Queer Quote: Gingrich Accepts "Reality" of Gay Marriage

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Well, well, well! Maybe miracles can happen after all. (Not!) The thrice-married, serial adulterer and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has apparently evolved on the question of marriage equality.

In an interview with Huffington Post Gingrich said the following, which is today's queer quote.

"It is in every family. It is in every community. The momentum is clearly now in the direction in finding some way to ... accommodate and deal with reality. And the reality is going to be that in a number of American states -- and it will be more after 2014 -- gay relationships will be legal, period."

It may not be clear from the context, but the "it" in Gingrihc's quote is "marriage for same sex couples." It's quite a big deal that Republicans are starting to embrace reality ni any form, but that it is happening on the question of marriage equality is astonishing.

And Gingrich, while still maintaining his heterosexual supremacist bonafides by insisting that he still believes marriage is only between a man and a woman, also said that he could accept a distinction between "marriage in a church from a legal document issued by the state."

Well, duh! That's what we've been talking about the whole time: civil marriage. Civil marriage is about going down to some out of the way crappy government building and getting an official piece of paper from a bored bureaucrat which allows one to access all the rights, benefits and responsibilities of marriage. It has absolutely nothing to do with whatever people do in a church. That's called a wedding. You're not married under the law until you actually sign the marriage license issued by the government and get your official marriage certificate back.

Bloomberg's List of the Richest People in the World

Bloomberg News has started a daily index compiling the worth of the Top 20 billionaires in the world. Note that the richest person in the world is from Mexico.

Also, note that right-wing Republicans like the Koch brothers (Wisconsin Governor's Scott Walker's sugar daddies) and Sheldon Adelson (Newt Gingrich's) are in the Top 15.
Curiously, Mike Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg News is not on the Bloomberg Billionaires index.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God.

Relative Cost Per Vote In Iowa

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God.

Godless Wednesday: God and Politics

Since, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Willard Mitt Romney all apparently feel that God spoke to them to encourage them to run for President, who is lying, God or the presidential candidate?

Hat/tip to Friendly Atheist

Obama Well Ahead Of Rivals In 2012 Money Race

It should also be noted that these amounts shown here raised by the 2012 presidential candidates do not include the nearly $28 million more President Obama raised that went directly to the Democratic National Committee. None of the money raised by the Republican candidates is going to the Republican National Committee. In the previous quarter, President Obama raised a record $86 million ($47 for his own campaign and $38 million for the DNC).

Joe.My.God posted the numbers shown above before the Bachmann and Gingrich campaigns had filed their reports.

Herman Cain Leads Latest NBC Poll

Black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is now leading the polls for the Republican nomination, breaking out of the single digit pack.

Cain also leads putative frontrunner Mitt Romney in recent polls in Florida, South Carolina, and Iowa..  Surely, a Black man could never be elected President of the United States, right?

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God.

Newt Gingrich: "The Good Ol' Boy" Who Wants To Be Prez

Newt Gingrich, with his 3rd wife (and former aide) Calllista

Newt Gingrich has a long and troubled history with making statements which are both counterfactual and controversial. His mendacity and mischievousness know almost no bounds.

Recently, the Republican presidential candidate has become decidedly non-elliptical in his racially charged remarks. Last week, Newt said this before a Republican audience:

Gingrich sought to lay blame for the recession, as well as the economic and social upheaval in Detroit, on Obama and his policies. “President Obama is the most successful food stamp president in American history,” Gingrich said. “I would like to be the most successful paycheck president in American history.”

Unfortunately for Newt it's not 1994 anymore, it's now 2011 so people like Salon's Joan Walsh and The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates have started to notice Newt's blatant appeals to racial prejudice:

But let me be clear: I might not have paid attention to Gingrich's "food stamp president" jibe had it not come along with a panorama of images designed to make clear Barack Obama is blackity black black. Praising right-wing Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Gingrich said he'll make the U.S. more like Texas, while Obama only "knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit." In the speech to Georgia Republicans where he tried out the "food stamp president" slur, Gingrich also told the bastion of the old Confederacy that 2012 would be the biggest election since 1860 -- you know, when Abraham Lincoln got elected and the South began to secede over slavery, commencing the Civil War. He also suggested the U.S. might need to bring back some kind of voting test, banned under the Voting Rights Act. Last year, of course, Gingrich denounced Obama's "Kenyan anti-colonialist behavior," which made him "outside our comprehension" as Americans, spreading the lie that Obama inherited angry African anti-colonialism from his absent African father, though he was raised by his white mother and grandparents. Oh, and he headed the drive to label Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor "racist" when she was nominated in 2009. 

So let's review: Welfare slur? Check. Tie to a troubled, mainly black city? Check. Specious association with African anti-colonialism? Check. Dire reference to Lincoln and the start of the Civil War, while campaigning deep in the heart of Dixie? Check. Suggestion we need a voter test? Check. Oh, and for good measure, calling liberals concerned about racial injustice "racist"? Check. Awesome: They've hit pretty much every way the GOP has used to divide Americans by race in the last 200 years! 

Great job, Newt. You've developed the perfect platform to run a spirited GOP campaign that attracts a cadre of aggrieved white people. You'll never be president of the United States, but you'll be the champion of the declining share of the country that still thrills to what we used to call dog-whistle politics: coded varieties of racism only understood by their intended audience.

It will be interesting to see if  other Republican candidates and politicians call Newt out for his racist remarks, or (more likely) they also use more subtly coded appeals to the predominantly pale populace's anxieties about racial progress. Interestingly, on This Week with Christiane Amanpour even George Will said that Newt "is not a serious candidate" for president.

Let's hope not.