [but] in terms of our overall campaign strategy, it’s just one among multiple things that we’ve been doing in South Carolina. People in South Carolina listen to gospel music, so we have organized some gospel concerts. Black folks in South Carolina frequent barbershops and beauty shops, so we’ve had a barbershop–beauty shop strategy. And by the way, I can’t vouch for the opinions of every barbershop and beauty shop owner in South Carolina. But that is where people go, and so we’ve organized a particular way of reaching out to African-American voters in the barbershops and beauty shops. So this is just part of an ongoing strategy with multiple parts.

Furthmore, Think On These Things had a terrific write up:

There is no way to unify this country if people on both sides refuse to be in the same space as those with whom they disagree. It is fine to disagree and be vocal about your disagreement, but you absolutely can’t make progress without even talking to each other. Both sides need to stop being intolerant and threatened by those who are different from them. We need more Rick Warrens on the conservative side and Barack Obamas on the progressive side.

Which would have made everyone happy if McClurkin himself wasn’t such a dickhole. We were, largely, willing to forgive and get along, until this:

Tonight there was a small vigil of about 15 or 20 gays and lesbians, who stood quietly across the street as people filed into a big auditorium here for the last of three campaign-sponsored concerts (and the only one to feature Mr. McClurkin). The whole controversy might have been forgotten in the swell of gospel sound except Mr. McClurkin turned the final half hour of the three-hour concert into a revival meeting about the lightning rod he has become for the Obama campaign.

He approached the subject gingerly at first. Then, just when the concert had seemed to reach its pitch and about to end, Mr. McClurkin returned to it with a full-blown plea: “Don’t call me a bigot or anti-gay when I have suffered the same feelings,” he cried.

The Obama camp did a daring thing: They invited a Grammy winner to sing in their concert, and, when presented with his anti-liberal views, stood by him, proclaiming he, too, could be a part of the tent. Those of us on the outside looking in applauded, hesitantly, this position. McClurkin did not need to defend himself here, in what should have been a venue supporting Obama and not veering off in to personal speaker opinions. You’ll get no argument here.

However, this especially is not Obama’s fault, as Goon Oracle so well pointed out:

Christ. McClurkin is not a spokesman for Obama’s candidacy. Let’s get that straight right now, shall we? He was invited, among other gospel performers, to sing at an event, not give a rousing let’s burn the faggots speech. If this hadn’t been blown into this big huge dustup the man would likely have just gotten on stage, sang his little song, and left. Giving him the chance to have the ‘last word’ as it were, was probably not the best idea, but I don’t think anyone expected him to go into a half hour rant about it when all he was supposed to do was fucking sing. For all we know he promised them to do just that then couldn’t resist hogging the spotlight.

As far as this getting the base/Kos all in an uproar, Kos is becoming seriously known for eating its own because of the purity tests. As far as Kos being right about Obama being in some kind of death spiral, I’ll remind you this is the same blog that had all but anointed Howard Dean the Democratic candidate even when the polls started to turn. One might charitably say they have blinders on. As for the rest of the base, don’t forget a large chunk of said base is blue-collar union workers, who are not exactly gay tolerant as a group. To pretend that every single Democratic or even Democratic primary voter is a frothing PFLAG member is being… optimistic, to say the least, especially in places like Iowa, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. Sad to say, but gay rights are still not quite as high a priority as they should be in the party, a few very vocal members and some party convention planks nonwithstanding. I don’t think voting-wise this is going to hurt Obama much if at all, and it may even help him among the religious left of the ‘pray the gay away’ persuasion who otherwise support things like birth control, national/universal health care, peace in Iraq etc. Let’s not forget how many states just passed same-sex marriage bans and the Democratic crossover votes that helped them pass.

