My cousin Dandy Nieuws insists he's going to start a blog any day now where we can come together to celebrate and gloat over the hard times befalling Republican politicians and their enablers in the business community. And there will be occasional bouts of genuinely good news, though I've warned him that he may run short of material.

In the meantime I thought I'd mention a few stories that caught his eye—

• After the Democrats picked up a House seat in Mississippi last week, the Republicans have now lost three special elections in a row. Of course the Democrats replacing them bear an eerie resemblance to their Republican predecessors.
• Alaskan Congressman Don Young, under investigation in a bribery probe, is reporting "no activity" in his legal defense fund. As a consequence he's had to spend over a million from his campaign fund for lawyers' fees. He might as well divert all of it. He's going to lose the election anyway, and his legal expenses are only going up, up, up!
• The Vatican is organising a conference next year to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. It will be interesting to see how the conference evolves. And a priest-astronomer is floating the notion that God may have created aliens elsewhere. (I foresee a severe immigration problem in our future.) There's evidently a push by the Roman Church to save science from the clutches of Evangelical know-nothings.
• And speaking of Evangelicals, pastor Joe Barron of the Prestonwood Baptist megachurch in Plano, Texas, was arrested Thursday after driving 3 hours to minister to someone he presumed to be a 13-year-old girl. He brought along a hymn book, some condoms and a minicam. I'm trying to rein in my imagination.
• Texans are also finding new uses for guns. Jorge Espinal of Ft. Worth was playing poker when he developed an itch. He went to the next room to look for a backscratcher and settled upon a revolver. Unfortunately the gun went off in mid-scratch and left him somewhat bloody but presumably without the itch.

With news like this, how can you not have a good weekend?

Tags: news and politics religion humor

Today a friend sent me an excerpt from Amy Goodman's interview with Gore Vidal that was broadcast yesterday on "Democracy Now!" Aside from Vidal's fame as an author he is also Al Gore's cousin. I don't recall that anyone attempted to use this family connection against Al Gore during his campaign for the Presidency in 2000, but rest assured that Vidal is more outrageous than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright any day of the week.

I'd like to think that Vidal has been reading Simply Appalling, but the truth is that no one—least of all Gore Vidal—should really need my assistance to see the obvious.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you hold out hope right now? 



GORE VIDAL: Well, what hope? 



AMY GOODMAN: That’s what I’m asking, if you have any. 



GORE VIDAL: No, not much.

You know, Benjamin Franklin, after the Constitution of 1789 was ready to—was being voted on, actually, in Philadelphia, he was leaving the hall, and he had been warned—the people running the Constitutional Convention, they knew he was very sharp-tongued and he was not an admirer of their works. He thought they were naive. He thought they were missing the point. He had read Aristotle, who explains how every republic has gone crashing. And he was leaving the hall, and an old lady that he knew said, “Well, men, what are you giving us?” He said, “Well, we’re giving you a republic, if you can keep it.”



Well, there were three or four boys who had been assigned to follow him around and make sure he didn’t say anything embarrassing to the people. Well, he went right around saying exactly what he wanted to say. So the kids sort of cornered him on the way out to the street, and they said, “Why do you take such a dark view of the Constitution? It’s the best work of some of the best people in the United States. Why are you so skeptical?” And he said, “Well, Aristotle or indeed history tells us that every republic of this nature has failed because of the corruption of the people.” And he stepped off the stage. 



AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to happen right now?

GORE VIDAL: It’s happened. We’re broke.

Do you follow television, as they find out we’re running out of food? That’s never happened in my lifetime. 



AMY GOODMAN: Do you think there’s a way to fix this? 



GORE VIDAL: A crash will do it. But that’s pretty extreme.

Whatever works.

Related posts
Good news about the economy (3/31/08)
Why haven't the Democrats ended the wars? (5/12/08)

Tags: news and politics recession depression antiwar

As I mentioned in a recent post, the economic cheerleaders spare no effort to present a rosy scenario of the nation's economic future. Since the Department of Commerce releases the nation's economic statistics faster than I lose hair, there's plenty of material to work with.

The latest cause for cheer was the "Advance Monthly Sales for Retail Trade and Food Services" released this morning by the Census Bureau. It comes out monthly and these were the numbers for April.

This report is watched carefully by economists and investors. It's considered of great significance because two-thirds of the contribution to the statistical measure of the overall U.S. economy consists of nothing more than the total of money that consumers have spent, whether they actually have any or not.

