Kerry: It's the voters' fault

In a gaffe reminiscent of his bumbling 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry has explained that the reason why the voters are angry with the Democrats is that they- the voters- aren't paying attention.

It's the voters' fault, you see.

And this guy was nominated by a major political party for president?

HT: Drudge

The breast of Sesame Street

Sesame Street has pulled the following sequence because of complaints that singer Katy Perry shows too much cleavage.

Gimme a break.

How about that?

Little Village- the community in Chicago in which I was raised, and which appears in red on the map of the city to the right- has for decades been the heart of Chicago's Chicano community. After misreading the title of a book here at the West Des Moines Public Library, it's just dawned on me for the very first time that the words "Chicago" and "Chicano" differ by only one letter. As far as I can tell this has absolutely no significance, other than the fact that given where I grew up I really ought to have realized that a long time ago.

The origin of the word "Chicano" is obscure. It has been traced to 1930's and '40's California, but some scholars claim an earlier origin. One theory is that it originated with the inability of native speakers of Nahuatl, an Aztecan dialect spoken in the Mexican state of Morelos, to say Mexicano. Instead, the
theory goes, they said Mesheecano, as the word would be pronounced in their language.

The name Chicago, on the other hand, is said to come from a Frenchified pronunciation of the Miami-Illinois Indian word shikakaakwa, meaning "wild onion,""wild garlic," or "wild leek" (Allium tricoccum, right) which grew in profusion along the shores of Lake Michigan before the coming of the white man. The French explorer La Salle, an associate of whom had described the plants on an earlier visit to the area, referred to the site as "Checagou" in a memoir written around 1679.

While the name may seem appropriate, it is probably unrelated to the pungent play of the Chicago Cubs over most of the past century and more.

Throughout most of my residency there, Little Village (also known as South Lawndale) was a largely Bohemian-American community, with a substantial German-American minority (including my mother's family). It has been a center of Chicago's Mexican-American community since the late 'Sixties and early 'Seventies.

I must be getting old

Here it is Thursday, and I forgot. Jay Cutler finally lived up to his hype, my Bears beat Dallas on Sunday, and we're 2-0!

How could I be so oblivious? It's Packer Week, for crying out loud! Next Monday night, the unbeaten Bears will do battle with equally unbeaten (though evil) Green Bay on prime-time national TV. I should have Bears on da brain!

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from the Ursine Warriors this season. Still not, really- though Sunday was surely a good sign, to say the least.

We shall see what we shall see. But in any event... Bear Down!

Woodward, Democrats turn on Obama

Bob Woodward, who did a series of hit books on the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, has turned his aim toward the Obama administration- and the results ain't pretty.

Woodward's portrait of a dysfunctional Obama presidency includes accounts of "Professor" Obama giving his aides homework assignments, and admitting that he only set a deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan because he couldn't afford to lose the support of his fellow Democrats.
Woodward portrays the administration as deeply divided over Mr. Obama's Afghanistan policy.

Meanwhile, Woodward is not the only person to paint the Obama administration as "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," to borrow a phrase from the late Jimmy Breslin. Even Democrats are beginning more and more to compare the current president to Jimmy Carter- including both Carter himself and Carter's vice-president, Walter Mondale.

HT: Drudge

Carter: Blue vs. Red divides us more than Blue vs. Gray did

Jimmy Carter says that America is more polarized than it was during the Civil War.

While that's obvious hyperbole, I wonder whether Mr. Carter has reflected upon the degree to which he, personally, has contributed to that polarization with his own overheated rhetoric.

Mr. Carter's transformation from a moderate, if ineffectual, liberal president to a reckless and rhetorically extreme ex-president has saddened many of us who once found things to admire in his record, and endangered his fair prospects of historical rehabilitation in the wake of what was at the time largely perceived to be a disasterous presidency.

HT: Drudge

Meet James Meeks- potentially, Chicago's socially conservative, African-American mayor

Here's an article by the Trib's John Kass on the Rev. (and State Representative) James Meeks, a Baptist preacher and Democratic legislator who brings a virtually unheard-of dynamic to the upcoming race to succeed Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Rev. Meeks, you see, is a prominent member of Chicago's African-American community- and a social conservative.