Am I saying this is right or fair or proper? Hell no. It sucks people are still voting on the ick factor when so many more important things that actually affect them are up for grabs. However that same ick factor is going to make this a relative tempest in a teapot. Regardless of how many gay folk are raising hell about it, they are still very much a small minority with limited support even within the Democratic party (remember when Bill Clinton promised gays they could serve openly in the military and then reneged with Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell? Yeah, forgive my irony, but the gays have been taking it in the ass from the Democrats for a long time. A huge stink was raised about that too but come ‘96, I didn’t see a whole lot of Homos For Dole buttons, you know what I mean?)

I think the smartest thing he can do at this point is just shut the hell up about it, not hire McClurkin to sing again, and vette his performers for, if not perfectly aligning views, at least the ability to not go off on rants about them while on stage for other purposes.

We could not agree more.

On October 20, it came to our attention that the Obama campaign was planning a gospel concert series in South Carolina. It came to our attention because people got their panties in a wad over the inclusion of Donnie McClurkin.

Who? one might rightly ask. Donnie McClurkin is a Grammy Award winning gospel singer, a preacher, and an “ex-gay.” That’s right — after being repeatedly raped as a child by various male family members, McClurkin believes he was able to pray the gay out of himself. Incidentally, he also told Ebony Magazine in 2001 that prayer cured his leukemia.

Whatev.

I thought Goon theblackw0lf handled this one well:

[Obama’s]also done quite a bit for Rick Warren, because even though Obama believes some of Rick’s beliefs are too conservative, Rick has also done quite a bit for combating poverty and aids, and Obama supports him and helps him in those areas.

Personally, I get tired of politicians having to distance themselves from certain groups because they might hold a controversial opinion. It just seems to me that by doing so we’re limiting our ability to combat certain social ills. Because while there might be groups that believe homosexuality is a sin or even against gay marraige, they might also care about fighting aids, poverty, and global warming.

And that should have been that, as we moved on to filibustering FISA, Mitt Romney being an ass and support from The Butter Cow Lady.

But no. No no no. It had to become a “campaign crisis” as Hillary’s pocket constituency, The Human Rights Campaign, got all grumpy.

According to sources, HRC offered various suggestions to the Obama camp to avoid criticism by the group, among them dropping McClurkin from the gospel act.

Oh, yes, I remember that great line from his DNC speech: “There is not a red America or a blue America, but The United Stated of People Who Already Agree With Us.” Obama stated his position very well on October 22:

“I have clearly stated my belief that gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters and should be provided the respect, dignity, and rights of all other citizens. I have consistently spoken directly to African-American religious leaders about the need to overcome the homophobia that persists in some parts our community so that we can confront issues like HIV/AIDS and broaden the reach of equal rights in this country.

I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin’s views and will continue to fight for these rights as President of the United States to ensure that America is a country that spreads tolerance instead of division.”

He then added an openly gay minister to open the show that McClurkin will be performing at.

ArchPundit then made a really good point about all of this:

The real point here is that Democrats have two constituencies that often disagree with one another. One, African-Americans, compose a socially conservative demographic who are more anti-gay than the average member of the population. The GLBT community is a strong supporter of Democrats as well, but they find that many African-American religious leaders who back Democrats have offensive ideas about gay people. That’s true. Lots of black preachers say such things. Does that mean none of them can be associated with a Democratic Campaign?

And no one makes a stink when Hillary Clinton stands with Harold Mayberry.

So here’s the nitty-gritty: The entire point of the Obama campaign is inclusiveness, which includes people he himself and his other supporters may not agree with. If that’s not your thing, he’s not your candidate. But to repudiate him for standing by his matra of inclusiveness is retarded. Since Obama’s central plank is, in fact, uniting the country, is ending the divisions that separate us, we’re all going to have to learn to play nice.

It’s the same thing that happened a few weeks ago regarding Tom Coburn. Yes, Coburn has some despicable social stands, but that doesn’t eliminate the good he has done in government. Yes, McClurkin holds some despicable views, but that does not mean we shouldn’t include him and try to change his mind.

