Iowa Liberal

Republicans are getting really nervous lately, for things are not as they have been ad nauseum.

Some analysts suggest that North Carolina and Virginia may even be within reach for the Democratic nominee, and they point to the surprising result in a Congressional special election in Mississippi this week as an indicator of things to come.

With the strong support of black voters, a conservative white Democrat, Travis W. Childers, scored an upset victory in that race, in a district held by Republicans since 1995. Kelvin Buck, a black state representative who helped the Childers campaign, said he saw a “level of enthusiasm and energy” that he had not seen before from black voters — significantly motivated, he said, by a recent Republican anti-Obama campaign.

Supposedly safe Republican elections are falling out of their hands. Bush is trying the usual horseshit and getting clobbered immediately back by Obama, which is fucking terrific news for Democrats in November. The more Obama is seen as running against Bush, the more clearly the lines are drawn for Americans. And John McCain is helplessly pinned, forced to come out defending Bush and making Obama’s case to America that he represents a continuation of Bush’s policies. The election is Obama’s if he can keep talking like this:

“What’s reckless is continuing the Bush-McCain foreign policy that has cost us thousands of lives and a trillion dollars in Iraq, strengthened Iran, enabled Hamas to take Gaza, took our eye off al Qaeda, failed to capture Osama bin Laden, failed to finish the job in Afghanistan, and left us less safe and less respected in the world. No amount of utterly predictable fear-mongering and tough talk can change the fact that John McCain is running to continue the most disastrous foreign policy in recent American history,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

And, of course, once again McCain is caught doing something the GOP just hates to death, flip-flopping. He simply cannot hide that he did not think a few years ago the things he supposedly thinks today, and that he wants to have it both ways: George Bush’s boy for the base, and the straight-talkin’ maverick for the independents. In the end, he can make neither happy. He can’t escape the fact that a few years ago he thought Bush was dumb as a stump, and now he’s forced to get Bush’s back every time Obama fires off a few shots.

Obama just took down Bill and Hillary Clinton. After that dogfight, taking on Bush and McCain, people he has much sharper differences with and dramatically stronger arguments against, is a fight he’s apparently been eager to dive into.

“The debate we’re going to be having with John McCain is how do we understand the blend of military action to diplomatic action that we are going to undertake,” he said. “I constantly reject this notion that any hint of strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender or means that you are not going to crack down on terrorism. Those are the terms of debate that have led to blunder after blunder.”

Obama said he found that the military brass thinks the way he does: “The generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

I asked him if negotiating with a theocratic/ideological power like Iran is different from negotiating with a nation that’s primarily pursuing material interests. He acknowledged that “If your opponents are looking for your destruction it’s hard to sit across the table from them,” but, he continued: “There are rarely purely ideological movements out there. We can encourage actors to think in practical and not ideological terms. We can strengthen those elements that are making practical calculations.”

In this fight, Obama is able to float like a butterfly and sting like a Gatling gun. As he continues, virtually able to strike at will, I’m suspecting America will enjoy cheering him on greatly.

-jb

Sorry, gay haters, but courts do have this unfortunate tendency to protect individual rights rather than defend irrational prejudice…

In a monumental victory for the gay rights movement, the California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage Thursday in a ruling that would allow same-sex couples in the nation’s biggest state to tie the knot.

Domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage, the justices ruled 4-3 in striking down the ban.

Outside the courthouse, gay marriage supporters cried and cheered as the news spread.

Jeanie Rizzo, one of the plaintiffs, called Pali Cooper, her partner of 19 years, and asked, “Pali, will you marry me?”

“This is a very historic day. This is just such freedom for us,” Rizzo said. “This is a message that says all of us are entitled to human dignity.”

Of course we are. In the most pleasant part of this news, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger vows to remain passive.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has twice vetoed legislation that would’ve granted marriage rights to same-sex couples, said in a news release that he respected the court’s decision and “will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling.”

Earlier today I wrote that gay equality would never come at the hands of a Republican, but every day there are signs that Republicans are realizing they have to change the game or go extinct. The person who does something active to bring equality to America certainly won’t be representing what is known as today’s GOP, it is possible that an (R) might be sitting next to their name. I overlooked the more libertarian-oriented wing of the GOP. Schwarzenegger didn’t do anything to bring this about, but executives can accomplish a lot through passivity. It is to be commended.

-jb

The economic gurus over at Common Sense Political Thought have figured out the cause behind increasing fossil fuel prices. What do you think it is? If you guessed librulz you’d be correct! There’s so much wrong with this post that it’s difficult to know where to start.

I can’t wait until next winter when home heating oil will be $3.00++++ What will low income people do who heat with oil? Oh, the Dims will let the tin horn dictator Chavez show them up by offering cheap oil. So far it is known that there are proven oil fields of billions of barrel of oil within the USA. It’s just that the Dims and the watermelons would rather support Middle East and South American dictators than they want to represent the people. I wonder who the Dims really support? Us, or the Dictators? So far yesterday’s vote was for the dictators and the continued gouging of the public.

Where are these “billions of barrel of oil” here in the USA that I keep hearing about?

And watermelons? Is that an adhominem?

-mg

In our age of information and communication, so many can remain trapped and unable to cry out for help.

-jb

John Aravosis:

She makes me yell at the TV like she’s George Bush, and no one other than George Bush makes me yell at the TV - until now. I actually can’t stand her or her husband any more. I defended her. I defended her husband. And now I’m actually wondering if the Republicans weren’t right about them. That’s how bad she has damaged her reputation. People who actually liked you, who actually helped you, who actually defended you, LOATHE you now. Call me a Clinton-hater all you like, but people like me were the ones who had your back. And we never will again.

I will disagree with the last statement. I would again, perhaps. If Hillary Clinton were being attacked unfairly, I would defend her. But she is not being attacked unfairly. She is having the truth told to her, repeatedly.