The report found that retail sales had dropped by 0.2% since March. Well, whoo-hoo! Before you turn all incredulous let me explain that the reason for the good cheer was that the number had dropped less than economists had expected! That calls for a second whoo-hoo!

But sometimes you have to dig about for the really good news, and our economic brethren wasted no time. Chris Bryant of the Financial Times, in a story glowingly titled "US retail data show signs of resilience," leads in with—

Fewer car purchases put a dent in US retail sales last month, which fell 0.2 per cent, as consumers were hit by high fuel costs and a weak labour market.

Excluding autos, however, total sales increased, indicating signs of resilience in consumer spending, a government report showed on Tuesday.

So if you eliminate car sales, things went swimmingly, right?

To bolster that view, Bryant quotes from an expert—

“Given all of the negative news... the strength in this report is a startling reminder of the resilience of the US consumer,” Drew Matus, senior economist at Lehman Brothers, said.

My, oh my. Digging a little deeper Bryant finds that—

Car sales fell 2.8 per cent last month while overall petrol sales posted a surprise decrease, slipping 0.4 per cent.

Is it really possible that someone can get a degree in economics and be surprised that gasoline sales dropped?

But here's the good news—

Excluding petrol, retail sales fell 0.2 per cent, while excluding both petrol and cars retail sales rose 0.6 per cent.

Michael Feroli, US economist at JPMorgan Economics, said he was encouraged by the broad-based nature of these sales increases, which included gains in electronics, apparel, sporting goods and general merchandise.

In other words, if you drop out the figures for auto sales and gasoline, sales were actually on the increase! Now I'm beginning to get it.

So I decided to drop by the Commerce website and have a look at the actual report. Economic statistics can be a bit tricky, so I wanted to find out what was being measured—was it the number of units sold or the total dollars spent? The short answer turned out to be total dollars spent.1 And here's what I found floating above the charts—

Estimates adjusted for seasonal variation, holiday, and trading-day differences, but not for price changes

In other words, if consumers made exactly the same purchases in April that they made in March, we would expect "total consumer spending" to rise, since the price of just about everything has risen. Whoopee! We're saved! We don't have to buy more, we just have to pay more for it, and the economy will still be on the right track!

It appears that the "core CPI," a measure of inflation, hasn't been released yet for April. (Forgive me if I'm wrong. I don't follow these matters very closely.) However, the March figure was 0.6%—an exact match to the increase in consumer spending for April once we jigger out those depressing numbers in auto and gasoline sales.

See how easy it is to find hope in a doomed economy.

Of course the stock market responded immediately. One atop the other in Google News were these two headlines—

Stocks head to higher open after retail sales report
The Associated Press - 2 hours ago

Stocks decline after retail sales report, Bernanke speech
The Associated Press - 44 minutes ago

Mr. Bernanke should just shut up. He's ruining my day.

Related posts
The Depression Chronicles – 4: Insurance (5/10/08)

Tags: news and politics economics economic statistics recession depression economic indicators retail sales

My morning wouldn't be complete without the Post publishing another war criminal in its op-ed pages. —cassidyt in a comment to Henry Kissinger's op-ed in the Washington Post, "The Three Revolutions"

Kissinger's op-ed appeared last month, and I would have missed it entirely if a rabid Zionist publication had not dropped a link to it into my Inbox this morning. After reading Kissinger's effulgence I concluded that the Zionists' enthusiasm derived from Kissinger's Europe/NATO bashing—

Conventional wisdom holds that disenchantment with President Bush's alleged unilateralism is at the heart of European-American disagreements. But it will become apparent soon after the change of administrations that the principal difference between the two sides of the Atlantic is that America is still a traditional nation-state whose people respond to calls for sacrifices on behalf of a much wider definition of the national interest than Europe's definition.

Shorter version: Europeans are less enthusiastic for war than their American counterparts.

Zionist Jews can barely contain themselves over the efforts by Western European countries to maintain a more balanced stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when compared with every U.S. administration since Ronald Reagan. The European refusal to accept at face value every Israeli claim of injustice and every Israeli excuse for vengeance is a matter of some grief to Zionists.

Then there's the Islamist threat—

Today it is radical Islam that threatens the already brittle state structure via a fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran as the basis of a universal political organization. Jihadist Islam rejects national sovereignty based on secular state models; it seeks to extend its reach to wherever significant populations profess the Muslim faith. Since neither the international system nor the internal structure of existing states has legitimacy in Islamist eyes, its ideology leaves little room for Western notions of negotiation or equilibrium in a region of vital interest to the security and well-being of the industrial states. That struggle is endemic; we do not have the option of withdrawal. We can retreat from any one place, such as Iraq, but only to be obliged to resist from new positions, probably more disadvantageously. Even advocates of unilateral withdrawal from Iraq speak of retaining residual forces to prevent a resurgence of al-Qaeda or radicalism.

