NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, picking through some of the recent attacks on Obama during his vacation, including the recently discussed Photo Phunnies. There's plenty of other choice stuff, including a rant by Erick Erickson suggesting that the President's condolences on the CIA agents recently killed in Afghanistan might be an attempt to "sabotage the intelligence community." Of course, if Obama hadn't said anything, it would prove he hates America's Spooks.

One thing I didn't get into was the high volume of complaints that Obama had a vacation at all, and had the temerity to golf during it. This is an old trope among the brethren ("Media Cheer Obama's Golf Outings; Criticized Republicans' Trips to Course"). I wonder how long it'll be before someone puts up an Obama Golf Watch.

I MEAN, DID YOU EVER LOOK AT A DOLLAR BILL, MAN? THERE'S SOME SPOOKY STUFF GOING ON IN A DOLLAR BILL, MAN. Holy moley, they're still doing heavy photo analysis on Obama. Today the Ole Perfesser finds a pic of the President in a less than subservient attitude and goes all Ann Althouse:

OBAMA AND BIDEN: Analyze the body language. From the White House Flickr page.

UPDATE: No, I don’t think Obama’s facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off. His eyes aren’t closed, as some with poor displays seem to think. Here’s a detail from the frame.

Jesus Christ. I wonder if he tried folding it to turn Obama's head into a mushroom.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Joseph Gautier writes: “If I really wanted to set my dad off, all I’d have to do is send him this photo..."

No doubt it would: "A nigger in a tuxedo!"

"... The amazing thing is, that it is found on the WH’s flickr page. Proving that they don’t see what we see."

Hate to tell ya, buddy, but we don't see the pink elephants or the leprechaun that tells you to burn things, either.

Was there a gas leak at the last CPAC convention or something?

UPDATE: Commenters point out further sifting by the photo analysis squad. This is getting to be the rightblogger equivalent of arts and crafts. Also, inevitably, one of the brethren says I'm "making this about race." Also claims people like me are "why I will never, ever, vote for a fucking democrat, ever again!" If the Democrats, or democrats, lose the House in 2010, you know who to blame, folks! They don't like socialism, but they really hate being made fun of.

UPDATE 2: Comments reveal the "making this about race" guy is kinda crazy, which is too bad. Where is that honest, sensible conservative who will help me get over my prejudice against white people?

YOUR OWN LYIN' EYES. The meaning of the much-circulated Photoshop of Barack Obama as a shoeshine boy shining Sarah Palin's pumps is clearly understood by most people. We're sure the boys at Chimpout -- "Cops on Nigger Obama and shoeshine boy Gates" -- and Stormfront get the joke. See also Urban Dictionary, etc.

The image has turned up at Free Republic, SodaHead, and other places where you'd expect to see it. But other rightbloggers are going to great lengths to rehabilitate this ancient racist trope since it's been used on Obama.

One device they're using is the Democratic Party affiliation of one person whose handling of the photo made the news. "Her status as a registered Democrat cannot be ignored," says Patterico.

As the image was flagged by Charles Johnson, whose apostasy has made him a target of conservatives, this becomes a "My Hair is a Bird, Your Argument Is Invalid" line of defense among the brethen. "For someone so 'scientific' [as Johnson],'" says American Power, "real facts must have caused nasty bouts of cognitive dissonance and psychological displacement." Patterico's research is commended by America Daughter Media Center: "If a CJ makes a mistake, along comes a Patterico to correct it... bloggers are inheriting the mantle of the dying mainstream media."

Others are actually insisting that there's nothing racist about it. Tom Maguire, while conceding that "there are certainly some racial overtones of servitude to the shoe shine imagery," learns that Rush Limbaugh claims to have once been a shoeshine boy, thus cleansing the image of its racial associations.

Instapundit picks it up:

Or is it racist? Rush Limbaugh actually was a shoeshine boy. Yeah the racial stereotype is a bit shaky -- when I was a kid I knew older brothers of friends who did that; even in Birmingham, Alabama they were white. By the time I was a teenager, of course, shoeshines were on the way out.