It saddens me to think of her and Bill Clinton now, and what the future holds for them. I guess I was always neutral towards Hillary, admiring her at her best but never being particularly excited about her. But Bill, whoo boy. That one stings. I still remember the excitement I felt in 1992 when he ran against Bush I. I loved the man. I loved the way he ran the country, although I came to understand later that many of his policy decisions were heavily flawed and sacrificial of what made Democrats different from Republicans. But on the whole, it was good government that looked out for those trying to get ahead, balanced our books with long term prosperity in mind, and didn’t get us into an endless clusterfuck of a war. Bill’s intelligence was dazzling, and the nation was infused with a sense of well-being in no small part due to his skill behind the wheel. Flaws were there to be seen, no doubt, but in the end it was the first Presidency in my lifetime that I felt good about.

I don’t feel that anymore when I look at Bill today. Today he seems irrelevant and obsolete, a gas-station attendant trying to get everybody to remember when he was the Homecoming King who fucked the Prom Queen. And Hillary, who started out passionate and strong, has fulfilled her years-long mission of erasing the scars caused by her honesty and turning into the ultimate robo-candidate, a plastic automaton devoid of integrity, sensibility, or principle, existing only to pursue and accumulate power. While every once in awhile you sense her saying, “But it had to be done so I could get the things accomplished I cared about…” she revealed the damage done once she was cornered and saw defeat approaching. She had made the sacrifices necessary to be comfortable saying whatever it took to get elected, and so it became the path of least resistance.

I want to feel sympathy for Hillary and Bill now, as they look to the future and see their hopes die. I want to think of them possessed of their old humanity, and feel their frustration as they say to themselves, as I’ve often said to myself, “But I did my best…” But they sacrificed that humanity to attempt destroying a candidate who still possesses that quality.

Hillary voters, I do not know how you can continue maintaining any sense of idealism or affection for the Clintons after the past couple months. I do not know how you cannot see how she has offended the majority of Democrats and lost the race. I do not know how you can act indignant about perceived insults from Barack Obama when he has been as gracious and restrained as possible in dealing with her scorched earth campaigning. I do not know how you could let her Republican tactics turn you off on Barack so much that so many of you claim you’ll vote for McCain instead, although that is rather improbable. You people have not explained yourselves well.

But this is the time to put these things behind us. The Clintons can earn some respect back, depending on how they act over the next six months, although Hillary is clearly not ready to rehabilitate herself yet. But Barack Obama has done plenty enough to earn your respect and cooperation to put an end to the ways of George Bush and his adoring GOP. And, having defeated Hillary Clinton while polling consistently ahead of John McCain, he’s done more than enough to assuage your fears that he won’t get the job done. The time to fear and fret is over. If you make the decision to support the Democratic nominee all the way til November, it will happen. Hillary’s claims are self-fulfilling prophecies borne of no rhyme or reason. We must all put at the forefront the mission of getting a Democrat in the White House, so that we can pursue the vital work of remaining vigilant and staying on top of that Democrat to stick by us all until the last day of office.

-jb

The GOP shites another special election in Mississippi even with the help of GOP celebrities:

Democrats picked up a northern Mississippi House seat in one of the most conservative-minded districts in the country Tuesday night — an upset that will reverberate darkly through a House Republican caucus already reeling from losses in special elections in Illinois and Louisiana. …

The results amount to a rebuke of the Republican strategy of trying nationalize the race by tying Childers to Sen. Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Obama held low approval ratings in the district, but the nearly $2 million that GOP groups poured into northern Mississippi failed to make the race a referendum on the national political landscape.

Republicans dispatched a lineup of heavy hitters in the campaign’s final week, including a pre-election stop Monday by Vice President Dick Cheney. President Bush, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and First Lady Laura Bush recorded automated calls urging voters to support Davis.

A GOP House leadership aide told Politico last week that “if we don’t win in Mississippi, I think you are going to see a lot of people running around here looking for windows to jump out of.”

Obviously the GOP continue to believe in their own bullshit. When confronted with declining approval numbers they point to Congressional statistics and insist that the discontent is across the board. If anything, favorability of Congress suffers because voters don’t think that the Democrats do enough to combat a rubberstamp Republican congress. Here’s another clip from the article:

The results amount to a rebuke of the Republican strategy of trying to nationalize the race by tying Childers to Sen. Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Obama held low approval ratings in the district, but the nearly $2 million that GOP groups poured into northern Mississippi failed to make the race a referendum on the national political landscape.

The race wasn’t a referendum on the national political landscape but rather one on what the GOP has steadily become, embodied by President George W. Bush. NRCC Chairman John Davis said today:

“We don’t need to abandon long-held principles, but we do need to understand our shortcomings and make appropriate adjustments,” Davis wrote. “It starts with the brand, and the brand is Bush. “

Davis has been sounding the alarm for months but the question is; is anyone listening? As long as radicals like Rush Limbaugh and the online devoted remain the mouth-pieces of the GOP the party will continue to suffer losses.

-mg

Hillary Clinton’s supposed last chance:

“Michigan and Florida are key to it,” Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, said Monday.

Counting Michigan and Florida is also cheating, violating an agreement Clinton herself signed onto, one immediately null and void in her mind as soon as she won those non-legitimate elections. Of course, had Obama won either or both, either or both would immediately resume illegitimacy in the eyes of the Clinton campaign.

Don’t think Hillary Clinton is sick for power yet? Politico does the math and says that at this point counting Michigan and Florida still make Obama the winner. Clinton team’s response?

The Clinton campaign rejected the premise of Politico’s analysis, dismissing it as “artificial metrics” that “might make for interesting cocktail party conversation” but would give Obama no legitimate claim on the nomination.

Wow, good thing all Democrats are against eight more years of up-is-down politics.

-jb

The wheels have come off of the stagecoach. Really, if I were a Democrat, it’d be bad luck for me to take as much pleasure as I do in watching the Republican party collapse right before my eyes. So thank God for my cynicism! I wouldn’t want to miss out on the cheap, delicious LOLs I get from watching this evil, corrupt machine imploding in real time right in front of everybody.