The potential Meeks candidacy has set off all sort of alarms in Chicago's gay and lesbian community due to his outspoken opposition to gay "marriage," civil unions, "hate crimes" legislation, and benefits for the same-sex partners of city employees.

Meeks says that he would expect as mayor to have his hands full enough, at least initially, that advancing his conservative social agenda would not be a priority for him. Chicago's gay and lesbian community, however, is not mollified.

A textbook case of bad economics

If you were to go looking for a textbook example of a failure to understand the dynamics of recessions (and deficits), this piece of nonsense by Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe would be it.

First, government "stimulus spending" doesn't end recessions, the Democratic catechism to the contrary. It didn't end the depression. And it hasn't ended any of the economic crises we've gone through since then, either. Instead, what ends recessions is the technique successfully used by John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush: tax cuts, which encourage large numbers of people and businesses throughout the economy, rather than merely government and the businesses it favors with "stimulus" contracts, to spend money by allowing to keep more of their money to spend instead of paying it in taxes.

"Tax breaks for the rich," as the Democrats are fond of calling them, are merely tax cuts which allow the people with the most money to spend the most money, too. Although the point is often missed on the economic Left, one of the unique things people in this classification tend to spend their money on in greater qualities than anybody else is hiring people! Another is investing in their businesses, which tends to lead indirectly to people being hired.

For the government to spend like a drunken sailor makes deficits worse, and does not bring us out of recessions and depressions. On the other hand, for the government to generate more revenue while spending less certainly is a legitimate remedy for deficits, and does a far better job of stimulating the economy than spending large amounts of money the government doesn't have.

Is it true, as Jackson maintains, that tax cuts would merely dig the deficit deeper? History's answer is an emphatic- if somewhat qualified- no. It has been a long time since liberals have had a chance to laugh at the Laffer Curve, the economic principle behind the 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cut which was the cornerstone of "Reaganomics-" the combination of such strategically-planned tax cuts with parallel cuts in spending through which Ronald Reagan solved the double crisis of recession and mammoth deficits he inherited from Jimmy Carter (and, to be fair, which he, in turn, had inherited from Gerald Ford).

World War II, not the New Deal, brought us out of the depression. And tax cuts (combined, of course, with cuts rather than Obama-esque increases in spending) brought us out of the recession of the late 'Seventies and early 'Eighties. Granted, this will not always work; it depends on the data the Laffer curve displays at any given moment. But as a matter of fact and history, Jackson is simply wrong. Tax cuts (and especially "tax cuts for the wealthy") will not necessarily dig the deficit hole even deeper. Combined with prudent cuts in spending, history tells us that it often will produce not only jobs, but (counterintuitive though this might be) more rather than less income- because the growth of the economy caused by those tax cuts will increase, rather than decrease, the amount of tax revenues being taken in!

The way to dig the hole of the deficit deeper is precisely the traditional Democratic answer to recession: for the government to spend more money that it doesn't have. The effect is exactly the same as if you were to react to the problem of your money running out too far in advance of payday by spending more of it, and faster!

The real solution is to somehow manage to get paid more, and at the same time to spend less. Time and time again, strategic tax cuts (most emphatically including tax cuts for "the wealthy"), combined with thoughtful- and, if neessary, drastic- cuts, rather than increases, in government spending have gotten us out of recessions without breaking the bank in the process. But for government to simply go on a spending spree seldom adquately stimulates the economy, and makes deficits even worse.

Which is one of the reasons why the economic crisis is unlikely to end until Barack Obama moves out of the White House, and somebody closer in economic philosophy to Ronald Reagan moves in.

HT: Real Clear Politics

Hartford Council substitutes moment of silence for prayer to Allah

Muslims are upset because the Hartford, Connecticut City Council opted for a moment of silence, rather than a prayer to Allah led by an imam, to open Monday's meeting.

Sorry, Muslims. This time you're wrong; I don't blame the Council one bit. I am not crazy about prayer at civic functions in any event for the very reason why the councilpersons weren't comfortable with it in this instance: it must of necessity either be a generic prayer to a generic deity, or a prayer to a specific deity worshipped according to assumptions and beliefs not necessarily shared by those called upon to participate. Either constitutes idolatry.

