Young Professionals for McCain Chicago Bar Crawl

A great prank has been pulled on the Illinois Republicans. Check it out.

Is Ignorance Republican Party Policy?

Check out Paul Krugman's column in this morning's New York Times:

...know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

I guess I am a little more optimistic than Paul Krugman. He thinks this appeal to ignorance and stupidity may well win for John McCain. I have hopes that the images of people dying in the aftermath of Katrina because the government was not there when they needed it had enough of an effect that when people go into that voting booth they will vote as if their lives depended on having competent, thinking people in the federal government.

Sunrise on the river

Here is a picture I took on an early morning walk on the bike trail along the Mississippi near Sylvan Slough and the I Wireless Center in Moline.

Click on the picture to see it full sized.

Early morning excitement in Moline

Updated below
A rather unusual thing just happened to me and my wife. It was about 6:10 am and we were near the end of our early morning walk, walking down the usually very quiet 1400 block of 18th Avenue in Moline. Two windowless vans, a white pickup and a SUV pulled up to the curb just ahead of us. About 8 men in full military gear including helmets and automatic weapons and another two men wearing bulletproof vests but no helmets or rifles, jumped out of the vehicles and started trotting toward a house just ahead of us. We had already decided to quickly turn around and head in the other direction when one of the men without a helmet and rifle suggested, with a smile, that we do exactly that. We walked quickly away but after getting a couple of hundred feet away stopped to watch and see what would happen. The group of men went up to the door of a very normal looking house in the middle of the block, shouting “Police” and “Search Warrant.” We heard a woman’s voice shouting “No” from inside. About 3 of the men entered the house while the others stood around in a group by the street. I didn’t get my camera out quick enough to catch that action but this is what it looked like just after the some of the officers entered the house while the others waited in front.

[Click on picture to see it full sized.]

After a few minutes there must have been some communication from inside the house because the group outside visibly relaxed and started smiling and joking around. One of the men who had been inside the house came out and talked with the man in the in the picture in the blue tshirt. Nothing much seemed to be happening at that point and we had to get going so we continued our walk.

Does anyone know whose these guys were? Does the Moline Police Dept has a SWAT team?

Update Aug 8, 2008
On this morning's walk I met a fellow who recognized me and my wife from having seen us watching the assault weapon raid yesterday. He lives next door to the targeted house and told us he had come out on his porch to watch the proceedings. He told us that the fellow the police wanted to talk to came home while the police were there, they talked to him but did not arrest him. Huh? So what was that all about anyway? I asked him who the guys with the automatic weapons were and he said he recognized some of them from his national guard unit. So the guys in full military gear, helmets and assault weapons were not Moline Police? "Not all of them. It must have been a combined operation," he told me.
So how would you like it if a bunch of guys in full military gear came to your neighborhood just to ask one of your neighbors some questions?

"It's like they take pride in being ignorant"

Barack Obama talks about the Republican reaction to his suggestion that if everyone inflated their tires to the proper level it would save more oil than would be found in all the drilling in currently restricted areas that McCain has proposed.

I want to make a prediction about this. I don't know any more about this issue than what I read, see and hear in the news and on the internet, so I might be proved wrong here but I bet that the conservatives have reacted to this issue totally from their guts, before receiving any focus group or polling data on it. I predict that in a few days or weeks, their experts are going to be telling them to drop the whole thing like a hot potato.

One thing we have learned about conservatives during the last 8 years is that they think the idea of taking steps to use less energy, especially as an alternative to going out and finding more of it, is just totally wrong - weak, unmanly, stupid and (in the words of Newt Gingrich) loony tunes. But the vast majority of Americans who are not conservatives are environmentalists (to varying degrees) and are quite open to the idea of conserving and using less energy. Also most Americans hate waste and love efficiency -- conservatives, not so much.

So watch and see over the next few weeks and see if I am right. I predict that a month from now Republicans will be claiming they are the ones who advocated filling your tires and they gave out tire gauges to prove what good environmentalists they are.

Get your free tire gauge

I don't know about you but if a supporter of John McCain offers me a free tire gauge I'm going to take it. I gather their purpose in handing them out is to try to convince people that properly inflated tires is the only idea Barack Obama has about energy, or something. Seems sort of stretch to me since the facts about Obama's energy plan are so readily available, for example here, on the official Obama campaign web site. But anyway, thanks in advance for the tire gauges, guys.

Is Obama “The One?”

You may have already known this but I have just recently become aware that at least some of the Fundamentalist Christians who think the Book of Revelation was a prophecy about things that will happen in our lifetime, the "Left Behind" readers who think that the Rapture is near, think Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ. For a sample of that kind of thinking see here and here and here and here. Now that I have thought about this for a little while I realize that this is actually more good news for Obama's chances of being elected.

After all, these people are strong political supporters of Israel's military hardliners because the extension of Israel's borders through military means is necessary, in their view, to bring about the Rapture. The election of the Anti-Christ is just as necessary to set this all in motion as is the reestablishment of the State of Israel. To set the stage for Christ's return surely these people must be planning to vote for Barack Obama!

(Just for the record: I do not believe that the Book of Revelation was intended by its author to be interpreted as prophecy of things to happen thousands of years in the future. The book was about things the author thought had already happened and were going to happen in his lifetime. The fact that the things described did not happen then, at least if you interpret the text literally, does not mean that it was therefore a prophecy of the distant future.)

(I also do not believe that Obama is presenting himself as any sort of savior. If you actually listen to what he says he never takes personal credit for the great changes he hopes will happen. If some people seem to be reacting to Obama as a celebrity rather than as a politician with policy proposals and political positions then that just shows how silly they are.)

Anthrax case solved?

I have little interest in conspiracy theories but I hate the idea of finding out later that I was being lied to and there were obvious clues at the time that I could have picked up on but did not. The current push by the MSM (main-stream media) to present the anthrax attacks of 2001, a couple of weeks after 9/11, as being the work of one geeky scientist while completely ignoring what was being said about those attacks at the time is setting off alarm bells in my head as it should in yours also.

As reported by Glenn Greenwald:

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

If the attacks were the work of one weird guy who were all those "well-placed" sources who were telling lies to ABC? If investigators are really trying to figure out who was responsible for the attacks why are they not investigating that part of the story? Why isn't ABC embarrassed about having reporting lies? Why are the news stories focusing almost totally on the personality of the alleged attacker and completely ignoring how the attacks were used as justification for the invasion of Iraq?

Courage required

Last Sunday, 27 July 2008, two people were killed and six injured because of the church they attended, the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. The accused gunman, Jim D. Adkisson, left a note suggesting that he targeted the church because of its liberal policies including its acceptance of gays. The note indicated that Adkisson intended to keep shooting, killing many people, until the police showed up and killed him. Instead he only fired three times before members of the congregation tackled him, holding him until police arrived.

