As I go to cast my vote this morning against a white supremacist running for Superior Court judge, I am warmed by Libertarian candidate Bob Barr’s correct response to an issue that Ron Paul screwed up.

When he learned that he had received a donation from Ron Black, who operates the white supremacist site Stormfront, Ron Paul kept it, saying that he’d use the money for good.

Compare and contrast Bob Barr’s response to a Stormfront endorsement yesterday:

The Barr campaign is not going to be a vehicle for every fringe and hate group to promote itself. We do not want and will not accept the support of haters. Anyone with love in their heart for our country and for every resident of our country regardless of race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation is welcome with open arms.

Tell the haters I said don’t let the door hit you on the backside on your way out!

Barr consultant Steve Gordon sent me the statement and added: “We denounce anybody who doesn’t want to treat everybody equally under the law.”

That’s the way to handle the racist vermin. Short, to the point, calm, but plain and contemptuous. Why couldn’t Paul’s campaign have sent a signal about its position on racial issues through a similar response? One wonders.

Most political activists recognize that their methods, to be effective, should be tailored to the mood of the day. When you’re down and out and nobody is paying attention to you, it might take some theatrics and self-immolation, literal or figurative, to get attention to your issue.

However, when a majority of the nation agrees with you, the same tactics can come off as silly and self-indulgent.

Somehow, I don’t think the Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War had that firmly in mind when they disrupted an Easter mass and sprayed fake blood around.

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Good ole Osama, who we will be capturing any day now, issued a new angry rant this week, this time aiming primarily at Europe and the Pope. Osama’s got his panties in a bunch over the Mohammad cartoons and the recent republication thereof by a handful of the less craven publications in Europe.

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Ed Morrissey at Michelle Malkin-owned Hot Air on the release of Hillary’s White House calendars:

There are no connections to Foster’s death. Hillary was not in town when he committed suicide, and hadn’t had a scheduled contact with Foster for over a month. Nothing in the record Holmes reviews suggests any sort of unusual activity or behavior.Why write this post at all? It might make sense if it was written to explicitly point out no connection between Hillary and Foster’s suicide in the schedules, but that’s not how Holmes writes this post. She claims that this sheds light on Foster’s death, but it provides nothing new at all. Only the most paranoid Clinton Derangement Syndrome sufferers thought that Hillary somehow arranged for Foster’s death, or that the Clintons had him “bumped off” at all.

Michelle Malkin on Clinton fundraiser Norman Hsu:

several hours before Norman Hsu was apprehended in Colorado, I got a curious visit on my website. Someone had Googled “Norman Hsu suicide.” My site came up in the search results because someone had made reference to Vince Foster’s suicide in the comments of one of my Hsu posts.

Note the “hint hint” parenthetical from Malkin, throwing in the Foster reference for “context” in a story whose purpose (read it) is to suggest that perhaps, just maybe, with all plausible deniability, sinister forces were anticipating (or arranging for) Hsu’s suicide before his arrest. I should add that, according to google, the comments sections at both Hot Air and Ms. Malkin’s personal site are wretched hives of Vince Foster conspiracy theory.

I agree with Morrissey that only nutcases and paranoid Clinton Derangement Syndrome sufferers believe anything but that Foster was a sadly depressed man out of his home and his element in a vicious Washington freakshow.

When is he going to explain that to his boss?

Courtesy of the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, I give yousome of the candidates for Superior Court Judge in Los Angeles. First, their endorsement, and a hint of their regard for the other candidates:

Deputy District Attorney Jared Moses is “very well qualified and credentialed” for the post of Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

Those words come from the only one of his three rivals in the contest whose candidacy can be taken at all seriously, attorney Pattricia Vienna.We agree with her assessment of Moses.

“Hooray! The paper implied my candidacy can be taken at least somewhat seriously!”