Since my God is not Allah, but the Holy Trinity, and since the two are not the same, I, for one, could not in conscience participate in such a prayer. Evidentally the Christians- and perhaps Jews- on the City Council also understood that neither the generic god of the American Civil Religion nor the god of the Koran can be addressed in prayer without worshipping a deity other than the one in which they believe, and thus becoming guilty of hypocrisy or worse.

Is the ghost of John Wilkes Booth to blame for the Washington Nationals' misfortunes?

It is being suggested in our nation's capital that the proximity of their stadium to the spots where John Wilkes Booth was once buried and where his co-conspirators (as well as the probably-innocent Mary Surrat) were hanged has made the Washington Nationals the victims of a curse- one even spookier than the ones put on the Red Sox by the trade of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, on the Cubs by billy goat owner Billy Sianis, or on the Blackhawks by disgruntled former coach Pete Muldoon.

While I don't believe in curses (Cub and Blackhawk fan though I am), it does make me think. The mortally wounded Booth's last words, looking at his own hands, were, "Useless. Useless." The same might, I suppose, be said of the hands of some who play for the Nats- and who, like the late Michael Jackson, wear one glove for no apparent reason.

It's not just raining cats and dogs. In Iowa, it's raining frogs!

I’m afraid there is no escape for us: we shall have to give to civilization upon this earth—some new worlds. Places with frogs in them.
—Charles Fort (August 6, 1874 - May 3, 1932) Book of the Damned

Charles Fort was an American skeptic, anti-dogmatist and student of weird phenomena who wrote several books during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. He retains a cult following today, and the Charles Fort Institute continues his work.

One of his tomes- The Book of the Damned, quoted above- contains a section on occasions upon which it has rained frogs in various parts of the world. The phenomenon has been observed many times, not only with amphibians but also with fish, squid, and other creatures. The most common explanations are waterspouts and really, really strong winds.

I've had great respect for the strength of Iowa winds ever since I conspired with a couple of seminary classmates who also were from Chicago to vandalize the statue of Martin Luther in honor of the Bears' participation in Super Bowl XX (President Fjeld, upon learning of the plot, told us, "If I see you, I'll have to stop you. I go home at seven o'clock...."). Making it out of good, strong tape enabled us to secure Martin's Jim MacMahon-style "Rozelle" headband securely to the statue, but we had a terible time keeping those oversized sunglasses on Dr. Luther's face. The wind kept blowing them off, no matter how strongly we tied them to his head!

Mid-way through my second call, when I lived in Kellogg, Iowa, a 70 mile-per-hour straight-line wind blew the metal chimney cap from the parsonage through the front window of the elderly lady who lived next door. Even when they don't come from tornadoes, Iowa winds can be rather formidable.

This has been an amazingly rainy, stormy summer here in the Land Between the Rivers. A couple of months ago, I noticed a dead, squished, and decomposing creature on the sidewalk that I assumed had to be a baby bird. But it looked an awful lot like it had been a frog at some point. The problem was that it was too far from any body of water for that explanation to seem likely.

Now, there is a creek several blocks from my apartment, and the Des Moines River is about half a mile in another direction. But neither seem close enough to explain the number of similar little corpses that I kept spotting all over the neighborhood as the summer went on. Closer examination confirmed my initial impression: these were definitely small frogs, and not baby birds after all.

We've had so much rain that some low points and ditches have become semi-permanent little mini-swamps this summer. I considered the possibility that frogs from the creek and/or river might have laid eggs in some of them, produced tadpoles, and thus boosted the amphibian population of the neighborhood. Maybe. But I never saw anything swimming in them, and- though I did once hear some suspicious rustling in the plants which hid most of one of the larger of these front-yard swamps from easy view- I have never actually seen frogs in or near any of them. In fact, none of the frogs I've seen this summer have actually been alive. In fact, all have them have been reasonably far along in the process of returning to the dust from whence they came.

I see no other conclusion possible: we have had a Fortean summer here in the Highland Park section of Des Moines. We have been treated to a rain of frogs, and perhaps more than one of them. The winds from the angry thunderstorms we have experienced so often in the past several months must have picked up the little fellows from along the banks of the river (the creek seems awfully small to account for so many), and deposited them all over the neighborhood, causing them to either die from the impact on the concrete or dry out and shrivel up from having been deposited too far from water for them to survive. They have my sympathy, either way.