How much courage does it require to attend your church? Are books being written advocating that people with your views be attacked with baseball bats? Are millions of radio show listeners being told daily that policies that your church has, such as its attitudes towards gays, lesbians and transsexuals, are ruining the country?

Tomorrow, August 3, here in the Quad Cities the Davenport Unitarian Church will be holding a special service of healing and remembrance for the shootings at Knoxville at 10 am. All are welcome. If you are not near the Quad Cities I imagine you might be able to find a special service at a Unitarian-Universalist church near you. Those with sufficient courage should attend.

The “popular” candidate

The McCain Campaign is now running ads attacking Barack Obama for being popular. The suggestion that someone should be resented simply for being popular reminds me of junior high and high school, as I suppose it does most of you. But it also stirs up childhood memories for me of an elderly relative that I imagine are not so universal.

I was a child and he was an old man. He had been a Protestant minister his whole life and not a particularly successful one. Even his wife and children admitted that he needlessly offended and insulted people, apparently through an inability to understand what others would take offense at (or perhaps an obstinate refusal to care.) As a result he never stayed for very long at one church and was never promoted to larger churches or greater responsibility. By the end of his ministerial career, when I knew him, he had developed a scorn for successful ministers and churches with large congregations. He would call someone a "popular minister" as if he were calling them a bad name, full of disdain and disapproval. He would imply that all "popular" ministers were lacking in conviction and principle, and that ministers who were focusing on what God wanted were never "popular."

That is how I see John McCain now, as a result of these ads. A bitter old man, like my elderly retired minister relative, railing at those younger, better-looking people who know what to say and how to carry themselves so that most people like them. I wonder if they are going to start referring to Obama, with disdain and scorn, as the "popular candidate," in the same way my relative did "popular ministers?"

Crazy ideas

There has been a lot of talk in the Main-Stream Media (MSM) and by Republican politicians like John McCain that tries to portray Israeli and/or American air strikes on Iran's nuclear sites before January as inevitable or even desirable. Among the most frightening was this recent New York Times op-ed piece by Benny Morris

Israel will almost surely attack Iran's nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country's nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

These statements seem to presuppose that we have forgotten the NIE report that states Iran is many years away from having nuclear weapons. In case you had forgotten, something these people seem to be counting on, a Dec 3, 2007 article in the New York Times, reported that the National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies:

concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

Furthermore, since there are international nuclear inspectors in Iran, to restart their nuclear program Iran would first need to kick the inspectors out, at which very pubic and noticeable point they would still be years away from having a nuclear weapon.

Far from making the world safer, airstrikes by the United States or Israel against Iran would be an unmitigated disaster, most immediately for the Iranian people but also for the Israelis and the Middle East as a whole. Talk of bombing Iran, a country which has attacked no other country for thousands of years, is absolutely crazy and by rights anyone who advocates such ideas should immediately lose all credibility and influence. Instead we have the "paper or record" publishing such notions and a major political party is about to nominate as its candidate for president a man who jokes about bomb, bomb, bombing Iran.

God says, “I sent a helicopter…”

You have probably heard this story. I found the following version of it on the web related by Dr. Robert A. Schuller during an interview:

…It's like the joke about the man who has been notified that his house is going to be flooded and he needs to get out of the house. He says no I don't have to, God is going to take care of me. Then the flood starts to rise and a sheriff comes along and tells him to get out. The man says no, God is going to save me. So, the floods continue to rise, and he climbs on top of the house. A boat comes along and he's told to climb into the boat. He says, no, no , God is going to save me. Finally, a helicopter comes along and they lower the net to rescue him. The man says, no, no, God is going to save me! Well, the man drowns and goes to heaven. When he gets to heaven he says to God, "why didn't you save me?" God says, "I sent the sheriff, I sent a boat, I sent a helicopter, what more did you want me to do?"

I thought of this story when I recently saw a television program about medical researchers who had dedicated themselves to curing paralyzing spinal cord injuries. One of the researchers had a daughter who was in a wheel chair, paralyzed from the chest down after breaking her neck in a diving accident. They thought therapies involving stem cells were the most promising line of research, but were forced to spend a great deal of time away from the laboratory doing education and public relations, trying to overcome religious objections that impeded their work.

If the first version of the story is valid theology surely the following is equally valid :

A vigorous, intelligent and attractive young man breaks his neck in a horse-riding accident and becomes a paraplegic. During the following 10 years many medical researchers work on promising therapies for healing spinal cord injuries but their work is hampered and delayed by religious-based objections to the use of embryonic stem cells. Finally the man dies of complications from his paralysis. When he gets to heaven he says to God, "why didn't you cure me?" God says, "I sent medical researchers to devise therapies for healing injuries like yours using stem cells. What more did you want me to do?"

Brief but destructive storm passes through

A severe thunderstorm came through the Quad Cities Monday morning about 6 a.m. In the Illinois Quad Cities power was knocked out almost everywhere and had not been restored to large areas as of Monday evening and, according to the Moline Dispatch, would not be restored to many until Wednesday. I live in one of the few neighborhoods in Moline that never lost its power. I also had cable (and therefore internet) connections for 3 hours after the storm, but then curiously lost it until early Monday evening. Although we had not lost power almost all the stores and other businesses in Moline had and we had to go across the river to Iowa just to find a place to eat.

When the power goes out it is a reminder just how dependant on our modern technology and conveniences we have become. It should also be a reminder how quickly and dramatically our easy and comfortable world can be turned upside down by a disaster. Imagine a disaster that effects the whole world rather than just a narrow thunderstorm band and continues on for weeks, months or years rather than just a few minutes. Further imagine that it is a disaster caused by us that we could have prevented.

How do we get good government?

The terms oligarchy (rule by an elite), plutocracy (rule by the rich), kleptocracy (rule by thieves), geriocracy (rule by the old) and nepotism (hiring and promotion of relatives) are always used to describe bad government, government not run for the general good. What is the preferred alternative to those sorts of bad rule? It is a meritocracy (a system in which people rise to positions of authority and responsibility based on their performance and accomplishments), of course. What other good alternative could there possibly be?

So, if we want a meritocracy, rather than those bad things how do we bring it about? When choosing for whom to vote for president you would make your selection based on the candidate's experience, education and accomplishments, of course. You would not automatically select the next highest ranking person in the governing council like they do in China, the old Soviet Union and the Mormon Church – that would give you an oligarchy. You do not automatically select the richest candidate (or the candidate who represents the richest people) – that would give you a plutocracy. You would not automatically select the best thief, the oldest candidate or the candidate most closely related to the previous ruler.