And he's from Tennessee, so he should know. We also have Armed Liberal taking the things-are-complicated approach, whereby liberals of the unarmed kind are trying to make a "Big Story" out of what is actually the fascinatingly complex phenomenon of a black President pictured shining shoes. Plus he saw a black cashier being mean to an Asian.

Another Black Conservative testifies to the work ethic of black shoeshine men, which he suggests may be the real meaning of the photo. Certainly it's less demeaning than the job ABC's got.

Soon they'll be telling us that pictures of watermelons on the White House lawn are a tribute to Michelle Obama's garden, pictures of Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose are a tribute to his rich cultural heritage, etc.

BLFF. Guy Benson -- "America's youngest top-market political talk show host" -- claims he knows a woman in Jersey who's a "lifelong Democrat voter, harbors a long-standing distaste for George W. Bush, and slants left on most issues." This already tells you where Benson is going, for when such as he announce they have a liberal friend, they will inevitably tell you immediately thereafter either that the liberal has committed a horrible offense, or that he or she has converted.

In this instance it's Door #2, as the alleged liberal friend starts reading off Republican talking points:

She was particularly furious about the health-care debate (a family member is battling cancer)... Her best line? "Just because I don't want my kids paying off national debts for their entire lives doesn't mean I'm a racist." Being a good Democrat, she couldn't quite bring herself to name names, but did noticeably bristle when I mentioned the unholy trinity of Obama/Reid/Pelosi.

How I wish he'd provided more detail to "noticeably bristle." How'd he notice her bristling? Maybe the fur on the puppet he was actually talking to needs brushing.

Anyway, Benson finds the alleged conversation "a real-life, first-hand example of the conservative re-awakening America is experiencing, and anecdotal confirmation of the polling data energized conservatives have been poring over for months."

Oh, yeah? Well, I had a conversation recently with a lifelong Republican who harbors a long-standing distaste for Jimmy Carter, and slants right on most issues. From Alabama! She came up to me at the sort of unspecified location where such conversations always take place, and suddenly started ranting about Bush having eight years to fix our national security and accomplishing "jack-shit," the way the former President let the banks run wild and destroy the economy, etc. Her best line? "This country is so totally fucked we had to hire a black guy to unfuck it," though I think she got it from Madeleine Albright.

This, I declare, is a real-life, first-hand example of the conservative destruction America has experienced, and anecdotal confirmation of the polling data showing the conservative movement splitting into a Give Us Our Patronage Appointments Back faction and a White People's Party faction.

And to add a little extra versimilitude, my conservative friend is a cab driver.

NOT A YEAR-END "BEST OF," but emblematic in its way -- The Ole Perfesser:

Yeah, I actually agree with Andrew [Sullivan] on torture, but the more I read his stuff, the weaker my sentiments on the subject get...

This really nutshells a certain kind of conservative thinking -- either directly of the "I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick" school (thanks, Prof. Berube), or opportunistically feeding off it -- whose adherents claim they would have coherent moral standards if only liberals didn't make them mad.

I'm actually surprised the Perfesser used language that would hearken us back to the warblogger era ('member that?), when alleged former liberals like Matt Welch and Jeff Jarvis would bellow that the scales had been torn from their eyes, revealing to them the necessity of invading Iraq. I notice that they're not similarly rallying to the call to invade Yemen, which suggests such epiphanies have a more limited shelf life than once was thought, as well as a longer, subsequent period of buyer's remorse.

To assert while drunk and belligerent at a party that you've become more hot for torture because people you dislike are against it is one thing, but to publish such feelings while sober, and with evident sincerity, is literally depraved.

Yet apparently this sort of thing goes over in the conservative world now, as is also seen in the whole crotch-bomber contretemps. The similarities to the Richard Reid shoe-bomber episode, which passed with blame largely attributed to the malefactors rather than to the Bush Administration, are obvious, but the current rightwing talking point is that the threat "would have easily been caught by 1990’s computer" were it not for the deliberate malfeasance of Obama.