-TT

Oh, hell yes.

-TT

Thin skin always makes for high comedy. Let me get this straight, Senator McCain: suggesting that one’s opponent is the terrorist’s choice, that’s fair and decent; using a phrase at which somebody who’s really, really sensitive about being seven years past retirement age might take offense is off-limits? Better get some chain mail and a shield, Grandpa. General elections aren’t for people who bruise when they sleep on twenty mattresses with one pea underneath.

-T “Get Them Kids off my Lawn” T

Blacks are the true racists!
Women are the true sexists!
Liberals are the true totalitarians!
Jews are the true genocidists!
Native Americans are the true exploiters!
Polynesians are the true imperialists!
Environmentalists are the true polluters!

Second verse, somewhat like the first!

Whites are the truly oppressed!
The rich are the truly robbed!
Heterosexuals are the truly threatened!
Christians are the truly silenced!
Men are the truly marginalized!
Southerners are the truly disenfranchised!
Republicans are the truly smeared!
Global warming deniers are the truly scientific!

Take you mama out!

Here at Iowa Liberal we’ve spilled a lot of ink bemoaning the ethanol boondoggle and contended that mass transit is a better idea than expecting consumers to wait around for whatever combination of miracle alternative fuels that will allow them to carry on driving Ford Expeditions and GMC Yukons. And we’ve never said that these alternatives won’t exist, just that they’re not scalable to the point of providing a viable replacement for gasoline. Metro commuters seem to agree:

Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.

“In almost every transit system I talk to, we’re seeing very high rates of growth the last few months,” said William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association.

“It’s very clear that a significant portion of the increase in transit use is directly caused by people who are looking for alternatives to paying $3.50 a gallon for gas.”

Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges — of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year — are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited.

Hopefully we wont have to wait until gas is six or seven dollars a gallon before state and local leaders start looking into light passenger rail service along I-80 or I-380. Regardless of those who are pathologically opposed to anything resembling mass transit it’s inevitable that pubic demand will bring these alternatives to the fore simply because it’s more economically feasible than waiting for electric cars (which would necessitate a massive overhaul of the electric grid, the costs of which would invariably be shifted onto taxpayers) or E85 ethanol which, even in it’s infancy, is proving to be a massive disappointment.

-mg

Number Of Acceptable Things Candidates Can Say Now Down To Four

“At the beginning of 2007 there were 38 things candidates could mention in public that wouldn’t be considered damaging to their campaigns, but now they are mostly limited to ‘Thank you all for coming,’ and ‘God bless America,’” ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos said on Sunday’s episode of This Week. “There would still be five phrases available to the candidates if the Obama camp hadn’t accused Clinton of saying ‘Glad to be here’ with a little tinge of sarcasm during a stump speech in North Carolina.”

Our world grows increasingly Onion-esque…

-jb

Should such a record for Republicans be rewarded in November?

Republicans held all the levers of power in Washington for six years. They turned budget surpluses into huge deficits, which put pressure on the dollar. The financial industry’s house of cards got blown down and the Federal Reserve cut rates to head off a recession. That put even more pressure on the dollar. Its value sank against other currencies, and investors have taken refuge in commodities, driving those prices up. Republicans’ aggressive, swaggering foreign policy has shot uncertainty through the market, driving (dollar denominated) oil to record highs. Simply put, their policies have put us in a position where we can’t deficit spend, can’t lower prices, can’t cut rates and can’t do much to restore value to our currency. Even simpler, every time you fill up your tank or buy a loaf of bread you pay the Bush Tax.

Should it even be forgiven by 2012? The Republicans have been playing up Jimmy Carter’s Iranian hostage snafu and other situations largely out of his control for 30 years. Let the state of the USA today remind us for a generation what it means to give Republicans control of the country.

-jb

I sure hate to veer outside the narrative of John McCain as The Man Of Integrity, but sooner or later won’t it kind of be inescapable that every time the man is caught saying something stupid, he simply claims he never said it? And that most of the time he’s being filmed or says things in front of numerous witnesses?

Arianna Huffington wrote a post recently about how John McCain told her at a party after the 2000 election that he didn’t vote for Bush. Apparently Cindy McCain said the same thing.

I mean, first thing’s first, people: How could you possibly blame them? These were two people who were still washing off Karl Rove’s slime at the time. How do you walk into the voting booth months and vote for the guy whose campaign spread rumors about your Bengali daughter being an illegitimate black child, and your wife being addicted to painkillers, and you being a little crazy after being tortured for 5 years by the Viet Cong?

But now John McCain says he was A Good Republican who marched right in that booth and voted for Bush. In fact, his people started with some classic Rovian maneuvers and started blasting Arianna personally, saying, “Consider the source.”

Arianna responded with a humiliating smackdown:

My sentiments exactly — because John McCain has a long history of issuing heartfelt denials of things that were actually true. He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry’s ‘04 running mate — then later admitted he had, insisting: “Everybody knows that I had a conversation.” He denied admitting that he didn’t know much about economics, even though he’d said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun. He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record. He denied that he’d ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.

And those are just the outright denials. He’s also repeatedly tried to spin away statements he regretted making (see: 100-year war, Iraq was a war for oil, etc.).

So, yes, by all means, “consider the source.”

Arianna Huffington is certainly an honest person who wouldn’t fabricate a story out of thin air, but as the founder of The Huffington Post, she’s easy for every rightwinger to blow off. “She’s a liberal!” pretty much wraps it up for them. Oh, but wait, suddenly The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times have sources corroborating Arianna’s story. Two of the sources who were also at the party have come out publicly, with a third remaining anonymous fearing McCain’s scorn (for telling the truth, mind you). The vice is clinched, no?

Ah, but look out! The two named sources are Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff…LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD ACTORS! If you cup your ear, you can hear millions of rightwingers sighing with relief. It’s wrapped up again! Obviously, Arianna met these liberal actors in a private meeting, they all agreed to make up a story about the night John McCain partied with them (lesson to rightwingers: don’t attend liberal Hollywood parties!), Arianna would break the story and the others would get her back. One other person agreed to the alibi, but chickened out a little and went anonymous. Roll the presses!!!