In any event, in reading about rains of frogs (both in the Book of Exodus and elsewhere), I never expected to actually experience one. Son of a gun, it seems that I have.

ADDENDUM: Or not.

I had an interesting conversation with one of my neighbors from the building last night. Seems that he has seen lots of living frogs in thw 'hood of late. One of them even got inside the building, and was hopping around in the hall outside my apartment!

Perhaps all the rain has simply made for an environment in which the little guys have felt safe in wandering unwonted distances from permanent bodies of water. Maybe those semi-permanent pools have played a role. Either that, or somebody in the neighborhood is keeping some Hebrews in captivity, and needs to let them go.

Congratulations...

...to the Rev. Matthew Harrison, who was installed yesterday as president of the Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod.

May God bless President Harrison as he strives to return Missouri to its former place as a bastion of sound, biblical, confessional Lutheranism in a nation desperately in need of its witness.



HT: Diane Meyer, Respublica

Silly season on what ought to be a solemn day

Even after the Irreverend Terry Jones announced that he would not be burning any Korans today after all, they're demonstrating against him- and America- in Afghanistan.

The "Muslim street" has never been accused of rationality, of course. But the point is hard to miss: the wave of anti-Muslim bigotry that is sweeping the nation on this ninth anniversary of 9/11 is doing permanent damage. With these guys, even coming to one's senses doesn't do any good; while repentance is not a concept alien to Islam, forgiveness does not necessarily follow.

Meanwhile, as we assess the damage the unacknowledged religious bigotry of the wingnut Right has done to America, the danger in which it is putting our fighting men and women in Afghanistan, and the favor it's doing al Queda, Iran and the other Islamofacists of the world by alienating the very people they want to win over to their crusade against America, the moonbat Left is also chiming in. It seems that Terry Jones and Rush Limbaught were high school classmates in Cape Girardeau. And given the "progressive" passion for guilt by association when it comes to people it doesn't like, the haste of the liberal media to report this very minor story is hardly any more remarkable than their adroitness in insinuating a significance for it even in the process of agreeing that there is none.

Limbaugh didn't reveal the fact himself, you see.

It shouldn't be surprising, btw, that the story was first broken by the Left's hatemonger-in-chief, Keith Olbermann.

The end of a dynasty: Richard II calls it quits in Chicago

Here's an article by Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune on the career of Richard M. Daley, who on Tuesday announced his retirement as mayor (or, as they say back home, "mare") of the city of my birth and youth, Chicago. He will not run for re-election next year.

Daley has led the greatest city in the world for 22 years. Despite approval ratings of only 37% back home, from my vantage point in exile he seemed to me to be a pretty darned good mayor. And this from a guy who spent his young life- from a Republican boyhood through the night he was tear gassed as a messenger for the McCarthy campaign during the 1968 Democratic Convention to almost a decade of involvement with the "Independent Movement" on the Left of Chicago's electoral politics- fighting the political power of the current mayor's father, Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Chicago is a city in decline. When I was born, it was economically, culturally and in terms of population clearly America's "Second City," surpassed only by New York. Now it is a distant third to that artificial patchwork of suburbs, Los Angeles, in population, and- like all large American cities- was struggling economically even before the economy imploded.

It remains a cultural center with few peers nationally, and under Daley's leadership has done better in dealing with both the economic downturn and the realities of modern economics and demographics than nearly any other major American city. Still, the revolutions in transportation, communications and technology have left it behind Los Angeles, and this is not, in any case a very good time for our nation's cities generally. One of the ways Mayor Daley has dealt with the problem of the budget in the aftermath of the Great Recession has been to establish the second highest sales tax in the nation. For a while, it was the highest. A declining quality of life combined with a rising cost of living has left Chicago in a bad way; the recession has made a bad situation far worse. Against these crises the current Mayor Daley struggled manfully, healing the political and cultural wounds opened under his father with the city's minorities and his own party's Left (David Axelrod, President Obama's "Karl Rove," was- like yours truly- a member of the Independent Movement, and his cordial relations with Chicago's mayor would have been unthinkable for a member of that movement in my day; Barack Obama would not have been possible without the rapprochement between the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization and the former Independent Movement- a rapprochement over which Richard II presided ) and doing the best he could against an increasingly deteriorating situation on too many fronts to count.