There is literally nothing, in the eyes of such people, that is not suddenly rendered immoral by its attachment to liberals. But it leaves the rest of us free to ask what, in particular, their own moral certainties might be.

UPDATE. People are leaving comments referring to some "New Year" thing. Is it some sort of holiday? It sounds suspiciously like Year Zero. Is it socialist?

Haw haw, I am making the joke. Happy 2010, if that doesn't prove an oxymoron.

THE GREAT REVIVAL. Kathryn J. Lopez:

So many, like Mark and myself, have personal stories about Rush's kind generosity. But there are millions of people who have never met him who are e-mailing me today telling me they went to morning Mass with his intention in mind, that they have their whole family praying for him...

Why hasn't this sudden, massive rise in church attendance been reported by the MSM? Maybe a substantial number of these millions only meant to go to church.

PISS ON YOUR OWN LEG AND TELL YOURSELF IT'S RAINING. I have to hand it to Don Surber. I couldn't guess how he'd spin the news that President Obama topped the latest Most Admired Men list. But goldurn it, he came up with a beaut:

Both Hillary and Sarah beat Michelle...

While that is up from 3% last year, the fact is [Michelle Obama] is nowhere near as popular as her predecessor, Laura Bush, whose popularity ranged from 63% to 80%.

Hillary Clinton's popularity suggests to Surber that "maybe Democrats will switch quarterbacks in 2012." Alternatively, I suppose, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could swap wives.

Surber briefly mentions that "President Obama led the list (as most presidents do) with 30% (last year he led with 32%)," gliding over the fact that the guy not-yet-President Obama beat in 2008 was President Bush, who had a vote of five percent. Bush was the first President since 1952* to fail to make first place. (Bush topped the poll in 2007 with a vote of ten percent.)

At some point, spin just becomes the spins.

*UPDATE. Commenter Neil points out that Jimmy Carter ran behind the Pope in 1980. Also, Nixon and Ford lost to -- get this -- Henry Kissinger.

JOURNEY INTO FEAR. The Corner at this writing is largely devoted to demands that Janet Napolitano be fired. In a crowded field, Jonah Goldberg has distinguished himself. Early on, he reiterates the general willful misreading of Napolitano's statements, then huffs, "I thought the head of the DHS was supposed to have the trust of the American people." I must have missed those days when American parents named their children after Tom Ridge, and kept portraits of him over their kitchen tables. Apparently Goldberg did too, because later he says

Well, if memory serves, I've never been much of a Tom Ridge supporter. And this magazine was awfully tough on him and DHS in general.

Maybe he meant the Golden Age of Michael Chertoff. Sometimes I think Goldberg suffers the same condition as the guy in Memento and has right-wing talking points tattooed on his belly, so whenever he comes to, he can just start bellowing away, blessedly unaware of what he said just hours before. Would that I were similarly blessed, at least regarding what Goldberg has said.

Goldberg also complains that Obama used the words "allegedly" and "suspect" regarding the incident. His post includes an almost perfectly Goldbergian sentence -- "If we know it, how 'allegedly' can it be?" I bet he mutters that to himself whenever he reads crime reports in the papers, or when he gets queries from his editors at other publications.

Goldberg acts as if Obama were going to blow the whole case, dammit, because he used careful language at a delicate time, rather than the pirate impersonation Goldberg favors. Presumably if Obama referred to Abdulmutallab as "yon scurvy dog" his chances of lifelong incarceration would be increased from certain to oh totally.

This obsession with tough talk is shared by Andy McCarthy, who wants to know why the Secretary of Homeland Security did not quickly and definitively attribute the failed crotch-bombing to Al Qaeda:

That is to say, indications of a larger plot abound. The prudent course is thus to say, "We are aggressively investigating all possibilities" and leave it at that. At this premature stage, no sensible person would be surprised to hear that; but saying it suggests we might be open to the possibility that there's a massive international Islamic terror conspiracy -- can't have that.