Of course, your political orientation would determine what type of experience and accomplishments are most relevant and important. You may or may not think that having been a community organizer in one's youth is a plus. You may or may not think that having been held prisoner and tortured is experience we want in our president. But experience and accomplishments are what you would look at in making your choice.

So what are we to make of people who are wary of politicians they suspect may "be looking down on people like me" or may "think they are better than me" because the candidate is very accomplished? What are we to make of suggestions that we select a politician for president that gives us the impression that we could just hang out and share a beer with them? How could choosing our leaders on that basis result in good government? Wouldn't that result in a fratocracy (rule by frat boys)?

War Crimes were committed

I think it is now clear to the vast majority of Americans that over the last 7 years the CIA and the United States military, following orders coming down from the Bush Administration, have been torturing people, despite repeated statements from President Bush and his spokesmen that "we do not torture." The latest evidence is in a book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer. According to an article in the New York Times which received an advance copy of the book:

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

Now that the International Red Cross has concluded that war crimes were committed, will top Bush Administration officials, such as Richard Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, live the rest of their lives in fear of being arrested and tried as war criminals, ala Pinochet? Although indicting and trying Pinochet was not politically possible in Chile that was not the case everywhere in the world. Spain indicted Pinochet for war crimes and Britain honored Spain's warrant when Pinochet came to Britain for medical treatment.

Back in 2001 a high-level government official bragged to a reporter that they in the Bush Administration were creating reality by their actions, unlike those, like the reporter, who were in the "reality-based community." We now see what the world they were creating looks like. Although the rest of the country may be able to move on after November the former Bush Administration officials will have to deal with the consequences of their actions for the rest of their lives. They have created a Hell here on earth for themselves in which they have condemned themselves to live. I wonder how that will be working out for them.

McCain – “Social Security is a disgrace”

Has John McCain given up on the idea of being president? How else can you explain him saying that the way the Social Security system works, and has worked since its inception, is a disgrace that he would change if he were elected. Here is a link to an article about this by Washington Post bloggers. [Many newspapers this morning have an AP article about this that puts as favorable a McCain spin as it can on it, but AP does not want bloggers linking to their stories so you will have to find that article on your own.]

All retirees who receive Social Security paid into the system all their working lives, paying the benefits of those then retired, in the expectation of receiving the benefits now. Neither they nor the baby boomer generation who are going to be retiring soon would look favorably on a proposal to change the system so that current workers no longer pay the benefits of current retirees.

The only way the system could be changed that would not be grossly unfair to all the workers who have paid into the system would be for the federal government to inject huge amounts of money into Social Security from somewhere else in the budget to cover the shortfall caused by workers' contributions going into private accounts rather than the general pool. John McCain, as would be expected given his admitted lack of economic expertise, has no idea from where this extra money would come, especially since he plans to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and also balance the budget.

Perhaps he is just tired of campaigning and thinks that touching the third rail of politics will put him out of his misery.

An Oil-Free President

For most Americans the rise in gas prices has been a very unwelcome development, forcing all but the very rich to reduce their driving, boating and other gasoline dependent activites and/or cut back in other areas to pay higher fuel prices. But it has been a godsend to the oil companies-- they are making record profits!

Polls show that an overwelming majority of Americans consider the presidency of George W. Bush a failed presidency. But the president and the vice-president, both oil-men, may consider the current situation to be "mission accomplished!" They and their oil company supporters and contributors may be giving each other high-fives and fist bumps in private celebration of high oil prices.

How is the Republican Party responding to this crisis? They are spending over $3 million in the next week in a new ad campaign to convince voters that high gas prices are Barack Obama's fault.

A lot of people think this demands a response. Tomorrow, Wednesday, July 9, 2008 has been declared a National Day of Action for an Oil-Free President. People will be gathering at gas stations around the country to reach out to voters and make sure they know John McCain is Big Oil's candidate and that he won't solve our energy crisis. In the Quad Cities people will be at the corner of Harrison and Locust streets in Davenport between 4 and 5 PM. If you are thinking about attending or want to know more details go here.

They will have signs and be handing out fliers to remind people that McCain is in the pocket of Big Oil. His campaign is run by oil industry lobbyists, and he looks to Big Oil for big campaign contributions. We can't count on him to push for alternative energy solutions or help lower gas prices.

This Land is Your Land

In celebration of Independence Day today I present the most patriotic song I know - "This Land is Your Land" by Woodie Guthrie:




I think if Woodie were here today he would be telling us that the message of this song is needed now more than ever. This land is your and my land but it has been stolen from us and we need to take it back. Unlike the people of Zimbabwe, China or Burma we do not need to risk beatings, prison or death to fight the bastards that have stolen our country. What we have to do is stop believing their lies, stop allowing them to frame the debate for us and stop being afraid of the things they want us to be afraid of -- things that pose relatively little danger to us -- like foreigners and the spector of terrorism.

We need to start recognizing who the true enemies of our freedom and liberties are:
* People who accuse others of not supporting our troops while they themselves are destroying our military by starving them of resources and sending them on multiple extended tours of unnessary, counter-productive invasions and occupations of countries which were no threat to us.
* People who ask us to give up our personal liberties and freedoms for more security which they then do not deliver.
* People who give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while pawning off the costs of unnecessary wars on future generations.
* People who tell us the answer to our energy problems are to allow drilling for oil in some of our few remaining pristine natural places, which would not result in any additional oil for more than 10 years and would at best only produce enough oil to meet our needs for 6 months while causing damage to the environment that would last for hundreds of years.
* People who convince our legislatures to remove the traditional limits on usury and predatory lending and then proceed to prey upon the most financially vulnerable among us, sadddling them with loans with interest rates that start off low but then rise above the borrower's level to pay and then these villians ask the legislatures to make it harder for their victims to declare bankruptcy.
* People who tell us that government is the problem rather than the solution and then, when they are in power, appoint incompetent idealogues to head government agencies so that government will resemble their description.

Military ordered to become terrorists?

An article in this morning's New York Times reveals that when the US military received orders from the civilian leadership in the Bush Administration in 2002 that everything had changed after 9/11 and that they should now use interrogation techniques which had previously been illegal on the prisoners they had captured in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, they knowingly adopted techniques used by the Chinese Communists against US soldiers captured during the Korean War.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

Holy Manchurian Candidate, Batman! The military leaders who sent those trainers to Guantánamo Bay knew that those were not techniques to obtain "actionable intelligence." The idea that the torture was justified because it would reveal information about future acts of terrorism, allowing those acts to be prevented and thus saving lives, has been proven by this article to have been a post hoc rationalization.

We don't know even the approximate wording of the order that came down from the Bush Administration to the military that rescinded the ban on torturing prisoners but we now know that when the military implemented that order they started using techniques that they knew produced false confessions. What does that tell you about what the thrust of that order was?

