Hmm...

Bush states firmly in his closing remarks that the Army will remain "volunteer" (that means no draft.) Well...I'll let you know how that promise turns out if it's two years from now and I'm helping secure a girls' school in Falluja.

I'm shocked that nobody brought up the murder of 30-odd kids in Iraq yesterday. If there's ever an argument that things suck over there right now, that's it.

I don't really have an opinion on who "won" this debate. I'll just say that it was better than I thought it'd be.

Kerry's embracing of bilateral (so much for going to the international community) talks with N. Korea seems foolish to this hawk's ears. Maybe we should just buy another ten years of peace with them. You know, like Clinton did.

Bush's defense of Putin was goofy. Sort of saying, "He's a totalitarian, but he's my bud."

It's still weird to hear candidates refer to the U.S. as "the homeland."

Bush is a horrid public speaker.

Kerry is good.

After watching the debate, I can say with some authority that I have absolutely no idea whether Kerry thought Iraq was a threat or not. Clearly, he didn't want to come right out and say that men are dying for a murky cause, but he also didn't make any sense when railing against Bush for not having men seal Iraq's borders, guard their munitions, and nuke facilities, and then turn around and say, "Iraq didn't have WMDs."

Also, Kerry attacking the President (rightfully) for "outsourcing" the war in Afghanistan ultimately fails when he turns around and talks about bringing more people in (persumably to do our fighting for us) in Iraq.

As the National Review summarizes...

"[Kerry's platform is]: The war was a mistake, but I'll fight to win it anyway, but it is a distraction, and I'll send more equipment, but we're spending too much on it, and I'll inspire other countries to join us, but the countries who are there aren't doing much worth commending, etc., etc."

Anyway, I'll let Asa pick apart Bush's end of this hilarity.

I'm going to file this post from Pandagon as being highly relevant to my previous post about the speed of media becoming a detriment to its usefulness:

"Last night on the Daily Show, Ed Helms read his prewritten debate report to a stunned Jon Stewart. Stewart's straight man simply couldn't believe Helms had reported an event that hadn't happened yet. When asked what happens if news is made the next night, Helms replied, 'that's what bloggers are for.'

Today, CBS accidentally posted the AP's prewritten debate report. Aside from some blanks that needed to be filled in, the article's core was written, all the way down to the past tense ('The 90-minute encounter was particularly crucial for Kerry')."

It's almost like there's a Bell Curve, where we hit this peak of instant 24 hour news and everyone was really well informed, but then it just kept coming faster, and at greater volume, and slowly but surely it becomes almost entirely meaningless.

Instant spin.

At the rate data flows and things drop down the memory hole these days, it's no wonder that we've completely lost any sense of introspection or real debate in politics. Its just gets easier to disseminate whatever newspeak you want, and this goes for both sides. There's no turning back the tide of technology, so how do we make people slow down enough to ever stop and think about anything?

It's fairly well established at this point that the debate tonight won't be anything like an actual debate. It's a joint press conference. The candidates aren't allowed to address each other specifically, nor respond to each others answers to the questions. Question. Response. Response. Next question. That's not a debate.

But I've been thinking about it, and there's another factor at play. Because of this set up, and the bizarre expectations game going on, there isn't really a way to win the debates. Each candidate will spout whatever they spout, talking beside each other but not to each other, and probably mostly talking to the people who are already voting for them. Neither candidate will score some brilliant point, or make some glowing statement, which wins the debate. However, one of the candidates will make a gaffe, or look too squirrelly, or sweat, or wear the wrong color socks. And that candidate will LOSE the debate.

No winners, only losers. Quite frankly, that's not really a fun game to play.

I think that we may be ill-placed on Alan's blogroll, even though he is the man who put the Milliondollars in Cash Milliondollars. Though I'm not entirely sure if we really belong anywhere else.

Maybe we just don't belong.

Do you like that turnabout from the subject heading?

Saddam declares his intention to run in the Iraqi elections scheduled for January. If, through some legal loophole (or simple lack of applicable laws), he is able to run, what if he wins? They don't have a two party system over there, I believe, and Rumsfeld has already said that some areas simply won't be able to vote because of security concerns. So if the Baathist community rallied around him and used terrorist attacks to suprress voter turnout in heavily Shiite and Kurdish areas, maybe they could get him back in a real election. I can't imagine that would ever happen. We'd never let it happen. But how completely insane would it be? I can't even comprehend.