Despite our political differences, as a person who still considers himself a Chicagoan despite a thirty-year exile (and always will), I am grateful to "Richie," as he is known, for the fight he put up these past two decades for the city I love. I probably would have voted for him at least on occasion in recent years. Perhaps not every time; our differences on some issues are profound. But maybe once or twice. And given the job he's done against tremendous odds, I wouldn't have been all that disappointed on the election nights when I was at the defeated candidate's
"victory party."

Because I love Chicago, I am not about to give up on her. The fight to restore her place in America's economy and culture will continue, and even if I'm condemned to continue to do it from a distance, I'll be rooting for her with every fiber of my being.

Most prominent among potential successors is President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. Other potential candidates include socially conservative African-American activist Rev. James Meeks, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, County Assessor James Houlihan, Congressman Luis Gutierrez, City Clerk Miguel Del Valle (thus far the only declared candidate), and City Council members Bob Fioretti (2nd Ward), Sandi Jackson (7th Ward), Thomas Allen (38th Ward), Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward), Pat O' Connor (40th Ward), Brendan Reilly (42nd Ward) and Tom Tunney (44th Ward), Tunney, who represents the Lakeview and Wrigleyville neighborhoods on the Near North Side, is openly gay.

I really, really hope it's not Emanuel, though.


ADDENDUM: The consensus back home seems to be that it probably won't be. The affable and popular Dart (above)- who has made a name for himself by refusing to evict people who have defaulted on their mortgages- is said to be the favorite, and key Chicago constituencies- including the Latinos and the African-Americans- aren't too crazy about the lack of support they see themselves as having received from Emanuel in his present position.

Of course, President Obama could intervene, perhaps on Emanuel's behalf and perhaps on someone else's. But the president's popularity in our mutual home town isn't that much greater these days than it is in the country as a whole. It isn't clear how much influence, as a practical matter, he could wield.

This figures to be the most interesting and certainly the most wide-open Chicago mayoral election of my lifetime, and perhaps in the city's history. Stay tuned; this is gonna be fun.

Oh, to be back home for it!

Another one

Another wingnut pastor- this one in Springfield, Tennessee- also plans to burn a copy of the Koran tomorrow.

Whether in its Koran-burning or anti-Cordoba manifestations, I never cease to be amazed by those who believe that we some how are scoring points in a "battle of civilizations" by abandoning our own values and embracing Islam's.

HT: Drudge

Some people I don't know, but mourn anyway

For various reasons, I failed to note the recent passing of some people whom I will miss.

Bob Probert was both hated in Chicago for his role as the "enforcer" for the evil Detroit Red Wings and loved there when he took over the role for my Blackhawks. I remember seeing a jersey at a Hawks game once bearing Probie's number and the word "INSTIGATOR" on the back where the player's name was supposed to go. He played hard and watched out for his teammates, and was as appreciated by his team's fans as loathed by those of the opposition. He died while boating on July 5 of an apparent heart attack at the age of 45.

Bobby Thompson, best known for his "Shot Heard "Round the World," a homer off Brooklyn's Ralph Branca that won the one-game playoff for the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants, died on August 16at the age of 86. Thompson, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, was significant to me because he was the center fielder for the very first Cubs team I followed.

And Jack Horkheimer, a self-taught astronomer who became director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and a well-known PBS personality, died on August 20 at the age of 72. A flamboyant personality whose show previewing the astronomical highlights for the coming week was called Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler for his salesman-like enthusiasm before being more sedately renamed Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer late in its long run, he was not only a familiar lead-in to episodes of Doctor Who on Iowa Public Television, but a handy "heads up" on what to look for overhead for amateur astronomers like yours truly. I'm going to miss those brief, entertaining, and informative weekly visits with Jack.

Resquiat in pacem.

In the first 19 months of his administration...

...Barack Obama has added more to the national debt than all the presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.

HT: Drudge

Terry Jones and the anti-Cordoba crowd are two sides of the same ugly coin

The Rev. Terry Jones (who, like his namesake from Monty Python's Flying Circus, is a clown) has everybody from the American Muslim community to the Federal government in an uproar over his plan to conduct a public Koran burning.

