fame and has chosen politics as her path to that goal.

As I examine the steaming entrails of the sacrificial beast it appears that Ex-Governor Palin will compete in the Iowa primary but will not win that contest and, hearing her handlers tell her that she will be trounced in New Hampshire, will invoke the Going Rogue option (likely planned all along) and declare herself an independent, third-party candidate.

This sustains her celebrity, activates nutbag donors, and dims the next day's political headlines from Des Moines for whoever does win in Iowa, likely Huckabee.

Either resign if he truly feels that he is ethically compromised or renounce his affiliation with the Democratic Party.

f he does not wish to be a part of the Party whose nomination he has twice sought I suggest he renounce his affiliation with the Democrats and declare himself an Independent.

He would be far more comfortable in that role -- and just as isolated and ineffective.

He should do this immediately, as early as noon tomorrow.

I'll kick the shit out of them.

there is all that much teaching at all. Christianity is less pedagogy than it is resonant myth, and I mean 'myth' in its most gleaming definition.

Paul's letters are teacherly, sort of, but they are not resonant with all readers, including readers who like the ministry of Jesus better than Paul's more authoritarian social doctrines. There is a lot of pure politics in Paul. There is unfathomable mystery to the figure of Jesus.

There remains the problem of interpolation over many centuries by people with varying agendas. The version in the canonized Bible now may or may not have been the "books" used by the Christian communities of the century of and century following the life of Jesus. There are passages of significant beauty and of garbled nonsense as well.

And not least, we cannot say with certainty that the Jesus referenced in these texts is an actual person. We are told that that is the case, but it is quite another matter to say we clinically 'know' it to be the case.

Lincoln was at Gettysburg; we have photos and an address written in his hand. No such record is extant regarding the life of Jesus. There is the long trail of awed comment on his ministry, there are those imbued to help others banking off his model -- and they seem to me to be genuine in their impulse to do good -- and of course there are the unstable and insecure nutbags who warn us of "witches praying over Hallowe'en candy." Jesus, if he was a real person, was likely a Jew.

As it's given to us, the gospels in varying degrees of detail and emphasis, suggest a man in his very early 30s who pointedly and often cleverly distrusts the local authorities of the realm in a time when the Roman Republic had become the Roman Empire and individual freedoms and dignities were hard-won things, and damned rare. We see an intelligent, charismatic figure emerge from (evidently) Galilee, we get the boats and the water and the anglers, we get a strikingly vivid woman in the Magdalene, we get another woman rescued from a hole and stones and certain death, we get the sick and the afflicted healed, we get a maniacal king threatened by a baby in a humble manager, we get a very well-placed donkey for the final number into town, and two thousand years of redemptive blood.

Sincere spirit in a world of warfare and poverty appear to register more deeply than corrupt application of power and conquest by remote tyranny. The frail and the unlistened-to are raised higher in esteem and given citizenship in a broader communion. Forgiveness appears to take precedence over condemnation. The truth itself is suggested to be in faraway desert caves or in any case well out of town, and certainly involves express nonalignment with organized temples, churches, etc.

Paradox is also a theme, as even though uplift and belongedness inspire individual and community change and maybe world peace, efforts toward those goals are met with violent resistance.

people are already dangerously Far Right. Their wiring is misfiring. Along comes Palin last year, stepping onto the stage in St. Paul, and the zealot delegates hear her berating Obama's community organizing in metropolitan Chicago and they hoot and howl and stomp their feet. They thought the Governor of Alaska was going to deliver them Jesus' own care package from the Great Wells Fargo Wagon in the Sky. Bill Kristol must have felt like he was being lifted off the earth by benevolent angels into God's lap.

Two weeks later, McCain's polling tanked. And these days, Palin trails two or three Puke contenders by significant margins. She's widely perceived as a cartoon. Her husband is an automaton. What's-His-Name is about to flash his ding-dong to the entire globe, as if the world's populations had never seen a ding-dong before. Palin quit her job because the going got tough and she found she could not replace the spirit of public service the job required with her limitless ego and ambition. She's inappropriately flirtatious instead of issue-savvy and she's vacuously stupid.

That she would appeal to posters on the Free Republic is unsurprising. Let's hope her odds against attaining the Republican nomination remain insurmountable. We're trying to run a country here, and after eight years of Dubya we ought to have learned not to turn over adult jobs to incompetent high schoolers.

I considered his public threat to support a filibuster of health care reform legislation to be "cowardly grandstanding."

In the emailed letter I recalled to Senator Lieberman the now-long-gone era when he left comfortable environs to join the fight in the American South for civil liberties for all citizens. That Joe Lieberman checked out of the hotel some decades ago, sad to say. The one remaining is a smarmy, self-important, attention-seeking obstructionist.

Subsequent to the Lieberman email I contacted Senator Reid's office. I reiterated the points made in the Lieberman email, including my characterization of Lieberman, and suggested to Senator Reid that he consider yanking a certain independent Senator from a Committee Chairmanship should that independent Senator make good on his filibuster support threat.

In a not-unrelated sentiment, I also suggested to Senator Reid that many folks out here in voterland volunteered for many Democrats up and down the ballot and donated significant, even record-breaking sums, to those blue candidates, with the added observation that as we fought for those Democrats, it was bloody right and high time those Democrats fought for us.

