The Politico is reporting that Ron Paul is on track to raise the most cash in the final quarter of the 2008 Presidential primary… except that Mitt Romney is expected to buy the top billing in the fundraising race by infusing millions into his own campaign.   With that type of profligate spending Romney is starting to make George Bush look like Alan Greenspan when it comes fiscal discipline. 

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Here’s one time when I agree wholeheartedly with a Republican senator, Chuck Hagel.

With the news today that people were taken hostage by a reportedly bomb-wearing nut at a Hillary Clinton campaign office in Rochester, NH, the scariest part of this was the reaction I read in perusing some of the tighty right sites. There were some folks absolutely cheering, calling the perpetrator a hero. Others suggested they put THIS PERSON up for GOP candidate because he’d be sure to get their vote.

A hero? For taking innocent people hostage in rural New England where usually only snow holds us hostage?

With the rhetoric in this country since the 1980s, I swear the American human civilization is regressing and retreating rather than evolving. Thankfully, not everyone is trying to prove Darwin wrong by seeing how far humans can DE-volve, but damn, others are coming close.

Let me say that I think Ricky Shambles used great respect and tact when referring to the GOP YouTube debate as merely a “poo-bomb” (poo is a necessary process and, in certain situations, actually useful beyond excretion which is not I believe true of most of the Republican candidates) and bhfrik, in discussing these pitiful men in debate, showed reserve in his remarks on these idiots’ protests about how infallible the Bible is.

But, as a supposed descendant of Eve - and you just know how evil the Bible paints her - and even more as someone who studied religion (still does) and the Bible and the history of the creation of what we call the Bible, all I can say is that I am floored whenever I hear anyone with more than a BAD third grade education insist that the Bible is the literal word of God.

It is, at its very best, an interpretation of certain events and stories, penned by men, edited and changed readily and self-servingly by kings, high priests, and others, and then copied and copied and copied and copied by monks and others over time. Remember the game of Telephone as a kid? How what you started with changed mightily by the time it reached the last person? THAT, at best, is the Bible.

The great majority of Christians (I am a Christian, fwiw), have NO IDEA that there are a SLEW of gospels, including some by (oh heavens!) women, who are not included. Those that still exist are available only to a very small number of historians and theologians. Many of them contradict what the others say. SOME have a much more charitable view of both God and Jesus than today’s Bible and do not call for the hatred of women, non-Christians, homosexuals, etc. that the current versions do.

Most Christians - and Jews, who share the Old Testament in their religion - have no blessed idea how much history tells us that leaders specifically ordered changes to text to “make people become obedient to the rule of the crown or the church”. And that’s BEFORE the interpretation done today which varies so incredibly widely. Nor does this discussion even address the huge mistakes that occurred in taking the Bible from the Greek to English, etc.

Men do NOT possess one less rib than women because Adam gave it up for Eve’s creation. Women do NOT have to suffer the worst effects of menses - or men themselves - BECAUSE Eve wants (oh how horrible) to eat from the tree of knowledge. And those are just the silliest examples of ways the Bible cannot be in any way considered a literal historical document of God’s word and Christ’s teachings. It is but a tool, one that must be tempered with an even greater gift God (for those who believe) gave to us: a mind capable of critical thought.

Instead, the Bible hardliners take ONLY from the Bible that which they find self-serving: Giuliani can steal from NYC coffers to finance his trysts with his then-mistress (now THIRD wife) Judy Nathan, the GOPers can LIE, for example - all on the “sin” list of the 10 Commandments - and still stand before the American people and pretend the Bible is a literal statement of God, just as other rightwing Christians can point to “an eye for an eye” to justify capitol punishment when they want someone executed and then scream and yell when a fetus who is not a fully cooked human being is lost.