Shorter version: The notion of the nation-state is being threatened by "Islamists." (That would include Israel of course.) These people are beyond negotiation, so stay in Iraq or fight them elsewhere.

Never mind that Iraq was a secular state before the invasion, and never mind that there is at least one advocate of unilateral withdrawal—retired Gen. William Odom—who does not speak of retaining "residual forces." And never mind that this was Kissinger's talking-point during the Vietnam War—that we must stay in Vietnam or fight the Communists elsewhere.

To paraphrase a line from a famous general—Old U.S. war criminals are never indicted, they just go into consulting.

Related posts
A different view of the Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq (5/9/07)
Reality Check of the Day (6/20/07)
Training the Iraqis: A contrary view (7/19/07)

Tags: news and politics Henry Kissinger foreign relations realpolitik Israeli-Palestinian conflict Iraq withdrawal

The newly energized voters on the moderate left look at what they have wrought in the 2006 election and wonder why they've seen no change—especially in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lulling the Republican base and the fellow-travelers

The most benign view of the Democratic majority in Congress is that they don't want to "rock the boat." That is to say, the Democratic leadership knows that if they sit tight and keep their trousers buttoned the Democrats are going to win big come November.

It's also true that the Democratic majority in the Senate is razor-thin and falls apart at the slightest sign of contention. This means there will be no impeachment of Bush or Cheney. Confrontations between the Democrats and the White House will go no further than a sound-bite on cable news. And you can be damn sure they're not about to cut off funds for the war and lay themselves open to accusations of "not supporting the troops" or "losing Iraq."

Underlying this calculation is a fear that they will do something to re-energize the Republican constituency—the low-paid white men, the conservative money machine and of course the Christian evangelicals, who've been the real workers at the roundup when it came time to herd the Republican faithful to the polls.

The multi-party Democrats

Another reason for Democratic inaction that many voters fail to appreciate is that within our two-party system, unlike the European multi-party systems, we have parties within parties—and this is especially true of the Democrats.

An item in the Wall Street Journal provides an excellent illustration of this. Bush has demanded—and the Democratic leadership intends to give—$183.7 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through next summer, which will be agreeable to the so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats. But the Democratic leadership hopes to sweeten the bill for the antiwar Democrats by providing better benefits for veterans and a requirement to begin the drawdown of troops within 30 days of the bill's passage. And for the populist liberals there's a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits—all in the same bill.

Sarah Lueck writes—

House Democratic leaders have set a floor strategy intended to deal with the different views of the war within their party. Three separate votes will be held: one on the war funding, one on the war restrictions and one on the domestic-spending items. No lawmaker will have to vote for all three items. The procedure will allow antiwar Democrats to support the domestic programs but vote against the funding for Iraq. Fiscal conservatives can oppose the domestic spending but vote for the war funding.1

There's something for everyone—and an escape hatch for all.

But Bush has promised to veto any bill that contains anything other than the money he wants, and I'm doubtful that anything but the war funding can make it through the Senate. Perhaps if the Republican Senators become sufficiently frightened at the prospect of being accused of "not supporting the veterans" or if employment figures begin to worsen (which they will), there is a possibility that a veto-proof majority could be fashioned that would include some progressive features in the bill. But whether that occurs or not, when the dust has settled you may be sure that Bush will get his war money.

The power of capital

Of course there is another view—readily found among the more leftist writers—that the Congressional Democrats are simply sucking on the same capitalist teat as the Republicans and are not ready to switch to formula. The corporate profits from this war are enormous, and small portions of those profits are allowed to filter back not only to the campaign coffers of the Congressional Representatives but also to the citizens of the Senators' states and of most Congressional districts.

Nevertheless, if the Democrats are installed in Congress at a level not seen for generations and Obama wins the Presidency, there will be some real pressure to get off the teat—at least so long as the public continues to demand change and the internet donations keep coming.

That said, we will be electing politicians—not heroes. Unfortunately, too many Democratic politicians—especially the old-guard—will readily accept the murder of vast swathes of foreign populations in return for two more years in office. To end the wars will require ongoing pressure from the electorate and real Presidential leadership. Either precondition is hard to come by, and to satisfy both at once will be a miracle.