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There’s been a fair amount of ink spilled about wives like Silda Spitzer standing up by their husbands at the sort of press conferences that ex-Gov. Spitzer had to hold this week. Many people hate it, thinking that the wives are demeaning themselves. (Certainly that’s long been an undercurrent of resentment in some quarters towards Hillary Clinton.) Of course, there are always the outliers like that demented freak “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger, who apparently thinks that Elliot would never have developed a taste for the strange if he had gotten a few more spontaneous blow jobs at home, or something. Feh.

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Geraldine Ferraro recently, on Obama:

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Geraldine Ferraro, defending her comments:

Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?”

Geraldine Ferraro in 1988, on the Presidential race:

And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his “radical” views, “if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.”

Wow, the Black Man has been keeping her down for twenty years.

Via Wonkette, I see that there is now a rather specific dress code for post-sexual-hijinks press conferences. And it’s not sackcloth and ashes.

Ooopsie.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

There’s an awkward conversation. And it’s not “involved” as in “involved in prosecuting.” It’s “involved” as in “send a blonde to room 312 of the Plaza.”

Plus, as dramatic convention now requires with politicians, we have this:

In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.

“”This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. ”It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.”

Edit:  And, by the way, my slightly more serious take:

1.  Yes, it’s sex, and sex is personal.  Prostitution should not be illegal for reasons having to do with morals or preventing sex (the reasons having to do with the welfare of prostitutes are considerably more rational, if not necessary conclusive).  But if you make a living busting prostitution rings and puffing about it, you can’t get away with hiring prostitutes.

2.  If he’s married, and doesn’t have the wife’s permission to have sex with whores, then he’s a scumbag for at least three reasons:  (1) he’s broken his vows to her, (2) he’s done so in a way highly likely to humiliate her publicly, and (3) he’s risked bringing disease home.

You might remember that the Fifth Circuit recently struck down a law prohibiting the sale and advertising of dildos. (Note that my idle question about whether it should be “dildi” was answered, with more alacrity and detail than I can, strictly speaking, absorb without getting kind of creeped out, by commentators in the linked Volokh thread).

We should have known that cultural conservatives would not take that lying down, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Prof. Marc Randazza’s entertaining and informative blog has links to a request for rehearing en banc filed by a group of Texas Republican legislators. Prof. Randazza notes that these purport to be small government conservatives.

Ron Paul would say the states should take care of such things, in the name of freedom.

Once scandals took days or weeks to play out. But in the age of Google, a miscreant can be identified, accused, and given the boot in the time it takes you to nurse a mild hangover. Case in point — Timothy S. Goeglein, a treacly columnist for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, was accused of plagiarism by blogger Nancy Nall in an email to his paper last night, exposed publicly by Nall this morning, further instances of apparent plagiarism identified by commenters on Nall’s blog within minutes, and confessed and thrown under the bus by noon by the paper. Note that Goeglein has warned the paper that there may be other instances. That seems prudent.

Why is this notable, other than for the speed of Goeglein’s downfall?

Tim Goeglein is on the White House staff. He’s President Bush’s Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liason and tasked with — wait for it — the White House’s relationship with the religious community.

Ethics and morals (religious or not) aside, in a world with Google, he is too fucking stupid or self-destructive to be in politics.

Edited to add:  That’s some nice journalism by Nall, and the quick discovery of further apparent instances by her commenters demonstrates how the internet empowers individuals to feats of research previously undreamed of except by professional reporters.

Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy links to a NYT article on a new study showing that 1% of the adult population of the U.S. is in jail. That’s sobering. The racial disparity is also sobering:

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Presented without comment, a dark-side-of-the-internet Rorshach test:

Courtesy of BoingBoing, I discovered TimesMachine, a terrifically cool archive of NYT editions from 1851 to 1922. The little stories and advertisements are often as fascinating as the headlines.

Assud, the giant pink Jew-eating Easter Bunny that I previously mentioned, is back for more widdle bunny hiijinks — in this case, threatening to kill and eat the Danes for the republication of the infamous Muhammad cartoons.

You can’t make this stuff up.