The problem for Romney...

...is the dude can't speak a word of truth. You want to talk about flip flopping, here's your poster child. But the best part is he keeps lying even as he gets caught lying again and again.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/21/romney.details/index.html

"I'm not going to distance myself in any way from my faith," Romney told NBC's Tim Russert. "But you can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at, at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights."

But Romney never did witness his father march with King, as the campaign now acknowledges.

Romney's presidential campaign says that the elder Romney marched with the civil rights leader, that he told his sons he had, and that written accounts from the time back up the claim.

But experts quoted in a Boston Globe investigation this week concluded that the event never happened.

"It's a figure of speech," Romney said this week of the claim he'd witnessed his father and King together, like saying "You know, I speak in the sense of 'I saw my dad become president of American Motors.' I wasn't actually there when he became president of American Motors, but I saw him in the figurative sense of he marched with Martin Luther King."

Guns have been a particular problem for him. Earlier this year, he told a New Hampshire voter: "I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," but he admitted later that he did not own a gun or possess a hunting license, and had been hunting only twice in his life.

During Romney's recent Meet the Press interview, he said that his gubernatorial bid had received a National Rifle Association endorsement -- but later conceded that the group's support had been limited to phone banking efforts, "which is not an official endorsement."

"That's what happens in the course of a campaign, when everything you say gets jumped on," Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said Friday. "Do you think every word that came out of your mouth this month was completely accurate? Can anyone's speech stand up to that kind of scrutiny?"

When campaign reporters pressed him on his King claims this week, Romney explained that he "saw" his father march with the civil rights leader "in the figurative sense," but did not literally see the two men walk side by side.

"The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights, and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King, is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership," he said. "I've tried to be as accurate as I can be. If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of -- in the sense I've described."

"I'm an English literature major. When we say, 'I saw the Patriots win the World Series,' it doesn't necessarily mean you were there," he said.

A CNN poll conducted earlier this month found that a quarter of New Hampshire's Republicans found Romney the most believable candidate in the race -- enough to give him a tie for the top spot in that category.

Why yes, as a matter of fact, everything that has come out of my mouth in the salt month was completely accurate, and I take offense at Romneys campigns inference that it was not, that everybody lies and that when he said he "saw" something, he only meant it figuratively.

Not everybody lies, nor do they lie all the time, nor do they lie about stupid shit like saying they saw something and then saying it was only mean 'figuratively.' Yeah, I saw that man kill that other man, figuratively speaking that is.

I give Giuliani props in one respect and one respect only, in that he finaly gave up trying to fudge his record and just said look, assholes, here I am warts and all, take it or shove it. That in no way lessens his idiocy or incompetence or egregious and blatant misuse of authority, nor his humongous ego and arrogance, but at least he's not blatantly lying anymore.

By the way if anyone is interested, do yourself a favor and check Merriam-Websters's online dictionary and decide on your own.

New Jersey bans death penalty

The first state in over 30 years to stop executions, it's fairly significant don't you think?

I kind of like Corzine, even if I do think he's probably as dirty as my week old underwear.

In signing Monday's bill, Corzine called it a "momentous day" and made New Jersey the first state to ban capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976.

"It's a day of progress for the state of New Jersey and for the millions of people across our nation and around the globe who reject the death penalty as a moral or practical response to the grievous, even heinous, crime of murder," Corzine said.

Society is not forgiving criminals, the Democratic governor insisted, but the law is necessary because "government cannot provide a fool-proof death penalty that precludes the possibility of executing the innocent."

"Society must ask," he continued, "is it not morally superior to imprison 100 people for life than it is to execute all 100 when it's probable we execute an innocent?"

The state Assembly approved the measure Thursday by a 44-36 vote after the Senate OK'd it 21-16.

New Jersey has not executed a prisoner since 1963.

Not as heavy as it could be seeing as how they haven't offed anybody in my entire lifetime, but still significant, again IMO.

The only argument one can make for killing them instead of life in prison is based on the false premise that somehow being in prison for the rest if your life isn't all that bad. We're talking no possibility of parole here, ever, so that straw man is burned.

And anyone that think state prison is a fucking country club where you just hang out and and pump up and learn to be a lawyer so you can dick with the system on our by God dime doesn't know anyone that's ever been in a state prison, let alone been there themselves. I never have, though I've visited, but I know a few, sadly, not for knowing them just for them being there, that have been in state prison.

We're not talking where people who screw tens of thousands of people out of their life savings go. But I won't get into the gross disparities between 'white' and 'blue' collar crimes, they speak for themselves as far as I'm concerned.

And one could argue that being in prison possibly getting ass raped for the next couple of decades and maybe even shived in the process would be harsher than being offed nice and quiet like with a nice buzz and an audience and all your pain and suffering ended.

If you want to go the religious route, to the best of my knowledge there's only about one or two things that God won't forgive you for is forsaking Him and taking other gods as your own. Murder is not one of them. If there people truly repent and truly ask forgiveness, God pretty much supposedly will grant it and into Heaven they will go. So isn't a lifetime paying for your sins a little more satisfying on the base human level than ending their pain and suffering and even possibly hastening their ascendancy to Heaven?

OT, how would that work in Heaven? You get murdered, you got to Heaven, your murderer repents, goes to Heaven, do you meet in some way? Is there any base human feelings left over or is it instant forgiveness or do we even have the same semblance of emotions we have in life? Funaky shit there.

Though I personally think the death penalty is wrong, I'm not God nor do I play Him on TV, my only real opposition to the death penalty is the very real threat of offing an innocent person. You put someone in prison for 20 years by mistake, you can still let them out. Even a lame ass 'oops our bad' is still significantly better than being dead, and dead is what you are after being executed. Dead is dead. Done. Gone. Fini'. No Give Backs.

I started to write or let a guilty person go free, but we aren't, we're talking life in prison with no possibility of parole. Make it an act of Congress, or the state legislature on the state level, and it'll never happen with the politics we have, so no claiming we're letting guilty people walk.

So it is, at it's most base, a question of whether we are willing to risk executing an innocent person or imprison a guilty one for life. I really don't see the problem?