I am dying to find out how voting went in California today, especially in the race for the congressional seat vacated by Randy Duke Cunningham.

If a woman’s studies professor can win this Republican stronghold (Republicans outnumber Democrats in this district 3 to 2) then November will be sweet!

Must wait till later for results.

Charles Pierce is so good that I would feel remiss in adding my own commentary to his smackdown of National Review’s pathetic attempt to find 50 conservative rock songs. The first sentence says it all: “Oh, Lord, sometimes, you make the fish so big and the barrel so small.”

So just go read it at The American Prospect site.

Sexiest picture of Al Gore ever.

There’s an effort to draft Gore into the 2008 presidential race and I am going to throw my 2 cents in.

I think he can do.

I think he should do it.

I think he’s proven that he can win a presidential election.

And he’s gone through some changes. He lost the thing he’d been working for his entire life and then saw the damage that came from not fighting hard enough. I think if he comes back he will be tougher and less “wooden” than before. Personally, I saw him speak at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in 1998 and never understood the wooden part, but he’s lightened up.

So there’s a Draft Gore in 2008 plan running. You should check out the site even if you don’t like Gore because they are going for publicly funded elections. Can you imagine if corporate shills didn’t get to fund elections?

Oh wow! Free, fair, non-corrupt elections and sexy denim-clad President Gore. I may faint.

( I stole the pic and the link from Shakespeare’s Sister– she thinks he’s hot hot hot too)

Because I am about to type something that is complete heresy.

Yay Wal-Mart! (Oh my god- is my hair on fire, am I going to be struck down by the progressive gods?)

From the AP

MADISON (AP) – A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a pharmacist who claimed he was fired by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for his refusal to fill birth control prescriptions.

But wait, there’s more.

Wal-Mart and the staffing agency that hired the guy tried to work with him on his beliefs. He was not required to fill birth control prescriptions because there was always another pharmacist on hand to fill them.

But that wasn’t enough for the guy. Instead, he left people calling about birth control on permanent hold and didn’t tell the other pharmacist when someone came to the counter to fill a birth control prescription, so the person went away thinking that the prescription could not be filled.

Wal-Mart fired him for insubordination, which is a lot more than I can say for Target*.

Damn, I hate it when evil empires do something good.

* That I have to link to Big Girl John Arovosis pisses me off, but it was the best thing I could find for a 7 month old story.

PS- This is our 300th post. Who knew we were so verbose?

I have to drop the marriage equality talk for a while because it physically pains me- I mean heart sick, nauseous, migraine inducing pain- to continue the argument with people I am friends with on something that is such an integral part of my character and values. It’s easy to disagree so vehemently with people you don’t respect, but I feel vicious anger coming on and I don’t want to unleash that on someone I like.

With that, I ask you to try some empathy. You may not think that marriage equality is a life or death issue, but for some it is. For others it is just the day to day discrimination that wears them down. You can start with reading the stories at Freedom to Marry.

First, I am not against same-sex marriage. It probably needs to happen and I look forward to the public debate toward its resolution.

I AM against falling on our swords to see it happen. Whether I am for it or against, I realize a passage of a ssm rights bill, either nationally or in the states is an uphill battle. It is one I hope happens, but one that I am assured has no chance at all under our current right-wing theocracy.

What I highly object to is using the black population to gain its passage. Blacks have never been in the position to deny this right to homosexuals. Does homophobia exist in the black community? Undoubtedly. Can the gay community work with the former to assuage its existence? Hopefully. But to say that the struggle for gay marriage is the same as the one for Black emancipation is both insensitive and irresponsible. If you want to pass ssm laws, find another tactic.

Many of the discussions about ssm point to how the families of gay lovers ignore the promises lovers may have made to one another. Is this a black issue, even it occurs among black families? No, it is a social issue that needs to be addressed for what it is.

I support, no, applaud and celebrate feminism. I feel the same about gay rights. But never have I said that I know what if feels like to suffer the oppression of women and gays; I simply don’t know that experience. If I said I did, all would know that I am lying. I expect the same respect from the gay community, no matter if I support them or not.

