It is truly a sad week to be a liberal when it is obvious that Newt Gingtich gets it and the most vocal liberals don't. While Newt Gingrich is urging the RNC to take down an Obama/Blago web video and work with Obama, the left just keeps piling on Obama over trivial BS.

Prop 8 passed. You didn't get to redefine a millenia old institution. So the best thing to do is whine incessantly and try to undermine the President-elect, who is a strong supporter of the real civil rights issues involving gays and lesbians.

The VAST majority of preachers in this country would have supported Prop 8. Obama being on the stage is the sign that the legitiamte concerns of gays and lesbians will not be overlooked. Warren on the stage is a sign to the vast number of Christians in this country that they aren't going to be ignored either.

You can spend the next four years tearing down the best hope for civil rights protections for all Americans that we have had in a long time (Clinton was too worried about offending anyone to take truly aggressive steps), or you can wait and see what kind of real steps Obama takes once he is, like, actually President (although one must also bear in mind that keeping us out of a depression and getting us out of Iraq are probably a little higher on the priority list).

The right can't hurt Obama. That is clear. But a bunch of whiny extremists on the left could help usher in the era of President Palin.

I am sure that Kennedy will do what Schumer and Clinton did. And the appropriate time to do that is in the lead-up to the 2010 special election to fill Clinton's seat. Right now the choice for Senate seat lies SOLELY with Governor Paterson. He is the only one she needs to convince that she can win in 2010 and will be good for the state.

So when she travels upstate and visits with upstate politicians, she is doing EXACTLY what she needs to be doing if she wants the seat in 2008. She is shoring up support from the politicians in that region to convince Paterson that she is the best choice for the job. If she wants to keep the seat (should she get it), she is going to be doing a massive amount of handshaking across the state given that she will have to run for election in 2010 AND 2012.

Now is not the time for a campaign to win the voters. It is the time to get the backing of the people Paterson listens to in order to convince him, and him alone, that she is the best choice for the Senate seat.

George Carlin once said that you can joke about anything. He used rape as example. He talked about news stories of men raping 70 year old women and asked if they were that desperate. He explained that the focus was on the perpretrator being screwed up and not at the expense of the victim. Of course, he did it humorously.

The SNL skit was almost entirely based on attacking Patterson's blindness. It also attacked him for drug use in his distant past and an affair he had when he and his wife were going to divorce and she was seeing someone else, too. These were, of course, referenced without any perspective on their timeframe. Paterson was also duly elected Lt. Governor by the people of New York. He backed into the position, but he didn't fall into it as SNL implied.

The skit was offensive in its blatant disregard for facts and constant attacks not on Paterson, but on his disability.

Jokes can be offensive and funny. But if you are going to be offensive, you better be damn sure you have the funny part down. SNL didn't. Tina Fey aside, they haven't had the talent to pull off successful satire in years. (Sorry, Broadsheet, Amy Poehler is the most talented of a truly awful bunch, but she is overrated.) The skit was about as funny as the 500th telling of those Helen Keller jokes I heard nearly 30 years ago as an adolescent.

As to the comparisons to other politician's tics, that is a false comparison. Hillary's laugh is funny because it sounds fake. Palin's sentence construction is funny because it makes her sound like an idiot. Same with Bush's entire use of the English language. Those things in no way to compare to mocking a man's blindness. Has Paterson ever held a chart upside down? Has he ever faced the wrong way in an interview? No, he hasn't. So, in depicting him doing so, they weren't mocking Paterson's actual tics, they were mocking the fact that he can't see.

Paterson himself is funnier than anyone on SNL today could ever dream of being. Want a GOOD joke about his blindness? Listen to Paterson say that he felt kind of bad about what happened to Spitzer... because he was the lookout.