Slate has a funny travelogue up where this guy talks about how crazy India is. It's not just that India's poverty is bad, it's otherwordly.

I gaze out on wet, destitute slums. Wherever one can build a shanty, someone has. Wherever one could be pissing, someone is. The poverty's on a mind-blowing, overwhelming scale, and you feel so helpless.

A few years back I remember listening to the Howard Stern show and Howard's sidekick Robin was talking about how for years she dreamed of visiting India. When the time was right, she spent her thousands, flew to the subcontinent, promptly got sick/grossed out/terrified and was back in the States within two days. Now, obviously you can't learn anything about anything in just two days, but I'm telling ya, India is not for me. Indiana, maybe...

I think the biggest problem we face today is a lack of space. There are still rural areas, but nothing unclaimed. There is no western frontier to settle, and live as you would. There is no New World to flee to in order to escape tyrrany.

People think that space exploration, or exploration at all, is important because we wish to discover the unknown. They're only part right. We've come full circle around the world and now there's nowhere left to run. If you wish to live out from under the thumb (or the long arm) of the law, too bad, you're stuck. If you are oppressed by, sickened by, or simply bored with your society there are only so many options. They used to be near limitless.

I'd be the first to go.

This post is only tangentially related to Alex's below.

(Note: Biased Weekly Standard links enclosed)

Those two great (militarily weak) powers that Kerry appears to think are key to stabilizing Iraq have said -- again -- that they're not coming, even if Kerry wins and begs.

On top of that, Kerry continues to offend the countries that DO want to help in Iraq.

MSNBC test drives a prototype fuel cell car!

Billmon, a blogger I really like, who i put in the blogroll a day or two before he entirely stopped posting, has written an article for the LA Times called Blogging Sells, and Sells Out

Here's a good snip:
"At the time, the idea of buying a blog struck me as funny, like trying to buy a conversation. Now, having seen blogs I admired mutate into glorified billboards, and having witnessed the emergence of the 'sponsored' blog (in which the blogger is literally an employee of, or contractor to, a corporate owner), I can see who's likely to have the last laugh"

I post this not to revel in my own blogiosity, which would be a fool's gambit, all things considered, but rather to bring up the latest in a long line of bought and paid for counter-culture experiements. Billmon mentions rock and roll and rap, previously subculture now feeding the media machine. Punk has, to me, always be the best example of the phenomenon. A movement based entirely on being angry at authority which, in under two decades, became as commercialized and socially neutered as Britney Spears. In a pretty good book called "Angry Young Spaceman" this trend has gone so far that companies invent and seed counter-culture movements so that they can sell the associated products. And who knows, maybe the spray paint intdustry secretly popularized graffiti.

I doubt there's anything to be done about this. Revolutionaries, when successful, always become the mainstream. But the process of assimilation seems to be speeding up, which doesn't bode well for cultural revolution in the future.

This NYT article about bloggers, along with a bunch of other stuff since the RNC, has outed Atrios as one Duncan Black. I guess anonimity is bad in public discourse, but I have to admit to feeling a certain romantic attachment to someone with secret identity.

Reality must be a Marvel book.

Hey guys, grab a gal and head on ver to check out how totally cool it is to deny equal rights to gay couples! Discrimination is so hip, so now, so very IN.

Reason #1819 why I'm not an isolationist.

Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.

And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action. Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur.

Reading comic books as research/study.

Reading comics counts as working!

Slate stumbles upon Bush and Kerry's increasing drive to appear Lincolnesque.

Bush lays claim to the mantle of Lincoln the Emancipator: Like the 16th president, Bush believes that individual liberty trumps state sovereignty (the international version of states' rights). Sure, Saddam Hussein was sovereign, but he was a tyrant and a menace to his people, Bush says, so America's invasion was a just one. Kofi Annan says Bush's invasion of Iraq was a violation of international law, but Bush appeals to a higher law that says that some laws and some rulers are illegitimate. Bush laid out his Lincolnesque doctrine of liberty over sovereignty in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention: "Our nation's founding commitment is still our deepest commitment: In our world, and here at home, we will extend the frontiers of freedom." Bush wants to paint Kerry as a global Calhoun, a man who prefers French sovereignty to Iraqi freedom.