If the primary directive the military was following was to obtain information about future plans would they have adopted those techniques? We are left with two choices. Either that the order was to obtain accurate information "by any means necessary" and the military was incompetent, implementing that order using methods totally unsuited to that purpose. Or the military competently followed an order which placed little or no importance on obtaining accurate information. Perhaps the order said simply: "to combat terrorism we are going to become terrorists."

Riding the "Channel Cat"

It was a beautiful sunny day in the Quad Cities this morning. I took my family to ride the water taxi, the "Channel Cat." . Although the Mississippi has dropped below flood stage here in the Quad Cities it is still very high and there is still a great deal of water flowing. Here is a picture I took of the normally tame river. Click on the picture to see it full sized.



The Army Corps of Engineers has still not opened the locks for barge traffic so we pretty much had the river to ourselves.

The Minority Vote for Obama

Imagine African-Americans, who voted 88% Democratic in 2004, voting 95% for Obama in November. Imagine Hispanics, of whom 60% voted for John Kerry in 2004, voting more than 80% Democratic in 2008. Further imagine Asians, 65% Democratic in 2004, also voting more than 80% for Obama.

It looks like it could happen, especially if the racist attacks continue.

Robert Novak, in yesterday's Washington Post said this of Colin Powel:

His tenuous 13-year relationship with the Republican Party, following his retirement from the Army, has ended. The national security adviser for Ronald Reagan left the present administration bitter about being ushered out of the State Department a year earlier than he wanted. As an African American, friends say, Powell is sensitive to racial attacks on Obama and especially on Obama's wife, Michelle.

Polls show that among Hispanics, traditionally wary of African-Americans and being too closely aligned with the Democratic Party, Obama leads McCain by more than 20 points. Geraldine Ferraro's comments about the advantages Obama enjoyed by being a minority particularly galvanized Latinos, who saw that same line of attack working equally well against a Hispanic candidate. This is a typical reaction to Ferraro's comments on a Latino blog:

…the whole implication that Obama is the front runner because he's not white really gets to the essence of her racism and stupidity. I don't think that Obama is the token minority candidate. He could not be leading in the delegate count and popular vote if he were such. And doesn't Ferraro remember Alan Keys? He's black, and he has run for president a couple times. The country wasn't caught up in "the concept" of Alan Keys. And what's with this whole "concept"? Can we not fathom having a president who isn't a WASP?

I wonder if she would have said something similar if Bill Richardson had achieved the success that Barack Obama is having. You could just as easily swap out Obama's name for Bill Richardson's in the above statement and have something as equally offensive

McCain's options for reaching out to minorities to counter these trends are limited by his need to try to hold onto the Republican party base which is already very wary of him and noticeably non-energized about his candidacy.

Remember that in 2000 and 2004 the country was pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Think what taking 10% or 15% of the minority vote away from the Republicans and giving it to the Democrats does to that balance.

Legalized Gambling is not the root of all evil

Barb Ickes has a column in today's Quad-City Times talking about how Earl Beasley and his wife, Julie, spent some of the money they embezzled from the Quad City Times. Unlike many other recent embezzlement cases in the Quad Cities they did not spend the money they stole on the river-boat casinos. They bought stuff (a lot of stuff) and took trips to Disney World.

So we have to assume that even if we had never legalized river-boat gambling this particular crime would still have occurred. It is important to keep things in perspective.

Exploiting your dislike of arrogance

ABC News is reporting Karl Rove's latest advice to fellow Republicans on how to attack Barack Obama

ABC News' Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as "coolly arrogant."

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said, per Christianne Klein. "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by." Read the entire article.

I think this quote epitomizes the Bush Administration's attitude toward truth. Karl Rove is not claiming that Barack Obama actually has ever even been at a country club with a beautiful date (presumably other than his wife) holding a martini and making snide comments. It makes no difference to Karl Rove that of all the current male U.S. Senators Barack Obama is among the least likely to have ever been seen doing that. He has no interest in the reality of who or what Barack Obama is. He is talking about mental images and emotions that can be successfully implanted in listener's minds by the use of carefully chosen phrases, exploiting their insecurities and fears.

Charles Gibson of ABC referred last week to a political campaign as a "level playing field of ideas and personality." The assumption is that the voters make their choice based on the actual ideas, policy proposal and personalities of the candidates. In Karl Rove's world the reality of the candidate's ideas and personality have been replaced with marketing slogans and images created by professional, highly paid consultants.

When you hear Barack Obama being referred to as arrogant and elitist it is not just Obama who is being unfairly attacked. They are attacking you -- your emotions and susceptibility to manipulation. How arrogant is that?

Who would benefit from a terrorist attack?

Ellen Beth has a disturbing report on how some Republican leaders seem to be calling for another terrorist attack on America.

100 Years In Iraq

Why do John McCain and his supporters insist that he is being quoted out of context in a misleading and deceitful way whenever anyone mentions that he said that as far as he was concerned we could be in Iraq for "100 years?" See here, here and here. They claim that the "misquoters" are implying that John McCain wants 100 years of Americans fighting and dying in Iraq when, in fact, he had made it clear that he imagined the vast majority of that 100 years to be a non-fighting presence without any American casualties – as we have had for over 50 years in Korea and Germany. But John McCain and his supporters often claim that this false and deceitful implication has been made even if someone merely says "John McCain wants us in Iraq for 100 years." Where do they see in that sentence an implication of war, fighting and dying? Does it all depend on the definition of "in?"

Well, I think I have it figured out. The only way it makes any sense is if John McCain can't believe that anyone would have any objection or concern about us having a military presence in Iraq if no Americans were being killed or wounded. Therefore if an opponent says that "John McCain wants us in Iraq for 100 years" as an reason not to support John McCain and people hear it as a telling point against him then, in John McCain's eyes, they must all be thinking of 100 years of American casualties. Why else would they think that 100 years in Iraq was undesirable? The more effective an argument that turns out to be against him, the more John McCain sees a false and deceitful implication that others cannot see.

If any John McCain supporters are reading this they probably expect me to now explain why it would be bad for America to have a long-term military presence in Iraq, even if the American troops are not doing any fighting. But I don't think I will bother. Polls show that a solid majority of Americans want us out of Iraq and see any proposal for a prolonged military presence in Iraq as a bad thing. The debate is over, most Americans have made up their minds and further argument will have little effect. So if you share John McCain's beliefs about American military involvement in Iraq then you, like John McCain, will continue to see things that most Americans do not see – such as implications of war, fighting and dying hidden within the tiny word "in."

“Is it basically fair?”

