As a religious minority (I am an atheist - Spider Grandmotherist.  I do my best to live by the two rules given tp the Hopi Indians by their Spider Grandmother: "Don't go around hurting folks.  Try to learn about things.") I am sick of political candidates pandering to religious testing by fundamentalist preachers posturing in  their megachurchs like modern day Elmer Gantrys and mainly questioning the candidates beliefs about Jesus, abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage and euthanasia.  

Come to think of it, I think there used to be something in our U.S. Constitution banning this, but I suppose after almost 8 years of the Bush II presidency, and a majority of Democratic cowards and Republican crooks in our Congress and a criminal majority in the SCOTUS, that, like so many things in our constitution, the ban on religious testing no longer applies.

Every Wednesday noon I go to lunch with a bunch of old friends I call The Curmudgeons.  We are all more than 50, most over 60 and a few of us over 70.  We are all yellow dog Democrats who enjoy sitting around our round table and cursing TGDSOBGWB abd the cowardly Democrats and criminal Republicans in the US Congressw and among the Bush Administrations appointments.

At the same time, we curse with equal passion the criminals who have taken over the control of most of our MSM and major corporate board rooms.

One of the Curmudgeons, an funny IrishAmericanteacher of American  history sent this to all his friends this mrning.

I picked up this story by Joy Pincus from Womens Enews.  The story starts

Monitoring a fetal anomaly left Joy Pincus hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. In the end she followed doctors' advice to have a late-term abortion. The decision is a milestone marking the unpredictability of life and the value of choice.

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And continues below the fold

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/1065415,abortion072008.article
 July 20, 2008
Baby dead after mother apparently gives herself abortion  

Police are conducting a death investigation after a woman apparently
gave herself an abortion inside a vehicle on the Far South Side early
Sunday.
 Baby boy Johnson was found unresponsive in the back seat of a vehicle at
708 W. 103rd St., according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's
office. The baby was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:20 a.m.  Police responded to the 103rd Street address about 5:15 a.m. when they
found that a mother had apparently given herself an abortion, according
to a Calumet Area police sergeant.
  Detectives remain on the scene at 6:20 a.m., according to the sergeant,
who said he did not immediately know the mother's condition.
  Calumet Area detectives are conducting a death investigation.

John McCain and the Radical Right say this election is all about "character" and who will "keep us safe."  I am not here to attack McCain's character, nor his committment to "keeping us safe."  But I think that we should remember what is on the public record.

Several years ago, a book came out about 5 very public men, some of them military heros, all graduates of the US Naval Academy and the stories of their lives and their families lives before, during and after their military service.  It is a wonderful book called The Nightinggale's Song. In it, the author (himself terribly injured as a young Marine Lt in Vietnam) explores the characters and the experiences of these five exceptional men.  One of them, whom the author apparently found the most attractive during his writing of his book, was the then much younger John McCain.

In today's WaPo, Richard Cohen writes a column using the above name. Mr. Cohen writes: : "(Hillary) Clinton has been a one woman industry. ...more than 50 books have been published about her, some so purple as to be suitable for evidence at their authors' competency hearings." 

Cohen goes on to name several of the books, each seemingly more imaginary than the last, and ending in one named "Hillary's Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy To Muzzle Internet Journalists."  Cohen goes on to say, "Given her palpable mendacity and diabolical powers, it is either dumb luck or part of her long range evil plan that she lost the Democratic nomination.  Time will tell."More below the fold.

Baring another national tragedy, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee.  He has run a stellar race, far outperforming his DKos supporters who are still dissing Hillary Clinton and firing vitriol unworthy of even the Republican dung that almost destroyed Bill Clinton's presidency.   I am certain that should such a national tragedy occur, our DKos Obamanistas all know who will be to blame:  That awful Bill Clinton!

Last evening, against my better judgement, I attended with my wife a showing of Sex and the City at a local theater.  It is rated R, evidently because of extreme high heels, $800.00 purses and $400.00 shoes.  Oh, and there are some pretty steamy sex scenes and plenty of nudity, one showing the "male member" that ads for "male enhancement drugs" routinely avoid mentioning by name.  We will call it, "the full Monty."  Well, actually, it wasn't the full Monty, only a halfMonty seen from a side view.  But still pretty ugly to an old man like me.  As a gyno, I am accustomed to seeing the female body from every vantage point, and consider it to be one of the gods' greatest invention.  But the halfMonty?  Not so much.

My goodness, can you believe that awful HRC said the word assasination?  How insensitive!  How awful that someone would mention assination and Kennedy in the same sentence.  During a presidential campaign!?!!  

How insensitive that a woman whose family has had perhaps as many assination threats as any in American history over the past 16 years would ever even think of the word. 
I wonder where she heard it?

On Friday night I watched Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, the United Church of Christ "reverand" Jeremiah B. Wright interviewed by former Southern Baptist "reverand" Bill Moyers.  And I understood exactly why Barack Obama refused to "throw his friend under the bus" as some many of the MSM are saying he should have done.  Had Rev. Wright left it at that, I think both he and Senator and presidental candidate Barack Obama would have weathered the storm in good condition.