Kerry, on the other hand, casts himself as Lincoln the preserver of the Union (while at the same time questioning Bush's competence and highlighting the disparity between the president's "fantasy world" ideals and the "world of reality" on the ground). I don't want to overstate this, because the Republican caricature of Kerry as a one-worlder who would let France exert a veto over American security is inaccurate. But Kerry clearly believes in the international structures and institutions that have been created since World War II, and he sees Bush, shall we say, nullifying them. In this version of the story, it's Bush who is Calhoun, the man who would elevate the shortsighted rights of his state over the compact that every state has entered to promote the greater good.

What I find interesting in all this is Bush's beliefs in "natural rights." A classically liberal view if there ever was one. Far from being an old-style Southerner, I can totally see an 1860s Bush leading the charge to liberate the slaves.

And failing.

But still, he'd lead the charge.

Anomalous Data - "It's OK. Don't think about it too much, and it will be OK"

I was in Tijuana last weekend, and aside from seeing some guy masturbate on the street it all seemed pretty normal. One major difference, though, is that little kids costumes all come in the form of Mexican Wrestler style cape and cowls. Instead of those flame retardent jumpsuits and flimsy plastic masks of my childhood, little Mexican children play Spider-Man with a sequined Spiderman mask and a cape. It's an odd collision of cultures and cultural icons into this hero/wrestler superhybrid.

Just a curiosity is all. I'm sure there's a better cultural critique to be made of all this, but I should be working right now anyway.

Cash Milliondollars hits the big One-Oh with the newest strip. And hey, they're almost always nearly funny!

Right?

USAToday has a roundup of all the goofier-than-usual macho posturing going on in this election. Says Bill Maher...

So knock off the regular-guy act -- and by the way, that also goes for John Forbes Kerry, the other white meat. Two Skull and Bones preppies, these guys are, from Nantucket and Kennebunkport, who use the word "summer" as a verb and probably had monogrammed beer bongs in college.

Yale class of '66 vs. Yale class of '68.

Those Daily Kos headlines are interesting. I think they're less reflective of the changes in Bush, than the changes in American politics at the meta-level, in the wake of 9/11 and Iraq War II. Would anyone have believed in 2000 that both parties would be actively talking of a global war, global engagement, destroying international terrorism, and promoting a democratic Middle East? Looking at American history, it really boggles the mind that there's not a single isolationist voice in this election (or for the foreseeable future.). I guess Kerry's railing against "outsourcing" might count, but really, both parties are committed to Team America.

As for The Fantastic Chore...

('Cause that's what it will be to sit through! Get it?!)

Um, the costumes look, how do I say this... cheap. Yeah, they look cheap. Yeah, I know these aren't even official production stills, but hey, when you can barely equal the craftsmanship of the Corman costumes (and those can only be seen on 12th generation VHS) well, that's gonna send up red flags with fans. I shiver to think what Dr. V von Doom will look like.

And by the way, has anybody actually stopped to wonder why the hell Tim Story is directing this movie? Sure he's a fellow Trojan, and yeah, Barbershop was decent, but Tim Story? For the Fantastic Four? The World's Greatest Comic Magazine? This just has mistake written all over it.

This here Daily Kos Diary takes a look at what newspaper endorsements back in 2000 said about then-Governor Bush. Some of my favorites include:

"The Texas governor states he would not engage in "nation building." Good. It can't be done from  the outside, and such an effort isn't worth rivers of American blood."
-Tampa Tribune

"Bush has offered solutions to problems. He has, to his credit, not given the impression that he has the last word on every problem to confront government. He would listen."
-Chicago Tribune

"Mr. Bush will be a far better friend to Michigan workers. Preserving and growing jobs through smarter economic and conservation approaches is far better for the state's unionized work force than the empty and tired slogans of Mr. Gore."  
-Detroit News

"Americans of both parties are weary of the scandals and ceaseless investigations that have marred the last eight years and long to leave them behind."
-Houston Chronicle

Golly, I bet they're all surprised.

I can't believe it, but the Thing costume from the new movie doesn't look nearly as good as the costume from the cheapo Corman movie. Mind you the Thing costume was the best thing about that movie, but still...

I'm cross-posting this from Begum because I think it's good to look back a little:

I decided to look back over my posts about Kerry from the primary, and this is what I've learned:

I didn't like his stance on gay marriage, ie support civil unions but not marriage, because I felt it was a political straddle. It was also the straddle being made by the entire Party, including Dean, and so on that count in the end I was pretty much up the river.

I didn't like his war vote, and still don't. But I understand it better now and so I no longer hate it abjectly but rather I see the logic and agree with the principle but not the execution. I still kind of hate it, but at least I understand.