The ABC's "World News" this evening I heard Charles Gibson talk about Barack Obama receiving a lot of criticism for his decision to opt out of the public financing system and then Charles asked George Stepanopolis the following question:

George, I've heard a lot of political analysis today about his decision, but let me ask you a question about basic fairness. People in this country like to believe that people play on a level playing field and that a campaign will be about ideas and personality. If you start with that much more money, is it basically fair?

Coming from someone in the main-stream media doesn't that strike you as an incredibly dishonest question? More money will allow Barack Obama to get his message directly to the public by means of paid advertisements, bypassing the incredibly biased filter that is the main-stream media. I am not surprised they are not happy about that but it takes a lot of chutzpah on their part to suggest that it is unfair.

The main-stream media works very hard to influence public opinion to the benefit of their corporate owners by their power to frame the debate and, even more importantly, their power to prevent ideas from even being presented. For example, I know that for a large percentage of the American public the War in Iraq is the most important issue in deciding with candidate to support for president. And yet in the thousands of hours of pundits endlessly discussing the various candidates the main-stream media has presented in this campaign almost never is the War in Iraq mentioned as a reason why voters might pick one candidate over another. In exactly the same way that Geico endlessly repeats in their advertisements "Geico can save you money on your insurance" hoping to bypass your conscious filters to implant the idea in your head, the main-stream media is trying to convince you that the War In Iraq is NOT the basis by which people are deciding who to support.

Another example of the main-stream news unleveling the playing field of ideas, several weeks ago the New York Times reported that the military recruited and paid more than 75 retired military officers to portray Iraq as an urgent threat and continues to pay many of them generate favorable coverage this Administration's wartime performance. Many of these paid agents appeared in the main-stream media, presented as presumably unbiased experts on military matters. This is obviously a very important story, one you would expect to be presented, especially by the networks who unknowingly presented these propagandists to an unsuspecting public. As of yet there has been no mention of this story on the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN or Fox. Is that "basically fair?"

So where is this supposed level playing field of ideas that all of Barack Obama's money, mainly raised as small internet contributions from hundreds of thousands of donors (and none from lobbyists) is going to destroy?

Flooding on the Bike Trail in Moline

In response to numerous requests (well, one actually) from readers of this blog who do not live in the Quad Cities wanting to know how bad the flooding is here I am posting a couple of pictures I took this afternoon on the bike path along the Mississippi River in Moline.

Above is the foot bridge to Sylvan Island. (Click on the picture to see it full-sized.) The experts tells us that the Mississippi is cresting this afternoon, so this is as high as the river is going to get. That is a good thing because, as you can see, if the river went any higher we would be cut off from the park on Sylvan Island.

As you can see in the picture below, some sections of the bike trail are flooded.

The flood here is not nearly as bad as in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. Unlike the Iowa River in Iowa City and the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids neither the Mississippi nor the Rock rivers are setting any records this year -- 1993 and 1965 were worse.

A couple of people I know live in the Quad Cities and work in West Liberty, Iowa which is normally about 45 minutes away. But West Liberty is on the other side of the Cedar River and every single bridge over the Cedar River from north of Cedar Rapids to where the Cedar River joins the Mississippi south of Muscatine is closed due to flooding. That means it is impossible to get from here to West Liberty (or any other place on the other side of the Cedar River) by car without going hundreds of miles out of your way, down through Missouri or up through Minnesota. I suppose you could get there by airplane.

Gangsters in judge’s robes

It should not be surprising to anyone that the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right of habeas corpus for people held by the government of the United States. After all, this is a right English-speaking people have cherished since 1305. It is enshrined in the Constitution, which states that the right of habeas corpus can only be suspended in times of insurrection and rebellion -- a very high standard that no one could think our current military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq meet. No, the surprising thing is that 4 justices dissented.

The Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration yesterday for a third time for its handling of the rights of terrorism detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, saying those in custody there have a constitutional right to challenge their captivity in federal courts.

By a 5-4 vote that brought strongly worded and remorseful dissents from the court's conservative justices, the majority held that an alternative procedure designed by the administration and Congress was inadequate to ensure that the detainees, some of whom have been imprisoned for six years without a hearing, receive their day in court.

…

Justice Antonin Scalia took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench, calling the court's decision a "self-invited ... incursion into military affairs," and was even stronger in a written dissent in which he was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. "America is at war with radical Islamists," Scalia wrote, adding that the decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Read entire article

When I first read Justice Scalia's warning that granting the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay the right to challenge their detention in federal court would "almost certainly" cost American lives I was baffled. What could he possibly mean? He is not an expert on Muslim or Arab psychology, history or culture or on religious extremism. He has no special knowledge or expertise in these matters. He did not refer to any testimony by experts to justify his conclusions. In fact all the experts on such matters that I have heard say that by treating people harshly and unfairly we are motivating other, previously peaceful, people to become anti-American terrorists. The expert opinion is that holding prisoners indefinitely without trial at Guantánamo Bay makes us less safe by inflaming anti-American passions in the Middle East. See samples of such opinion here, here and here.

No, Justice Scalia's opinion is not based on any facts or expert opinion, but must arise out his understanding of how the world works. The only way his opinion makes sense is if he sees the world the same way as does the Corleone family in "The Godfather." In the book and movie the Godfather's family accepts his murders, even of family members, as necessary to keep the family safe by being strong. In the Mafia world-view being ruthless and violent is being strong and a reluctance to be violent is weakness – and weakness results in being killed by the strong.

I doubt that 4/9 of the population of the United States sees the world this way, but apparently 4/9 of our Supreme Court does. How did such a situation arise?

They thought it would never flood

The Cedar River had not flooded in the great flood of 1964. It had not flooded in 1993. The people of Cedar Rapids thought it would never flood. It's flooding now. Interstate 80, the great east-west route from New York City to San Francisco is closed where it crosses the Cedar River about 20 miles east of Iowa City. All that traffic, the trucks, buses and other traffic is being detoured over 100 miles out of its way on U.S. Hwys 61, 20 which are not designed for that volume of traffic. All the highways between the Quad Cities and Muscatine and Iowa City and points west are flooded and closed. How long will they be closed? The rivers that are flooding have not even crested yet.

If your house is not flooded, if you have electricity, if you can get to your job and everywhere else you need to go by your normal routes, then you have a lot to be thankful for.

We are living in interesting times. Rivers we assumed would never flood are flooding. What are some other things you have always assumed will never fail -- the U.S. dollar, our banking system, our ability to grow food, the freedoms guaranteed us in our Constitution?

How to sabotage a business or organization

Do you have anti-American saboteurs in your workplace? According to a number of websites the following instructions came from a 1944 CIA manual on how to sabotage a business. Have you encountered anyone who seems to be following these instructions?

1. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
   
2. Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per­sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
   
3. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and considera­tion.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
   
4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
   
5. Haggle over precise wordings of com­munications, minutes, resolutions.
   
6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
   
7. Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reason­able” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
   
8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris­diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

When I have encountered people doing those things I was always baffled by their behavior. Now that I have this information I will know how to categorize their behavior. Forewarned is forearmed.

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention

Reuters reports from London:

President George W Bush admitted on Wednesday that his tough rhetoric had given the world the impression was a "guy really anxious for war" and said he now wished he had used a different tone on the global stage

In an interview with The Times, Bush said his main aim in the seven months before his presidency ends was to leave his successor a diplomatic framework for tackling Iran.

Bush voiced regret at divisions in the international community created by the war in Iraq, adding: "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric."

He admitted that his use of phrases such as "bring them on" and "dead or alive" had "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

Read entire article.

Gee, ya think? But George, I think your actions gave them that impression also. After all you preemptively invaded and are occupying a country that posed no threat to the United States. I don't think a reputation as a "man of peace" was in the cards no matter how you explained it.

When I first read this article I was excited that Bush might be starting to admit that he had made some mistakes – a crack in the certainty of his own righteousness. But after reading it several times and thinking about it I don't think these are true regrets. I think he is just trying to tell the Europeans what they want to hear. Words, after all, are easier to withdraw than troops.

Judge O’Shea’s Bold Leadership on Energy

The Moline Dispatch this morning ran a column by retired judge John Donald O'Shea of Moline.

How would you like to live in a 900-square-foot mud hut of a standardized design approved by the United Nations? Drive a two-door subcompact car with specifications approved by the European Union? Subsist on a diet of fish and rice "OKed" by the people of Pakistan and Bangladesh? Be required to keep your thermostat at 60 degrees during the winter, and 85 degrees during the summer, to please the people of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia?

On May 19, Barack Obama told voters in Oregon, "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say 'OK.' That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."

Okay, so what is "leadership?" Is leadership moving into mud huts because the people of Sudan live in a mud huts? Is "leadership" driving a 1952 Chevrolet like the people of Cuba? Is it eating mud cookies because there are starving people in Africa who eat salted mud to fend off starvation? If North Koreans are willing to work for a dollar a day, should American labor "lead" by agreeing to have their wages cut to a dollar a day?

Read entire article.

I think that is wonderful! I hope we hear a great deal more from Judge O'Shea and other McCain supporters with views such as this between now and November.

Everyone knows that because of global warming, the rising price of oil and many other factors Americans are going to have to change the way they live, drive and consume energy. There is no alternative – we must decrease our consumption of fossil fuels. The necessary changes to our lives here in America need not involve a great deal of hardship and suffering with the proper planning, attitude and leadership.

What sort of leadership do John McCain and the Republicans offer on this issue? Readers of Judge O'Shea's column could easily conclude that all they have to offer are fear-mongering, prejudice and xenophobia

Foggy Morning on Sylvan Slough

Foggy Morning on Sylvan Slough, originally uploaded by dvdbarrett.

I just bought a new camera, hoping to be able to take pictures in conditions in which my old camera was useless. One of my goals was to be able to take pictures outdoors in dim light. This morning was cloudy and foggy. Here is what Sylvan Slough looked like at 7a.m. this morning.

Apologizing to Hillary?

Paul Krugman, in his column in this morning's New York Times has the following to say:

This… involved an interview Hillary Clinton gave the editorial board of South Dakota's Argus Leader, in which she tried to make a case for her continuing campaign by pointing out that nomination fights have often gone on into the summer. As one of her illustrations, she mentioned that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June.

It wasn't the best example to use, but it's absurd to suggest, as some Obama supporters immediately did, that Mrs. Clinton was making some kind of dark hint about Barack Obama's future.

But then, it was equally absurd to portray Mrs. Clinton's assertion that it took L.B.J.'s political skills to turn Martin Luther King's vision into legislation as an example of politicizing race. Yet the claim that Mrs. Clinton was playing the race card, which was promoted by some Obama supporters as well as in a memo by a member of Mr. Obama's staff, achieved wide currency.

Why does all this matter? Not for the nomination: Mr. Obama will be the Democratic nominee. But he has a problem: many grass-roots Clinton supporters feel that she has received unfair, even grotesque treatment. And the lingering bitterness from the primary campaign could cost Mr. Obama the White House.

Read the entire column.

If Paul Krugman is being sincere here and this is what he and other Hillary Clinton supporters truly believe then the divide between them and supporters of Barack Obama that he decries is unbridgeable. I, and everyone else I have personally discussed this with (all Barack Obama supporters), gasped with shock and horror when we heard that Hillary Clinton mentioned Robert Kennedy's assassination in the context of why she should stay in the race. This was an immediate reaction before we had heard anyone's spin. This was not a manufactured – it was a visceral response.

If, as Paul Krugman believes, the only hope the Democrats have for winning the presidency in November is for Obama's supporters to admit to Clinton's supporters that she has been treated unfairly by them then we all better get used to the idea of President McCain. How can Barack Obama's supporters admit for the sake of party unity that it was "absurd" to suggest that Hillary's comment was "some kind of dark hint about Barack Obama's future" when that was exactly what it sounded like to us? The only hope for party unity would be for Clinton's supporters to be satisfied with Brack Obama's magnanimous suggestion that she had simply misspoken.

More militant than the government of Israel?

President Bush thinks that history will vindicate him. He thinks that in 20 years historians will look back on his presidency and proclaim that in retrospect he was right and his critics wrong. If he is right then the Middle East is doomed. An editorial in the New York Times this morning points out that Bush turns out to be much more militant than the hardline government of Israel.

Everybody knew President Bush was aiming at Senator Barack Obama last week when he likened those who endorse talks with "terrorists and radicals" to appeasers of the Nazis. But now we know what Mr. Bush knew then — that Israel is in indirect peace talks with Syria, a prominent member of Mr. Bush's list of shunned nations — and it seems as if the president was going for a two-for-one in his crack about appeasement.

If so, it was breathtakingly cynical to compare the leadership of the Jewish state with those who stood aside in the face of the Nazi onslaught, and irresponsible to try to restrain this American ally from pursuing a settlement that it judges as possibly being in its best interests.

Read the entire editorial

Think about what would have to happen in the Middle East in the next few months and years for the situation to be such that historians would later conclude that President Bush had been right and the government of Israel wrong about trying to negotiate with Syria. I would think that all Americans, except perhaps those desiring a world-wide conflagration for religious reasons, would be fervently hoping their president and vice-president are in fact the misguided fools who don't know what they are doing that so many Americans have been saying they are.