Look. If, as some maintain, the issue in the controversy over building an Islamic community center containing the immediate vicinity's second mosque in the same neighborhood as Ground Zero isn't about religious tolerance, but a "war of cultures" between Western Judeo-Christian civilization and Islamic civilization (a war we apparently can win by abandoning our own values in dealing with Muslims and adopting theirs), why is Pastor Jones's moronic book burning less appropriate than preventing Muslims from building a second mosque within a half-mile radius of Ground Zero merely because the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon happened to share their religion?

Rationalize as much as you like. They both are religious bigotry, plain and simple.

Sabato on November: "Good chance" for GOP in House, Dems "on the bubble" in the Senate

Academician and pollster Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball at this point predicts a good chance that the GOP will gain control of the House in November- and the odds only slightly favoring Democratic retention of the Senate

In Sweet Home Chicago, Obama's magic is wearing off

Even in Chicago, people are getting fed up with President Obama's ineffectual policies.

One note on Jay Levine's article, though: while it's true that the economy was in recession when Mr. Obama took over from George W. Bush, the unemployment rate at the time was 7.4%

It's 9.6 percent today. Things are getting worse, not better.

Sorry, but blaming Bush has long since ceased to work in the nation at large- and one has to wonder how much longer it will work even in Chicago. The issue is the increasing evidence that Mr. Obama and the Democrats can't fix our economic mess- and there's only one alternative.

HT: Drudge

Barack Obama isn't what!?

This- by Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times- is one of the most disingenuous pieces I've read for some time.

Rutten's sneering implication that the bizarre slanders the Far Right make against President Obama must of necessity be made because he is an African-American is worth a cynical chuckle or two. Whence, then, the equally bizarre lies about George W. Bush, his National Guard service, his alleged complicity in 9/11, his prior knowledge of the absence of Saddam Hussein's WMD's, and the alleged stealing of elections in which the evidence of chicanery is far greater against the Democrats that were, and remain, just as prominent on the Left- so much so that John Kerry repeated the National Guard lie on the campaign train in 2004, four years after it was first made and then immediately discredited? Come off it, Tim. There are malicious nuts in both parties and at both ends of the political spectrum. Not every piece of right-wing lunacy is automatically due to racism!

But probably the silliest thing about the whole article is the suggestion that a man who was a member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's congregation for a quarter of a century, who was married by Rev. Wright and had his children baptized by him, is not influenced by Liberation Theology. Well, no. There is one thing sillier: the suggestion that, since Glenn Beck was wrong about Jeremiah Wright's hero, James Cone, being one of the founders of Liberation Theology (as opposed to merely one of its practitioners), Beck's essential point is in any way compromised.

Liberation theology- which sees Christ's mission as the liberation of the poor and the oppressed rather than the saving of the world from "sin" in the Christian sense ("sin," in Liberationese, being captialism and unjust social structures), and reads the world and events through the filter of a Marxist hermaneutic- is part of the warp and woof of the theology of the Religious Left, whether its practitioners are brown, black, or white. And make no mistake: James Cone and Jeremiah Wright are very much liberation theologians, so much so that it is bizarre that this should even have to be pointed out.

No, I am not saying that the President is a Marxist. But I am saying that it's beyond denial that his personal religiosity- at least as indicated by his choice of churches and ministers- is heavily influenced by a theology which, whather he realizes it or not, is Marxist to the core. Further, it would be a sad commentary on Mr. Obama if he were to have remained a member of a church for more than twenty years and yet remained wholly uninfluenced by what is preached there!

If Barack Obama were free from the influence of Liberation Theology, he wouldn't have remained Wright's parishioner for a quarter century. Instead, he would have sought out a minister who proclaimed the gospel of Christ rather than that of Karl Marx.

HT: Real Clear Politics

In Ohio, people would rather have Dubyah back

A new poll on who Ohioans would rather have in the White House yields an interesting result: George W. Bush 50%, Barack H. Obama 42%.

It's looking more and more like my 2008 prediction was correct, and that year's election- like those of 1976 and 1988- was a "poison pill," whose winner was destined by the dynamics of the economy to be a one-term president.

It's a long way to 2012, of course. But even the most optimistic economists don't see the economy- which is worse by every criterion today than when Dubyah left office- returning to anything vaguely resembling normality before 2014.

Can you say "President Romney?"

HT: Drudge