When I first discovered Goodnight Bush I thought it was one of the best and truest parodies I have ever seen.  I cannot find a review of it on dKos (I thought I had seen one - - links appreciated), but the Villiage Voice review has one sentence that describes it well "The parody to end all self-parody presidencies."

Goodnight Moon is truly one of the classic bedtime books for infants, and 12 years or so ago, I must have read it at least 100 times to my son, who is now 13.  This diary is not going to be a review of Goodnight Bush.  It is, rather a tribute from a proud parent to my politically aware son, praise for his equally aware friend, and a call to use this deceptively simple device as a way to use humor to truly teach our children what went wrong during the last 8 years, and what we can do about it.

This Diary late, but I just couldn't believe my ears.

On Wednesday Night, I was watching The Verdict with Dan Abrams, when Brad Blakeman(sp?), Abrams's favorite Republican punching bag, said something that made it clear exactly why the Bush Administration feels so free to treat the Justice department as their own personal fiefdom.

Abrams did not call him on it, so I wrote the show.  I thought about cross-posting the E-mail here, but frankly, I thought I might have misheard.  Even after all these years, I find the venality and stupidity of the current crop of Republicans to be beyond belief.

I was clearly not the only one to note this, as last night, Abrams featured this mistake in his P.O.ed section, apologizing for not calling Blakeman out on it the prior night.  (I'd love to link to this or the original video or transcript, but I can't find it on the MSNBC website)

What was the mistake, and what is its larger meaning?  Below the break.

In yesterday's post, I noted how the Assemblies of God are rallying around Kenneth Copeland's latest attempt to derail Sen. Chuck Grassley's investigation of nonprofit groups.

There's a very valid reason why the Assemblies may be quite concerned, should Congressional attention focus on them.

Namely...not only is illegal electioneering rife within the denomination, but there is some troubling evidence to suggest that violations may be crossing over into direct contributions to Assemblies-favoured candidates--possibly the most blatant 501(c)3 violations ever documented.

People who've followed the hijinks of the Assemblies of God in regards to televangelist scandals--and the history of televangelism, for that matter--know that the denomination has a long association with televangelism--and as the Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard scandals have shown, often a quite unsavoury one at that.

So today's news that the Assemblies are hip-deep in the latest televangelist scandal is no shocker--the thing is, they may have tangled themselves rather deep, as the latest association is with an explicit defense of Kenneth Copeland--one of six televangelists targeted in a Congressional investigation.

Even worse, the Assemblies are now trying to use the very scandal as a wrecking-ball to knock down the separation of church and state and scuttle all attempts to require accountability.

In yesterday's post on a case of an ambulance driver's "moral refusal" of taking a woman in severe pain to a women's clinic, a frequent criticism came up: "But wouldn't the EMT get in trouble if she died?  Surely they could revoke his license?"

This, sadly, can no longer be assumed.  In at least one state--Mississippi--the scenario of an EMT conducting a "moral refusal", the woman dying as a result, and the EMT getting off scot free is an unfortunate possibility.

Even worse, Mississippi's law is now considered a model "moral refusal" statute--as we'll see below.

In Part 2 of the miniseries which we began yesterday, we discuss how "moral refusal" clauses are increasingly going far beyond just doctors and pharmacists, and are now extending to the most basic thing we associate with healthcare--the trip in the ambulance to have emergency surgery.

Yes, you're reading this right--dominionist ambulance drivers are now refusing to take people to women's clinics just because the woman needs a medically necessary abortion.

And at the end of the post--because I never like to just bring bad news without discussing ways to fix what's broken--I present some possible solutions to the problem of "moral refusal".

I have written rather extensively on Talk to Action regarding dominionists and reproductive health--one of the larger issues being the spread of so-called "moral refusal" clauses that do not just ban medical abortion but go towards banning the pill and even go so far as refusing reproductive health services to LGBT people and refusing prescriptions outright--including for antibiotics and prenatal vitamins--because they came from a women's clinic.

Now, in an end-run against "must dispense or refer" laws in several states, dominionists are now expanding the large "parallel economy" to a new area--namely, the dominionist-run pharmacy not providing contraceptives at all...and there are disturbing indications that a prediction I made re broad "moral refusal" clauses may have come to pass.

Barack Obama has recently announced a new initiative to reach out to non-dominionist evangelicals.  It is a wonderful idea in practice.

Unfortunately--partly due to neopente dominionists--Barack's initiative may have a wee bit of a naming problem.

Whilst the term "Joshua Generation" has been used in African-American churches to denote the generation of people to bring social justice (much as "Moses Generation" was used for the Freedom Riders), "Joshua Generation" unfortunately has a very different connotation outside of the African-American church community...and one which Barack Obama will likely not want to be associated with.

Over the past few days, we've gone over a history of dominionist prosyletisation efforts during the Gulf War and how they are endangering not only Christians but our own military to boot.

Today, we get into the real heart of why some of us are so worried about the "God Warrior" tendencies in neopentecostal dominionist groups.

Everyone who hasn't been completely isolated from the outside world knows by now about the revelations of torture and human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other facilities used for "extraordinary rendition" (or, more properly, gulags).