It depends on the definition of “working”

Driving back from St. Louis yesterday my wife and I were listening to old blues CDs. Listening to Muddy Water's "I've Got my Mojo Working" I started wondering about what he meant when he said he had his "mojo working." He had gone down to Louisiana to get it, he had it working but "it just don't work on you." Had it ever worked on anyone? By "working" did he simply mean that he had prepared it and was using it according to the instructions? Or did he know it was "working" because it worked on some people, just not on "you"? My wife is strongly of the opinion that he would only say it was working if it had worked on someone. I am not so sure. Would you say you have a magic spell "working" if you had set it into action, regardless of results? What do you think? I have put up a poll on this question over on the right.

20,000 people come to see Obama in Tamp, Florida

Barack Obama was campaigning in Tampa, Florida yesterday. Although I have not seen much press coverage of it, he drew 20,000 people to an indoor event at the St. Petersburg Times Forum. Blogger Deborah Newell Tornello writes about it here.

The Broadway Oyster Bar in St. Louis

BroadwayOysterBar, originally uploaded by dvdbarrett.

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On a recent trip to St. Louis, my wife and I visited this wonderful bar. Link to Broadway Oyster Bar website. It is on Broadway street in St. Louis, just a few blocks from Bush Stadium. They serve New Orleans style Cajun and creole dishes in an extremely informal setting in an outdoor patio on the side of the building.

BroadwayOysterBarPatio, originally uploaded by dvdbarrett.

The ambiance is very funky and my wife and I found it delightful. I had the jambalaya and my wife had the sampler plate. Both dishes included a steamed crayfish, which we had to ask the waitress how to eat. (It tastes like a little lobster.)

They feature live music almost every evening. We were there early in the evening hours before the band was scheduled to play so we just heard some extremely good recorded music -- Chicago style blues.

If you are a blues fan I heartily recommend you check this place out the next time you are in St. Louis

Younger than John McCain

Check out this blog. It has dedicated itself to listing things younger than John McCain.

My Mother is younger than John McCain.
Here's an email I just received from my mother:
"I am younger than John McCain and I get senior citizen discounts, I can't bend, my knees hurt, and I just went on Medicare!"

link

Getting what you deserve

In today’s New York Times’ Caucus blog, Carl Hulse reports the House Republicans have selected a new slogan:

In a memo to be sent to Republican members today, the leadership hints at a new slogan building on the change message that has already been shown to have political resonance with a public unhappy with the nation’s direction.

It looks like Republicans will counter the Democratic push for change from the years of the Bush administration with their own pledge to deliver, drum roll please, “the change you deserve.”

As I have written previously my New England Puritan heritage predisposes me to be pessimistic about what a sinner like me deserves so I respond much more negatively than most Americans to offers to “get what you deserve.” But I do like this new Republican slogan because it sounds like they agree with me that if you vote for them you deserve what you get.

What is wrong with these people?

An op ed piece in today's New York Times by Robert Kaplan talks about a military invasion of Myanmar by the United States as a moral thing to do.

France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta.

…

It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.

Read entire article.

Did you or anyone you know think in 2003 that it would be simple and moral to invade and occupy Iraq in order to free it from Saddam Hussein? At least in this part of the country those who agreed that we should invade Iraq did so because of assurances that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the United States. If the stated purpose and only rationale for the invasion of Iraq had been that to do so would be doing a favor for the Iraqi people I don't think there would be much support for it outside of Washington and the part of New York where the NYTimes is written.

Most people I know would never believe that an armed invasion and occupation of a country by foreign troops is ever anything but a disaster for the people being invaded and occupied. What is wrong with these people?

Don’t just do something, stand there.

My brother has been doing a lot of thinking and reading about the Civil War lately. He has been doing this as part of project that started out simply as a desire to help my aunt organize and write a book from all the genealogical information she had accumulated. She has a lot of information she had inherited from her mother, aunts and uncles and grandparents. To this she has added a great deal of information from her own research, traveling all over the country, especially in last few years since she has retired from a career as a librarian.

Of all this information some of the most tantalizing was the handwritten partial Civil War diary of our great-grandfather who had been a white officer with "colored" troops during the Civil War. It was tantalizing and frustrating because we only have parts of the diary and also because there were so many topics and details that we would be interested in today that our g-grandfather had apparently not considered of note and had not written about. In order to make this diary interesting to modern readers my brother feels he needs to add context and additional detail and therefore he has been doing a lot of reading.

Not much has been written about the colored troops in the Civil War and what has been written has little or nothing to say about their training, focusing instead on what they did in battle. The diary, at least the parts we have, is almost all about training and non-combat activities, because that is what most days of a Civil War soldier consisted of, especially the colored troops – the generals did not know how well they would do in combat and so often assigned them other tasks.

As a result of his research my brother is starting to develop some interesting ideas. It is well known that 80% of the soldier fatalities during the Civil War were from non-combat causes. It is also well known that the South was not so much defeated on the battlefield as much as they were defeated by a lack of resources—the Northern blockade of their ports and the lack of a manufacturing base made their defeat inevitable. Those facts suggest to my brother that the North did not really need to fight at all. All that was needed was to blockade the ports, raise a huge army to protect Washington D.C. and to prevent the Southern armies from invading the North and wait until disease, internal dissention and the lack of supplies defeated them. Lincoln's need for military victories was for political reasons, not a military or logistical necessity. What do you think?

Which of your values do the candidates share?

In his column in today's New York Times Frank Rich, purporting to explain what has been happening in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, had this to say:

Hillary Clinton's attempt to impersonate a Nascar-lovin', gun-totin', economist-bashin' populist went bust: Asked which candidate most "shares your values," voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater.

If you are anything like me and most people I know when asked which candidate most shares your values you would not be thinking about Nascar, guns, economists, arugula, Rev. Wright, Hillary Clinton's laugh or any of the other things the media like to talk about in this race. You would say Barack Obama most shares your values because he thinks it was a mistake to authorize President Bush to invade and occupy Iraq. Whenever the media suggest (as they constantly do) that we might consider some other factor (such as the slight differences between Obama's and Clinton's health care plans or Hillary's gender, for example) the idea that the war should be ignored strikes me as weird as if Mrs. Lincoln was asked, "other than that how did you like the play?"

I understand that the campaigns are now focused on wooing over undecided voters, as they should be. Undecided voters are not as concerned about the war; if they felt strongly about the war they would not be undecided. That is why the war in not the only issue the Obama campaign talks about or emphasizes in their advertising campaigns. But Barack Obama talks about the war a lot if you listen to him directly, rather than filtered through the media.

