Palin "a Grand Slam:" Gary Bauer Interview

Speaking of the Values Voters Summit, this is my interview from the Republican National Convention with Gary Bauer, former president of the Family Research Council (which sponsored the Values Voters Summit), now running another Christian fundie outfit, American Values, and also founded the Campaign for Working Families. You'll remember too that he ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000.

This interview took place in St. Paul on the first day of the convention, which had pretty much been cancelled because of Hurricane Gustav, and he already had the talking points down on Sarah Palin, hilariously idiotic as they are. He actually tried to counter the Palin experience question by claiming that the first thing she would do as President (if she became president due to John McCain's death soon after he was elected) would be to name an experienced vice president! Insane.

He also put out the more and more laughable line that she had foreign policy experience because Alaska borders Canada and (almost) Russia.

We also talked about the California ballot initiative to ban marriage for gays and lesbians. People like him have said for years that they just want "the people to vote" and so I asked him, if Californians decide to retain marriage for gays (as polls suggest), will that end it, will be satisfied? Of course, he's now changed his tune. Listen in.

A Kid in a Candy Store

We weren't in the Xcel Center at the RNC for more than five minutes when I ran into Senator Orrin Hatch. We talked about various issues and then wound up getting into it over Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy, which he said was "terrible" to bring up. By that point several other reporters had gathered around, and they wouldn't let him back off it or silence the discussion. I'll play the interview on the show tomorrow.

Then I ran into Gary Bauer -- had quite an interesting discussion with him about "sinners" and Ballot Measure 8. I then headed for the floor of the convention, where they were only doing limited business (because of Gustav), and I got into quite a scrap with rabid right-wing California Congressman Dan Lungren, over the issue of marriage and the "activist judges" and the liberals who are destroying America. He did not like me!

I went to the Alaska delegation and spoke with a woman who is in Palin's cabinet. She assured me that Palin is not in favor of giving any rights to gays and didn't want to give domestic partnership rights to government employees but that she had to veto the bill that would have rescinded such rights because of the Alaska Supreme Court ruling. So can we please cut this crap Log Cabin and the McCain campaign have been trying to put out: Palin only vetoed an antigay bill because she had to, by law. This woman, Annette Kreitzer, who serves in Sarah Palin's cabinet in the Department of Administration, said, oh, well, it was the law -- drat! -- or something like that. I'll play it tomorrow. (Kreizter, by the way, is one of the officials who are focused on in the probe of Palin, now under investigation for firing a man who wouldn't fire her brother-in-law, who had broken up with her sister; Kreizter is portrayed as a loyal soldier who did Palin's bidding.)

I also caught up with the anti-tax conservative activist Grover Norquist, and asked him about the rumors that he is gay -- there was a silence before he answered (said he got married recently) and then explained why people think he's gay. (I will play it on the show, and I'll post some audio and video here too). Interesting stuff, and we've only been here a couple of hours!