Goon Sub Par adds:

What’s different about Obama is that he will get up in front of a group of southern black Christians and tell them they are wrong on GLBT issues. He will get up in front of gay groups and talk about how they need to work with and educate the black church population, not ignore, ridicule, and hate them. It really is inspiring.

Oh, looky, a Joint Letter from the African American Religious and LGBT Leadership Teams. These guys get it.

We believe that Barack Obama is constructing a tent big enough for LGBT Americans who know that their sexual orientation is an innate and treasured part of their being, and for African American ministers and citizens who believe that their religion prevents them from fully embracing their gay brothers and sisters. And if we are to confront our shared challenges we have to join together, build on common ground, and engage in a civil dialogue even when we disagree.

And there you have it. You can (erroneously) believe Obama is a bigoted gay-hater, or you can (correctly) believe he’s reaching out to two disparate groups in an attempt to get them in the same tent.

This post is long, so I will finish with a final quote from Goon drscience:

As tempting as it is for us to exploit long-awaited political advantage and start our own “agree or fuck you” mentality after languishing under Bush, it’s not the campaign Obama’s going to run. There is a serious divide among the religious black community and homosexuals, and he hopes to establish a civil discourse and start mending the issue through humanization and empathy, rather than taking the easier road by calling Pastor McClurkin a nutball and possibly squeezing a few sound-byte votes out of the conflict. If I wanted that Rovian 51% split I wouldn’t be supporting Obama.

In the Let’s Parse The Word “Is” catagory, we bring you the controversial FISA bill.

On October 17, the Senate Intelligence Committee reached an agreement with the White House to give telecom companies imunity from the shit they turned over to the NSA. They did this illegally, because Bush asked pretty pretty please, but, as we all know, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it.

On October 18 Chris Dodd said he would filibuster and put a hold on this bill. That same day, Obama said this:

“I have consistently opposed this Administration’s efforts to use debates about our national security to expand its own power, whether that was on the Iraq war, or on its power grab to curb our civil liberties through domestic surveillance programs. It is time to restore oversight and accountability in the FISA program, and this proposal — with an unprecedented grant of retroactive immunity — is not the place to start.”

MoveOn and other groups then asked that he be explicit. An hour and a half later, they had an answer:

“Senator Obama has serious concerns about many provisions in this bill, especially the provision on giving retroactive immunity to the telephone companies. He is hopeful that this bill can be improved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But if the bill comes to the Senate floor in its current form, he would support a filibuster of it.”

However, this, apparently, was too explicit. By saying this bill he was called “chickenshit” and it was demanded that he “support a filibuster of any bill that grants retroactive immunity to telecoms amongst few others.

Because stating that if the bill comes out of committee including the immunity he disagrees with he will veto it is apparently not good enough, he had to say it again.

“To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

That’s right — in politics, it doesn’t count unless you say it twice. And really loudly.

Oh snap! Michelle Obama laid the smack down on Hillary today, saying:

“If you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.”

Papers and blogs rushed to print the verbal slieght. Excpet it wasn’t that at all, and has been a part of her normal stump speech for a while. The full quote, in context:

That one of the most important things that we need to know about the next President of the United States is, is he somebody that shares our values? Is he somebody that respects family? Is a good and decent person? So our view was that, if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House. So, so we’ve adjusted our schedules to make sure that our girls are first, so while he’s traveling around, I do day trips. That means I get up in the morning, I get the girls ready, I get them off, I go and do trips, I’m home before bedtime. So the girls know that I was gone somewhere, but they don’t care. They just know that I was at home to tuck them in at night, and it keeps them grounded, and, and children, the children in our country have to know that they come first. And our girls do and that’s why we’re doing this. We’re in this race for not just our children, but all of our children.

The media needs to stop manufacturing fights. The candidates can do that all on their own.

