Conservative Christian Group Accuses Obama of "Child Sacrifice".

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Wednesday October 22, 2008 · 6:22 PM PDT

2008/10/22 · 18:22

With two weeks to go until the November elections, a free Conservative Christian magazine called "The Judeo-Christian View" is sending faxes to churches throughout the country accusing Barack Obama of "child sacrifice". Two versions of the faxes are being received in tandem. The first version, sent to the church pastor's attention, reads, in part:

Preach Scripture and NAME NAMES
Explain Sen. Obama’s pledges to Same-Sex Unions and Child Sacrifice:
• Repeal Defense of Marriage Act
• Enact "Sexual Orientation" Law
• Enact tax-funded Partial Birth Abortion
View an eyewitness account of his kill-off of Born Alive Infant Protection

It is only the beginning of a list of accusations which astonishingly includes "child sacrifice".

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

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Friday October 10, 2008 · 6:36 PM PDT

2008/10/10 · 18:36

As the Republican Party’s efforts to stave off an electoral debacle, in November, grow ever more desperate, suddenly Lake County, Indiana, election offices have begun receiving huge numbers of blatantly fraudulent registration applications. In an intro to a television new segment on the subject, CNN (a.k.a. Fox Lite) detects "huge fears of voter fraud" throughout the country:

There are huge fears of voter fraud in the presidential election. We're 26 days from the election, one of the biggest horse races in American history. And already there is threat of big trouble. All eyes are on a handful of swing states where several voter fraud investigations are threatening a basic idea, whether or not free and fair elections will be held.

These fears, inasmuch as they actually exist, are almost entirely the product of the grossly exaggerated claims of the Republican Party, its legal teams and its media shock troops. It is a fear they wish to use to get out the vote of their own disenchanted voting base and to intimidate election officials and newly registered voters. Still more, this strategy suggests that the Republicans have already begun pre-positioning to be ready to contest another election in the courts.

Poll

25 votes Show Results

Should John McCain Publically Censure the Actions of Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller?

25 votes Vote Now!

Should John McCain Publically Censure the Actions of Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller?

Yes.

8 votes

No.

0 votes

Is McCain stil running? I thought he suspended his campaign.

11 votes

No. Sarrah Palin should censure him with a sassy little wink.

6 votes

Alex Castellanos Now Advisor to McCain Campaign

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

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Sunday July 20, 2008 · 4:45 PM PDT

2008/07/20 · 16:45

Alex Castellanos of subliminal message fame is now an "outside advisor" to the McCain campaign, according to the New York Times:

Alex Castellanos, formerly the top advertising strategist for Mitt Romney, has been a regular guest on CNN’s bipartisan panel on Democratic election nights. Mr. Castellanos is also now an outside adviser to Mr. McCain’s advertising team.

Readers may remember him as the perpetrator of the infamous RATS commercial. (Here's a YouTube video of it.)

Of course Castellanos's checkered past as a negative advertising specialist and dirty trickster goes way beyond...

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

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Thursday July 10, 2008 · 8:28 AM PDT

2008/07/10 · 08:28

(Sung to the tune of "Big Bad John")

Ev'ry mornin' at the White House you could see him arrive,
He stood five foot ten and weighed two twenty-five.
Kinda broad at the shoulder and broader at the hip,
And everybody knew ya didn't give no lip to Big Dick.
Big Dick, Big Di-ick, Big Bad Dick Big Dick.

Nobody seemed to know where Dick called home,
He just drifted into town and stayed all alone.
He didn't say much, kinda quiet and sly,
And if you spoke at all, you just said "Hi" to Big Dick.

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday July 07, 2008 · 3:47 PM PDT

2008/07/07 · 15:47

An African-American President? One with a strange name even? Luckily, Barack Obama has everything else, it would seem, in his favor going into the general election, because those infamous "closet Muslim" e-mails will keep coming and they will continue to affect a surprising number of voters.

Should even a more or less explicable skeleton be found in Obama’s closet the number of disaffected voters could grow at a rate that would challenge our image of the American people, even of Progressives. Why? Because of the well documented affect of Implicit Associations within the human subconscious.

The Situationist blog has posted an abstract from a paper by Gregory Scott Parks and Jeffrey J. Rachlinski entitled "Unconscious Bias in the 2008 Presidential Election". The abstract begins in reassuring fashion that belies its thesis:

Poll

56 votes Show Results

What percentage of the electorate do you think will vote based upon the candidate's race?

56 votes Vote Now!

What percentage of the electorate do you think will vote based upon the candidate's race?

More than 25%

13 votes

Between 10 and 25%

27 votes

Between 5 and 10%

13 votes

3 votes

0 votes

In the Name of All That We Hold Sacred.

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

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Monday June 30, 2008 · 3:24 PM PDT

2008/06/30 · 15:24

While I was perusing the back posts listed under the The Situationist blog’s category tag for "politics" I happened to click a link looking much like any other. On the other side of it was a NY Times article entitled: "Across the Great Divide: Investigating Links Between Personality and Politics." It seemed unexceptional at first glance. Little did I know that it would change my life forever.