You gotta give those Hollywood people credit too, they can sure weave wonderful fantasies out of thin air. Check out this hilarious detail from the NYT article:

“McCain was just sort of going off on how much he disliked Bush and the horrible things that the Bush campaign had done to his family in South Carolina, and his exasperation with Bush about his ridiculous tax cuts and he really wanted to talk to him about it, but he said the guy doesn’t have the concentration, and you talk for 10 minutes and then the guy wants to talk about baseball,” Mr. Whitford said.

Surely those liberals will sink to anything! Suggesting George W. Bush is an intellectual lightweight who was in over his head and never truly interested in the particulars of doing his job…for shame! Boo!

Man, the right almost escaped having to face reality for a second. McCain can, of course, go repeat his denial to Bill O’Reilly in the safe haven of Faux News.

But that’s beside the point. Of course he can. Any Republican can go on Fox News and be treated adoringly, with every denial or outright lie coddled and nourished lovingly. That’s what Fox News is for. But McCain has also been enjoying a love-fest from the MSM for years. Chris Matthews has admitted that the media is McCain’s real base. The question is, how long can that possibly continue before the media is forced to admit that the John McCain of 2000 is gone, and that what we have now is a man with little if any shame left, a panderer and an outright liar who does it because he thinks nobody will hold him accountable? “Hey, it worked for GWB,” he undoubtedly thinks. George Bush, of course, was able to say, “I never said that!” when confronted with his own words about not caring about Osama bin Laden anymore, and got it waived.

The media made special accommodations for Bush because that’s what you do for the mentally challenged. They’ve felt McCain deserves special accommodations because he talks to them and gives them donuts. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, folks.

The media can be forced to start treating John McCain with the same degree of scrutiny and relentlessness with which they handled Obama over the last couple months. Of course, Obama has managed to take the media beating and throw them off, but the nature of the charges against him were beyond trivial and mostly hyped up.

I don’t think McCain can take the same kind of pressure, because he’s been such a blatant fabricator there’s no way to spin it. He will lose his image as the maverick truth-teller, and it will be long overdue.

But the pressure on the media to do its job will come from one place, and one place only: you.

That is all.

-jb

p.s. O’Reilly, the bimbo that he is, claims someone wrote a blog on HuffPost claiming John McCain wasn’t tortured and collaborated with the Viet Cong, then said, “That’s Arianna Huffington.”

Somebody feel free to correct me, but here’s the only thing I found: Jayne Lyn Stahl reporting on the fact that the same group of people who swiftboated Kerry formed a group, Vietnam Vets Against McCain, that was going to peddle that line against McCain about his time in Vietnam. Stahl makes it abundantly clear that the charges are completely false, only that she wouldn’t cry any tears for McCain if the group was as successful as the Swiftboaters were.

Of course, fact-checking O’Reilly is kind of like trying to beat the Guinness Book of World Records for longest fingernails: It will occupy you endlessly, and after you’ve done it, nobody will be particularly impressed because there’s no skill involved.

UPDATE: Arianna notes a Freudian slip on McCain’s part:

O’REILLY: Did you vote for President bush?

MCCAIN: Of course not. I campaigned all over this country for him.

For all the whining McCain’s camp did about Obama saying he was losing his bearings…he sure is losing his bloody bearings. Of course, this is one part age, and one part political pandering. Even a younger McCain could not have thrown his principles out the window and turned into Bush’s butt-boy without tripping over himself daily.

John Edwards is going to endorse Obama. Listen to his last sentence.

-mg

Mmm, mmm, good! One of our old friend Brian’s many cringe-inducing witticisms involved his contention that scandal was really the domain of liberals. It’s my own opinion that scandal follows power, but has extra savor when it’s accompanied by moral hypocrisy: an environmental crusader who races Hummers on the sly, say.

I would say in defense of liberals however that most of them, when having affairs, aren’t too damned stupid to use birth control.

-TT

-mg

Make any type of disparaging comment to somebody who has drunk the Greek Kool-Aid and you’re bound to hear one thing: “But, but…we do a lot for the community!!” as if college social fraternities and sororities are charitable organizations that are unfairly characterized as simply a way to emphasize differences in race, religion, or economic background by means of symbols, ritualism and group-think. Seriously bro, like, wtf? Personally speaking, I could think of better ways to experience college than to spend it with people that look, think, and act like I do. But hey, that’s just me, and I’m probably just jealous, right?

Here in Iowa City the Greek system is waning. They’ve had to shut down a few houses due to either lack of interest or being in general disrepair because of low pledge numbers. This comes as no surprise considering that with the advent of community based technologies like Facebook and the current preference of students to live off campus it isn’t necessary to purchase your way into social groups. Nor do you have to suffer the humiliation of hazing or pretend that you enjoy a barracks-like living arrangement. And cutting your own rent check, paying the utilities yourself and doing your own laundry is going to better prepare you for the outside world more than honing your social graces at the Kappa Kappa Gamma Spring Formal ever will.

I have to admit though that it’s going to be hard for those frat boys when they’re forced to explain to a judge why they chose to sell drugs despite enjoying such privileges in life.

-mg

Republican bellwether Rush Limbaugh, whose bluster couldn’t keep McCain out of the nominee spot, has also had to confront his own dwindling influence in regards to the Democratic primaries and voters at large. Now that Operation Chaos has proven to be a dud in Indiana and North Carolina (Clinton only won Indiana by a hair and Obama easily won North Carolina) he is claiming that he thinks Obama is the weaker candidate…..after performing well in both primaries.

Is there any doubt that Rush would have taken credit for Tuesday night regardless of the outcome?

-mg

The only thing that people find remarkable about The Stones is the fact that they’re still going. Besides making the Baby Boomers that still dote over them feel relevant what purpose do they serve? They remind me of those Dockers clad fuckheads you run into at the countless Blues-Fests white people love to go to who insist on lecturing you about “real” music.