No normal person, hearing Napolitano's actual words, would assume that an Al Qaeda connection had been ruled out. Why is McCarthy doing this? His tell is "massive international Islamic terror conspiracy." McCarthy wants the most terrifying description of the possibilities front and center in the public's mind. And if people inclined to listen to him aren't terrified enough, he heads directly from certainty to speculation -- "They may very well be complicit. For a better sense of the potentially involved Yemeni players..." -- so that they'll go away in an imaginative frame of mind to draw webs of their own.

His purpose -- like that of Pete Hoekstra, quoted by Robert Costa in complaint that Napolitano is "reluctant to use the word "terrorism'" -- is not to enlighten but to spook. These guys discovered a while back that the public liked them better when they were scared, so now they're picking nits to suggest the Administration is incompetent or just not bloodthirsty enough, hoping to draw Americans back into the state of fear that increases Republican chances.

Goldberg pops back in to run the old Animal House clip of Kevin Bacon getting flattened by a panicked mob as he cries "All is well." His joke is that Napolitano is behaving like Bacon, but it would work better if the frightened mob had actually materialized anywhere but in National Review's offices. It remains to be seen if he and his buddies can get the extras to follow direction.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger rampage over the failed crotch-bombing. Janet Napolitano may be my least favorite cabinet member after Tim Geithner, but her anodyne ass-covering statements were perfectly appropriate for what it is becoming hard to remember was a non-explosion. The conservative response has been to willfully misread her statements, then demand her resignation based on their own misinterpretation.

Their long-term strategy is not yet discernible, but I hope they got for a NEVER FORGET 12/25 angle, and next year start yelling at people who insist on making merry during the anniversary of America's worst terrorist non-attack.

Do they never cease pissing their pants?

AND I EVEN THINK I SEE TWO CATS FROM INTERPOL, MAN. The Anchoress is upset by a Presidential directive on Interpol. It's not just about Socialism, which The Anchoress says "like the Chicago fog, creeps in on little cat feet," but the Nazis:

I have never understood why the Jews in Germany and Poland and the Netherlands simply went along with what they were told to do by the Nazis... Civil Disobedience is a good thing, sometimes -a force for good- we learned that from the very same spoiled-brat generation that now attempts to utterly corrupt our government, and our way of life...

Blargh blargh blargh. And yet she was only exercised about the Patriot Act when she heard other people wanted to get rid of it. Some civil libertarian.

(She's seeing Nazis everywhere these days, as in a fellow Christian's insufficiently resemblance to herself: "the piece reminds me a little of that scene in Schindler’s List, where the female Jewish architect tries to stay alive by offering to help design a better, stronger gallows..." I wonder whether she was driven to Hitler-Spielberg analogies when Ada Calhoun denounced "psychos shooting up abortion clinics and telling gay couples they're going to hell," or when Calhoun talked about smoking cigarettes and listening to Paul Westerberg.)

I doubt The Anchoress would find this explanation convincing, particularly the bit about Interpol having no international crime-busting agents of its own, which rather spoils the outrage of other yahoos crying that "our president has set an international police agency above the Fourth Amendment constraints of the Constitution that he finds deeply flawed."

The most interesting analyses of the Obama EO I've seen so far come from a reliably rightwing nut source and an less obviously affiliated nut source, which, despite their nuttiness, eschew the popular Bourne Identity nonsense and concentrate on its impact on American cooperation with the World Court and economic benefits to Interpol.

These may be fruitful areas of inquiry, and we should all be concerned about any expansion of government powers, national or international. But alas, in the current environment it's hard to find a good, un-nutty discussion of them. Even commentators who start out sober on the Interpol subject rush without explanation from what seems to be a tax code issue to an alleged abrogration of the 4th Amendment. At this writing, if you look for "Interpol" at Google News, the first result is "US placed under international police-state."

