I don't care much about polls showing a slight upturn by McSame in some states. All I need to know about the weaknesses of the right, given the right's fear of an Obama victory, are to found in such rantings as this, by CNN's resident idiot (well, I should say, one of their many resident idiots) Glenn Beck.

Beck now is whining about the minutia of coverage of Obama's campaign, that is, of facts ranging from the trivial (e.g., how often Barack exercises at the gym) to the truly significant (e.g., Obama's current and ongoing foreign policy trip).

I'd thus like to ask Glenn Beck if I can have some cheese to go with the whine.

All I can say, as an educator and as one concerned with freedom of speech and belief, is yikes! This is my response to a report, in Slate, on the biased language of Saudi textbooks.

This is partially paid for by petrodollars each time we used petrolium.

While flip-flopping McCain will probably flip-flop away from his earlier position that the U.S, should join the International Criminal Court, which would make it much easier to see war criminals from the U.s., such as members of the Bush Administration, brought to justice, the U.S. should have as one of its major foreign policy goals, the joining of this court, ideally within months of the November elections. It then needs to prepare to hand over a number of its likely war criminals for prosecution.

To me, there is no schadenfreude quite like the schadenfreude of seeing right wingers piss all over each other, or over themselves, as the illusion of their moral and intellectual superiority gets shattered. Such is the case with the shattering of the Reagan stamp of approval for McCain, given Nancy Reagan's siding with McCain's poorly treated ex-wife. Further delights are to be had in examining, up close, the realization, by the public, of the many hypocrisies to be found here.

Short diary here.

MSNBC is reporting that Rove, as predicted, is refusing to testify before congress, and has thus "defied a congressional subpoena to testify Thursday about allegations of political pressure at the Justice Department."

This will be a very short diary, mainly to ask a question; now that Congress has sold us out and upheld a trampling upon the Bill of Rights, where, exactly, do we go from here?

Some interest and revealing news: Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell, who presided over the wedding of Jenna Bush and Henry Hager, and who introduced President Bush at the 2000 Republican National Convention, has come out as supporting Barack Obama.

This sort of  story, currently running on CNN's website - an experienced and seemingly enlightened teacher being punished by a bunch of prudish, power hungry, yokels - never fails to make me both angry and queasy. It calls to mind other such censorious and irrational cases as the Scopes trial, the burning of Beatles albums by Southern evangelicals in the 60s, and the attempts to keep certain reading materials out of the hands of young people; in fact, that is what this is. I get outraged by seeing idiot mobs getting away with such abuses of power.

Part of the reason for dumbing down in our culture has to do with power being placed in the hands of such entities as the Perry Township School Board, as expressed by Jon Baily, its pasty faced, censorship-legitimizing attorney, and of other such unenlghtened boards across the country. My sympatheties here are absolutely with Connie Heermann and her students. She is clearly a woman of character and integrity, and this school probably doesn't deserve her. I hope that her union will continue to fight for her.

This will be a relatively short diary, one I will attempt to expand upon soon, but I just wanted people to be aware of the existence of the for-profit, Christian right/GOP front media conglomerate, Salem Communications. It's employee list reads like a who's who of some of the best known stars of the far right: Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham and Dennis Miller. And it's founders, Stuart Epperson and Edward Atsinger III, have between them, donated $100,000 to the Bush presidential reelection campaign and $780,000 to the 2000 "California Defense of Marriage Act" (Proposition 22) ballot measure.

Beware these relatively unknown but well financed and influential propagandists for the far right!

There has been quite a lot of critical commentary, here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, about what appears to be Barack Obama's move to the political center, now that the general election season has begun. While it may be a bit hard to stomach seeing Obama offering his qualified qualified support for the death penalty, seeing him have his own  Sister Souljah moment, and his going against his own better judgement on FISA, to me, none of this suggests that Obama has become a Blue Dog or a DLC'er; it's simply smart politics.

This is, of course, not to say that I am happy with the idea of granting immunity to telecom companies. About this, I am deeply unhappy. And that unhappiness is directed primarily at the leadership of the Democratic Party. That means you, Nancy, Steney, Harry and company.

Here's Antonin Scalia, asshole supreme and total Bush/GOP partisan: "At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield." This was a statement in his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, the case that decided that Guantanamo detainees have some constitutional rights.

And here is a retort: False, you lying sack of shit and pathetically unqualified Supreme Court hack!

Only a partisan hack like Scalia would play the fear card by announcing, as he did, that the majority's decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," and only a partisan hack would cite, as Scalia did, testimony that originated with a party in the case before him, i.e., the administration's false claims, as an authoritative source.

I was inspired to write this diary after buying a button this weekend.

Here is a story that strikes me as the very embodiment of the arrogance and inherent idiocy of Bush's nearly eight years of mangled, mismanaged, foreign policy. It is a story that follows on the heels of repeated acts of desecration by U.S. troops toward Islamic objects in Iraq. It is a story with plenty of blame to go around. And it underscores the kind of overly heated political environment of the Middle East into which the next president will be forced to wade.

Two of the Bush-McCain-Lieberman constituencies - the Israeli right wing (unconditionally supported by US policies up to this point) and evangelical Christianity - clashing in the Holy Land. Imagine that!

Some great news. Local Republicans in NY's 19th District have now tapped wingnut Keiran Michael Lalor to take on John Hall in November, with the likelihood of a sweeping win by Hall in this moderate, somewhat liberal, and firmly Democratic leaning district. This is looking like a safe seat for the Democrats.

"They will appoint to the federal bench judges who are intent on achieving political changes that the American people cannot be convinced to accept through the election of their representatives.

I intend to nominate judges who have proven themselves worthy of our trust that they take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people's elected representatives, judges of the character and quality of Justices Roberts and Alito, judges who can be relied upon to respect the values of the people whose rights, laws and property they are sworn to defend."

From John McCain's CPAC Speech February 07, 2008

While many of us can easily point to some very specific instances of the Clinton campaign playing the race card or the victim card so as to either create divisions among the electorate or to garner sympathy votes for Hillary, I am hard pressed to find equal counter examples of expicit acts of sexism by Obama, or members of his campaign. That is not to say that there has been no sexism in this election cycle, but any such sexism has come from either corporate media, or by Republican bigots.

So to those - such as Geraldine Ferraro - accusing Obama of sexism, and threatening not to vote for him in November out of spite, I say to them, put up or STFU. Offer specific evidence of these charges of bigotry, or back away from them.

Last week, I diaried here on the coming coordinated attempted swiftboating of Obama by Republicans, with a message of Obama's supposed "softness" on security issues. Such swiftboating is also, currently, being echoed by Hillary's campaign, in her desparate attempt to wrest the nomination away from Barack. Already, then, we are seeing this smear campaign by, among others, unindicted political criminal, Karl Rove, one of the leakers against Valerie Plame's covert CIA status and an architect of the political firings at the Justice Dept, and also - it should be added - a source of authority by Hillary. Of course, Hillary also has taken, in the past, political advice from this man.

After Tuesday night's win for Hillary in West Virginia, exit polls suggested that both race/Wright (i.e., racism) and jobs/the economy/a gas price rebate (i.e., populism) were factors. While an interesting, and I believe insightful, diary here, which uses exit polling data so as to rank order states in terms of their racism, there may be more to the story than simply race; when racism and populism intersect, it is often hard to know how to sort things out.