Anyways, Keith Richards dissed David Bowie. Oh, how rock and roll.

Newt Gingrich’s remarks about the GOP in peril will doubtless be all over the blogs today, and there lies the cheap, beautiful irony of the whole situation. Gingrich is dead right - obviously he is: no product whose sole selling point is “don’t you hate our competition?” can last long. Sooner or later, a seller’s own product is either going to rise or fall on its own merits, not on the perceived shortcomings of some identified greater-evil. You know who’s never understood this, though? Republican bloggers. They don’t have the first idea of how to present a positive message; their one trick is in trolling lefties to make them look unhinged. Their skill in pulling off this trick can’t be denied, but in terms of broader media spin and ballot-box bottom lines, it’s pretty much stopped working, as the Jeremiah Wright affair proves. Unfortunately for the GOP, it is the only song the online right-wing faithful know how to sing; it is too late in the election cycle for the right-leaning volunteer corps to learn a new one. Many of them aren’t particularly interested in winning approaches, anyhow; they’re too high on the fumes of their own self-regard. They’ll do the only thing they know how to do - holler about the evil liberals - while a disinterested political marketplace grows less and less interested in what is by now a very old and tired routine, and while the same routine dooms their candidates to irrelevancy. Oh, well, my Republican friends: there’s always 2012, right?

-TT

Empty crap like this:

Clinton retorted, “Instead of attacking the problem, he’s attacking my solutions,” and ran an ad in the campaign’s final hours that said she “gets it.”

It’s called pointing out that your “solutions” are no such thing. That’s logic, Hillary. You do the same thing every chance you get.

As for what Hillary “gets,” it seems to be only that she can say whatever she wants without paying too many penalties from voters. What she doesn’t get is that it hasn’t been good enough to win, and that the high road was the one to take against Obama. She didn’t get that, and right now Obama is closing in on the nomination and pulling in superdelegates left and right.

Obama only needs a minority of the remaining superdelegates to clinch the victory, and throughout these past few “rough” weeks he’s still been getting the majority. This means Hillary’s hopes are resting upon something so terrible happening that virtually all the remaining superdelegates swing for her.

This isn’t going to happen, and she doesn’t get that either. All the negativity, the slime, the Republican race she’s been running, has been for naught, except to battle-test Obama and see he’s doing just fine. Hillary had her argument, briefly and tenuously, and now it rests punctured and bleeding.

The only question is, when will she get it?

-jb

Pollster is where I go to get a sense of what’s going to happen on election night. Drudge and the rest of the bottom-feeders will only link to polls representing outliers because they can hype the horse-race narrative that online traffic tends to gravitate towards. Pollster uses a running aggregation represented by simple line graphs so naturally you get a better sense of where things are headed.

The easy money is on Barack winning North Carolina. No surprises there so naturally the press will cover the tighter race in Indiana more closely because it will give the pundits plenty of opportunities to stroke their chins and ruminate over “what it all means”. And nobody will dare come right out and state the plain and simple truth that it’s mathematically impossible for Clinton to win the nomination because they’re scared shitless of being labeled as “in the tank” for Obama.

What else will happen? Wolff Blitzer will fail to burn an effigy of Jeremiah Wright as a statement of public odium and revulsion which will provide definitive proof to right wing bloggers that an Obama presidency means certain enslavement for the white race.

-mg

Updates:

8:33pm-Barack Obama just gave his first official general election stump speech.
8:44pm-Lake County results haven’t come in yet and I think those numbers might just bring him to within three to four percentage points of Clinton.

10:50pm-Lake County is coming in and the deficit has narrowed to two percentage points. Perhaps it will be a tie when I wake up in the morning. Regardless, it’s a helluva lot better than what I expected.

So McCain didn’t vote for Bush. So says Huff, anyway. McCain’s response? He asks us to “consider the source”. Here’s Huff’s rebuttal:

My sentiments exactly — because John McCain has a long history of issuing heartfelt denials of things that were actually true.

He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry’s ‘04 running mate — then later admitted he had, insisting: “Everybody knows that I had a conversation.”

He denied admitting that he didn’t know much about economics, even though he’d said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun.

He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record.

He denied that he’d ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.

And those are just the outright denials. He’s also repeatedly tried to spin away statements he regretted making (see: 100-year war, Iraq was a war for oil, etc.).

So, yes, by all means, “consider the source.”

I have no doubt that the online devoted are willing to make excuses for any number of verbal blunders that are sure to come out of McCain’s pasty gob during the run-up to his certain defeat in November but how is it going to make them look when the only way out is to tell people that they’re stupid for misunderstanding what he’s saying? Elitist, indeed.

-mg

John McCain let the cat out of the bag a little bit today in Denver:

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East,” McCain told a crowd of 300 at a Jewish Community Center in Denver.

“That will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

Ignoring the obvious implications of the above statement for a moment I think that it needs to be pointed out that John McCain currently has no sensible energy policy to begin with, let alone “eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East”. But to just come right out and state a common sense observation like the above is very out of character for any politician, regardless of affiliation.

-mg

In Iowa:

Clive businessman Marty Parrish was escorted from Sen. John McCain’s town hall meeting by Des Moines police and members of the Secret Service after asking McCain if he had called his wife Cindy an expletive in 1992.

Parrish, an ordained Baptist minister who holds a master’s degree in political science, was questioned by Secret Service agents before being released. He was not charged in the incident. Parrish asked whether McCain called his wife Cindy an expletive related to the female anatomy, as has been alleged in the book “The Real McCain,” written by Dem strategist Cliff Schecter.

McCain’s response got him a round of applause from the crowd: “There’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language, so I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.”

In an interview with IowaPolitics.com, Parrish said his intentions were simple in posing the question to McCain. The former Joe Biden campaign worker stressed he is very concerned about the Republican presidential nominee’s temperament.

