Here and There

The Bush Squad wants to redefine birth control as abortion.

My take: They sat back and reflected, and realized that they hadn’t wreaked enough physical, moral, and sexual havoc on the nation and the world, and decided this would really get the ball rolling again, circa 20 A.D. style.

Bastards. At least Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the decency to waste no time denouncing the move.

Do not give a misbehaving child what (s)he wants.

And with that implicit analogy, this blog now turns its full attention toward taking down John McCain. Reader submissions are accepted.

The aim will be to expose John McCain for what he is — an old-school politician, beholden to special interests with deep pockets who play by their own rules. The arguments about approach to government are tired, but must be hashed out. The real question is who these candidates are, what they represent, and how they will lead and represent the United States of America at home and to the world.

Given these tenets, the choice should be pretty clear, methinks.

Call them whatever you like, there is no liberal bias. What there is is a sensationalist bias. What plays is what will generate viewers/readers, rather than what matters.

But even given this premise, nothing explains the fact that The Washington Post and The New York Times published more than 12 times as many stories about Obama’s questionable pastor as they did on the endorsement of the at least equally offensive televangelist who endorsed John McCain.

Sure, McCain disavowed himself of Hagee, but sheepishly. And at the outset of the so-called Reverend Wright scandal, Obama did the same.

I mean honestly, if McCain and Hagee were black, their story would’ve been huge.

I want the major news outlets in this nation to recede into the fold and die quietly.

Miraculously, I made it home last night in time to watch Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers Journal.

From the outset, I was struck by Wright’s intelligence, his patience, and a general sense of agreement I had with perhaps every idea he put forth, whether it derived from the Bible or his own education and experience.

His detractors will say of him (and, by extension, of Obama) that he is anti-American, that he’s racist toward non-Blacks, that he’s X and he is Y. Nonsense.

If Jeremiah Wright is guilty of anything, it is of providing an unskeptical, uninquisitive culture reasons to vilify him, courtesy of the media masquerading as journalists.

I realize I’m probably preaching to the choir here, and that the people who really need to understand all of this won’t see it (just as they didn’t and won’t watch Wright on Moyers’ show). And that’s the real tragedy here. That people in this nation lack the willingness to think deeply about the words and actions of “controversial” others.

The meat of what Wright preaches can be summarized thusly:

The U.S. has managed to conceal from its citizenly the bad actions this nation has committed. Our “history,” as taught to our children, glosses over atrocities such as the genocide of Native Americans, the slave trade, the disenfranchisement of the poor, the dropping of nuclear bombs and agent orange in Asia, needless aggression against small nations with inferior militaries in which untold innocents are slaughtered, and more recently, Iraq and Katrina.

That’s not to dismiss the great things we’ve done as a nation. Bringing these things up is recognizing that we are equally capable of straying from a path of righteousness as we are committing to it. And in the end, aren’t we better off acknowledging our shortcomings in order to overcome them? I certainly think so.

I’ll probably be doing this periodically throughout the day. Sticking with Here and There protocol, I won’t be linking to polls.

• On Obama and the Jewish vote, by Frank Gruber.
• On why Obama should answer the 3 a.m. call, by Richard Cohen.
• On how Obama defied expectations to challenge Clinton, by E.J. Dionne.
• Clinton says McCain has more judgment than Obama (true, of course, being 25 years older and having been in the Senate roughly 20 more years). By implication, of course, Clinton is saying McCain would make a better president than her Democratic rival. From Huffington Post.

You be the judge:

It’s happening: Iowans are going Protestant over Mormon. Jon Cohen and Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post report.

Regarding comments the former senator (who endorsed Hillary) made about Obama’s so-called ties to the Muslim world.

NYT Caucus on Huckabee’s mea culpa to Romney.

* My mom, fresh from a trip to Denali National Park, informed me very matter-of-factly the other night that “reindeer and caribou are the same animal.” Whoa, wait right there. When you say, “animal,” do you mean species, mom? “Well, the way it was explained to us was, a caribou is a nondomesticated reindeer.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, reindeer are domesticated? Reindeer actually exist? “Look it up. I’m just the messenger.”

Sure enough, when you wiki “caribou,” you’re lead to the entry for “reindeer,” whereupon you’re informed that they are members of the same family, and that, yes, mom, reindeer are domesticated caribou. Moose are members of the Cervidae family as well.

Here’s the rub, though: deer deer (think Bambi) is composed of the entire family Cervidae, which includes brockets, pudus, reindeer/caribou, and moose. Wow.

* I recall hearing something about this before (maybe on my parents’ last visit, as they love to tout all things Texas), but Fort Worth, my hometown, is experiencing a boom these days thanks largely to the discovery of natural gas in something called the Barnett Shale formation, which the city was built atop. Apparently the discovery, coupled with a rather new ability to drill horizontally, is making a lot of Texans rich.

* The theme here is “Mom Told Me So.” Last night over drinks at the splendorous San Francisco Hyatt, she told me about some catholic-priest-marriage-loophole, wherein a married Episcopalian minister can convert to Catholicism and stay married!!!

It’s a tough one to verify, but here are some clues.

* Courtesy daring fireball, the itso. (love it)

* I grew up wondering exactly what “gig ‘em” meant, in the sense of the Texas A&M sports slogan, “Gig ‘em, Aggies.” Mom did the favor of explaining, by way of dropping a “TCU rules” reference in there, that the term was coined during a football game between A&M and TCU, in which Aggie fans told their team to “gig ‘em,” a reference to a method of killing frogs. Yes, TCU’s mascot is the frogs.

* Sorry to incur another sports reference here, but I also learned the origin of the name of my college’s mascot, Bevo. Wiki dispels what was discussed last night, that some time way back University of Texas mascot (a longhorn bull) was stolen by students of the then-named Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. He was branded “13-0,” which was the score by which A&M beat UT years before. UT students then got the longhorn bull back and changed the brand to “Bevo.” Crazy? Dumb? Yes, yet I’m interested.

I’ve often wished there were a way to collect and retrieve data about yourself. You know, without diagnosable OCD or autism, a way to tap into such facts as:

How many steps I’ve ever taken
How many times I’ve eaten at my favorite taqueria
How many hours I’ve spent online
How many times I’ve pooped
How long my fingernails would be if I had never cut them

So, if there’s a god (or if anyone from MIT is reading), it sure would be great if this could happen. I mean, wouldn’t that be a great trade-off for having to die?

“Okay, yeah, you’re not gonna live forever, but after you die, you get to know any and all facts about yourself (and hell, while I’m at it, everything else) you could possibly want to know.”

I seriously had to do a double take when I read this story today, about the Vatican’s new rules for how God wants us to drive our cars.

Can’t find a link, but I’m just about finished reading “The Castaways” by Mark Singer, published in the Feb. 19 issue of The New Yorker.

It’s a stranger-than-fiction tale of a group of Mexican fisherman who end up stranded on their fishing vessel in the Pacific Ocean. There is survival, comraderie (or lack thereof), Catholicism, marine biology, international trade routes, Mexican presidential politics, poverty, education (or lack thereof), and more.

I recommend you either pick up a copy of the magazine, or find someone who has it and borrow or Xerox it and read this story.

With the continued revelations of Bible-thumping homophobic Christian preachers who, it turns out (lo and behold), have had sexual relations with members of the same sex, intolerant Christians everywhere now have a choice: realize that sexual activity with someone of the same sex is an entirely individual, non-”sinful”, private endeavor, or lump these former leaders in with the rest of the heathens on their way to hell.

Wouldn’t the compassionate, “Christian” thing to do be the former?