Sunday links and comments

Jimmy Carter continues to prove he should never have been president. Once again, this jerk is overseas criticizing the United States.

braindead prosecutor alert!

a 14-year-old babysitter engaged in sexual conduct with an eight-year-old boy, and the eight-year-old was charged with lewd conduct. Prosecutors have since dropped the charges against the boy, but his mother is still concerned. The sexual conduct occurred during a game of “truth or dare” while the boy was being watched by the babysitter. Prosecutors say that, while the babysitter initiated the contact, the young boy was a willing participant.

Who cares if he was a willing participant, he was only 8 years old?

Don Surber, who has a good handle on West Virginia politics, looks at Shelley Capito's chances of taking Bob Byrd's senate seat. The wild card in this is Byrd's health. If he is healthy I don't see him getting beaten. However, he is in his late 80's and health can deteriorate precipitously at that age.

Today is the trading dealine in baseball and the Indians are 5 games out of the wild card. They are right on the edge of being either buyers or sellers at the deadline. I think the need to maintain fan interest for attendance reasons will prevent them from making any major deal.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has endorsed Jean Schmidt for Tuesday's special election to replace Rob Portman as the Second District congressional representative. I think Paul Hackett is going to surprise people by making this race a lot closer than one would expect in a traditionally safe Republican district. In fact I wouldn't be completely shocked if he were to pull off an upset. The turnout in special elections is usually very low which means he doesn't have to fool too many people to win. As Bizzyblog showed, Hackett is careful to leave the word Democrat out of his commercials and he even included President Bush in some commercials. The use of President Bush in his commercials is especially duplicitous since during the primary he claimed Bush was a bigger threat to America than terrorism. Here is a link to more info on Hackett.