But on three counts Kerry has won me over:

He's gotten a lot more charismatic. Not actually charismatic, but he's getting better. His speech at the DNC was better than Edwards', and he's been watchable if not downright engaging on the talk shows I've seen him on.

I took big issue with the fact that he wasn't a fighter, but lately he has been acting like more and more of one, particularly regarding Iraq.

I also said he would be just a Dem placeholder, and I now think that the real Dem placeholder was Clinton. Kerry might not do anything too radical, as he is hampered by the wars and deficits caused by Bush, but the country can't afford radical right now. The past 4 years of having a radical as a President has done too much damage. Even given those limits Kerry can probably accomplish more than Clinton.

Well, those delightful savages in Iraq have "sawed" off the head of another American. It's sad, it's awful, it's evil, and there's no end in sight, but I do have a somewhat macrabe question.

Why do we say "behead" instead of "dehead?" We say bedeck to mean put something on something else. Shouldn't behead mean to place a head on something? Oh, maybe its because they used to put heads on pikes? "We offed his head and beheaded a pike."

Sure, maybe its gross and exploitative, but I really don't think you can tell me about something like this and not show me a picture.

So I pass the frustration on.

6 of the Top 10 comics for August feature the X-Men.

Come one people. Buy something else. There are lots of good comics out there that don't have the X-Men.

Jeez.

That's right, it's time for the second Mayday 24 Hour Filmmaking Competition. The first one was a blast, and this one will be even better. If you live in Los Angeles I strongly suggest that you participate.

It will be glorious.

As you may have noticed, Alex and I are working on a project called 'The Hand.' It's coming, I promise. You will love it. I gave the script to one of our friends to read through and critique, and one of his comments was that it wasn't dense enough.

The hell you say.

One of our main goals while writing The Hand was to make the story (our first 22 page comic) as dense as we could. Both in spirit and in pacing we wanted to harken back to silver age style, where a whole story could be told in one issue, and it could be a darn fun one at that. None of this decompressed storytelling for us. I personally don't go in for it most of the time, and given that we have a, shall we say, sporadic publishing schedule, it would be a great disservice to our readers to not give them a full story each time out.

And then I realized: Our friend has been learning comics on a steady diet of 80s classics. He has read, at my behest, Watchmen, Sandman, and Grant Morrison's Animal Man and Seaguy. The only one of these published in the last 10 years is the still going Seaguy. His conception of comic book pacing doesn't include the massive shift that's occurred over the last two decades. It never snapped into such clear focus just how much has changed until now. In seeking to recompress our storytelling we still haven't matched the incredible narrative density of the 80s masters. And thinking back on it, comic narrative has probably been at its densest in the 30s and 40s (when an entire scene was often a signle panel) and then in the 80s (I think actual words have fallen out of my copy of Crisis On Infinite Earths, just for lack of space).

So swing pendulum, swing. For $3 an issue we deserve a hell of a lot more story than we've been getting.

I can't even believe how much of this space is now devoted to talking about polling. When do we talk about comics again?

Regardless, John Zogby makes a great point about telephone polls (which almost all of them are): You're missing a huge swath of almost an entire generation of people, those 18-29 who ONLY use cell phones and don't even have landlines. This includes, mind you, probably 80% of the people I know. They just aren't polling us.

Hurm.

As long as we're talking about polls...

Gallup: 54 Bush 40 Kerry
Pew: 46 Bush 46 Kerry
IBD: 47 Bush 47 Kerry
Harris: 47 Bush 48 Kerry

One of these things is not like the others...

The Poor Man: I Know All About These Kittens

RedState.org, which I mostly like, has an insanely bizarre post analyzing that Harris poll data.

...Polls like this one suffer from the fact that they were partially conducted over a weekend. Democrats stay home in disproportionately higher numbers over a weekend when compared to Republicans--who go out more often, and therefore are not able to answer phone calls at their homes.

Uh, what? I've NEVER heard this before -- and I read political shit ALL the time. Oh, and if you're gonna put it in a post, at least hyperlink to a source -- any source -- ya bozos.