My mind turns again to the decade's social media disaster. We were once promised a consortium of great minds cooperating to unravel current events, and wound up with a cottage industry of propaganda mills extracting partisan advantage out of every news item that comes down the pike and churning it into outrage. Here we see one of its many depressing effects: a gang of rightbloggers who in years past never showed any interest in Constitutional protections predicting home invasions by jack-booted international thugs from an organization best known for tracking down ivory poachers and from a passing reference in Lenny. Paul Krassner, come back; all is forgiven.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. Now that Giuliani is out of the Senate race, it seems clear to me that he had one overriding motivation for bailing: If he ran, he'd lose. I've laid out the case at the Voice. Not having room for war-gaming, and being lazy, I didn't posit a Giuliani-wins scenario, but I'll outline one here:

• Giuliani joins the tea party. The true believers might squawk, but his bodyguards muscle the crowd and tell hecklers "Have you forgotten when the world stopped turning?" (those people are still big on 9/11 bloody-shirt-waving), and his presence at one of their shindigs swells attendance and coverage. Plus he's local, which the poobahs approve. Soon he's no longer a philandering abortionist gun-grabbing RINO, but a full-fledged fist-shaking rabble-rouser! Call it a return to his roots.
  
  
• Kirsten Gillibrand is a socialist. "$5.1 Billion For Home Heating Assistance," "Federal Funds for Staten Island University Hospital," "$1.6 Million For Vaccine Program" -- what is this, Russia? She's taking your tax dollars and giving them to the union bosses at hospitals, schools, and heating oil distributorships!
  
  
• Kirsten Gillibrand is a woman. During their first debate, Giuliani sets off a stink bomb and firecrackers and yells "This is what it was like during 9/11." Gillibrand flees the stage. She can't take the heat! Also he addresses her as "Mrs. Gillibrand" and "lady."

Etc. Of course now it's just a beautiful dream.

PS: Russell Harding brings up another good reason why Rudy may have bailed: the Senate's comparatively lousy pay. (Scroll down to "Sen. Giuliani?? Follow-up.") "He cannot live on what a Senate salary pays. He would have to sever all ties to Giuliani Partners (GP) which would be the death of that business... I think he requires the millions he brings in each year to maintain his lifestyle. That is one reason so much has to be comped when he travels for speaking engagements."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about this and that, but mostly the Senate health care doings and how they allegedly spell doom for the Democrats. (Also: Obama bows while seated, etc.) I remain agnostic on the ever-changing kaleidoscope that is the plan, but note with interest that as the PR war over it drags on, opposition language grows more apocalyptic as the bills themselves grow milder. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if the thing ends up as a Free Aspirin for Seniors, with RedState calling for armed defense of the old folks who will suffer fatal nosebleeds in the coming socialist aspirin apocalypse.

THE INTERNET, RUINED. I try not to trouble you good people too much with redirects to my Voice stuff, and will not tug your sleeve every time I update the "Why Our Decade Sucked" series I have commenced, but I do think you might be interested in the first entry, "Social Media Ruined the Internet." It builds on things I've observed over my years of watching the blogs and their nightmare offspring, Twitter, Facebook and the like.

In brief, the tech revolution has brought us some clear benefits (e.g., LOLcats, free porn), but when it comes to thinking and communicating, it's been a net loss. (Hoists snifter) Perhaps you disagree?

SAVING SNOOKI FROM TIGER WOODS AND INTEGRATION. Jesus God: No sooner had I waded through Maggie Gallagher's o tempora o mores than Jonah Goldberg sticks his fat thumb in, on the subject of reality shows. Like Gallagher, he starts with unobjectionable statements about the foolishness of the participants, and then gets to this:

The elite minority’s general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs.

Holy shit.

As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls “ecumenical niceness.” A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass -- or people with underclass values -- are forbidden. A corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.

So, because the elite minority made white men treat Negroes and women like equals, Jersey Shore is on TV and we all swear.

