Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A key architect of Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign has urged conservatives to drop their opposition to same-sex marriage.

In a speech Friday to Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative gay rights group, Steve Schmidt said allowing same-sex marriage is in line with the conservative credo of keeping government out of people’s private lives.

“There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex marriage,” Schmidt, who was McCain’s campaign manager, told the group. “I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one’s liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage. In a marriage, two people are completely responsible to and for each other.”

He added: “If you are not willing to accept and faithfully discharge those responsibilities, you shouldn’t enter the state of matrimony, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you’re straight or gay. It is a responsibility like no other, which can and should make marriage an association between two human beings more fulfilling than any other…”

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Aides to former Republican presidential nominee John McCain questioned running mate Sarah Palin’s ongoing second-guessing of the McCain campaign.

The McCain aides were responding to a report on CNN that the governor got a laugh when she told a GOP audience in Alaska she had declined to pray with McCain staffers prior to her debate with Joe Biden, who was elected vice president in November.

Describing the pre-debate atmosphere, Palin told the crowd last Friday, she was “looking for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra.”

Should not-so-Christian Republicans prepare to follow sacred writ?

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

There are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says…

After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest…

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

All of which reinforces something the rest of us have always known. Hypocrisy was perfected by conservatives and christians.

Thanks, Justin

Private information at bargain prices. It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when Fox 5’s Investigative Reporter Tisha Thompson bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information.

It started with a snippet we read on page A23 in Thursday’s Washington Post. The McCain-Palin campaign was going to sell its used office inventory at low prices.

When we got there…most of the good stuff was gone. The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple. And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support. And – most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

We called some of the numbers. “They should have wiped that stuff out,” one said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

After the McCain closeout staff put out a statement saying secure procedures were being checked, he sent a blank email CC’d to his entire address book – which apparently still included the ex-staff Blackberry – with the subject line “We’re so screwed.”

Daylife/AP Photo by Rogelio V. Solis

Charles R. Black Jr. says he is going back to lobbying after his stint advising 2008 Republican U.S. presidential nominee John McCain on his campaign.

Black is to resume his post as chairman of BKSH and Associates.

“I’m happy to work with good friends and with clients whom I like and respect,” Black told the Washington Times.

Black resigned from BKSH early this year to work full time for McCain after McCain prohibited lobbyists from working on his staff while continuing to be paid by lobbying firms. Black had acknowledged making lobbying telephone calls from McCain’s campaign bus, the Times noted.

Black’s clients at BKSH have included AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways, the Times reported.

[Sudden gasp of disbelief] You mean John McCain wasn’t the maverick candidate?

AT&T cell tower truck

Verizon and AT&T have both located temporary cell sites near presidential-candidate John McCain’s Arizona ranch, to better connect the good Senator, his supporters and security staff.

The news comes from the Washington Post, which established that Cindy McCain, the senator’s wife, offered some land on the ranch to Verizon early last year in the hope that it would put a cell there. Verizon got pretty far with that request, but ended up deciding the planning requirements were too onerous, and the return on investment too nebulous.

But come June the operator was wheeling in a temporary base station to provide coverage, apparently responding to a request from the security services.

In July AT&T noticed, and figured it’d better get in there too, so brought in its own temporary base station. So both networks now provide superb coverage to the McCain ranch…

None of this would matter if McCain wasn’t so closely involved with both Verizon, AT&T, and US regulator the FCC. Five of his campaign officials have worked as lobbyists for Verizon, and Verizon employees have stumped up $155K to help fund the campaign as well as $1.3m raised by the chief executive and company lobbyists. AT&T is even more McCain-centric, with the executive vice president raising $2.3m with the help of AT&T lobbyists, and staff chucking $325K of their own money into the pot.

McCain himself is member of the Senate commerce committee, which oversees the FCC.

But, then – since John McCain is a “maverick” I guess we can trust that he’s not influenced in the least by the butt-kissing treatment he’s getting from AT&T and Verizon. Eh?

C’mon, now. All you McCain voters. Y’all sing along!

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is slated to make an appearance on David Letterman’s show Thursday, three weeks after he raised the ire of the generally mild-mannered host by canceling his scheduled appearance at the last minute, citing his decision to suspend his presidential campaign because of the financial crisis.

“This doesn’t smell right,” Letterman said then, during a routine that only half appeared to be a joke. “This is not the way a tested hero behaves. Somebody’s putting something in his Metamucil.”

Letterman didn’t appear to buy the Arizona senator’s explanation for the cancellation, showing the audience a live feed of McCain preparing for an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric.

What Letterman said at the time was – “Here’s what you do if you are running a campaign in the middle of an economic crisis and it’s about to crater.”

Thing is, it’s probably just as true – now – about going hat in hand back to the Letterman Show.

The veterans group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America has released a “scorecard” which gives letter grades to members of congress based on their voting record for veterans issues. Senator John McCain received a D, while Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Joe Biden both received a B.

According to the group’s Website, the grades were based off of how many times a member of Congress voted along the same line as the IAVA’s own position on 22 key votes affecting veterans (nine in the Senate and 13 in the House).

The report also features a list of the best and worst voting records on such issues.

I’ve seen the director of the IAVA, Paul Rieckhoff, on TV a few times in recent months – saw him mention this study in passing, last week, and looked up this story about it.

The IAVA doesn’t especially endorse political candidates; but, is willing to confront a hypocrite like McCain who prattles about his war stories as if he’s speaking for all veterans when, in fact his record on veterans’ needs sucks.

Is he being honest or just trying to cover his butt?