The great Texas progressive Jim Hightower has occasionally been urged to moderate his insistence on fundamental change. His response is a classic of disdain: "The only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos." As it writes its 2008 platform, the Democratic Party should remember Hightower's wisdom. This is no time to be going backward, either on principle or as a tactical concession.

Everybody considers Barack Obama through the self-reflective prism of his blackness while pretending to ignore the fact that Obama is black. White Democratic primary voters made all manner of unsupported assumptions about Obama based largely on his skin. There was absolutely no indication that he was a progressive true believer.

I used to electronically converse with a born again Christian who used a retrospective definition of "Christian." In his view, people who did bad things could never be Christians, because Christians don't do bad things. That little loop of illogic seems to run deep through right wingers, whether they be Christian or other. So let's talk about good old Mr. Adkisson, who just went berserk in that Unitarian Universalist (UU) church in Tennessee.

The old "what's in a name" question occurred to me as I read a recent bylined piece from Reuters bearing the headline "Majority of economists see McCain better for stocks: poll." Wow. "The majority of economists" out of the tons of "economists" in America, of every stripe and persuasion.

Yeah, right. Only if you make a double misrepresentation about who was polled.

Being a Palmetto state liberal doesn't come easy; among such things you wish were different was that we still had our beloved Senator "Fritz" Hollings back in his office. He was interviewed the other night on PBS' Bill Moyers Journal, and what he said didn't surprise nor shock me.

But, I damned near vomited all the same...

You can call this trivial and nitpicking if you want, but....the "John McCain isn't old" campaign seems to be in full swing, in that barely competent McCain campaign way. BuzzFlash has a "what's your caption" piecebased on John McCain's Facebook picture showing a tall slender John McCain. It's so obviously off that I felt compelled to check to make sure the photo really is from McCain's Facebook page; it is.

What's with the WaPo this time, I have to wonder?

Hmm, could it be another snow job?

That certainly appears to be the case based on a CBS investigation of at least one area in Iraq: an expensive military effort to minimize US casualties from IEDs.

I've complained before about the Pope's carefully tailored apology for the abuse of children by Catholic priests. It's good to know the Pope pays no attention to me--he just reiterated the same limited apology which puts all the wrong on the priests who directly committed the abuse, whitewashing the church bureaucracy that fostered it and allowed it to continue so much longer than it otherwise could have.

In keeping with the religious right's concept of "The birth, the whole birth, and nothing but the birth," the pro-birth forces are out in force, singing the praises of the Department of Health and Human Services proposed rule to define various methods of contraception as "abortion."

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