Mark Ambinder of the Atlantic brings us this:

With the headline “Democrats Play Dirty In Charleston,” the Palmetto Scoop blog published what it said was a flier found affixed to fence posts near the Citadel, the location of Monday night’s Democratic debate.

The pamphlet, suggestive of an appeal to racial prejudice, visually links Barack Obama to Michael Dukakis and to Willie Horton, the convicted rapist whose furlough in Massachusetts became a controversial television ad during the 1988 presidential race, and it goes on to accuse Obama of favoring early release for sex offenders.

The charge in the flyer is a distortion of a 1999 state senate vote in Illinois that grant “good time” credits for convicts (i.e., those who are good prisoners are eligible to shave time off of their sentence for their good behaviour.
                           

For Mark’s report, click here.

Sex Ed for Kindergarteners ‘Right Thing to Do,’ Says Obama

Oh, ABC, why do you have to be so misleading? OK, he did say it:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood Tuesday that sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is “age-appropriate,” is “the right thing to do.”

But it gives the false impression he’ll be handing out condoms to 5 year olds. What’s it actually mean?

When Obama’s campaign was asked by ABC News to explain what kind of sex education Obama considers “age appropriate” for kindergarteners, the Obama campaign pointed to an Oct. 6, 2004 story from the Daily Herald in which Obama had “moved to clarify” in his Senate campaign that he “does not support teaching explicit sex education to children in kindergarten. . . The legislation in question was a state Senate measure last year that aimed to update Illinois’ sex education standards with ‘medically accurate’ information . . . ‘Nobody’s suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it,’ Obama said. ‘If they ask a teacher ‘where do babies come from,’ that providing information that the fact is that it’s not a stork is probably not an unhealthy thing. Although again, that’s going to be determined on a case by case basis by local communities and local school boards.’”

Here’s the kicker:

In addition to local schools informing kindergarteners that babies do not come from the stork, the state legislation Obama supported in Illinois, which contained an “opt out” provision for parents, also envisioned teaching kindergarteners about “inappropriate touching,” according to Obama’s presidential campaign.

Well, I never.

Mitt Romney immediately let out a wail.

“How much sex education is age appropriate for a 5-year-old?” Romney asked rhetorically. “In my view, zero is the right amount.”

Problem is, Mitt Romney held this same position as governor of Massachusetts. You’d think that even GOP hatchetmen would feel uncomfortable attempting to get political mileage out of talking points from the Alan Keyes campaign.

Goon bbsrock adds: Honest information should be presented to children while in school, at an age-appropriate level. Something along the lines of “when a mommy and a daddy love each other, they make a baby” would be fine for a kindergartener. It’s time to stop thinking of sex as some disgusting act that children have to be shielded from, when they are going to get the information from other sources anyway.

Obama Talks About the VT shooting

“We’re still selling handguns to crazy people,” Obama said during a campaign stop at a Nashua senior center on Friday. “We’re supposed to have a system that these people are screened out. What’s clear is the background check system in this case failed entirely.”

He’s not saying he want to restrict guns, he specifically points out that gun control laws failed in this instance. He’s talking about one instance of one guy being really crazy and shooting a lot of people.

I’ve heard this same thing from the right side of the aisle this week. It’s not about taking away guns, it’s about re-examining how batshit insane (that’s the technical term, I believe) people get guns and go on killing sprees.

Some people took issue with this remark (from the same article:

“(Cho) had a semiautomatic weapon with a clip that allowed him to take 19 shots in a row,” Obama said. “I don’t know any self-respecting hunter that needs 19 rounds of anything. The only reason you have 19 rounds is potentially to do physical harm to people. You don’t shoot 19 rounds at a deer. And if you do, you shouldn’t be hunting.”

Everything he said about the 19 rounds was personal opinion, not that he was going to try to pass a bill outlawing how many rounds a clip can legally hold. You can disagree with his personal opinion, but unless and until he outlines some sort of legislative measure on his personal opinion, there’s nothing to worry about.