Yesterday, I wrote:

Brigadier Gen. Keith Kerr (Ret.) is related to the Clinton campaign, but was not there in that capacity. I would guess that the outrage being spouted by the right today is a gut reaction to the ignorant, bigoted, deer-in-the-headlights response that this very valid question garnered. Duncan Hunter spews that allowing open homosexuals to serve would disservice conservative Christians serving. Huckabee agrees, and Romney backpedals on his vision of equality to fit into the hate conga line. They simply didn’t know what to do: an openly gay man who has honorably given so many years of his life to American service does not compute in the straight white Christian Republican cannon of reality. There are no gay heroes. So they’ll stick to calling him a plant.

Republican nerves were absolutely akimbo with outrage over the question (or, as I speculated, the confusion about the need to answer). CNN waffled then defended the content and substance of the questions. And then they folded. After the live version of the debate, in the subsequent airings, CNN deleted the don’t-ask-don’t-tell question and responses. And CNN didn’t say anything about it: why they did it or that it was even going to happen.

A sad, sad day in media today.

The Republican debate last night brought an interesting theological question into the political spotlight. Is the bible the infallible word of God?

(Click *more* only if you are interested in coming along for a bit of a ramble down theology lane… ) (more…)

Last night I sat through the mental poo-bomb that was the Republican debate and yadda, yadda, let’s get on with those notes.

• Approximately 3000 questions were asked for the YouTube Democratic Debate; 5000 for the YouTube Republican Debate. This is probably attributed to everyone from the first debate, 1900 new Democrats desiring to zing the Repubs, and 100 Republicans who were able to figure out a camera, Windows MovieMaker, and the YouTube on the internets.
• I thought Anderson Cooper looked rather dapper in his black satin tie, but then again I’ve always found him a handsome man.
• The sparky exchange that started out between Giulianai and Romney left Giuliani defeated and looking like a fool for his comments about Romney’s workers and wide-open for his non-answer of New York as a sanctuary city. And he was the first booed by the audience.
• Every boo in this debate was an ecstatic spark of schadenfreude.

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Ever wonder what the top 10 political sites are on the net? Find out here.

If you want to hear some of the economic experts discuss the dire state of our economy, catch Democracy Now’s broadcast today (starts about halfway in, after the YouTube debate talk).

Nice to know we’re being bought by the rich of the Middle East and the elite of the Arab world. Funny how much this group wants to scare you about Muslims while standing by and smiling while the richest of them buy up America, one working class home, local bank, and CitiCorp at a time.

You know, I’d really like to comment on last night’s (ridiculous, lame, surreal) Republican YouTube debate but…

Everytime I tried to listen and watch, my head started to implode. It still hurts today. IF I believed in waterboarding, I might consider it for Mutt (hmm) Romney, Rudy, and a few others there. OK, that’s not funny. Nothing about torture and what this administration and so many of the Republican candidates want to continue to do in our name IS funny in any way, shape, or form.

These candidates they have running are a damned scary bunch. They seem eager to restore us all to 1950 standards (which sound nice to some people, but this was not a good time either) and pretend science, technology, world affairs, etc. have not told us anything SINCE then.

Even Rudy Giuliani, the candidate often called the “most” friendly toward women (perhaps those he commits adultery with - I see no other indication than that) made it sound like states, if not he himself, have a right to decide a woman’s womb status and future over the woman herself. The closest agreement I had was with one comment by Huckabee (and Ron Paul has spoken even more passionately elsewhere about this) about getting rid of the IRS. Now, I don’t think we can kill taxes. But I want to get rid of this nonsense system and get something fair and easy to calculate, not designed to catch the middle and lower classes and reward the rich.

[Yes, I do like many of Ron Paul’s statements but the GOP has made him their Dennis Kucinich, which is a shame to both men who deserve far better than they get by the media and their parties.]

We all know American homes have never been in more jeopardy (a tad ironic, considering all this crew does is talk about the safety and sanctity of the homeland). What fewer of us realize, however, is that some of the same people who helped build the misery of sub-prime home loans (and remember, many of those in foreclosure now are NOT sub-prime loans which is even scarier) are the same people who have advised the Bushies on the economy and how to proceed.