It is as if the Main-Steam Media were trying to create the impression, against all evidence to the contrary, that no one cares about the war. Think about the effect of hearing some idea endlessly repeated. If left unchallenged it can become conventional wisdom. That is what Geico Insurance is trying to do with the idea that Geico Insurance can save you money on your car insurance. They are spending millions of dollars on advertising with the sole purpose of driving that idea into your head in the absence of any evidence that it is true. (If Geico really was the lowest priced insurance they would not have to spend a dime convincing you of that. You would discover that on your own when you compared prices.) It is as if the media were trying to do the same thing with the idea that no one cares about the war.

Rev. Wright controversy a dud.

Now that the votes have been counted in Indiana and North Carolina it seems clear that very few voters who otherwise would have voted for Barack Obama were persuaded not to by the controversial views of Obama's former pastor, Rev. Wright. In exit polls a higher percentage of people who said the controversy was NOT important voted for Barack Obama than the percentage of voters who said the controversy was important to them and voted for Hillary Clinton.

We have all heard television and radio commentators and read newspaper columnists and blogs who claimed that Rev. Wright's statements and views had been very damaging to Obama's chances of being nominated and elected. Some Quad Cities blogs have even claimed that the controversy had finished Barack Obama – "he is toast" according to one commenter. Those people must be feeling pretty foolish now. Perhaps they will be so ashamed at having been proven so publicly wrong that they will abandon political commentary and prediction and devote themselves to some other area of human endeavor – one is which there is no final objective result to prove their opinions wrong, such as flower arranging or feng shui.

A 185 seat Democratic majority in Congress?

Saturday Democrat Don Cazayoux won a special election in the Louisiana 6^th Congressional District to fill a vacant Republican seat. That district has a Cook Partisan Index of R + 7, which means that it has been voting 7 percentage points more Republican in national elections on average. Just for fun I decided to figure out how many Republicans there would be left in the House of Representatives if in November the Republicans only won the districts which lean Republican by more than 7 percentage points. According to my count out of 435 Congressional districts just 125 of them have a rating of R + 8 or greater. So in the next Congress the Democrats would have 310 seats, giving them a 185 seat majority, if Saturday's result is a preview of November.

In the campaign for the seat the Republicans tried to nationalize the race running ads talking about Rev. Wright, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. Apparently that was not a winning strategy.

Why didn’t Obama walk out

Hillary Clinton asks why Barack Obama didn't walk out of the church, never to return, when he heard Rev. Wright say things with which he did not agree, and apparently that question resonates with a lot of people. I wonder why. It certainly is not because people normally walk out of church or synagogue when they hear the minister, priest or rabbi say something with which they do not agree. Think about it. Have you ever been in a house of worship and heard someone say something from the pulpit with which you did not agree? How many times? How many of those times did you walk out?

No, the question must really be why does Barack Obama attend a black church where things are said that sound foreign and strange to me as a white person. Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and white grandparents and we can easily imagine him as an adult attending a white church similar to the ones with which we are familiar. Why does he attend a black church? Obviously he attends a black church because he self-identifies as black, but why is that? To answer that question would require an in-depth discussion of the history of race in America. I don't have the time or inclination to try to tackle that.

Instead, I will talk about ministers who say outrageous things, not the famous Rev. Wright, Haage or Falwell, but my greatgreatgrandfather – Rev. Newton Barrett. The following is an excerpt of a letter I found in my grandfather's papers after his death. The letter is from a cousin of his talking about their mutual grandfather.

You mention that Grandfather was a strict man. We have always been brought up to regard him as a sort of paragon. True he was a gentleman and a scholar, but he had his shortcomings. He was very domineering, an autocrat and a dictator – impatient with those who did not agree with him. He was no diplomat and sometimes did and said things in his capacity as a minister that antagonized his congregation. It took a great deal of tact and diplomacy on the part of Grandmother to get him out of some of the jams he got himself into.

For instance he took a very positive stand against Masonry and I believe even preached against it, perhaps in Elkhorn (Wisconsin). I wonder if some of his feeling against Uncle Alfred stemmed from the fact that he was a Mason. (Allan was a 32d degree Mason, I think.) He also made a religious issue of insurance, which he thought and preached was acting in the face of providence. Ministers today would not be concerned with these particular issues. They have another entirely new set of problems to cope with.
 

Do you suppose the insurance salesmen and customers in his congregation got up and walked out when he preached against insurance? If they had simply left the church there would have been no need for my gggrandmother to play diplomat.

100 Years of what?

The Republicans are denouncing ads from the Democratic National Committee and now from MoveOn.org that show John McCain answering a question about how long we might be in Iraq "… I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years." The ads then make comments about McCain wanting the current situation in Iraq to continue. The Republicans claim these ads are lies which distort McCain's remarks.

Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan called the MoveOn ad an "assault from the extreme-left playbook" and compared it to MoveOn's newspaper ads last year criticizing Gen. David Petraeus. The RNC also called on Obama to denounce the ad.

Read the entire article.

How can an ad that shows McCain saying the words that he actually said be misquoting and distorting him? The Republicans claim that by not also quoting what McCain said next, in which he imagined the 100 years to be like our long-term military presence in Korea and Germany in which Americans suffer few casualties, leaves a mistaken impression of McCain's views and intentions. I and my fellow Democrats are baffled by these charges. What difference does it make whether we foist most of the fighting off onto the Iraqis while our military people stay in their bases? We would still be continuing the occupation.

I have been giving this controversy some thought and decided that both sides are sincere but just have very different feelings about a long-term American occupation of Iraq. We Democrats, and according to the polls a majority of the American public, want us out of there completely as soon as possible. The vast majority of the Iraqis who live outside the fortified Green Zone do not want us there and our continued presence in the Middle East will inflame anti-American feelings among Arabs and Muslims and aid terrorist recruiting, leaving America less safe. The Republicans think that a long-term occupation is a good idea and think the general public would really not object as long as Americans are not dying in combat.

At least some in the main-stream media seem to agree with the Republicans on this issue. Here is the Associated Press (AP) stating flatly that the Democratic charges that McCain wants to keep us in Iraq for 100 year is a false suggestion that he wants a 100 year war. This taking of sides by journalists is quite unusual these days. For example, when reporting on Republicans claiming that Obama is a Muslim and attended a Muslim religious school as a child the US media (except for a couple of investigative pieces by ABC and McClatchy) did not declare these charges to be untrue. News stories about the issue usually just quoted the charges and then quoted Democrats as saying the charges were untrue as though the author thought both sides had good points to make, or something. When reporting on the Swift-Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004 the media (except when in rare investigative mode) never said they were untrue.

These so-call journalists apparently are unable to determine whether charges that Barack Obama was raised as a Muslim are a lie. They could not determine whether the Swift-Boat attacks on John Kerry were smears or not. But a claim that McCain's vision of a long-term US military presence in Iraq without many casualties is a call for the continuation of the last 5 years of the US in Iraq –- that is something they are sure is untrue.