"Folk music and a collection of feminist poetry may well be dead giveaways that there is a liberal in the house," it began. The ancient text (February 12, 2007) was surrounded by numerous arcane images designed to tempt a reader from the target audience to click an ad: Paris Hilton, John F. Kennedy, theater tickets. How many such texts had I read over the years through progressively thicker lenses? Hardly the kind of thing to recommend continuing, but something drew me on, nonetheless.

Half way down the first page I came upon it.

Poll

46 votes Show Results

How Messy Is Your Bedroom?

46 votes Vote Now!

How Messy Is Your Bedroom?

I plead the 5th.

10 votes

I sealed it off years ago as hopeless and sleep on the couch.

3 votes

Messy ain't the word.

9 votes

Moderately messy.

12 votes

A little messy.

4 votes

More or less clean.

4 votes

More or less clean with Lieberman poster.

0 votes

Neat as a pin.

4 votes

I'm sorry, what was the question again?

0 votes

The Price of Poker (And Oil) Goes Up.

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday June 29, 2008 · 7:25 PM PDT

2008/06/29 · 19:25

"Iran has moved ballistic missiles into launch positions," according to the London Sunday Times,

The movement of Shahab-3B missiles, which have an estimated range of more than 1,250 miles, followed a large-scale exercise earlier this month in which the Israeli air force flew en masse over the Mediterranean in an apparent rehearsal for a threatened attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.

The launch stations are positioned for a strike on Israel.

Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Mohammad-Ali Jafari cautioned, during an interview Saturday, on Iranian television that:

"Israel is located entirely within the reach of our missiles. Our missile power is such that the Zionist regime, despite all its capabilities, would not be able to confront us."

Jafari went on to state that, in the event of attack, Iran could not choose to do otherwise than

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday April 20, 2008 · 7:28 PM PDT

2008/04/20 · 19:28

Many poems have been written about Emmett Till, the young African-American brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. The incident and trial to follow, in which his caucasian murderers were acquitted, in a mockery of justice all too common at the time, are credited with sparking the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s.

Among the first such poems (and surely the best) was written by a black French poet born in 1913 on the Caribbean island of Martinique. The controlling metaphor was the State of the Union Message delivered each January by the U.S. President. The poet who wrote "...On the State of the Union" was Aime Césaire.

Among the headline stories throughout the French speaking world, this weekend, is the death of Cesaire, on Thursday, at 94 years of age. According to Sylvain Rakotoarison, of the popular French-language blog Agora Vox, Cesaire passed away on Thursday at 11:20 AM, Paris time -- "Le 17 avril 2008 à 11 h 20 (heure de Paris)," -- after having been hospitalized for eight days for heart problems -- "hospitalisé depuis huit jours pour des problèmes de cœur". Césaire would have been 95 years old on June 26.

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday February 10, 2008 · 4:02 PM PST

2008/02/10 · 16:02

Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World
by Maureen Webb. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2007.
306 pp. $16.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-87286-476-4.

Maureen Webb is Co-Chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, a member of Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada and a founder of the Campaign Against Mass Surveillance. Her first book, Illusions of Security, begins with the story of Ottawa residents, and Canadian citizens, Maher and Monia Arar. On the basis of a casual friendship between Maher and Abdullah Amalki, the brother of a coworker, Maher was renditioned from the United States, where he had been to waiting for a connecting flight to Montreal, to a Syrian prison. He remained in the prison for a year during which he was frequently tortured.

Amalki himself had been detained while passing through Syria and placed in a prison there for 19 months. He, too, was repeatedly tortured. His crime was...

Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday February 05, 2008 · 5:11 PM PST

2008/02/05 · 17:11

As the polls in much of the country opened for Super Tuesday voting, American and European stock markets plunged. The Dow fell just under 3%, losing 370 points. The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 fared still worse in percentage terms.

While the European markets started their trading day down, the losses grew steeper as news was received of the sharp downturn in the U.S. markets. The Paris CAC 40 lost just under 4%.

The Federal Reserve has cut its prime lending rate by 1.25% in recent weeks, an amount suggesting panic. Both before and after the cuts it has auctioned off tens of billions of dollars, against questionable collateral, to U.S. banks in an attempt to replenish reserves and restart credit markets. The relief has been minimal, leaving U.S. market levels hovering after today's losses are factored in.

RSS

Conservative Christian Group Accuses Obama of "Child Sacrifice".

Republicans Manufacturing “Evidence” of Voter Fraud.

Alex Castellanos Now Advisor to McCain Campaign

The Ballad of Big Dick

Implicit Associations and the Obama Campaign

In the Name of All That We Hold Sacred.

The Price of Poker (And Oil) Goes Up.

Aime Cesaire Dies at 94.

Here’s Spyin’ on You, Kid.

Will Poor Market Day Affect Super Tuesday Outcomes?