At the YKos Sunday morning service, Pastordan encouraged us to reach for the spark or soul within our adversaries, and engage with them.  Shortly after the service, I had an opportunity to practice what he preached, and I failed.

During the Sunday Blogger's Brunch, Sergeant Aguina sat next to me at my table.  And I did not engage.

If Republicans are going to persist in supporting a "war president", and insist that criticism of the president during a time of war hurts America, perhaps Democrats can look towards Great Britain and counter by promoting a candidate for "Law and order President".

Our allies must be learning that, if they want to pursue counterterrorism investigations, that they have to be careful what to tell the Americans, who are establishing a record for prematurely publicising these investigations for political gain.

Wherein the challenger keeps getting his ass kicked, and ignores the pleads to "stay down!"

YouTube video

Would the drink-sipping guy represent Lieberman's Republican backers?  "He won the battle, not the war...right beside ya buddy...heh heh heh, let's go kid..."

As for his girlfriend Sharisse...

New York State's highest court is supposed to rule today on whether the state should recognize same-sex marriage.  

I've been exasperated for quite a while by debates on the issue of same-sex marriage, because there's a key question that I am not seeing being addressed, and I think it's the elephant in the room.

Why does the State recognize marriage as a legal institution?

The title of Ron Suskind's latest book, "The One Percent Doctrine", arises from this statement by Dick Cheney (via wikipedia):

If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.

What if this doctrine were applied to other, much more likely, scenarios?

I just came across this Rolling Stone article.  I hadn't realized the stop-loss program had reached such a point:

The latest Klein article on NoLogo.com,The Mother of All Anti-War Forces, suggests that the most important "Parental Demographic" category in the election won't be Soccer Moms, or NASCAR dads, but Grieving Parents of Soldiers:

I was just thinking....Bush is fond of referring to Saddam as a "madman".  I wonder if Saddam's lawyer could collect statements from various world leaders and use them to help support an insanity plea :)

"Well, if Bush says he's a madman, it must be true!"

On a more serious note: what is the evidence that Saddam is mentally unstable?  As opposed to just cruel, evil or whatever....

Naomi Klein says in her June 15 article that, if Stephen harper is elected PM and sends troops to join the "coalition of the willing", Canadians at home and abroad will become targets.

All the Reagan retrospectives reminded me of this.  I used to work with a bunch of ditto-heads, and one of them had a rationale for proclaiming "ketchup is a vegetable".  The argument was that it had nothing to do with nutrition, but that by categorizing ketchup as a vegetable, the government could supply the schools with cheaper surplus ketchup.

This smells beyond fishy, but I like to check things out before dismissing them offhand.  Can anyone point me to some primary sources that would debunk this?