For once, it wasn’t a wrong button — but her car’s accelerator — that Rep. Julia Carson, Indiana Democrat, pushed: “Due to a fender bender on my way to vote, I was unable to record my roll-call votes 400 to 402. Had I been present, I would have voted ‘yes’ on all votes.”
GET SERIOUS
A new Zogby nationwide poll of 1,018 likely voters finds fully 92 percent of Americans support the public’s right to observe vote counting after an election.
Now somebody should do a poll on how many Americans would be willing to give up Tuesday night’s popular fall TV lineup — “Dancing With the Stars,” “NCIS,” “Law & Order” and “Boston Legal” — to watch ballots being counted.
WHERE’S THE BEEF?
Now it’s the property-rights advocates who are critical of embattled Sen. George Allen, the Virginia Republican under fire for uttering what some consider a racial slur against immigrants.
“Senator Allen often describes himself as a ‘Jeffersonian’ conservative, which he defines as someone who doesn’t like ‘nanny, meddling, restrictive, burdensome government,’” said Peyton Knight, director of regulatory affairs at the nonpartisan National Center for Public Policy Research. “However, if you fail to support your rhetoric with substance, you’re all hat and no cattle.”
The senator who often sports a cowboy hat and boots is behind legislation that would create a federal “National Heritage Area” stretching from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello near Charlottesville in central Virginia (Allen once filled the Virginia General Assembly seat previously held by Jefferson), to the battlefields of Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania.
Among concerns of the property-rights crowd are new preservation measures and land-use policies.
Roger Pilon, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, doesn’t let one “irony” go unnoticed: “Overzealous” preservationists at Monticello “corrupting” Jefferson’s legacy in order to protect it. “They want to traduce Jefferson’s views in order to save his views,” he said.
CLOWNING AROUND
And whether he deserves such depths or not, Virginia Sen. George Allen remains knee-deep in “macaca.”
Everybody from Washington to Ahmadabad has heard by now that Allen recently resorted to the term “macaca” when drawing attention to one of his Democratic opponent’s dark-skinned campaign workers, who was videotaping the Republican’s campaign remarks.
“Let’s give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” were Allen’s exact words — not derogatory, he insists to critics who label them racially offensive.
Of all the related mail this column received (and there was a ton), perhaps the most revealing comes from Joseph Luchi, a translator who lives in New York City.
“As someone fluent in Italian and of Italian descent, I have used this word quite often,” Luchi writes. “My mom used this word about myself and my sister many times. It means ‘fool, clown, dummy.’
“My understanding is that Senator Allen’s mom is not French Tunisian, but of Italian heritage born in Tunisia. Many thousands of Italians lived in Tunisia before World War II before they left or were expelled. Senator Allen’s mom speaks several languages, but I understand that her first language was Italian.”
The point being?
“It is quite possible that the senator heard this word from his mom when he was misbehaving,” he guesses. “My mom used this word to chastise us when we were not doing the right thing. Many Italian mothers that I was around used this word.
“It was not flattering, but it did not mean ‘monkey,’ but in the vernacular . . . ‘dummy, clown.’ And I can hear my mom now calling that (Democratic campaign) kid a ‘macaca’ (clown) for running around with a camera and following the senator around Virginia with that silly haircut.”