So, while 2000 gave us that rarest of elections where a man won the popular vote and did not win the Presidency, 2004 might give us something rarer -- a statistical dead heat, but a landslide. Looking at the latest Electoral-Vote.com (which does change daily), it's quite conceivable that Bush could win well over 300 electorates, but still run neck and neck with Kerry. Swathes of the country even larger than in 2000 will be painted red, and yet half of all Americans will have voted for the other guy. If anything, I think such a situation would show that there are indeed two Americas -- one red, one blue -- but that they are actually quite fluid, not rigid and set in stone as the simple media often reports. Which, really, makes complete sense, considering that 150 years ago, New England was Red America and Dixie was Blue America.

ARRRRRGGGHHH.

Sometimes I think that right wingers must really believe their own hype. Unless he handed over the Oval Office to Osama himself I doubt that John Kerry could do a worse job fighting the War in Iraq and the War on Terror(ism) than Bush, who has done hardly a single thing right. Although doing that would require FINDING Bin Laden, so even that might put Kerry a step ahead of Bush.

For what it's worth, most of the polls showing Bush with more than a 5 point lead were taken DURING his convention. Everything post convention has been much tighter.

And according to this, 51% say Bush does not deserve to be re-elected. Now as much as Kerry should want to be ahead, Bush should want to, as an incumbent, have massively better approval ratings than this.

Basically I'm saying the race is a lot tighter than we are generally lead to believe, but Alex is right that, given how generally unpopular Bush is there's virtually no excuse for Kerry's not being ahead by a wide margin.

They say Kerry is a closer. It's time.

Is Kerry Doomed?

Either the race right now is still close, or it's breaking solidly (5-10points) in Bush's direction. Eitherway, that's not a good position for Kerry and CO. because you'd like your best case scenario to be better than even at this late-stage. So, I ask this: If Kerry loses, is he one of the worst candidates the Dems have put up there in the Modern Era? (1960-Present).

I don't get all the hubbub about whether or not John Kerry should focus on security or the economy. Apparently most big league Dems, including Clinton, are telling him to focus on the economy. Didn't we nominate him almost entirely because of his security credentials? Really, what else was there?

Yahoo! News - Blast, Mushroom Cloud Reported in N. Korea


Hopefully it was a fireworks celebration gone wrong. We'll know soon enough I suppose.

Comics with photos. How very droll. I promise it's good stuff.

I would like to refute Alex's post below by saying that in the three times I watched Obama's speech the fact that we was black hardly ever came up. The fact that he is an incredible orator did. The fact that his speech was all about uniting the country ("The UNITED States of America!") was mentioned. The way that he cuts through the last 30 odd years of misrepresenting liberal values (to the extent that some pundits mistakenly called his speech conservative simpyl because it didn't fit their parody of liberalism) most certainly came up.

The fact that he's black is nice, as it provides a good narrative and hopefully the civil rights landmark of our first black president. Limiting his appeal to that, though, seems like the very soul of racism-lite to me. Most of the liberal blogs I read have referred to him as a "post-racial" candidate. He isn't running on his race in the least. If you listen to his keynote address (I'll watch it with you Alex, it makes me so happy) he talks about his history, but doesn't go into the "as a black man schtick" and even goes so far as to say "there isn;t a white America and a Black America..."

So, this blogger that I've never read before makes some interesting points with regard to the Great Democratic Hope. And seeing as how I like all this blogger's points, I'm just going to paste 'em all.

A reader writes to wonder why Americans are so excited over the exotic half-Kenyan, half-white Barack Obama. Certainly there are numerous, say, South Asians of identical skin tone who were also on the Harvard Law Review, but nobody in America cares about them.

The basic fact behind this is that white Americans (and for that matter, black Americans) really aren't interested in any races other than whites and African-Americans. For example, the funny thing about Obama is that Americans are not at all interested in the truly interesting things about him. For example, he was raised largely in Indonesia by his Indonesian stepfather and white mother. That's certainly ... different. Does that give him any insights into, say, Southeast Asia or the Muslim (or Hindu?) world that might be useful in the U.S. Senate?

But, nah, nobody in America cares about weird foreign stuff like that. What everybody is fascinated by is the brute fact that he's (half) black. They hope that makes him an expert on -- and spokesman for, or spokesman to -- the 'hood (which is the one place he didn't grow up), which, love it or hate it, is infinitely more interesting to Americans than the rest of the world and all its people.

Good stuff.

Good question.

Once again the world has witnessed a savage episode of Islamist terror, and once again it strains to hear a convincing rejection of the terrorists from those who should care most about Islam's reputation.

What Chechan terrorists did to Russia last week was beyond awful, and I'm happy to have Russia's full-fledged support in the fight against Islamic fundementalism, BUT...