“We have a man whose temper can get the best of him,” Parrish said. “What I am worried about is his temper. Our country is in a serious crisis. This election is the most significant one since 1860. It appears America is asleep — so I stood up and asked the question.”

Question: What the fuck is up with getting escorted out by police and Secret Service for asking that question? Is it their job to protect McCain’s feelings as well?

p.s. Waiting for rightwingers to come to McCain’s defense for calling his wife a cunt in public…

-jb

While they’ve been functional for some time, improvements in battery technology have held electric cars back somewhat. Fortunately, a new battery promises to open some doors.

It is the quickest electric motorcycle in the world. On a popular YouTube video, the black dragster cycle nearly disappears in a cloud of smoke as the driver does a “burn-out,” spinning the back wheel to heat it up. As the smoke drifts away, the driver settles into position and hits a switch, and the bike surges forward, accelerating to 60 miles per hour in less than a second. Seven seconds later it crosses the quarter-mile mark at 168 miles per hour–quick enough to compete with gas-powered dragsters.

What powers the “Killacycle” is a novel lithium-ion battery developed by A123 Systems, a startup in Watertown, MA–one of a handful of companies working on similar technology. The company’s batteries store more than twice as much energy as nickel-metal hydride batteries, the type used in today’s hybrid cars, while delivering the bursts of power necessary for high performance.

Well, if power is what it takes to win over American audiences, then that’s what this new battery delivers. What’s even better, it eliminates a few other concerns:

In the past, automakers have blamed electric vehicles’ poor sales on their lead-acid or nickel-metal hydride batteries, which were so heavy that they limited the vehicles’ range and so bulky that they took up trunk space. While conventional lithium-ion batteries are much lighter and more compact, they’re not cost effective for electric vehicles. That’s partly because they use lithium cobalt oxide electrodes, which can be unstable: batteries based on them wear out after a couple of years and can burst into flame if punctured, crushed, overcharged, or overheated. Some auto­makers have tried to engineer their way around these problems, but the results have been expensive.

A123’s batteries could finally make lithium-ion technology practical for the auto industry. Instead of cobalt oxide, they use an electrode material made from nanoparticles of lithium iron phosphate modified with trace metals. The resulting batteries are unlikely to catch fire, even if crushed in an accident. They are also much hardier than conventional lithium-ion batteries: A123 predicts that they will last longer than the typical lifetime of a car.

What benefits can we expect to gain if cars like the plug-in Chevy Volt coming in 2010 utilize this battery?

If the Volt is popular, electric cars could finally start to take off–and that could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and petroleum consumption. A recent study by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council suggests that electric vehicles similar to GM’s car could eliminate billions of tons of greenhouse-gas emissions between 2010 and 2050. A study by General Electric indicates that if half the vehicles on the road in 2030 are electric-powered, petroleum consumption in the United States will shrink by six million barrels a day.

And batteries like A123’s could have repercussions far beyond the Volt. Even cars with internal-combustion engines are being engineered to rely more on electricity: the simplest examples involve batteries recharged by souped-up alternators that would allow a car to shut off its engine when it approaches a stoplight and restart when the driver hits the accelerator. In conventional hybrids, versions of A123’s batteries can deliver as much power as nickel-metal hydride batteries at one-fifth the weight. The new batteries could also benefit plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from a standard electrical outlet. Indeed, A123’s batteries may be used in a plug-in version of the Saturn Vue hybrid SUV that’s due out in 2010.

Yes, this is a necessity.

-jb

I know I just used the term the other day, but by all means, can we now throw the term “threw them under the bus” under the bus? Michale Calderone notes the ubiquity of the term, and John Cole suggests a worthy replacement in his post titled, “Obama Kicks Jeremiah Wright In the Junk.” The problem there, of course, being how much easier it is to throw women under the bus than kick them in the junk, so I will attempt to nominate a second option:

“Obama pulled a Clarence Boddicker on Wright.”

-jb

If this rebuttal makes sense to you, then you do!

Take, for example, the post-9/11 “chickens-coming-home-to-roost” sermon. Wright may have been ill-advised and impolitic in giving this sermon on the Sunday after 9/11, but he certainly was neither wrong nor alone in the view he expressed.

American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, has engendered enormous anger among people who don’t have the wherewithal to fight back on a regular battlefield. Should it surprise us that some of them resort to weapons of the weak—what we call terrorism. (Does an errant bomb dropped from a screaming jet inspire terror?) Do we suppose those fellows released from Guantanamo after years in a Kafkaesque nightmare are all just going to go home and say, “Let bygones be bygones”? Do we Americans think we are the only ones who get angry enough to strike back when attacked? Or is it that we think we’re the only ones entitled to get angry enough to kill?

Love harder! Love until your answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes! And don’t you dare think that “love” is more about giving our government carte blanche than actually loving the country and its people.

-jb

Hating Newsweek’s cover this week, but the essay within demolishes the madness about “elitism,” both through historical examples of presidents past who served the people fine while having some aristocratic airs, namely FDR, and Obama’s own personal history:

He was raised by a single parent, his mother, who lived on food stamps for a time. He graduated from an Ivy League college—Columbia—but worked as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago. After Harvard Law, he turned down the high-pay, high-prestige jobs in corporate-law firms to work in a small civil-rights firm, mostly on voting-rights cases. He talks about his experiences helping the poor in the shadows of shuttered steel plants in Chicago. “Politics didn’t lead me to working folks,” he says, “working folks led me to politics.” His wife, Michelle, is more emphatic. “I am a product of a working-class background,” she says. “I am one of those folks who grew up in that struggle. That is the lens through which I see the world.” (A close read of her Princeton thesis suggests where her heart lay even after four years in the Ivy League: the paper is a paean to staying in touch with her black working-class roots.) “So,” Michelle recently told a high-school audience in Evansville, Ind., “when people talk about this elitist stuff, I say, ‘You couldn’t possibly know anything about me’.”

