unfit for public service and frightening to contemplate in the 112th Congress, I think Toomey is even more dangerous.

Just under the polished veneer there seems to be a deep-boned rot, a dark and disorted contamination. I sense in Toomey the presence of a compulsive Inquisitor, a sycophant to a harsh god, a burner of witches.

He gives me a serious case of the creeps, folks.

I'm rootin' for Joe.

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http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/10/...

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find of late that the administrators do not appear to present a clear mission on how they want this site to be.

The rules do state that members are expected to generally support Democratic candidates for public office, or current incumbent Democratic office-holders. As it's written, that's pretty clear, but enforcement is obviously inconsistent, despite a noble effort by the moderators.

People in a Kurtz-like Leftist jungle will never support the Democratic Party or this Democratic President. Those who worked for the blue team and this president -- often including but not limited to those who contributed to donation drives generated and coordinated by this site during the 08 campaign -- find it increasingly puzzling that the site's administrators condone anti-Democratic and anti-Obama threads on their Greatest page. Pro-Democrats here have to run a gauntlet of subversion and derision just to assert their affiliation with the Democratic Party or to post praise in support of Barack Obama.

The administrators appear to sanction this, despite their own posted rules to the contrary.

The questions being asked in many posts on this site about the overall mission statement are appropriate, IMO, but the administrators are the ones who ought to be asking them.

Vote blue.

get the measure of what he's about, how he manipulates context, and how his propaganda ticks.

Beck is rolling in cash and that the public good is subverted in the process of his making that cash is of no concern to him. FOX News likely loves him because he is a value-added kook, effective on a variety of levels, in their general purpose of bringing down voters' faith in the democratic process, in the role of government, and in the gains progressives have made over the last several generations.

Beck is social malware. This past weekend he was loosed upon the media to erase the context of Dr. King's work.

Robert Bly warns that there are men "who are loosening the bolts on Noah's ark." Glenn Beck is one such.

I'm persuaded that he's not especially stable and so is given to this sort of self-promoting propaganda and subversion, but even more frightened that several thousand people attended the rally yesterday, all of them self-cast as "victims" of people with dark skin and bluer voting patterns than theirs.

And of course, Jahweh himself was trotted out to put the stamp of moral imperative on the event.

From out angle, Beck is newsworthy because what we seek to accomplish will have to navigate past the kooks and crazies whom he has convinced are victimized by people of color, pro-gay rights proponents, "the Government" in general, and the progressive worldview.

sons home on the farm is significant. Cows have to be milked and the crop has to come in for their to be food on the table in February.

Robert LaFollette, though, counted among his supporters some very radicalized farmers in his political career, and in U.S. politics, LaFollette was very sufficiently Left.

Gore Vidal believes that too many hyper-fundamentalists arrived, mostly from England and Scotland, and that their punishment-centered "Christianity" became the prevailing Christianity and thus contaminated day-to-day life and thinking in the U.S. even as it betrayed the tenets of Jesus' ministry. Vidal is not kind to this distortion, calling modern-day descendants of these fundies "ubiquitous...they breed like chiggers."

If you add those two up, though, I'm not sure you get John Boehner. Or Jesse Helms. Or Dan Coats. Or Rick Perry. There seem to be some other components in the mix, too, and the closer they're examined, the more daunting progressives' work becomes.

And the more worth doing.

Republican Party would greatly benefit from an honest self-analysis.

It might be healthy in the long run for the country if the idiots and screechers and fundie nutbags all whipped out their knives and went at each other. The GOP let these crazy asses in the front door -- welcomed them with open arms -- and began tailoring policy platforms to the idiots' specifications. This is on the bottom rung of their ladder.

At the top rungs there is Dick Cheney inviting giant oil company flunkies to write U.S. energy policy.

It's all beginning to come apart on the Pukes, and they deserve all the roiling division that can be heaped upon them. If you invite thugs to your party, it's on your tab if they trash the joint.

There's got to be a reckoning at some point. The 2012 presidential primary is potentially a disaster for the Republicans. As bad as their 2008 field was, this one is shaping up to be far worse. I think I do hear the sound of knives being sharpened in the shop as we speak, ladies and gentlemen. May the rivers run Red and may the mortally wounded be many.

send Newt into a tizzy, wouldn't it -- finishing in Iowa behind someone like Sarah Palin.

But it could happen.

It's kind of delicious for us that at least for now the Pukes are a rudderless pack of howling racist obstructionist morons. They're divided and clueless and mean-spirited as well.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact /


-- to offer comments about or support for Ms. Sherrod.

I just sent an email note suggesting that consideration be made to reinstate her and to re-examine the policy by which she appeared to be so swiftly dismissed.