I clearly remember many in America (myself included) supporting the Chechans in their fight in the early-90s to throw off Soviet, and then Russian, tyranny. As Andrew Sullivan points out...

the Chechnya situation strikes me as one in which the necessary distinction between terrorists' methods and the injustices that sometimes fuel them is not as iron-clad as, say, in our war against al Qaeda or against Saddam. The truth is: Putin has treated Chechnya barbarically, and his brutal suppression of legitimate demands for autonomy is partially responsible for the chaos in that region and the violence across Russia.

In case anyone cares, the Cash page got a very minor redesign today. I know there are lots of problems with the site, some technical and some aesthetic, and I'll start trying to fix them now that initial shellshock of building the damn thing has worn off.

I must say though that I'm a might pissed at this whole "Different browsers see things differently" problem. Whoever invented the internet needs a stern talking to.

Michael Bay's biological father? John Frankenheimer. But Frankenheimer won't have anything to do with him. Explains a lot, I think.

I went to the gym this morning before work, and while I was in the sauna the guy sitting next to me was shaving. Now first of all, that's kind of gross, because your stubble is going to be all over the sauna. But concerns for my personal comfort aside, HOLY CRAP, DOESN'T THAT HURT? I curse myself when I shave before I go running and the sweat gets into my poor defenseless open pores. I can't imagine purposely shaving while I sweat profusely. That man is insane.

Way back in January 2001 the Onion published a piece titled Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' and the article proved creepily accurate. Someone has gone through and added hyperlinks to show us just how accurate.

Makes you wonder if any of the real news sources had such a clear picture of what a Bush term would look like.

Is there a double standard at play, with all this recent Kerry bashing? Methinks.

There was an old joke back in the Cold War:

Proud American to Russian guy: 'In my country every one of us has the right to criticize our president.'

Russian guy: 'Same here. In my country every one of us has the right to criticize your president.'

That seems to be the way John Kerry likes it. Americans should be free to call Bush a moron, a liar, a fraud, a deserter, an agent of the House of Saud, a mass murderer, a mass rapist (according to the speaker at a National Organization for Women rally last week) and the new Hitler (according to just about everyone). But how dare anyone be so impertinent as to insult John Kerry!

Trapper John over at dKos makes the interesting observation that if you consider "conservatism" to be a desire to maintain the status quo, Kerry is a conservative and Bush is a radical.

He is launching an assault on the pillars of the New Deal, in an attempt to resurrect a Gilded Age that predates even his father's adulthood. It's as radical a course as could be taken in this day and age. And it's not like Kerry is proposing any huge new government programs. He's looking to pretty much keep things the way they are, and have been for his entire life. That's fundamentally conservative. Bush's agenda, by contrast, is that of a radical who hates the institutions of the nation in which he was raised.

Wow, Garrison is nasty. He's not doing much to civilize political debate, is he?

Uh, while it's true that the national platform of the GOP is quite socially conservative (and largely out-of-line with mainstream America), one must remember that at the local, and state level, the GOP is still very much the "Party of Lincoln."

There are delegates from every state in the Union at the Convention. One should not lump Ohioans, Indianans, New Hampshireites(?), New Yorkers, and Mainers, in with the Alabamans, Virginians, and Carolinians. These Northern, old-style Yankee Republicans still exist, and still exert much influence in their respective states. Just look at my recent post at Theo's Gift on the governorships. All of New England is red -- it looks like a map from 1864.

Then there are the folks out west. McCain, Arnold, that governor in Colorado. Hell, even Hawaii's GOP (and female) governor. These men are all remnants of Reagan's conservatism. Sun Belt optimism instead of Bible Belt fire and brimstone. Open range libertarianism instead of Federal Nanny-State.

The current GOP and conservative philosophy is best viewed as a three-way union between Yankee Republicans, Westerners, and Southern Democrats-cum-Christian Conservatives. Of course, right now the whole movement is weighted heavily towards the South, but as a lifelong Republican (and Yankee), I consider it a duty to help pull the party up from those reformed rebs in the South and re-orient it on the coasts.

Anyway, the point here is that it's flat-out wrong to say the GOP has completely reversed from its days as slave-fighting, fiscally responsible, patriots. It's rather politically amazing that the current GOP can combine the descendants of Northern abolitionists, with the descendants of those who died to keep slaves.

I tried to find a peice to quote here, but there's no great pullout, you just have to read it.

We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore: How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?