The Boss   He's endorsing Obama. Perhaps Hillary should make a play for Billy Joel?  http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/a...

This guy wants to be president?  Heaven help us.

John McCain's temper is well documented. He's called opponents and colleagues "sh*theads," "a**holes" and in at least one case "a f*cking jerk."

In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c*nt."

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/McCain...

Yesssssss!  Obama: I would "immediately review" potential Bush crimes http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/0...

Gay scientists isolate Christian gene (insert sinister laugh) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCzbN...

Clinging to God, Guns, Obama & Freud  What Obama did say was that guns and religion are best assessed as morally neutral, until we see what people choose to do with them. http://religiondispatches.org/Gui/Co...

World Bank climate profiteering

How exactly, does this work, you ask?
Quite simply: The Bank finances a fossil fuel project, involving oil, natural gas, or coal, in Poor Country A. Rich Country B asks the Bank to help arrange carbon credits so Country B can tell its carbon counters it’s taking serious action on climate change. The World Bank kindly obliges, offering carbon credits for a price far lower than Country B would have to pay if Country B made those cuts at home. Country A gets a share of the cash to invest in equipment to make fossil fuel project slightly more efficient, the World Bank takes its 13% cut, and everyone is happy.

Except the planet, of course, since this carbon credit shell game does little if anything to mitigate climate change. http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=394

A comedian as a moral leader  What does that say about us?  Jon Stewart takes the administration to task for deciding the intimate details of how we would torture people.

You gotta wonder, how could these administration officials be so confident that we don’t torture? Well, there’s only two options, really. One, the administration reminded all military and intelligence agencies of the moral commitment that civilized nations have to remain humane, even in times of peril. Or.... They sat in a room and meticulously crafted an interrogation regimen in the lawyer-created space between cruelty and torture. Hmmm....I wonder which way they went.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/0...

Bring back Rubenesque!  (It is healthier and, for my money, infinitely more attractive.) The French National Assembly has passed a groundbreaking bill which seeks to criminalize the promotion in the media of extreme thinness. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/eur...  With three daughters, this dad fights skinny-mania all the time.

Sounds like the start of another Dan Brown novel A thief posed as a student to steal centuries-old documents about the origins of the Catholic church in Scotland worth thousands of pounds. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/...

"Green lobby turns to prayer" http://unitedchurchofchrist.blogspot...

Boosting Bigotry: Two Thumbs Down For Medved’s Presidential Religious Test  http://blog.au.org/2008/04/15/boosti...

A day of mourning on Virginia Tech’s campus began at midnight, "exactly one year after the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history left 32 people and the gunman dead." Among the commemorative ceremonies taking place today, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has "ordered state flags flown at half-staff" and "a moment of silence at noon." A candle lit on campus "at midnight will burn there for 24 hours." http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...

I don't pretend to understand this Spiritual Politics reports that, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 62 percent of American Catholics think the Catholic church is out of touch "with the views of Catholics in America today."

That's the same number as expressed that view back in October of 2003, in the midst of the pedophile coverup crisis.  Then, 64 percent of American Catholics said that the pope should change church policies "to reflect the attitudes and lifestyles of Catholics today."

Today, however, by a margin of 50 percent to 45 percent, they think the pope "should maintain the traditional policies of the Church."

So.....  American Catholics want to belong to an out-of-touch church?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...

The two things I don't like about McCain are his face  "In my administration, there will be no more subsidies for special pleaders, no more corporate welfare," McCain said in a speech on the economy yesterday. Yet "much of what he detailed was a corporate special pleader’s dream: a cut in the corporate income tax rate, from 35 percent to 25 percent, a proposal to allow businesses to write off the cost of new equipment and technology from their taxes...and a permanent tax credit for research and development."  http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/...  and  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...

Religion, McCain Style

Andrea Billups of the Washington Times has jumped on the story about John McCain's reserved discussion of religion. As Billups and others explain, McCain remains mum on his faith other than a few brief mentions of how it has sustained him in difficult times. The more interesting issue at hand is whether this foreshadows a different GOP relationship with the religious right during the campaign? Well, skeptics remain.

http://egghead.cc.trincoll.edu/weblo...