There are many thousands of us on this site. Were a good number to contact the White House asking for respectful reconsideration on behalf of Ms. Sherrod, I think it would likely have a very encouraging result.

It's my best guess that the White House staff will be up late this evening over pizzas and Chinese take-out fielding emails and calls, most of them in favor of reinstituting Ms. Sherrod.

but that they will get their butts in gear to volunteer for Democrats up and down the ballot.

You'll likely meet some like-minded souls down at the blue headquarters and the work becomes very purposeful very quickly.

Pizzas can be ordered. Fun can be had. Alliances forged. Jokes swapped. Republicans disparaged and crushed.

I recommend the life.

wish to serve other human beings it seems to me that they should be encouraged and permitted to do so.

Indeed there are any number serving now, who, if ordained, might very well do a far superior job than the autocratic assholes currently in place in the Catholic hierarchy.

The closer you get to the very top of the hierarchy the far less Christian it becomes. At a point soon in that hierarchy, the tenets of Jesus' ministry become unrecognizable.

And let's not even get started on the public relations angle.

accept that fiction is fiction.

Fiction is more of a mosaic of degrees of truths. A ghost story around a campfire can be plausible if not strictly 'true' because its components are designed to be possible. It has a strategic aim and relies on atmosphere and convincibility.

Huck Finn is a 'fictional' character but there were kids like him living up and down the MIssissippi River in the early part of the 19th century. There were caves and cats and graveyards and freckles and so forth as well. In the big mosaic, Huck is pretty real, actually.

I like Huck when he accepts possible eternal punishment for deciding to help Jim. He's at his best there. He knows the stakes and does the right thing anyway. It would fair to say that Twain was making a point in a time when that point would not have been especially popular.

One of the problems with "religions" is that their narrative writers aren't nearly as gifted at language as Mark Twain. Some of them are downright dull and sloppy, in fact. In the New Testament, we can read that the writers of the gospels sound sincere, but they can't get their story straight, and there's a lot of fog out in the back yard, and the back yard goes back a hell of a lot of miles. In the NT mosaic, I like the Jesus who defends (and saves the life of) the woman in the pit whose villagemates are about to stone her to death. That could have happened. Or not. Hard to say. But it is at least plausible and makes a point about who's perfect and who isn't, and about prioritizing transgressions. Here, a woman is defended and saved. In Twain, it is an escaping slave.

The world' religious narratives are not without their poetry, but IMO the greater passages are the plausible ones. As a reader, I'm no more inclined to believe that Jesus could walk on the surface of the water than I am that Huck Finn could walk on the surface of the Mississippi. Twain makes no claim that Huck can do any such thing.

That is also a clear distinction.

grantcart's posts on this site.

The man lifts a lot of boats, IMO.

I like a room of brand new and veteran Democrats, let's say county organizers on behalf of local and national candidates up and down the ballot.

I like watching them come alive when an incumbent Republican is felt to be vulnerable and the Democratic challenger is known to be engaged, personable, and electable. I like the blue adrenalin that circuits thru the room.

I like the banter that flies around the table at the headquarters over a couple of pizzas and Pepsis.

I would expect that a group like that would have folks across the full spectrum of grantcart's proposed categories, and that many of the individuals involved, new or long-standing, would represent elements of more than one category, and what I like best of all is they' all be very focused on kicking Republican butt.

is not felt to represent the emotional and spiritual needs of people and that in their increasing awareness of that failure, people have rejected the authority of the Church.

The Church asserts moral authority but retains an inflexible and rigid world view to which they demand followers adhere, but the day-to-day, moment-to-moment, person-to-person world is more urgent. In many cases, people will do what they have to do before they will do what an abstract authority tells them to do.

The Church, as usual, seeks to demonize "secularism" as an encroaching evil which undermines the authority of the Church. But there are god-seekers (small 'g') who have found a sense of the divine (small 'd') in alleyways and abandoned lots and exiled wayfarers.

Until the Church includes all venues and all persons, it hasn't earned the authority it says it's owed.

say so, no matter what the nutbag fundies think.

I don't see good reason to believe that the cave paintings at Lascaux, France from c. 15,000 years b.c.e. are any less inspirational than the Gospel of Mark, for example, or (your favorite religious text here).

Four kids and a dog discovered those cave paintings one afternoon while they were out knocking around in the woods. I'd like to thank those younguns and their pooch for that discovery. Those paintings generally and that horse especially are magnificent. I would never have found that cave myself. And have never been there to see it. To know that it is there (and that it was discovered through inadvertence but has generated significant universal awe) is religion enough for me.