That would seem to be a climax of idiocy, but Goldberg must produce a few hundred more words before he can pretend this extended mouth-fart is a column. Where can he go from here? One imagines him at this point running his tiny mind through various exit strategies: Star Trek, FDR as Hitler, how great his dog is. Finally it hits him: double reverse class warfare!

Whatever you think of what Toynbee and Murray would call the “proletarianization of the elites,” one point is beyond dispute: The rich can afford moral lassitude more than the poor can. Hilton, heir to a hotel fortune, has life as simple as she wants it to be. Tiger Woods is surely a cad, but as a pure matter of economics, he can afford to be one.

The question is: Can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV?

I'm not sure who he's worried about here. The dumbbells of Jersey Shore haven't suffered by following the loathsome example of Tiger Woods; before they or anyone else learned that Tiger Woods fucked around, they got a TV show. Oh, but they might have seen Paris Hilton, and that may have altered their lifestyle. Before she came along, mooks such as Snooki and Vinny refrained from profanity, and kept their pinkies extended when they chugged their Mojitos.

As usual, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

MAGGIE PLEADS FOR THE OLD WAYS. Maggie Gallager, considering the Tiger Woods case, says "Sex Makes People Stupid." Gasp! For once she seemed on the same page as Shakespeare, Moliere, and all the greats.

Alas, Gallagher starts talking about "civilization":

This is why we need a little thing called “civilization” to intervene between people and sexual passion, so we don’t leave the young-uns to rely on their own genius to figure out certain enduring truths, like: A married man cannot betray you. You are not a betrayee. You are the co-betrayer...

Sexual virtue is hard. That is why most civilizations through most of human history have invested serious resources in attempting to teach the next generation how they’re ideally supposed to behave.

And that's why nobody had affairs before the Beatles' first LP. Gallagher laments the New Breed of mistresses who call up their paramours' wives and complain. Though she attributes the problem, as is her wont, to sex, the chief object of her complaint is impropriety. She would prefer no one got busy outside the holy state of heterosexual matrimony, but if they must they should be discreet about it. It's an arguable point, but made so much more elegantly by Mme. Armfeldt in A Little Night Music:



If only Gallagher had Mme. Armfeldt's frankness, and words by Stephen Sondheim! But she doesn't seem to know her argument is aesthetic, not moral. I wonder if she'd beat her wings so fiercely if the rich and famous conducted their liasons with the propriety of characters in drawing-room comedies. There were times when that was the fashion, and if transported back to them Gallagher would probably do as scolds did then, and berate poor women for their lack of morality.

Actually she does that too, but probably gets a lot more attention when she uses boldface names.

SOMEWHERE CHARLIE MANSON IS LAUGHING HIS ASS OFF. Looks like some War on Terror detainees may be sent to Illinois. Predictably this provokes blood and thunder from the belligerati. National Review cites "the courts’ pro-terrorist decisions over the last eight years" as evidence that liberal judges, having wrested authority from the military tribunals still planned for these prisoners, will gleefully release gibbering madmen into the wild to hijack SUVs and drive them into buildings or something. (Don't laugh, something similar has been suggested.)

Also, American prisons are not up to the job of holding these supervillains. "International jihadists," we are told, "are prone to riot, savagely attack their custodians, attempt escape, and plot terror attacks while in U.S. prisons." In contrast, I suppose, with the tinkerbells normally incarcerated for murder, rape, etc. -- on whom, I'm surprised National Review didn't add, the new bad boys will exert a negative influence. Our cons teach them to make Pruno, they teach ours to make jihad!

These protests that Gitmo detainees are wilier and more dangerous than American-made convicts are not only absurd, but an insult to our incarceration system, which, I say with pride, produces the finest homicidal maniacs in the world.

