Charles Barkey Will Always Be A Republican At Heart... But A Weird One

I don't know much about basketball but one of the perks of becoming president of Reprise is that I got the Lakers seats and season tickets that belonged to the company's founder. The company's founder was Frank Sinatra. The Coliseum had a best seat in the house. It wasn't Jack Nicholson's; it was mine. When the Laker Girls kicked, one of their feet came within a few inches of my nose. I even got to feel like I knew some of the Lakers players. I never got to know Charles Barkley though; never met the guy, even though we shared a birthday, February 20, albeit a few years apart.

Barkley always seemed like a weird guy to me though. For one thing, he was a Republican and used to talk about running for governor of Alabama. At one point he said he stopped being a Republican because "they lost their minds." In 2006 he managed to offend an awful lot of people while he was explaining how he would be a great governor of Alabama: "[T]he government is full of it. Republicans and Democrats want to argue over stuff that's not important, like gay marriage or the war in Iraq or illegal immigration... When I run-- if I run-- we're going to talk about real issues like improving our schools, cleaning up our neighborhoods of drugs and crime and making Alabama a better place for all people."

Then the supposed future Republican candidate for governor of Alabama endorsed Obama but said he's an Independent, not a Democrat or a Republican. "The Republicans are full of it; the Democrats are a little less full of it." True that!

Anyway, that crazy Republican, who says he thinks Kasich is the best guy running, more inspiring than Hillary or Bernie, says he's pro-gay marriage and pro-Choice and that the word "conservative" makes him "sick to my stomach." More recently he applauded a Missouri grand jury for not indicting the police officer who murdered Michael Brown, referring to the Ferguson protesters as "scumbags" and threw in his support for George Zimmerman in the Taryvon Martin murder. You kind of see the Republican aspect there, right?

Sunday he was on CNN saying how he wasn't inspired by Bernie or Hillary when he said he feels "bad for the American people. It’s the greatest country in the world, but what politics in America has become about is rich people screwing poor people. I feel sadness more than anything about how they’re dividing us up. We have made this thing about rich against poor, black against white, white against Hispanic, and that’s just not the way the greatest country in the world should operate. It has not enhanced the process."

At least he's not Dennis Rodman, Latrell Sprewell or Frank Kaminsky, basketball players who have been taken in by Trump. Oh, and The General... Bob Knight, no longer head coach of the Hoosiers (or even TexasTech), just another violent Trumpster.

OK, so support Bernie... not John Kasich!

AND IT'S NOT JUST DAVID GEFFEN WHO REALIZES OBAMA WOULD MAKE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN YOU-KNOW-WHO

Tom Daschle and David Geffen aren't the only ones bravely risking the ire of the Clinton Machine-- Geffen, a smart cookie, was already savaged on CNN's Situation Room by that reprehensible Clinton hack married to that Republican lady who works for Cheney-- this week by endorsing Obama. Although Daschle, who I would have pegged as a sure fire Clinton sycophant, hit the nail on the head by pointing out Obama's "great capacity to unify our country and inspire a new generation of young Americans, just as I was inspired by the Kennedys and Martin Luther King," it was a non-politician's endorsement that I was most excited about.

Ex-Republican and ex-NBA star Charles Barkley has been talking about-- or encouraging others to talk about-- him running for Governor of Alabama in 2010. He used to say he would run as a Republican. But last July he told the world, in disgust, that he had had it with the Republican Party. "I was a Republican until they lost their minds."

So yesterday Barkley announced he's supporting Obama, although he thinks it's kind of quixotic because he doubts America is ready for an African American-- or a woman, for that matter-- president. "I am going with Sen. Barack Obama. I like him a lot. I respect him. I really think he'd make a fantastic president." I like that. It's been making me ill seeing Clinton buying off a bunch of African-American politicos in South Carolina. Barkley, who also likes Clinton and Edwards, is doing the right thing.

I was happy to hear Obama going on yesterday, not about Hillary and her Geffen problems but about repealing Bush's tax cuts for multimillionaires. He told a crowd at a Des Moines Town Hall meeting that repealing Bush's tax cuts would be a large step toward restoring funding and assistance to weakened programs. "April 15 when I write that check, I say 'Golly, that's a lot of money,' but what I also know is there's no such thing as a free lunch, and one of those things politics is dishonest about is pretending there's a free lunch."

Tomorrow Obama speaks at UT, Austin and so many people requested tickets that they had to move the whole shebang outdoors-- and that was even before Daschle told them he was inspirational.