Abraham Lincoln did not run on a platform to free the slaves. Nor did he win in 1860 because people thought he would. He ran on the promise to save the Union. Freeing the slaves in 1863 was as much political ploy as it was an attempt to tilt the war to the side of the north.

Lyndon Johnson did not win in 1964 on the promise of assuring Blacks could vote. No matter what nobility can be seen in his successful effort to pass the voting rights act, Johnson was ever aware of where he stood with the American public. A book entitled “Cannan’s Edge” details the ultimately nasty reality of what really happened between and to both Johnson and Martin Luther King. Both for a time used each other for their own gains. That’s how politics works. Don’t take my word for this. Read the review..

Politicians who run solely on principle turn into “lobbyists”. It is an ugly reality, one that the left needs to not only take to heart, but one that it needs to learn up and down, backwards and forwards.

Until then, pray for miracles, but cover your ass!

I have no problems with being both religious and political, but the “Christian left” as a movement is pretty much doomed.
Now that’s not to say that some individual liberal Christians will not become more active politically, and maybe help remove some of the odious Republicans from office. But there will never be a Christian left the way there is a Christian right.
There are many reasons why, but one fundamental one stands out: Liberal Christians just aren’t willing to do — maybe they don’t have — what it takes to be successful in the political context.
What do I mean by that? Bottom line is that there is only one way to affect policy in American politics, and that is to elect candidates who will go to the wall for your proposals. Liberal Christians want to focus on the policy part without getting involved in the election part. As a result, their influence in the aggregate is practically nil.
If there is such a thing as a card-carrying member of the Christian left, that would be me. Raised in a Christian home, educated at Christian colleges, I came to the conclusion at a young age that Jesus would have fit in more on the “liberal” side of the fence if he were alive today. If you translate the Bible’s message to policy, it would side more with food stamps than stamping out gays.
For years I read Sojourners, the first and maybe still most influential Christian left publication run by the Rev. Jim Wallis, who is the poster boy for the movement. But Wallis is so dead set against being perceived as partisan, his writings became almost comically evenhanded. I found myself continually frustrated and angry by his “on-the-other-handism.” Even on issues where the magazine clearly sided with Democrats, he couldn’t come right out and defend the Democratic position. A negative comment about the Republican’s voting for something like funding “Star Wars” had to be followed by a swat at the minority Democrats — who voted the way Wallis wanted — for some trivial slight.
During the 2000 election, when it was clear that Al Gore represented a far more worthy clear choice when it came to the issues that concerned liberal Christians, Wallis was ridiculously evenhanded, obsessing over George W. Bush’s patently phony compassionate conservative rhetoric and faith-based pandering. On core Sojourners issues like racial and gender equality, war and peace and justice for the poor, Al Gore was a screaming better choice. Wallis, however, focused on the splinter issues without noticing the beams getting rammed into his eye.
The point is that getting things done in politics is a fairly dirty business. You win, you get the spoils. With their “God is Neither a Republican nor a Democrat” mantra, Wallis and his ilk remain smartly above the fray but also unable to produce any results. Christian liberals can have the warm fuzzy knowledge that they are technically right about Yahweh’s political affiliations. Meanwhile, the poor are getting poorer, bigots are running the roost and World War III is on the horizon.
No matter how much I despise Jim Dobson and the evil snakes of the Religious Right, I have to admit they know how the system works. They have created influence by getting people elected — they bang their shoe on the table and the Republican establishment quakes.
Now I don’t think that it is the proper thing for Christian liberals to become Democrats in the way evangelical churches have become outposts of the GOP. That is a debasement of religion. And I don’t have all the answers to what is no doubt a thorny and age-old problem.
But some first steps need to be taken. One is that liberals have to admit that there is a dichotomy. Another is that they have to clearly denounce evil for what it is, and if that sounds partisan, well, so be it. There is no truth or justice in phony evenhandedness. Christian liberals like to draw inspiration from Biblical prophets, and that is not the way they operated.

The NY Times magazine has a fantastic piece on the presidential race in Mexico and the left-wing candidate.

Something to consider while reading -Mexico is at the same economic stage the Spain was at when it joined the European Union. If Spain could improve rather quickly- so can Mexico.

Go read the article.