By the way, has John Walker Lindh dug his way out of Supermax with a spoon yet?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the War on Christmas and how Obama may be spoiling the fun by drawing attention away from un-Christmasy chain stores and onto himself. Not that there aren't some corkers out there, but they are more of the passive-aggressive variety. For example, there's this weird CSI parody video from Steve Crowder and the Pajamas TV troupe:



The cream of the jest, as it were, seems to do with Target's disallowance of Salvation Army bell-ringers in the earlier part of this decade. Target has chosen instead to make a large holiday donation to the organization, which would please even the fastidious Major Barbara, but not Crowder, assuming he knows about it. Still, try to imagine Pajamas viewers boycotting Target in outrage! You can even buy Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto there.

Now, if he'd picked on a library or a university, it would have shown Crowder was serious. But he obviously walked into the sessions stoned and with a dim memory of some email he got from his grandma while he was in college, and this is the result. They aren't making Christmas warriors like they used to.

Nonetheless there are such WoC funsies as I could find at the Voice item, and a few of the Obama Xmas rags that are replacing them. Go and weep for what might have been.

HOW SPIN WORKS, PART 639,020. Annise Parker has been elected Mayor of Houston. Being openly gay, she had a hard row to hoe:

A cluster of socially conservative Houstonians is planning a campaign to discourage voters from choosing City Controller Annise Parker in the December mayoral runoff because she is a lesbian, according to multiple ministers and conservatives involved in the effort...

"The bottom line is that we didn't pick the battle, she did, when she made her agenda and sexual preference a central part of her campaign,” said Dave Welch, executive director of the Houston Area Pastor Council, numbering more than 200 senior pastors in the Greater Houston area. “National gay and lesbian activists see this as a historic opportunity. The reality is that's because they're promoting an agenda which we believe to be contrary to the concerns of the community and destructive to the family.”

Now that she's in, Andrew Malcolm, who has shown no interest in her campaign heretofore, declares

Houston picks conservative Annise Parker as mayor, first lesbian to head a major American city

This theme is picked up by the Perfesser and Don Surber, who adds, "Her opponent, also a Democrat, spread fears that electing a fiscal conservative would warp the values of Houston." He doesn't mention the Republican, Roy Morales, they both beat in the general, nor the flyer that went out for that other Democrat, Gene Locke, endorsing him on behalf of the Conservative Republicans of Harris County as "the most conservative, best qualified candidate" for the job.

Meanwhile, from conservatives who have not gotten the memo: "Locke gained the support of conservative and anti-gay groups to battle what they deemed Annise Parker’s 'homosexual behavior.'" "Question, is an openly gay elected individual not the Mayor of all people? Will Annise Parker govern with a bias toward gays vs. heterosexuals? If so, she will last one term."

These latter worthies are a little further down the food chain, and so had no need to bullshit.

INGRATES. I think it was a little rich that Obama took time to defend the Afghanistan surge in a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Well, they gave it to TR and Kissinger, too. And I give Obama credit for taking a lonely road, as it was inevitable that no one would be pleased by it -- including rightwing war fans.

The dime's worth of difference between the parties first noted by George Wallace has depreciated to about two cents, yet at even Obama's most war-friendly moment conservatives stand against him as if he were an incoming wave of Japanese Zeros. The technique is familiar -- like Dan Riehl defending gay people he hates from Obama, it's probably their idea of a Jedi mind trick. But I'm beginning to lose track of what it is they want to replace this Administration with. Something similar, maybe, only whiter and more bellicose?

THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR LOVE. Rod Dreher:

Ambulance called to Tiger Woods' house in Florida; unidentified blonde woman seen taken out on a stretcher. More details TK.

So, if this is Elin Nordegren, and if she has tried to hurt herself over her husband's serial adulteries...

[Harangue about what a "contemptible human being" Woods is, "floozies," "he needs to suffer," etc.]

UPDATE: It's his mother in law.

Later Brother Rod prays for the strength to resist his "disgust" with Tiger Woods.

Dreher is my favorite Christian. Maybe he should try to convert atheists by getting them to read gossip magazines.