A Simply Appalling view

I believe that all of the factors cited above are playing a role in Democratic inaction on the wars. And I'm doubtful that any combination of marching, letter-writing, praying, voting or electing will be sufficient to overcome them—especially the power of capital.

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't been writing about Iraq or Afghanistan but have preferred to write about banks and bankruptcies. This isn't because I've lost interest in ending the wars, but because I'm persuaded that the only force powerful enough to end them is economic—a massive failure of the U.S. economy. Day by day that is looking more certain.

As it happened, Jim Hightower, the columnist and radio personality, was on C-span yesterday addressing some of the issues in this post. He's more optimistic than I am about what can be achieved through electoral politics, but here's his answer to a questioner who wanted to know why the Democrats "haven't been able to make more of a difference."—C-span clip. (If you have a popup blocker, you may need to click on the Flash icon on the right side of the screen to play the video.)

Related post
Must-Read of the Day (9/8/08)
Good news about the economy (3/31/08)

Tags: news and politics elections Iraq war Afghanistan war electoral politics

Fr. Reginald Foster, "the Pope's own Latinist," teaches us how the Roman media would talk terrorism as he guides us through the terrors of Latin (terrores linguae Latinae)—

The archives of Fr. Foster's series "The Latin Lover" can be found here.

Tags: Latin language Roman history posse comitatus

On Tuesday I marveled at the pundits' predilection for declaring that all was well in the world of finance upon the slightest excuse. We didn't have to wait long to see Wall Streeters running for their Alka-Seltzer and Pepto-Bismol.

On Friday the world's largest insurance company American International Group (AIG) surprised its shareholders by announcing it had lost $7.81 billion in the first quarter of this year. According to the Financial Times, this was on top of a loss of almost $15 billion in the previous quarter.

AIG hopes to raise $12.5 billion to tide it over. About half of that will come from the sale of common stock, promising another blow to its shareholders.

The FT reporters wrote that "AIG’s poor first quarter results and capital raising plans will ... dispel investor hopes that turbulence in the credit markets has subsided. Business Week ran a story with the subhead "The insurance giant's ... first-quarter loss ... renews fears the credit crisis may still have a way to go." And Business Week reporter David Bogoslav wrote that "American International Group's (AIG) financial results ... sent a shock wave through the equity markets, renewing concerns that there's likely to be more fallout from the credit crisis."

As usual, the mortgage mess underlies much of AIG's loss. But last year the company was assuring the Nervous Nellies of Wall Street that "the company's exposure to subprime investments is limited." So in November, AIG was sued by a shareholder. According to Janet Whitman,

Doris Staehr charged that AIG concealed the extent of its exposure to the subprime crisis, with executives at one point claiming that the mortgage market would have to reach "Depression proportions" before hurting the company.

Hmm. Maybe they were telling the truth. Maybe the mortgage market has reached "depression proportions." But in any case, the company will be embroiled in lawsuits for the foreseeable future.

Of course with corporate executives it's hard to tell when they're lying. Unbridled capitalism, with Republican assistance, has produced a bumper crop of accomplished liars, cheats and fraudsters. In March four executives from another company and one executive from AIG were convicted of "conspiracy, securities fraud, mail fraud and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission," for a bit of financial flimflam to prop up AIG's books—and that wasn't even related to the subprime debacle.

The officers come up for sentencing next week—

The defendants were former General Re CEO Ronald Ferguson; former General Re Senior Vice President Christopher P. Garand; former General Re Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Monrad; and Robert Graham, a General Re senior vice president and assistant general counsel from about 1986 through October 2005.

Also charged was Christian Milton, AIG's vice president of reinsurance from about April 1982 until March 2005.

Ferguson, Monrad, Milton and Graham each face up to 230 years in prison and a fine of up to $46 million. Garand faces up to 160 years in prison and a fine of up to $29.5 million.

Let's see if they pull a sentence equal to Wesley Snipes'.

Related posts
Many in finance found to be SIV-positive (10/30/07)
The Depression Chronicles – 3: Money market funds (5/6/08)

Tags: news and politics recession depression finance credit crisis credit crunch

The first high school dedicated to preparing students for the front lines in the Nation's homeland security has gone from theory to planning in Wilmington....

Curriculum choices for students, who are to be called Cadets, range from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) through prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator, according to a Board statement.

