Great post, as always!
Foreign Affairs had a good article on madrassas a year or two back (I don't have the cite handy) that makes it clear that it's inaccurate to equate madrassas with "jihadist training center," just as Christian school doesn't necessarily mean "right wing bigot training center."
I don't support Obama either, but he seems like a stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton (whose character is vulnerable to character destruction w/o without the necessity of resorting to lies). No wonder they have to assassinate him.
But the real danger is that the Republicans will try to continue their recent success at outdoing the Democrats with dreadful candidates. I didn't see how a President could be worse that Bill Clinton, but man, did the Republicans manage to teach me a thing of two!
What is scary is that Clinton was the best president since Reagan. Only King George could make libertarians nostalgic for Bill. Thanks for the compliment.
You know, sadly, I am currently myself predicting a Republican win for President. Neither Clinton nor Obama, the two fore-runner candidates, will win. Period. A "270" without the Bible Belt is indeed possible, but difficult given the religious proclivities that many face.
The right wing is really doing a hit job on Obama. I uploaded a video to google video entitled "Know A Bigot When You Hear One" with Ann Coulter and Rush limpball audio and Google banned the video after 368 views and 10 downloads. I uploaded it to youtube, but don't know how long it will stay up before they ban it. This is the link to the video.
http://www.hillbillyreport.com/
b...obama_ba_1.html
I think George H.W. was marginally better than Clinton -- some of Clinton's worst programs, esp. nationalized health care but also enviro policies, were blocked. they'd have been catastrophic and had they gone through he'd look worse than H.W.
If the Deomcratic Congress can avoid doing anything substantive for the next two years, and lets Bush preside over the defeat in Iraq, Democrats ought to be able to win the White House. They just need to keep pretending to be reasonable and let the religious and neocons continue to make asses of themselves.
I don't think Bush was even close. He spent like a drunken Democrat -- actually even Ted Kennedy couldn't spend like King George. Bush did more to strip away civil liberties and more to strip away the federal system of designated powers to the states. In addition he did something no Democrat could do -- destroy the Republicans who at least claimed to be for limited government. He was worse on civil liberties (and Clinton was very bad there), worse on economic issues and much worse on foreign policy.
I don't want to get into conspiracy theories here, but the HRod personal investigator machine is a hard-hitter. I'd be willing to wager that they "anonymously" spread information to interested partisan groups that might form solid opposition.
TWB: My policy is this: without evidence that this is true I assume innocent. Do I think H.R.C is one nasty character? Absolutely! Do I have any evidence she was behind this? No. But that doesn't matter in regards to what I wrote since disgusting groups like Insight and Fox spread the false story without making any attempt to see if it were true.
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