I think this might qualify as unreservedly good news. NARAL, Pro-Choice America, a leading abortion rights advocacy organization that has supported rival Hillary Rodham Clinton throughout her political career, has seen the light and is endorsing Barack Obama.

Starting right now I'm going to be tracking John McCain's twisting in the wind attempts to destroy the Democratic candidate. I will be doing this, naturally, with utter civility and tack. When occasion calls, I may verbally break his fucking kneecaps with a baseball bat, but for the most part, I want to remain professional objective and, as they say, 'above the fray'...so herewith is the first in the series.

Thoughtfully I have called it: John McCain, That Motherfucking Liar:

From the NY Times

Ed Schultz, a liberal talk show host based in Fargo, N.D.  called Senator John McCain "a warmonger." at an Obama rally recently. The RNC, as usual, blind as the proverbial bat didn't understand why John "100 Years war" McCain might be called a "war monger" and so demanded an apology.

Here's a good, clear answer to Republicans everywhere:

Aside from organizing the euphemistically named "National Smokers Alliance" used as a bludgeon to defeat EPA second hand smoke regulations (for which Burson-Marsteller was paid a handsome 4 million big ones), here's a quick run down on Mark Penn and where his clients are:

In February 2008, the nuclear company Exelon paid Burson-Marsteller $230,627.05, coded as "public affairs."

In April 2005, Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter reported that Burson-Marsteller had joined with Quinn Gillespie & Associates to launch 360 Advantage, a public affairs shop filled with "key players in George W. Bush's successful presidential campaigns."

Burson-Marsteller has been hired by the two firms representing PMC Blackwater USA, McDermott Will & Emery and Crowell & Moring, to help with the account.

And of course, JeddReport tells us that Charlie Black, John McCain's top adviser, is chairman of BKSH, the DC-based lobbying subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller -- of which Mark Penn is CEO.

Not sick yet? Don't worry...we're just beginning.

Al Rodgers has nice diary up about the recent brouhaha over Hillary's interview with arch-enemy Scaife. But I think the more appropriate title isn't 'Sleeping with the enemy'--I suspect Hillary doesn't do much of that. The more correct title I believe is Praying with the Enemy -- which Hillary has done for quite some time.

This diary is an effort at brainstorming a response to the coming Rightwing meme.

You can find a whiff of it here fronted this Sunday am on MSNBC:

Obama may face grilling on patriotism
No flag pin, no hand over his heart: Is he exposed?

From MSNBC

The Pentagon on Friday tried to cast doubt on an account of military equipment shortages mentioned by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whose campaign team stood by the story.

In a debate with rival Hillary Clinton on Thursday evening, Obama said he had heard from an Army captain who served in Afghanistan and whose unit did not have enough ammunition or vehicles.

Obama said it was easier for the troops to capture weapons from Taliban militants than it was "to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief," President Bush.

This is utterly whacked:

VA State senators voted to defeat a bill that would have required everyone undergo a background check when they purchase a firearm at a gun show. The legislation, backed by families of the Virginia Tech shooting victims, was to close a loophole that allows criminals and the mentally ill to buy firearms at gun shows without a background check.

Can't say for sure, but maybe those State Senators felt a bit of pressure from all the folks I saw in the lobby of the General Assembly building wearing these ridiculous red stickers reading: "Guns Save Lives"

About 2005, I had to discontinue an ongoing exchange with some intellectually dishonest or just flat stupid conservatives/libertarians. After the debacle of Katrina and after the debacle of the Iraq war they still defended the Bush administration and even went so far as to refuse to acknowledge that the administration had lied us into war.

One of the group, who fancied himself especially well read, said "the jury is still out on that." ...circa 2005.

Turns out, the jury was in, afterall.

Luckily, today thanks to an exhaustive study by the Center for Public Integrity detailing the lies of this administration, we are one step closer to empirically asserting what everyone surmised with half a brain 5 years ago.  

I have to admit to a little queasy schaudenfreude at this spectacle:
(from Calculated Risk)

"Part of one of the challenges is, and we've mentioned this before, a lot of this current losses have been coming out of California and it's -- they've been from people that have otherwise had the capacity to pay, but have basically just decided not to because they feel like they've lost equity, value in their properties, and so in a way, we may have -- it's hard to know right now, but we may have seen somewhat of an acceleration problem loans as people have reached that conclusion and we're just going to have to see how the patterns unfold here."

Now that I have your attention, let's talk about something incredibly more important than Obama, Hillary or Edwards. Don't worry, they'll still be there, warts and all when you finish this.

So what's so important? Whales. That's right. We've stopped exterminating them, but the Japanese apparently haven't.

That quote comes direct from Allen Raymond's new tell-all book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative.

In it, according to Josh Marshall at TPM, "upon a limited initial perusal, the normally low-key and laconic Paul Kiel concludes that it is 'awesome.' So that's saying a lot."

Today is December 10, 2007, nearly 26 years ago on December 10, 1981, a massacre occured in the small El Salvadoran hamlet of El Mozote.  Its inhabitants were systematically exterminated by the Atlacatl battalion, a U.S. trained counterinsurgency force. From the beginning, Monterrosa, their U.S. Special Forces trained commander, worked to give his new force a mística -- a mystique.

According to Mark Danner of the New Yorker, the men of the Atlacatl

celebrated their graduation from training by collecting all the dead animals they could find off the roads -- dogs, vultures, anything – and boiled them together into a bloody soup. They chugged it down. Then they stood at rigid attention and sang, full-throated, the unit's theme song, "Somos Guerreros":
We are warriors!
Warriors all!
We are going forth to kill
A mountain of terrorists

Only, they mistook at least 733 civilians as ‘terrorists’ on
December 10, 1981. And they  slaughtered them all.

What changed in the US with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences -- Al Gore

Years from now I suspect historians will use hurricane Katrina as the demarcation point for our decline.

But Katrina might be overly dramatic. Maybe those future historians should pay more attention to cities like Philadelphia. That mid-size city heralds how the end will likely look for many Americans. I suspect we'll not go out with a big wind & rain bang: but a Hobbesian whimper.

So here's a confession. This is the first Democratic debate of this primary season I've actually watched in entirety. Most the other ones were more or less painful, but for whatever reason seemed less significant...What made this especially compelling was the audience questions in the last half of the debate.

You'll notice that all the pundits are quoting the first half of the debate.

There's a reason for that.

David Brooks has his undies in a bunch. Noted economic radical (and probably communist!) Paul Krugman is calling Ronald Reagan a racist! How dare he?

... still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

Below the fold, why Brooks is full of it.

Hillary Clinton's campaign has made a great deal of headway in the run up to the primaries with their 'inevitability' meme.

And for months, the polls seemed to swing her way, at least with a broadly uninformed and largely disinteresed public.

But come late October, early November as folks start absorbing the candidate, moving beyond simple name recognition to actual positions and principles, those polls are tightening, and not in a way that's necessarily good for the Clinton camp.

Designating the Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard and four state-owned Iranian banks as supporters of terrorism gives Bush the cover he needs to declare unilateral war against Iran.

This is simple. The Bush administration has proven itself incapable of rational diplomacy to begin with. They've been foaming at the mouth to go to war with Iran for at least a year. Supporters of Kyl-Lieberman just provided them with the cover. But that's not all...