—The Business Ledger in "Charter school will focus on homeland security" (hat tip to Feminist Peace Network)

The new school's principal appears to embody all the forces you would expect to converge in such an undertaking—jingoistic militarism, know-nothing Christianity and corporate-style management—

The first Principal of the institution is to be Dr. Fred Fitzgerald. A retired Captain in the Marine Corps, Fitzgerald teaches English, speech and debate at New Castle Christian Academy. Fitzgerald is also a former executive for Coca Cola in Jacksonville, Florida, and a former Director of Operations for the Port of Wilmington.

The school where Fitzgerald presently teaches is forthright in its beliefs, which include—

• the Bible is the inerrant, infallible and inspired Word of God.
• all people are eternally lost; salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ apart from human works.
• a literal heaven for those who trust and receive Christ as Savior and a literal hell for those who reject Christ.

The students would be well advised to focus on their jackboot studies because they will certainly have no future in science.

Related posts
Addicting students to fascism (1/10/05)
Department of Defense teaches creationism in DoD highschools (4/15/05)
Christo-Republican cadres (6/22/05)
Dismantling public education at home and abroad (5/8/06)
Market Failure of the Day (5/23/06)

Tags: news and politics charter schools education religion

Forget the polls. Forget the pundits. If you want to know the future it's the Simply Appalling future you'll need to know. Basing our predictions on the presence of drugs in the voters' water, Simply Appalling has now called the last four Democratic primaries with 100% accuracy!

Last night as the talking heads of cable stayed past their bedtimes waiting for the final tabulations from Indiana because the race was "too close to call," I rested securely and knowledgeably in the arms of Morpheus. "Hillary by a nose," I thought as I cuddled up, though the Clinton win by some 20-odd thousand votes out of one and a quarter million was more by an errant hair than a whole nose.

The pundits of CNN, Fox and MSNBC declared the Obama-Clinton race effectively ended last night and launched into discussions of imagined behind-the-scenes negotiations between the two campaigns to divvy up the spoils. Will Obama offer to pay off Clinton's campaign debt? Will Bill Clinton be the messenger of peace between the two camps? Will Hillary insist on the Vice-Presidential spot on the ticket as the price of playing nice? Unless I can come up with some dope about the drugs they're on, we'll probably just have to wait and see.

Related post
Drugs in their water: Predicting Democratic electoral outcomes (3/10/08)

Tags: news and politics Indiana primary election forecast humor

I am always astonished at the optimism of economists and, if we can judge from the stock market, investors. At the slightest improvement of one economic indicator or another—or even a deterioration of an indicator that is "less than expected"—hallelujahs can be heard up and down Wall Street that are quickly echoed in the financial news.

This week's cause for jubilation was a slightly positive gross domestic product (GDP), which means—so we are told—that the economy is not in recession after all. The other bright spot was "better than expected" employment figures. Never mind that these statistics—and especially before they are "corrected"—are worth even less than the U.S. dollar. You'd be better off spending that dollar by buying a tip sheet at the race track.

I admire Paul Krugman, not as an economist but as one of the few writers in "big media" with any sense at all. So I was disappointed when he began yesterday's column with—

Cross your fingers, knock on wood: it’s possible, though by no means certain, that the worst of the financial crisis is over. That’s the good news.

Krugman's bad news is that—

as markets stabilize, chances for fundamental financial reform may be slipping away. As a result, the next crisis will probably be worse than this one.

Don't worry, Paul. We have a long way to go before the "markets are stabilized."

Today's chronicle relates to money market funds. Deborah Brewster leads off with—

Legg Mason, one of the world’s biggest fund managers, has reported its first loss in at least 25 years and become the first fund group to raise public capital to shore up losses arising from the credit crisis.
....

Legg, which manages money market funds, equities and fixed income, said investors pulled out a net $19 billion during the quarter, and its market losses amounted to $28 billion.

Part of the problem was those darned ol' subprime mortgages, so elegantly packaged into structured investment vehicles (SIVs) by the nation's top financial-mathematical wizards "to reduce risk." Christopher Condon reports that—

SIVs accounting for at least $31 billion in debt have defaulted in the past 10 months as the collapse of the subprime market caused investors to shun securities linked to the mortgages....

... Chief Financial Officer Charles Daley said the company bought $150 million of SIV-issued debt from its money funds, placing the assets on Legg Mason's balance sheet. The company is still liable for any future losses from $890 million of SIV-related debt it swapped with Barclays Plc in December.

In other words, the company had to bail out its money funds.