But former U.S. Marine Jeremiah Wright then went on the speak to the NAACP convention and next to the National Press Club and demonstrated exactly why so many of us U.S. Navy sailors called so many of the Marines we knew "Jarheads."  Instead of apeaking in soft and conciliatory tones in explaining his more "inflammatory remarks" delivered in many of his sermons, he came out swinging and delivered two more jeremiads that had ignited all those media fires in the first place.

The Clinton-Obama campaign has been portrayed by many as a white v. black contest.  Instead, we should recognize it as a contest between two prejudices.  Which does the greater damage to the greater number in our society in this year 2008.  In my opinion, it is no contest.

While I hate racial descrimination and recognize that it still holds back millions and has caused the degradation and deaths of many tens of thousands of our African-American brothers and sisters, the damage that still linger in our society as a result of hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crowism and racial prejudice in both the north and south, this hardly matchs the thousands of years of both institutional and individual sexism that rolls on in this country almost unnoticed and completely unrecognized by a majority of its male, and many of its female, populations, black and white, and brown, red and yellow.

It seems that the majority of the pundits in the major networks and the 24 hour "news channels" have given their opinion, and it is "NO! HILLARY CANNOT WIN.
Bullshit.  She not only can win, but she will have a major victory in today's PA primary. 
She should carry the day by at least 12% points.
Don't get me wrong.  I think either of our candidates will knock out Sen McCain in Nov.  But Clinton will not only deliver a knockout blow to McCain, she will be the great President that Bill Clinton could have been but for personal failings and the Vast Right Wing Conspiresy.  And if you don't think there was such a thing, you must have been a Washington or NYC media insider back when.

For 40 days, a small group of prayerful Christians stood for the most part quietly across the street from my office joining a national campaign of street side prayer and fasting called 40 Days for Life.  According to their national organizer, they were to pray quietly on the street near Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics for 40 days, while carrying minimally provocative signs and never screaming and assaulting the people coming in and out of the office.

Remember That Was The Week That Was?  No?  Well, I suppose most of you are a little young.  It was a comedy hour, or 47 minutes or so, a few years back...sort of like The Daily Show or Bill Maher's weekly program.  Mostly meant to be funny but with a deadly serious side.  Sort of like the movie I saw last night, Stop/Loss where I head young people laughing at the foibles of post traumatic stressed smalltown Texas soldiers returning from Bush's War, that seemed to me to be deadly serious but in the early going deemed funny by some of the younger folks in the audience.  

What follows is a That Was The Presidency That Was, about his other war, Bush's War On Women. Maybe it will seem funny in retrospect, when when a Democrat replaces George W. Bush and we can truly say, that was the presidency that WAS.

As some of you know, with the upcoming presidential general election just around the corner, the American Uncivil Abortion War is beginning to heat up.  Loud talk and anger words, like those that preceded the firing on Fort Sumpter are taking place even in my sleepy little town of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Fayetteville has been in the back waters of the war since we pretty much defeated the rebels after 4 years of war from 1985 to 1989.  But the 40 Days For Life.com campaign, supposedly with pray and fasting "24/7 for 40 days, has launched a new attact in my town on my office, and I have been firing back, figuratively speaking.

A few weeks ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper about the hypocrites ("Hypocrites" is what Jesus called people standing on the street corners rather than going into their closets to pray.) among the "gentle Xtains" picketing my office.  To learn more about the looming battle of Fayetteville, read below the fold.

A few days ago the WaPo printed a column about how dumb women are.  I think it garnered a few letters in opposition.  Maybe more than a few.  Most women are not stupid.  Though a few are.  And most Obama supporters are not stupid, and certainly Obama is not.  But the adolescent minded Obama attack dogs on DKos seem to fit exactly in the mode of Charlotte Allen's column on the WaPo the other day.  Let's see what she wrote.

Below the fold:

I have sometimes asked Americans whom I chanced to meet...whether in their opinion religion contributes to the stability of the state and the maintenance of law and order.  They always answered, without a moments hesitation, that a civilized community, especially one that enjoys the benefits of freedom, cannot exist without religion.
              Alexis de'Toqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1

I doubt not that all the infidels and heretics of the world would, if they could, confine honor to their own absurd errors and damnable deceptions.  But when I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion, and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion, and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England. And when I mention honor, I mean that mode of divine grace which is not only consistent with, but is dependent upon this religion and is consistent with and dependent upon no other.
              Parson Thwackum, from Henry Fielding's Tom Jones      

Each morning I get an email from a young man, David Bereit national organizer of the 40 Days of Life campaing which is supposed to involve 24 hours a day/7 days a week of prayer and fasting at targeted abortion care sites around the country, one of which is my office in Fayetteville AR.  What follows beneath the fold is today's message of encouragment and "inspiration."