. . . except that I'm trying to put together the playlist for The Ultimate Highway CD:

Do we like the NSFW Ted Nugent clip?

Or do you think Old Faithful is a better idea?

Countin' on you guys.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:08 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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It looks shorter here than I've ever seen it. Unless the wind is blowing it against his head.

I'd love to be able to blog "from anywhere." I'd especially like to blog a road trip, just once. Unfortunately, at this point I'd have to do it by going from Denny's to Starbucks to Denny's along the Interstate 5, and WiFi-enabled restaurants and coffeehouses aren't that thick on the ground in the middle of the state.

I'm so low-tech; I'm like the blogging Luddite, here.

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. . . is kind of a living document.

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. . . if Obama is such an "agent of change," why he didn't have the courage to stand up to his own pastor, and implies that the reality behind the Obama-Wright relationship is more like: Obama never really minded the hate-talk and the wild untruths until he got caught—which Gingrich likens to being "a normal politician."

Ouch.

Gingrich suggests that this will "slow the momentum" of Obama's campaign. I think it'll bring the whole thing nearly to a halt.

Barack Obama had two decades in which to have a "Sistah Soljah" moment. He declined to do so, and would now like to retroactively pretend that the whole issue never came to light.

"There used to be white racists in the past, and there probably still are, and so it's okay to support black racists in the present. Oh, look over there!—it's a shiny object! Look at the sky! Look at the trees! Looking at the water rippling on the edge of the lake; isn't it pretty?

He's finished.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 06:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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at SCOTUS Blog.

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Over at Just Barking Mad:

As long as there is female anatomy separating the guys there is nothing gay going on. Some will parse it to mean as long as the men are at opposite ends of the female; but thatÂ’s a constructionist viewpoint.

These rules are traditional from coast to coast. Now some may argue that the First Rule of Female-Male-Female isn’t biblical. But I can’t find anywhere in the Bible where it says that “woman shouldn’t lay with woman . . . ”

This leads him (the writer is male, if I know my sexes—and, ahem, I do) to a conclusion that some will find quite plausible, and some will find nearly as blasphemous as my initial suspicious misunderstanding of the "Ceiling Cat."

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It's a multifacted entry that's impossible to summarize. As usual, Joyner talks about the moral dimensions of the issue, the rhetorical devices Obama used, and the way this "Wright Stuff" stuff may affect public opinion/the horse races.

There is also, as one might expect from James, a nice little roundup at the end.

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Those of you who are still supporting Barack Obama (and I know you are lurking around), please go over to Ace's place and check out this video.

You don't have to read the post itself (sorry, Ace), and you probably shouldn't read the comments there.

But just deal with it, please. I truly want to see how you're wrapping your heads around this.

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Well . . . not exactly. But I liked it.

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and, of course, how they apply to Barack Obama.

I asked her about my rather confused white-girl thoughts here. So it's nice to see the concept expanded upon. I think it's also a nice thought process for young minorities to go through (or, ahem, anyone who might be tempted to slide into the culture of victimhood): how do you create a self that neither varnishes the past, nor wallows in it? Flight, or fight? Is there a middle way?

Maybe we all need to learn from Steele's "maskless black person." At least, when we wear our various masks, we ought to try to be aware of it.

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Karl at Protein Wisdom:

white Americans, who are fully aware that historically black church services may include dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting — just as some predominantly white churches do. What distinguished Trinity was the hateful and paranoid comments of the Rev. Wright and the apparently joyful reaction of his congregation to them. Indeed, Tom Maguire notes that after the speech, MSNBC presented black ministers who insisted that Wright is way out of the mainstream, and that most black churches preach a more traditional Christian message of love. That Obama insists on claiming Wright is like part of his family whom he cannot disown, when he self-evidently chose the association — and that he compares Wright to “the entire black community” tells Obama’s audience much more about Obama than about Wright or the black community.

Karl has also, in the post linked above, researched Liberation Theology in general, and Black Liberation Theology in particular, comparing it to other strains within Christianity and discussing Rev. Wright's teachings thereon.

I'd read it now if it weren't time for my "daily stint" of housecleaning/de-cluttering. So it'll have to wait tonight—but it's fairly thorough (in an introductory sort of way, natch), and it should make juicy reading tonight with my glass of red wine.

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Or David Duke, for that matter. Barack Obama, on why it's okay to hang out with racists.

Uh-huh. If people buy this, I'm going to be pretty annoyed.

UPDATE: Baldilocks has a nice roundup, including a link to the smartest man alive ("my other political father," she calls him), Professor Thomas Sowell, writing in National Review Online:

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election-year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

Racist.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:20 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Did he name that character after me?

What do you mean, "no"?

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Five more cool blogstresses talk about being a female writer on the right side of the 'sphere (well, the center—in Ann Althouse's case). This time, we've got Kathy Shaidle, our own divine Emily Zanotti (who has been to my house, and got hit on by my liberal friends), LaShawn Barber, and the multi-talented Mary Katherine Ham, (who is also part of the blogchick mafia Cotillion)—along, of course, with Althouse.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:43 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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in the Wall Street Journal:

Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma.

And:

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

I'm not sure that any black person who is working toward a color-blind society is a "bargainer," or that any black person who discusses race is a "challenger." I almost wonder whether Steele is boxing black behavior in unnecessarily this way. I don't know.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background.

Which is the crux of it. Read the whole thing.

I do not know how the Democrats intend to engineer a win for Clinton, but if they are smart they are working hard to change the rules. Because they cannot win with Obama.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:19 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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SCOTUS Blog has a nifty little blog-gadget that automatically scrolls down as new developments occur, and keeps one apprised just about by the second what's going on.

So, go. This is big.

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Althouse has a quick legal summary, and Malkin discusses the extraordinary (and extraordinarily sane) level of interest in the case. It's a good sign when

Getting into the hearing today is the hot ticket in town—the lines look like Hannah Montana concert lines.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I keep toggling back and forth between finding it charming and thinking that it's a bit dangerous.

Is the "ceiling cat" an idol, or a cat's-eye view of Yaweh/Allah/the Lord?

(Just a Christian who lost her sense of humor on the intertubes . . . )

I'd love to hear from Christian cat-lovers on the subject, since it appears to be a gray area.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:30 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Hackbarth is on the case; just keep scrolling.

I'm also reading McArdle, in an attempt to make sense of it all.

(For the record, Sean seems more deeply concerned than Megan, but it's early in the day. A lot may happen over the next few news cycles.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:38 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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At least, I don't think Hitch is. But I still adore his writing, and I'm not sorry, and I have no intention of stopping.

Via the puppyblender who brung me (today), an observation on the anniversary of the war, a series Slate entitled "How Did We Get Iraq Wrong?" (But not, of course, in an editorial way. No, no.)

Hitchens' short answer: I didn't.

I would . . . maintain that . . . incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.

Read the whole thing. It's loaded to the gills with nuance.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:06 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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