Remember connect-the-dots? I do, which is scary. Pages covered with numbered dots, plus a few embellishments that pretty much give the game away unless you're a particularly dim child. Grabbing your squat blue pencil, you draw a line from one dot to the next, using your newly acquired counting skills. An image emerges. Oooo.
Long gone now, I imagine, another victim of computers.
Still, we can play connect-the-dots by relating disparate news items until a picture forms.
Dot 1: Woke up Thursday morning to WBBM radio playing a Ted Cruz campaign commercial — right, Indiana, our slice of the Southland next door, is having its primary Tuesday. The Cruz ad does its own little connect-the-dots, taking the common fear of transgender people, marrying it to Donald Trump, who in a rare moment of common sense, said "people go, they use the bathroom that's appropriate." Cruz offers that as his plea for your vote.
Rex Huppke wrote a bold explanation in the Tribune this week of just how cowardly, offensive and un-American Cruz is for singling out a long-besieged minority for further abuse. Readers know I am not in the practice of touting the competition, but such considerations are a trifle compared to the welfare of the nation, and must be set aside so long as there is the threat, no matter dwindling, that Cruz could prevail. He's worse than Trump, and that's saying a mouthful....
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As I understand it, his sentence is related to his illegal bank transactions. The statute expired on the molesting but he still got off easy. Again, I ask: why does this guy's wife stay with him? Not like she'll be in the poorhouse if she leaves him, that goes for Cosby's wife too, etc. etc. Nor do I get his offspring standing by his side at the court house. They should be spitting on him.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, glad the judge and jury didn't fall for his "I'm old and feeble" pity ploy.
The victims who were molested were wrong to take money though and he should have been reported. Let's hope the days of thinking you can't
report coaches,actors, politicians or priests or it won't stick, are long over.
You sure are hung up on wives staying with husbands, aren't you?
DeleteI disagree that Hastert's victim was wrong to take money from him. Certainly he would have been entitled to damages had he sued in civil court. Seeing how so many who accuse prominent people of misdeeds are treated, I can't blame anyone for not putting themselves through that, after all they're already been through. As it is, Hastert initially accused him of blackmail, which turned out to be a lie.
DeletePrivate may be hung up on people staying will a reprobate significant other, but at least he's consistent. FYI, the best way to demand a bribe or pay off someone who is demanding blackmail money, and not get in any trouble with the law, is to give them a do nothing job, and pay a salary withholding all the appropriate taxes.
DeleteScribe, if they are being a sucker or sap, then yes, they shouldn't stay.Can't respect that in a public leader. I've been married a long time to the same,decent person so it isn't some bitterness in question here.
DeleteGood point, Bernie.
DeleteDon't agree with Fiorina but she's no buffoon.
DeleteScribe and NS-please revisit yesterday's blog.
DeleteBS, you sure are hung up on Hillary.
Fiorina cheated on her first husband with the guy who became No. 2. I guess by Private's standards, that makes her a heroine.
DeleteBitter Scribe
Well good to hear that her husband divorced her then, unless he cheated first.
DeleteStarted to feel sorry for the Republicans, at least those tenuously tethered to reality, but disaster might also be looming over my Democrats, should the email nonsense bloom into another Whitewater fiasco with special prosecutors and daily headlines linking Hillary and her husband to every conceivable evil on earth. However unlikely, it still seems to me possible that the 2 candidates facing each other in November might turn out to be complete strangers to the primary process, draftees hauled kicking and screaming into the convention. The 2000 election debacle might not be the worst we'll see after all.
ReplyDeletejohn
Of all the things Cruz (or anyone else) could attack Trump on, starting with his loutishness and complete unfitness for the job, Cruz is picking bathrooms. The only reason Trump has gotten as far as he did is that every single one of his challengers, with the possible exception of Bush, was a buffoon.
ReplyDeleteOn Cruz being worse than Trump, so John Boehner seems to think. I notice Cruze has chosen Ms. Fiorino, who single handedly inspired me to increase my annual donation to Planned Parenthood, to be his running mate, Dennis Hastert being no longer available for the position and the flake from Alaskan too unstable even for him. It does solidify the religious bigotry wing of the party, adding a Catholic element to his own Southern Baptist and evangelical constituency.
ReplyDeleteConcerning hypocracy in sexual matters, although neither party is immune, the GOP seems to take the prize overall. One thinks of the sainted Henry Hyde, author of the Hyde Amendment, who, as he was leading the pack against Clinton for his marital infidelities, was revealed to have had something on the side for a number of years without Mrs. Hyde's knowledge. And then there's the good former speaker Gincrich.