Obama’s chief campaign adviser, David Axelrod, bridles at the elitist charge: “In terms of his personal habits, this is a guy who is an ESPN sports fanatic, who plays basketball for relaxation. When he’s out and about, he’s more solicitous of the people around him, the people on the street and the kitchen workers and the police officers than almost any politician I have known. Anybody who advances the argument that he’s an elitist simply doesn’t know the guy. It’s generally the elite who advance the argument.”

Bingo.

-jb

I know, I know, Keith Olbermann was allowed to express his opinions (unlike Phil Donahue who got canceled despite having excellent ratings) and thus MSNBC became the socialist flagship the Communist News Network could only dream of being…this can’t possibly be true:

It seems that Arianna Huffington has run up against the impenetrable wall that is Tim Russert’s ego. Huffington, who is currently on tour for her new book Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, will be appearing on CNN, ABC, and CBS. She had been booked on Morning Joe and Countdown with Keith Olbermann as well, but those bookings were suddenly and inexplicably cancelled.

NBC confirmed that Huffington wouldn’t be booked on any NBC-affiliated show to promote her book, but refused to explain why. Huffington’s people say that this is Tim Russert’s doing, that Russert is out for revenge because Huffington called him a “conventional wisdom zombie” in her book and devoted seven pages to faulting Russert for allowing his Meet the Press guests to go unchallenged (not to mention HuffPo’s RussertWatch).

Russert, one of the most obstinate fat cats of the Beltway, likes to dish it out (to Democrats) but sure can’t take it, can he? He is to question as he sees fit and not be questioned!

-jb

Who’s the fiscal conservative here?

Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.

By the numbers, Bill Clinton was one of the most fiscally conservative presidents of the last half century. Both Democratic candidates are more fiscally conservative and more responsible with taxpayer money, than John McCain, who is happy to add $5.7 trillion more to the national credit card.

Why? Because today’s GOP is George W. Bush’s GOP trying to sell themselves with Ronald Reagan’s soundbites. But the two no longer intersect. They have utterly embraced Bush/Cheney’s complete disregard for financial responsibility, and gleefully believe they are avoiding tax dollar waste as long as they can charge it off. Yes, it’s insane, stupid, and reckless, but so it goes when you have a cult of personality around a team of idiots and schemers, and a not-so-principled candidate irrevocably hitched to them.

-jb

UPDATE: It’s Bush, stupid!

43 percent of respondents are concerned about the 71-year-old John McCain’s close ties to George Bush.

36 percent have concerns about Clinton’s political opportunism, and 27 percent are concerned about Bill Clinton being back in the White House.

34 percent have problems with Obama’s “bitter” remarks and 32 percent give a damn about Jeremiah Wright.

McCain can’t disown Bush. That’s why he’s still getting beat by either Democrat in most match-ups. Democrats must unite soon and stand up against the past 8 years.

Bob Cesca:

If the corporate media had been as diligent about watchdogging President Bush as they have been about watchdogging Reverend Wright, it’s very likely we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.

If the corporate media had spent as much time exposing the obvious flaws and grotesque inequalities of Reaganomics throughout the last 30 years as they’ve spent on Wright, we wouldn’t necessarily be staring into the maw of another depression.

If the corporate media were as diligent about debunking the lies surrounding Iran’s so-called nuclear program as they’ve been about Wright, there wouldn’t be such a sense of inevitability in terms of attacking — or entirely obliterating — Iran.

So what is the very serious corporate media, the only industry that is explicitly protected by the Constitution, doing to remedy their failures of the recent past? Rather than watchdogging the Bush administration and Senator McCain on Iraq, Iran, the economy and all the rest of it — areas in which Senator McCain is laughably wrong and dangerously inconsistent — what are we seeing instead?

All three major cable news networks are wasting valuable air time on Senator Obama’s former pastor. Why? Is the story newsworthy? Sure. Is wall-to-wall Wright coverage more important than Iraq or gas prices or the climate crisis? No way. But Reverend Wright is a scary, shouting black man and scary shouting black men equal ratings-sweet-ratings.

It’s not as if those in the media can possibly have avoided explanations of their fundamental dysfunction. Being functional simply isn’t their priority, and pontificating about “what people want to hear” without being challenged on it is cheaper and easier than being real journalists.

-jb

In a not-no-stunning display of poor leadership, President Bush has once again recommended that drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the solution to our current energy woes. Iowa Liberal has tackled this issue as have many others. At the very least, rational leadership would accept the simple fact that policies based upon keeping the cars running at all costs are doomed to failure as demand has simply exceeded supply with no possibility for reversal. Rational leadership would start looking at making other arrangements that aren’t completely dependent upon cheap and plentiful liquid hydrocarbons which are disappearing faster than even a pessimist like myself would have imagined. Politicians who lead people into believing that drilling ANWR is a solution are selling false hope.

-mg

Sullivan targets what has evidently soured Wright on Obama, and thus made it possible for Obama to sever their ties for good?

“I think that is part of Jeremiah Wright’s view of Obama as well (as Sharpton’s): he will never forgive him for winning so many white votes, and breaking the pattern and ideology of victimhood and marginalization that forged Wright’s identity.”

Out with the old, in with the new, in thought as well as deed. Obama was right not to throw Wright under the bus just because Clinton and the Republicans were freaked out by a few soundbites.

Funnily enough, virtually anybody who wasn’t a slobbering partisan hack or a Beltway zomboid could easily tell that Obama didn’t share Wright’s more flamboyant humdingers. Yet who foresaw Wright refusing to be preached to?

The student has become the master, and the master has refused to relent. Obama had already made the break from such old-school banter in forging his own philosophy, but as we saw, many whites recoiled at him even being associated with such a person.

I’m not sure I enjoy Sullivan’s tone entirely. When we live in a world where police stop filling unarmed black people with fifty bullets, more scorn can be heaped upon the Sharptons and the Wrights. They aren’t entirely wrong. Racism is still alive, and thumping along at a still unforgiveable pace in this country, and somebody should be pointing the finger. Blacks are victimized and marginalized still, and most of Obama’s opponents are all too happy to forget it. Listening to the rightwing radio yesterday, all I heard was the outrage that black people weren’t more thankful for how good they get it in this country. How could Obama sit in that pew and listen to an angry black man!?!?