Legg Mason still controls almost a trillion in assets—

Assets under management fell 4.8 percent in the quarter to $950.1 billion as investors withdrew $19.2 billion and market losses reduced assets by $28.5 billion. Equity outflows were $17 billion while bond funds lost $7 billion.

Money market funds are touted as "almost like a savings account," but the money isn't government-insured—at least officially. A lot of little people have money in these funds, and the failure of a major fund would go a long way toward setting off a real financial panic among the general public.

Of course there's no expectation that Legg Mason or the funds under its control will actually fail (there never is, is there?). Moody's, the same rating service that gave all those packaged subprime mortgages a top-of-the-line AAA rating, is giving Legg Mason—

... [a] senior debt rating at A2, with a negative outlook. The money manager should stabilize in the next three to six months, and probably won't be forced to "provide material additional support to its money market funds beyond the current levels," Moody's said.

So with assurances like that, how could you go wrong?

Legg Mason plans to raise a billion dollars to tide it over. This is the company's second trip to the well—

In November, the company received $1.25 billion from private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

According to Wikipedia,

Money market funds seek a stable $1.00 Net Asset value (NAV). Since the 2a-7 rule was adopted [that restricts the kinds of investments that can be made] only one fund "broke the buck" in 1994, paying investors $0.96 per share. That fund was the Community Bankers US Government Fund and had invested a large percentage of its assets into adjustable rate securities. As interest rates increased, these floating rate securities lost value.

Quite likely, short of total economic implosion, Legg Mason and its ilk will survive—thanks to more stringent regulations than were imposed upon the investment banks. On the other hand, it's hard to see why the small-time saver would want to put money in any of them. They appear to be a relatively high-risk venture with the promise of very little gain.

Related posts
Many in finance found to be SIV-positive (10/30/07)
Must-View of the Day (11/17/07)
The Depression Chronicles – 2: A view from the vault (4/28/08)

Tags: news and politics finance recession SIV

May 6 — In less than 24 hours since I posted the Youtube video it is "no longer available." Amazing when you consider that it's been around since January 1. Fortunately the video is also available at Metacafe.com.

John McCain: Reverend John Hagee Roman Catholic Church-Hitler Co

Frank Rich says most of what needs to be said—

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

Hagee has a much bigger audience than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But of course for McCain that's the point.

Related posts
Foreign Agents of the Day (7/24/07)
Quote of the Day: Jeremiah Wright — 1 (4/28/08)

Tags: news and politics Christian Zionism Israel Christian militarism Armageddon anti-Catholic evangelical

Warning: There is, as usual, some politically incorrect language at the Snapper. It is, however, the way real people talk.

It's been some time since I've given you an update on the doin's at the Pink Snapper. Since my last report Snapper men seem to have remained in the Obama camp, though Verl did mention the Rev. Wright controversy with concern. But Snapper men have rallied to the cry "Bro's befo' Ho's," and I truly believe it may help Obama. Never underestimate the power of a slogan, and especially a slogan as "politically incorrect" as this one.

While outsiders might take the view that the Sons of the Snapper are terribly racist and sexist, their behavior for the most part belies such an interpretation. The reality is that they're intensely antiauthoritarian and resent any attempt to tell them what they should think or say, which is why they don't like "libruls." Porkchop, for instance, remarked to me recently that he didn't think the government had any business telling people who they could sleep with. "Hell," he said, "I might wanna suck a dick one day, and who's to tell me I can't?!"

But I promised to survey the Snapper women's views on the election, and that I have done. Out of the 5 included in my in-depth survey, three were for Obama, one said she refused to vote for anyone (though I later learned she was an ex-felon and may have been just saving face since she can't vote at all) and the fifth said she would vote for Hillary, but only to save Obama's life.

That one caught me up short. I knew the thought was out there in the media. The Washington Times ran a story in January on Obama's security that caused some hand-wringing in the press. "[A]ssuming this topic continues to gain attention as the campaign goes on, how do you think the media should responsibly cover it?" asked one reporter-blogger. But I hadn't an inkling that it had filtered down to the Snapper. Marcia was serious. "I don't believe he'd make it to the inauguration."

This is pretty strange when you think about it. I've heard stories that some older Blacks are so convinced of the risk to Obama that they refuse to vote for him. The Washington Times story reported that one of the reasons Colin Powell refused a run for the Presidency was that his wife feared for his life. And now I find that a white Snapperette is of the same mind. Kinda makes you wonder what kind of country we're living in.

Previous post
Snatches from the Pink Snapper — 4 (1/29/08)

Tags: news and politics Barack Obama social libertarianism