So, what are the McCains hiding? Cindy McCain was asked about releasing her tax returns, on the Today show, and reiterated that she would never release them -- ever -- even if she becomes First Lady:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vZi6...

We're All Hacks Atrios is right

It's important to remember that none of us are above the fray, that we all have hackish tendencies to suppress information which doesn't fit our worldview and privilege information that does. We're more likely to excuse behavior from people we like and exaggerate the ills of people we don't like. I try to fight hackish tendencies especially during this intra-Dem battle, but I don't claim to have superhuman Nonhack powers.

For the record, I make no effort to be above the fray nor any pretense of being fair or balanced.  I'm not only a member of the Hack Club for Men, I'm the president.  It's good to know your own filters....

More hackery below.

Terrorist Alert!   Nelson Mandela, the 89-year old Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former president of South Africa, one of the most beloved and respected human beings on the planet is on the US terrorist watch list.  http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...  I kid you not.

More outrageous, immoral stupidity below...

[editor's note, by PoliSigh] Promoted by me.

Wednesday's dose of news follows below.

Q.  How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A.  Three.  Two to hold the giraffe in the bathtub while the third pours in the multi-colored hand tools.

Just sayin'.....

A radical capitalist ethics leads in most cases to
an ethics of prostitution. The radical capitalist often
has notions he can only marry and honor a woman
if he is in possession of real estate. Then later after
starving for sex in his youth he comes to the point
where more work and more real estate means to
him a more gorgeous woman. The Christian and Jewish
religions which claim that the believe in one God
demands to stay true to only one woman stand in sharp
contrast to the mammon and sexual objectivist religion.

Philocrites raises a point about Unitarian-Universalism that I find interesting in light of the discussion of "politics without principles" below:

Some people identify "Unitarian Universalism" with liberal religious congregationalism. By this view, one can't "be" a UU without being a member of a UU congregation, at least not fully. This view seems to have especially strong support right now on the Board of Trustees and in some other leadership circles, where the Association's congregationalism — its "congregational polity" and the Association's accountability to its member congregations — is emphasized to the exclusion of support for extracongregational forms of UU life. (An interesting question is whether the General Assembly could assert that the Association is, in fact, dedicated not just to congregational life and congregational partnerships but also to other forms of Unitarian Universalist affiliation.)

The limitation of Unitarian Universalist congregationalism is that "Unitarian Universalism" exists beyond the limits of congregational affiliation, and beyond the formal boundaries of the UUA. Most of our congregations don't regard children (or teens under 16) as "members" of the congregation, due to the peculiarities of our understanding of congregational polity and our non-ecclesiological understanding of membership, yet our churches do encourage the kids to think of themselves as UUs. And these children grow up to be youth and young adults who quite naturally — and truthfully — do see themselves as Unitarian Universalists even if they have never formally joined a congregation. They may still maintain many other connections to UU life, through social networks, camps, online communities, etc. The religion, in other words, can be practiced and claimed by people who do not participate in our congregational polity.

Last week, I was supposed to have a back-and-forth conversation with James Hutchins of UCCTruths about religion and politics. Things didn't really get off the ground, in part because I was busy and not feeling well, and in part because I didn't want to get sucked into a debate over the political effectiveness of the UCC's national offices. Somehow, I didn't think James railing at the national leaders and me calling James an idiot would have been a productive use of anybody's time.

Astoundingly, I'm not the first person to report on this failed exchange, but the third: Scott Paeth has a nice write-up at his place about the comments he was going to add from the peanut gallery.

Scott has a very interesting diagnosis of what ails our denomination. Everybody knows that the UCC is inchoate, if not downright incoherent. The wonderful, awful thing about our church is that you can have right-wing evangelicals parked next to people who'd fit right in at the MCC or UUA. And who's right? Nobody can say for sure. The beautiful thing about independence is that you can choose your own path. The frustrating thing about independence is everybody can choose their own path.

This whole blog debate thing isn't going well. James doesn't understand why I seem to be accusing him of mushy centrism. I for my part can't see what's so difficult about the notion that not everything is susceptible to pragmatic resolution.

Moral principles are ideals, after all, and some conflicts really do boil down to a conflict between competing principles. It's easy to take cheap shots at religious leaders such as those who run the UCC for being "idealists." But I guess I'm confused about what James expects from such leaders. That they should stick their fingers in the breeze and go with the flow? That they should act as if what they believed were not true? That they should not stick up for principle?

I suspect that what he really wants is for our religious leaders to be politically "relevant."  It's true that the right positions doesn't accomplish much by themselves without being coupled to political effectiveness, but that is not of course the call of the gospel. I'm honestly embarrassed to have to point out that Christ chose ideals over relevance on the cross. If we're going to be strict about being Christ followers*, that really ought to be the model. If that's disruptive, a bit unnerving, and ultimately renders us powerless, well, that's as it should be.

Or are we supposed to be political animals before we are Christians?

I am often insulted by narrow minded believers who argue that non-believers commit crime at a higher rate than their percent of the population.

What insults me most about this line of abuse is the claim that I am incapable of independently determining what is ethical because I was raised in a Christian country. Somehow the Christian ethics were imparted to me through my up-bringing, and those college years searching for my true beliefs as a philosophy major were a waste of time. Silly me, God was imparting His True Ethics to me all along.

We have so many things happening in our lives that I suppose the idea of a day when we reflect on the good things makes a certain amount of sense.  However, it seems a bit of a shame that, as a society, we don't stop to think about our blessings more frequently.

Some of the folks I hang out with are prone to having get-togethers with a gratitude theme.  There is a discussion, with each person taking a turn and expressing the things in their lives for which they are especially thankful.  On other occasions, when I was allowing life to get me down, it was suggested that I ought to make a "gratitude list" to help me concentrate on the positive aspects of a life that has been, overall, not only decidedly positive, but in some respects absolutely miraculous.

Those of us who have lived on the outer edges of existence -- whether through physical sickness, mental illness, poverty, addiction, war, or combinations thereof -- are perhaps a bit better-equipped to recognize the extremes than most folks.  That, alone, is a lot to be grateful for.

 This letter came in the mail yesterday from the vice president of a Northern big city newspaper:

Thank you for the material that you mailed to me. But you neglected to say why you had sent it.

Good to see confirmation (albeit indirect) of a point I was making the other day:

An unspoken assumption has been that if a person defines him/herself as a moral person then that is a good thing (indeed, a moral identity has been shown to correlate with charitable giving, donating time, etc.). We show that that is not necessarily the case. Even self-defined moral people need to take the time to make sound moral judgments. This underscores the importance and value of ethics training even for the "best" employees.

It also underscores the point that actions speak louder than words. I was going to say "underscores the point, as if that were needed..." But we live in an age when many politicians who publicly define themselves as Moral Persons also end up supporting transparently immoral positions, such as spying on fellow citizens, ruining Social Security, torture, secret detention, and bombing Iran.

And those are our leaders.

As you may have heard already, Barack Obama's campaign has created quite a stir this week by inviting the "ex-gay" singer Donnie McClurkin along on a campaign-sponsored gospel music tour in South Carolina. Then, when black gays and lesbians raised the logical questions about McClurkin's presence, the Obama campaign made things worse by distancing themselves from McClurkin and bringing on board an openly gay white pastor. See Aravosis for more, including reactions from the GLBT community, and Chuck Currie for even more, including a statement from Obama supporters.