NOW these people come out and say we should do something. NOW, after tens of millions of homes have been lost, and whole areas of the country are doubling up on recession because they have lost so many taxpayers and consumers in their communities. Of course, nothing will be done. Not by the Bushies and I don’t know if a Democratic winner in 2008 can help much there either. The point was NOT to let it get this bad in the first place, and for seven years, the Bushies deliberately fucked the economy and touted the very people who helped create a huge subset of foreclosed working Americans.

At the same time, economists are beginning to say en masse that the mortgage crisis alone COULD take down the rest of the American economy. Even the Bushies should wonder about that. I mean, can we attack Iran on a credit card? A subprime credit card perhaps?

Following Glen Greenwald’s titanic takedown of Joe Klein has been a real treat.   It all started with a column Klein wrote grossly misrepresenting the Democratic FISA fix, tarring Democrats as pro terrorist and soft on security.  Greenwald deconstructed that column piece by piece, leading to a bit of a back and forth… with Klein and Time.com just digging themselves in deeper and deeper.  It has gotten to the point the Klein is actually claiming that he is not a lawyer and does not have the time to check the claims of both sides of the FISA debate… while Time has to issue mealy mouthed corrections.  Greenwald provides the lefty blogosphere with an instant classic which will be long remembered for the devastating use of flawless logic to bring down Klein after he made the unfortunate mistake of parroting the Republican line on FISA before checking the facts. 

How about some Yahoo! News / AP action?

Twelve states sued the Bush administration on Wednesday to force greater disclosure of data on toxic chemicals that companies store, use and release into the environment.

The state officials oppose new federal Environmental Protection Agency rules that allow thousands of companies to limit the information they disclose to the public about toxic chemicals, according to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the lead attorney general in the civil lawsuit.

So once again, the Bush administration is allowing the interests of corporations trump the safety and health of Americans and our environment. Good show to New York, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Vermont for standing up. Wait, where, oh where, is Ohio?

After watching the last round of Democratic debates which fittingly took place in Las Vegas, the capital of intrigue, excess and illusion, I round myself wanting to waterboard Wolf Blitzer.

Whether I talk with Democrats or Republicans neither of them has anything nice to say about the debates, which they view as not merely a farce but a rigged one at that. The media have always found themselves accused of turning elections into a horse race, but this year members of both parties are wondering if the race isn’t a crooked one.

In both parties, the major complaint seems to be that the so-called debates virtually ignore people that the aforementioned media have designated as minor candidates while favoring the ones they have picked as front runners. One the Democratic side that means most of the camera time goes to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with an occasional nod to John Edwards, while on the Republican side it has meant we see a lot of Mitt Romney and Rudolf Giuliani with an occasional nod to John McCain. (more…)

I can see what Bill Clinton, who left office with a better approval rating than the last three years of Bush’s calculated TOGETHER, can do for Hillary; I’ve heard people I respect say that Hillary would get their vote just because Bill would be in the White House as well.

But Oprah for Barack Obama? Well, we’ll have to see if the media billionaire can do for Barack what she’s done for fat white women America over. I think Obama has some very solid creds and smart ideas. I like the heat he’s providing for Hillary. I’m just not sure that Oprah, who turned a tragedy of abuse at her school in Africa into another strategically-teared “It’s really all about ME moment because, to be fair, EVERYTHING is about me when it comes right down to it”, will bring voters of color learning toward another candidate OTHER than Obama already to Barack’s camp.

Polls coming out show that voters of color, particularly blacks (African-Americans, Jamaican-Americans, et al), do NOT see themselves as ONE block of people - though WHY we needed a poll to understand that intelligent people of any color would not see themselves as one voting block amazes me - apt to go for the same candidate, position, etc.

Only lazy strategists see women, see blacks, Hispanics, Asians, et al, as some quivering mass all likely to think, vote, act, and otherwise respond alike.

For example, I’m a less than fat WASP (with Native American heritage, too) woman who finds herself very reasonably inclined toward Obama - as well as Edwards and Kucinich and a couple others - DESPITE Oprah’s endorsement. Kidding aside, I just hope Oprah’s weight behind him will not hurt this candidate beyond my sense she won’t help him quite as much as some might believe.