Lotsa real smart folks can turn the air blue at a moment's notice. Has nothing to do with their education at all.

If the concern is how much words hurt others, any words carefully chosen can do that, whether or not they involve crude language. Silence itself can hurt others.

I don't see anybody endorsing sexism or racism and so language suggesting either or both would by default be unacceptable, but then again entire school districts have become unhinged over Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Most complex stuff is real complex.

A distinction should be made, IMO, between strong language aimed at others ("You MF!") versus frustration aimed at inanimate objects ("The goddam bus broke down and we were late for the movies").

What is profane for the preacher might be acceptable vocab for the public. I'm not seeing Jack Nicholson's films dubbed with "Son of a gun" and "Doggone it" any time soon and if they were I wouldn't shell out a penny to see them.

Kids realize from an extremely early age which words and phrases should be repeated at the supper table and which words and phrases should not be. Among themselves, they generally speak freely, and properly so.

the brains.

California's once and future Governor.

"dark, venal side of America," (in Hunter Thompson's memorable description of Richard Nixon), I would choose the Himmleresque Mike Pence.

I consider him a monster.

undercooked casserole that went wrong early in the kitchen phase.

Way too many holdovers from Nixon's group, far too little in the way of vigorous engagement. Possibly he assumed he'd cruise to re-election. He was swiftly dispelled of that notion. It was a close election instead and when on election night northeast Ohio gave Carter the Buckeye State, Ford was on the phone to the movers.

Going way back, as bad as Franklin Pierce was politically, he was impressive personally. His White House tenure was complicated by both his own lack of political acumen and his wife's suffering over grief and behavioral difficulties. She refused to live in the White House with him, claiming that their young son's death by accident was God's punishment on their family for Pierce's seeking the presidency. After office, Pierce drank himself into alcoholic stupors and died in near-obscurity. George W. Bush, phone home.

With Harding as runner-up, I'd maybe choose James Buchanan from the entire list. One of the worst presidents ever across all grids, if not the very worst, at least up until Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Bush.

The modern-day Democratic Party is as far away from someone like James Buchanan as the modern-day Republicans are from Lincoln. It does feel as if the blue team is the one heading in the right direction.

variable in the Committee's decision to award the prize to the young American president, although it is bandied about in responses here and abroad as one element of the rationale.

To give all your sources their due, it was with demonstrable hope that Demeter searched for her daughter. The torment referenced is real, certainly, but cannot be navigated around. It cannot be removed from dedication and love. Moreover it cannot be diminished in Demeter's total narrative and purpose because along her way, hope clearly attendant, she is welcomed to the supper table of a peasant family and it is to that family's youngest son that she reveals the divine secret of the grain.

A very useful by-product of her journey. Also one which is not time-specific. She honors in the youngest son his earnestness, the absence of cynicism. That son's older brother dismisses Demeter, unaware that she is divine, and for his loose, cynical tongue he is turned into a lizard by the goddess.

Extracting from Demeter's story the impulse to award Good we have Dubya cast as the older son and Barack Obama as the earnest younger son, a personification of the promise of fruitful agriculture, of bountiful harvest.

If there is a divine secret of sustaining harvest and survival, it is to the younger earnest son that such a secret be shared.

The Right's schtick is all volume and no values. Hypocrisy is a mangy 3-legged flea-bitten rabid hound dog come to eat Farmer Brown's chickens. History is about to foreclose on that farm.

I'm not seeing how the Republicans have a sustaining vision that is persuasive to a majority of voters when they continue to allow people like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck to be their voice. They appear to deliberately have chosen propaganda instead of any kind of political or social plan. The propaganda is all spite and spat and bile and bullshit. They condone and advance character assassination with no plausible alternative.

Michael Steele's public pronouncements have been useless to them in the times when he is not busy apologizing to Rush Limbaugh. When he's not useless as their Chair, he's damaging to their chances.

And just ahead, they are likely to experience a blood bath for their 2012 presidential nomination. Palin, if she runs as a Republican, is threatening to them because she is ignorance manifest, a joke, a cartoon, a quitter, a secessionist moron, a slaughterer of wolves. If she runs as an independent she is also damaging to the GOP, as she would siphon the idiots and nutbags and secessionists in any general election. At best, a Palin indie launch would pull 5-6% and relegate Romney to no better than 37-40% in a competitive general election, IMO. It would ensure re-election of the secret Muslin socialist Marxist Obama.

Hate-hosts, character assassins, teabagging hypocrites, and squawking townhall rowdies in diminished political acreage.

seems to me.

Very hard to find simple categories.

"The faithfulness I can imagine," write poet Adrienne Rich, "would be a weed flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief."

That is a determinedly pre-Christian, almost pre-consciousness formulation of faith, a plunge into very ancient Jungian archetypes shifting around in the subconscious and discoverable in fragments of a dream-state.

And I by god like it.

women in the United States to hold high the example of one of their own gender who from the lofty air blows wolves out of the wilderness on afternoons when she is not advocating the desolation of that wilderness by oil companies?

I'm tellin' ya, that Sarah Palin's a natural.

of us has to lift a finger to blur them.

Of the many versions, the first one that popped into my head after reading this thought OP was Lou Reed singing "It takes a busload of faith to get by."

And there's a lot of different kinds of folks riding' that bus.