And I would vote for an end to this business of condemning wives for either staying with or leaving their disgraced husbands. We don't really know enought about them and their families to judge their circumstances. And they are, in any event, victims. It does seem to be a mainly American thing. One thinks of the image of both the wife and long-time mistress of former French President Francois Mitterand walking behind the casket in his funeral procession.
Tom Evans
Tom Evans-If your Catholic element remark refers to Fiorina, that's her husband's surname. Her religious background was Methodist/Episcopal and now non-denominational.
DeleteYes, there are some men who would like the privileges of the French mistress/ President and the doormat wife-that does not make it right or something to emulate. So good for Princess Diana on not rolling over.
I admire the wife of that Senator who was having a fling with some lady in Argentina a few years back. He thought his wife would play the "stand by your man " at the podium for the press conference role. Not so. This isn't the old days.
DeleteNo Stepford wives (or husbands) allowed. Why anyone should think that's okay these days is beyond me.
DeleteThe dead President's wife, was it Mitterand's, should have bought her boy toy along. See how the French men would like that one.
DeleteAnd yes, in advance of the Oscar Wilde comment below-the irony indeed and he lost his health in prison.
This week, FiveThirtyEight.com did an article on Trump and Cruz and whether Trump will make it to the convention with enough delegates to win on the first ballot, and one of the things the author noted is that as the primaries go on, it looks like more and more Republican voters are staying home: that folks, when faced with voting for Cruz (or Kasich) to stop Trump, instead just aren't voting. More evidence pointing to Clinton having an easy path to the Presidency against Trump or Cruz, barring some disaster such as a terrorist attack that Cruz or Trump could use to stoke fear.
ReplyDeleteConnecting the dots for those historically inclined, there is a connecion between Hastert and, of all people, Oscar Wilde, each one of whom opened the door to their own discrace. Denny claimed he was being extorted, and invited the FBI to listen in on a phone conversation with his supposed blackmailer. The inimitable Oscar sued the Marquess of Queensbury, father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, revealing to the authorities grounds for a charge of "public indecency with a man."
ReplyDeleteTE
Speaking of Hastert: he needs to lose his state political pension just like he did his teacher's one.
ReplyDeleteInteresting about how Hastert got to Speaker of the House. He replaced Representative Livingston, the Speaker-designate after Gingrich quit, because of an extramarital affairs scandal. Hastert obviously never considered his own sordid past may be exposed. That kind of power over past victims is astounding. Up until the time Judge Durkin directly demanded he answer the question of whether he, indeed, sexually molested the victims, Hastert was still trying to cling to that power by not admitting his offense, thus victimizing his accusers again.
ReplyDeleteI was condemned to an eternity in hell by an official of a prominent right-wing religious organization for being in favor of a bill which would protect gays and transgenders from discrimination in the workplace. However, I do not know how comfortable I am with someone with male genitalia using the bathroom for women. I could see a rapist or some other kind of predator taking advantage of that to assault women. Am I just stupid or what am I missing? Wouldn't it make better sense to just bite the bullet and build separate bathrooms for transgenders?
ReplyDeleteWas there anything preventing those rapists from entering a bathroom in women's garb before these laws were passed (aside from the still-existing laws against rape, etc)? Are you aware of any cases in which they did so?
DeleteOf course not. Like gay marriage, just another imaginary problem cooked up by the Religious Right because they miss pushing people around.
DeleteThe fact that it would have been pretty darn obvious that it was a guy in women's clothes would have been a clue that something was not on the up and up.
DeleteAnd knowing someone who was raped and having saved two women from rape, I may be over sensitive on this issue but I do not appreciate being told that my concerns are imaginary or cooked up by the religious right especially when I am not one of them and have gotten flack from them.
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect and sympathy for you and the other women involved, unless any of those rapes/assaults were perpetrated by transsexuals or someone posing as such, I don't see how they're germane to this issue. The vast majority of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. I am not aware of a single case of one being committed by a man posing as a woman in a restroom. Are you?
DeleteZonker: That doesn't make you immune from their irrational fear mongering. This isn't about rape. It used to be black people who were the scary rapists we were keeping out of our swimming pools. Does that help you separate your personal experience from what's going on here? Maybe you should appreciate this, because it can be a growth experience, if you let it.
DeleteAs the fictional buffoon, Sheriff Buford (Jackie Gleason) would say when another sheriff used the word "germane" when speaking to him...
ReplyDelete"The damn Germans have nothing to do with it. " ;)