October 30, 2006

Rhymes With Yugo

The guy standing in the green shirt is Chris Lugo. Well, it's the wild, ponytailed-yet-unkempt hair on the back of Chris Lugo's head as he approached the microphone at the blogs-and-journalism panel discussion at BlogNashville in May 2005, where he asked some question I recall as being kind of stupid. I was on the panel. That's a blurry me, third from the left behind the left table. My wife took the picture. Lugo is running for the Senate. Not the state Senate. The U.S. Senate. Really.

His politics are waaaay Left. How Left? Well, he wants to create a "Department of Peace," but get rid of the Department of Homeland Security. America's nuclear arsenal, he says, is "the greatest threat to international stability." Not Islamofacists who are busy blowing things up and beheading people. America's nukes. Which haven't been used in anger more than half a century.

He wants publicly funded campaigns - you can't blame him given his campaign has raised very little compared to the mainstream candidates Bob Corker and Harold Ford. He also wants "federal funding of programs which employ artists and put them to work in our communities." But of course he wants to end U.S. aid to Israel, and he's a big fan of the Palestinians who want to drive the Jews into the sea. He says he's for "self-determination" for both Israel and Palestine, but of course the Palestinians are self-determined to destroy Israel, and Israel is self-determined to survive. Something's gotta give, but Lugo won't make a choice - except to strip Israel of the U.S. aid that sustains its military defenses.

He wants a more steeply progressive tax code, free universal healthcare and, get this, "free, universal access to education at all levels from pre-K through PhD."

Anyway, I'm not going to vote for him. I just figured this was the only chance I'd ever have to use the photo.