Midday open thread

• My two-year-old daughter has hit the Republican phase of her life: her two favorite words are "mine" and "no!"
• A Liddy Dole consultant claims his boss lost because:

  We knew we had three weaknesses. A report by Congress.org had ranked Dole 93rd out of 100 senators in effectiveness. She voted with President Bush more than 90 percent of the time. And during the two-year period when she was chairman of the NRSC, she only traveled to North Carolina a handful of times.

  But wait, we were told during the stimulus vote that Republicans are "back" because they were unified! Yet here's another Republican noting that unity was one of Dole's "weaknesses". Of course, as I've written several times, the GOP's blind obedience is a major factor in its demise. And not just obedience when Bush was popular, but even when he was unpopular on unpopular issues like stem cell research and SCHIP.

  But let them keep thinking that "unity" is their salvation. We could use a few more Liddy Doles in 2010, including the other North Carolina Republican Senator, Richard Burr, up for reelection in 2010.

• Surprising.

  [D]espite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

  In 1990, 86 percent of Americans self-identified as Christians. That number is now 76 percent. Mainline Protestants dropped from 17 percent of the total to 12.9 percent. USA Today has nifty flash charts to display the data by state. The least religious states?

  1. Vermont
  2. New Hampshire
  3. Wyoming
  4. Washington
  5. Maine
  6. Oregon
  7. Nevada
  8. Idaho
  9. Delaware
  10. Massachusetts
  11. Colorado
  12. Montana
  13. Rhode Island
  14. DC
  15. California

  New England and the West dominate the list. As for the most religious?

  1. Mississippi
  2. North Dakota
  3. Louisiana
  4. Arkansas
  5. Tennessee
  6. Georgia
  7. North Carolina
  8. South Carolina
  9. Kansas
  10. Oklahoma
  11. Alabama
  12. Minnesota
  13. Texas
  14. South Dakota
  15. Kentucky

  They don't call it the "Bible Belt" for nothing. And can you spot the political implications of this data? They are pretty obvious. Only three Red states in the top list, and Montana will soon be a Blue state. And only two Blue states in the bottom list, with North Carolina barely making the cut. The two Dakotas were single-digit Red states, and trended our direction, and Texas threatens to eventually become competitive, but other than those states, this is the GOP's base states. (Georgia isn't trending our way, at least not yet, even if record-breaking African American turnout made it surprisingly close.)

  Speaking of religion, it's shit like this that drove me from the Catholic Church.

  And Street Prophets, unsurprisingly, has lots more.

• New FDL campaign: tell Congress no more dough until we know where it goes. Transparency in the use of taxpayer dollars is such an obvious concept, that it's unconscionable we have to fight the Obama Administration to get it.
• Did you hear about the latest manufactured controversy? The one in which Obama is somehow stupid because he uses a teleprompter? Yeah, only idiots use teleprompters.
• The Census won't count gay Americans because it's a "lifestyle" choice.
• What a horrible nightmare. And what a weird conservative reaction to it.
• Remember how Obama "overreached" by carrying out his campaign promises?
• Conservative columnist David Brooks is not among the 16 percent of Americans who have a favorable opinion of House GOP leader John Boehner.  

  BROOKS: The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem. A lot of Republicans up in Capitol Hill right now are calling for a spending freeze in a middle of a recession/depression. That is insane. But they are thinking the way they thought in 1982, if we can only think that way again, that is just insane.