It's time that we fought back preemptively at the slime machine heading down its way towards Obama . (See Glenn Greenwald for the dirt ).  The extremity of attacks is breathtaking, but right now it's relatively confined, but it's a typical example of the Overton Window -the more extreme the attack, and the more it's propagated, the more something must be true.

So with that in mind, I'd like to point out some of the issues with John McCain that you might not know...that might help next time you meet a righty blathering about Obama's "Marxist" ties... (most of which is as distorted as the crap about Obama...we're not talkin' about the true stuff here.)

I was originally going to entitle this diary, F*&^ you Hillary.

This NYT article is making my blood heat up...

I've long - maybe since 2004? - had a soft spot in my heart for Barack Obama.

Not that I'm a card-carrying member of his cult. Yeah, I voted for him. Doesn't mean I want him to do anything for me other than be president. In fact, I've tended to agree with Krugman about Obama's health care plan, and am not convinced entirely by the argument about reducing costs first. But I've long had a soft spot in my heart for Obama.

Please let everyone make sure that as many people as possible go to the caucuses.

The Washington State Democratic Party has this nifty "Caucus Finder."

It seems to know who you are, but by all means, use it if you don't know where to go and when!

What a difference 5 years makes!  The NYT, perhaps noticing the fact that Republican triumphalism is as dead as Russian Communism, has abandoned its cheerleading role in its magazine for a bit of realism...

I just wanted to diary some rather bizarre things I've seen in the NY Times this morning. Quite a bit of them have to do with Mitt Romney and Mormonism- I'd half suspect it's the NYT trying to game the Repug side to make it competitive for Romney, except that I keep thinking, "The stupid! It burns!"

The NYT Week in Review section, like all of Time Magazine (except for the occasional interview)is opinion masquerading as news.

Today's Week in Review section features an article about Huckabee which presents a viewpoint common to my own: conservatism is dead. I've been saying it at least since Katrina, but now I have company...

(With apologies to Paddy Chayefsky, screenwriter for Network.)
I know we all have to get Bushism out of the national experience.

I know we have got to get conservatism's rotting corpse buried as soon as possible.

I was channel surfing last night, and came across, on BYUTV, "SACRED STONE: TEMPLE ON THE MISSISSIPPI," a documentary that describes in loving, glowing terms Joseph Smith's wild adventure of temple building and theocracy on the Mississippi.  That's right I joined Hal Holbrook who narrated this monstrosity (I liked him better when he was the bad guy in Dirty Harry movies), and I missed "Gordon Hinckley: Man of Intergrity."

Here's something that will not be surprising to the folks wishing for peace on earth...

FINALLY, the New York Times blows the whistle on Bubbles Greenspan:

YatPundit's excellent diary on Catholicism reminded me of a diary that needed to be written, which is based on a remark that fell out of my mouth at lunch at work the other day...

With all the candidate diaries - and we KNOW that some are driven by the campaigns themselves - I thought it was about time to write down my own thing.

Although in different schools of Buddhism the enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama is observed at different times, in the school in which I practice, in the Japanese Rinzai tradition, the enlightenment of the Buddha is traditionally observed on December 8.

I am not sure if there are other diaries taking apart Romney's speech from their religious standpoint, but I feel that Romney's speech, excerpted here, manifestly disqualifies him from the Presidency, not because of a religious test for office, but because of his contempt for non-Monotheists, he could not be President of all Americans. More below.

That Google, which now owns Youtube, allows  this crap to be easily downloadable is sickening.

OK, I've got to shower.  I've been over to the site of "Hugh Hewitt" (probably his name completely explains his behavior), to see if there's any reaction from Hewitt, a rabid Romney supporter, to Romney's Muslim Macaca moment, and its spreading fallout.

There's none yet, but what I did find...

Somewhere on Friday, at the mall, it occurred to me.  It later occurred to me last night at the movie theatre.  Can't we have some places, anywhere, without the goddam trees and ornaments and that insipid, syrupy, horrible "Wonderful Christmastime????"