Not so well publicised is the fact that the very denomination responsible for the "Teen Challenge" chain of "kiddie gulags" is in fact at the very core of the torture scandals--and that the Assemblies' own chaplains were in fact ringleaders of torture.

As amazing as it sounds, dominionists may in fact be fomenting terrorism--not just the domestic terrorism like bombings of women's clinics we normally associate, but the very "Islamist terror bombings" that the GOP loves to use to frighten America into voting a red ticket.

We detailed yesterday on how Christians in Iraq (including communities literally founded by the apostle Thomas) have been targeted due to aggressive prosyletisation by dominionist "missionary" groups; today, we focus on how our soldiers are targeted and becoming targets due to the actions of dominionists...and how some of the very folks targeting both our nation's fighting folks and Iraqis are essentially dominionist rogue agents in the US military's chaplaincy.

The recent incident where a Marine was recently found distributing "Bible coins" promoted by a fundamentalist "Bible church" is, sad to say, far from the first incident of overt prosyletisation in Iraq.

The truth is, this sort of thing has been going on literally since Gulf War I, and ramped up in Gulf War II--and, ironically, has directly threatened the future existence of two of the oldest Christian churches in the world--churches that can literally trace their founding to one of the Twelve Apostles.  Even more disturbingly, most of the worst prosyletisation has been with civilian dominionist groups that target both Iraqi citizens and US military personnel.

We detail the history of dominionist "missionary" efforts in Iraq, and the "dry run" in Lebanon, below.

In what is--sadly--yet another case of the extent of which blatant prosyletisation is tolerated in the modern US military, a recent incident where members of the US Marine Corps were handing out coins to persons in Fallujah with John 3:16 on one side and "where will you spend eternity?" on the other shows that dominionism can even be potentially a risk to national security.

One thing that has not yet been revealed in this incident--which has already led to the suspension of at least one Marine--is  the source of the coins, a fundamentalist "Bible church" which increasingly has embraced both war imagery--and America's fighting men.

There is being quite a lot of shock posted on a recent statement that Mike Huckabee made here in Louisville a few hours ago at the NRA conference--namely, Huck made a comment on how a supposed sound was Barack Obama ducking in an attempt to keep from being shot at.

For some of us--especially those of us who have followed Huckabee's extensive links with the highly militaristic "Joel's Army"/"Joshua Generation" neopente dominionist movement--this is but the latest and one of the more blatant of his statements of this type, and probably not even the most extreme of them.

In today's special edition post, we give a bit of history on this.

One question that was frequently asked in my series involving Matt Taibbi's infiltration of John Hagee's church (and the chunderfest resulting)--how could Matt Taibbi start developing what is known in exit-counseling as a cultic personality in just three days?  

Well, one particular tool used in the "toolkit of coercion" of neopente dominionist groups in particular is the use of cell churches--and today, we go into depth into a study that shows the actual process of development of a "cultic personality".

So, we've heard all of the media bashing and all of the complaints from voters about not knowing Senator Obama.  For as much as Senator Clinton has been around, how much do we really know about the skeletons that are sitting around in the closet just waiting for the GOP to pounce on them.

Certainly the latest fiasco has hurt Senator Obama, we'd be foolish to think that it wouldn't have some impact.

What disturbs me so much about this is the 'guilt by association' that is supposedly fueling the folks who are abandoning Senator Obama for Senator Clinton.  Let's talk about some 'association' for Senator Clinton.

Why are these two words eternally forbidden in proper conversation between Democrats, especially the Democratic Presidential nominees of 2008?

If HRC feels the need to manufacture false controversy out of every possible half assed questionable thing in Senator Obama’s past under the guise of ‘that’s what the Republicans will do in November’ - why does she and her campaign live in denial over the full impact of Monica Lewinsky?

until Hillary Clinton is out of the Democratic Primary Process.

What do I mean?  Read the following:

We must have our eyes WIDE OPEN, wit in check, and counter punches ready for November.

While many are worried, or not worried (I am not) about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the GOP should be deathly worried about the MSNBC/Wall Street Journal Poll.

Bush is the albatross, the elephant in the room, the oxygen sucker for the GOP and John McCain.

As long as McCain continues to promote, pimp, pump Bush's agenda, we are looking at a third term of George W. Bush.  In November, this election will be about CHANGE, because the public will demand it.

The Republican Party must stand by their record of the past eight years.

Amazingly, the overwhelmingly toothless U.S. Senate Ethics Committee deigned to administer a mild rebuke to Sen. Pete Domenici for the "appearance of impropriety" in connection with his call to former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias demanding information about the timing of pending corruption indictments. The Ethics Committee has been mostly comatose for a number of years, reportedly due to an informal, mutual agreement between Dems and Repubs to refrain from taking any meaningful action on ethics complaints against Senators of one another's parties. Foxes guarding the henhouse and all that. One hand washes the other.

The Ethics Committee issued a three-page letter yesterday "admonishing" Domenici but claiming there was no "substantial evidence" of purposeful wrongdoing on his part and recommending no punishment for the infraction.