Feed my sheep In northern Afghanistan it appears some parents are being driven by poverty and hunger to marry off (sold)  their daughters at an early age.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...

Feed my sheep, Part II North Korea is facing a humanitarian crisis because of acute food shortages, a UN agency has warned. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...

Obama To Meet With Philadelphia Jewish Community Leaders  http://thepage.time.com/2008/04/15/o...

That oughta help, sure.....  McCain Advised On Catholic Issues By Former Bush Adviser Accused Of Sexual Misconduct  http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/15/...

Sick Around the World The Frontline website is here http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl... and you can watch the show online if you missed it on TV. I liked the ending. This is approximate, but after wondering whether Americans will ever accept any of the healthcare ideas he had just presented, correspondent T.R. Reid closed with this:

These ideas aren't as foreign as they seem. If you're a U.S. veteran, your healthcare is like Britain. If you're a senior citizen on Medicare, you're Taiwan. If you're a worker who gets insurance from your employer, you're Germany.

Quite so. National healthcare really isn't as foreign or as frightening as conservatives make it out to be. "Sick Around the World" does a good job of demystifying it.  National healthcare, it turns out, is pretty effective in big countries (Germany, Japan), diverse countries (France, Britain), tax-phobic countries (Switzerland), and countries with health profiles similar to ours (Canada, Britain). And as Jon says, even warts and all, each one seems to deliver a better total package than the jury-rigged, pseudo-private mish-mash that we have here. So tell your skeptic friends to tune in tonight and watch the show. Maybe they'll start to understand that we can, indeed, do better if we put our minds to it.

Salem forum: Witches more popular, less scary  Witches get more respect than they used to here in the Witch City. That was a recurring theme among about 40 witches, pagans and Wiccans at a city-sponsored forum held Saturday night to educate the public and challenge stereotypes about their religion.http://www.religionnewsblog.com/2117...

Christians Promote Holy, Hot Sex in Marriage  More evangelical couples — once embarrassed and prudish about sex — are now leaving their Christian inhibitions at the bedroom door. For this growing group of younger, more progressive Christians, guilt is out and pleasure is in.   http://www.religionnewsblog.com/2117...

Defining Populism Down  Matt Y says:

If downing shots of liquor is really the truest sign of "being a man (or woman) of the people" then I guess every dude in every frat in America is now working class... Meanwhile, a little birdie told me a lot of working class protestant church folk are teetotalers. But who am I to correct Roger Simon, who doubtless has so much working class cred that wine bottles spontaneously combust in his presence.

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.c...

Liberal monsters under the Wingnuts' beds  http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_p...

Seems reasonable to me.

The IRS's scrutiny of the biggest U.S. companies is running at a 20-year low, according to the study, conducted by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a research group affiliated with Syracuse University.

The study, made public Sunday, points to "a historic collapse in audits." It found that major corporations — defined as those with assets of at least $250 million — have about a one in four chance of being audited, down from about three in four in 1990.

After all, corporations are so much more honest these days than they used to be. Why waste taxpayer dollars snooping around their books, when those dollars can instead be spent making sure that poor people don't abuse the Earned Income Tax Credit?  http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/...

Australia to get its first female bishop http://wwrn.org/article.php?idd=28331

Somebody send the VP a memo, please
A

t a time when eighty percent of the Arab world views America unfavorably, and in a war that a majority of Americans (let alone Iraqis) disapprove of, al-Qaida failed to establish a sustainable bridgehead. That's not the mark of an organization that represents a strategic, existential threat to the United States.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/b...

Pope Lands For Six-Day U.S. Visit http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/20...

Big Brother says "Trust me" FBI: No Need For More Restrictions on Our Spying http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/20...

We deserve to be told the truth by our political leaders? Such a quaint notion.

It's disappointing to hear now, two years after the fact, that the president was knowingly bull----ing us the whole time. And that he justified such dishonesty in the name of supporting the troops and protecting their morale. That's an insult to America's men and women in uniform (and their families), who deserve to be told the truth by their political leaders about what's going on. It's also an insult to us, as voters, who deserve the truth so we can make the right decisions in the voting booth.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/intel...

Pope "Deeply Ashamed" of Clergy Sex Abuse Scandal http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/20...