Because a lot of black people are fucking angry, and they’re not wrong. Yet there are angry white people incensed that they even have to hear the thoughts of such blacks. Yeah, there’s something wrong there.

But if Sharpton, Wright, et al. can’t find leeway in their own outlook for somebody like Barack, who bridges the divide and looks for compromise, then he has no choice but to stand up to them as well. It might seem like he’ll end up with everybody against him at that rate, but no…

…oh no. In with the new.

-jb

Parts two and three below the fold.

Continue reading…

Omigod!

As oil prices soared to record levels in recent years, basic economics suggested that consumption would fall and supplies would rise as producers drilled for more oil.

But as prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy experts are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to suppress global demand or attract new production, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices ever higher.

That has translated into more pain at the pump, with gasoline setting a fresh record of $3.60 a gallon nationwide on Monday. Experts expect prices above $4 a gallon this summer, and one analyst recently predicted that gasoline could reach $7 in the next four years.

No way!

In the United States and through much of the developed world, the higher fuel prices have led drivers to reduce their consumption, and gasoline demand is expected to drop this year. But that drop will be more than offset by the rise in energy demand from developing countries. In the next two decades, demand is projected to jump by 35 percent, and developing countries will consume more oil than industrialized countries.

C’mon, why they wanna do that? Only Americans really need cars!

The outlook for oil supplies “signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,” Jeff Rubin, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, said last week. Oil prices might exceed $200 a barrel by 2012, he said, a level that would very likely mean $7-a-gallon gasoline in the United States.

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001, and in Britain, output has dropped 43 percent in eight years. Production from the giant Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska has dropped by 65 percent from its peak two decades ago.

Shhh…teh oil is 4evah eff U don make teh oil angry witchoo!

“It’s a crunch,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. “The world is not running out of oil, but rather it’s running out of oil production capacity.”

That’s right, man, you go, dude! The world is NOT RUNNING OUT OF OIL! We’re just having a harder time figuring out how to get it, but the world is NOT RUNNING OUT OF OIL! If we could just drill some MORE, we’d be okay because THE OIL WILL ALWAYS BE THERE!

Lookee here, watch me with this calculator…if I decide that the world will need 15 million barrels a day from Saudi Arabia, I just multiply that by 100% and that’s what Saudi Arabia will be able to produce.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, is completing a $50 billion plan to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day, but it signaled recently that it would not go beyond that. That means Saudi Arabia could fall short of the 15 million barrels a day that most experts had expected it to produce in the long run.

Not 100%? Who will give me 100% so my calculator will work right? OPEC give me 100%?

OPEC’s 13 members plan to spend $150 billion to expand their capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012. But OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the projected growth in demand. Analysts say that without Iran and Iraq — where nearly 30 years of wars and sanctions have crippled oil production — reaching that level will be impossible.

Fine, OPEC is retarded anyway. Somebody else give me 100% Maybe 1000%?

But the International Energy Agency estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production. The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to raise global output. Otherwise, it warned that a crisis before 2015 involving “an abrupt run-up in prices” could not be ruled out.

Pfft! Everybody is retarded.

-jb

p.s. If only there were some way we could spend about $400 billion to power the whole nation on solar by 2050…

Those Brazilian oil fields that were supposed to stave off our collective day of reckoning have a lot in common with most of the other off-shore petroleum deposits that are supposed to allow us to keep commuting to work in Ford F350 extended cab pickups. They’re almost physically impossible to get to making them prohibitively expensive to exploit:

April 28 (Bloomberg) — Brazil’s plan to become one of the world’s biggest oil exporters hinges on exploiting crude 6 miles below the ocean surface in deposits so hot they can melt the metal used to carry uranium to nuclear plants.

Tapping what may be the biggest oil finds in the Western Hemisphere in three decades will require equipment that can withstand 18,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, enough to crush a pickup truck, pipes that can carry oil at temperatures above 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 Celsius) and drill bits that can penetrate layers of salt more than one mile thick.

Much like the “Jack” discoveries made a few years ago, nobody is even venturing a guess as to how much each barrel of oil extracted would have to cost in order to make such a venture profitable. If you guessed “a helluva lot” then you’re probably close. Rest assured, though, that when we get to that point we’re going to have more to worry about than the cost of driving our Ford Expedition to the Denny’s buffet.

-mg

-mg

Charles Grassley (R-IA) has a beef with churches that openly engage in political endorsements yet simultaneously enjoy tax exempt status. For his sins, Grassley gets tagged with the old, reliable, right-wing chestnut; the “elitist” label.

On Sunday Wead continued to press those same charges, arguing that “you cannot say there is not a legitimate scriptural rationale for these [Word of Faith] doctrines, they’re there in the Bible. If the Constitution allows freedom of religion, people who believe these doctrines and interpret them the way they choose to interpret them, have a right to believe that. And there shouldn’t be elitists who seize power in government to stop them from believing them. We’ve always had elitists like that who try to protect us dumb people, because we’re so dumb and we’re so stupid.” That’s a classic ruse used by the televangelists. They have long argued that, because Pentecostalism originated as a religious movement of the poor and uneducated, any criticism of its religious expression and worship style must stem from the disdain of mainline Protestants and evangelicals who engage in the theological equivalent of sipping lattes and driving Volvos.

Furthermore, this is not a case of the government dictating or imposing doctrine. It’s a situation involving a religious institution taking advantage of it’s special stature so that it can line the pockets of those who operate it which, of course, is nothing new in the strange realm of prosperity theology. But when a church starts endorsing candidates or political parties it needs to be prepared to answer some hard questions and at least be able to argue in favor of their status as a charitable organization without having to resort to Limbaugh-style rebuttals.

-mg