This is what passes for news at ABC

5 comments March 19th, 2008

The “journalists” at the Disney-owned network are sure we need to know about THIS.

Live-blogging the Gettysburg Address

Add comment March 19th, 2008

Mark Kleiman IMAGINES how Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech would have played with a right-winger blogging live from Gettysburg.

Five years

6 comments March 19th, 2008

My, what a GLORIOUS WAR this has been!

POSTSCRIPT: Reuters has a retrospective on the war HERE. (Warning: Some of the images are disturbing.)

UPDATE: President Bush celebrates the war’s anniversary with a display of AMNESIA.

McCain doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola

Add comment March 19th, 2008

Mr. Straight Talk, who thinks foreign policy is his long suit, got his MIX ALL TALKED UP yesterday.

UPDATE: THIS GUY says Hillary Clinton should exploit McCain’s blunder.

UPDATE II: THIS OTHER GUY wonders if McCain has mastered any issue during his long tenure in Congress.

UPDATE III: THIS THIRD GUY says McCain is “genuinely clueless about the real challenges and dangers the country is facing” and therefore is unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.

UPDATE IV: I finally found a video of McCain’s misstatement.  (Remember, this wasn’t the only time he uttered this nonsense.)

Anti-American rhetoric not uncommon in conservative churches

2 comments March 19th, 2008

 

Frank Schaeffer, a co-founder of the Religious Right, SAYS he and others have denounced America from the pulpits of conservative churches.

Schaeffer thinks Barack Obama is the victim of a “smear-by-association game.”

UPDATE: Schaeffer has more to say on this subject HERE, including some examples of what his famous father preached.

UPDATE II: Speaking of anti-Americanism, here’s a rant from right-wing nitwit Glenn Beck that seems not to have raised the hackles of the pseudo-patriots:

More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals. The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts. Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.

UPDATE III: Schaeffer touched upon this in the first of his columns to which I linked above, but I thought we would do well to revisit it at greater length.  It’s a conversation between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on Sept. 13, 2001, two days after the terrorist attacks for which they blamed America:

FALWELL: (W)hat we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact–if, in fact–God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.

ROBERTSON: Jerry, that’s my feeling. I think we’ve just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven’t even begun to see what they can do to the major population.

FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.

ROBERTSON: Well, yes.

FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.” 

ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

Net gauges favor Obama over McCain

6 comments March 19th, 2008

THIS is kind of fascinating: Internet indicators suggest that Barack Obama has a commanding lead over John McCain in a hypothetical general-election matchup.