i did misread you on the torture issue. for that, i apologize.

The US does not possess the wherewithall to police the world, and the sooner we function more as citizen of the world and less as global policeman the sooner we will be welcomed in countries where the arrival of our president is currently protested en masse.

I have no idea on earth why you would be surprised by this, but I agree with you that the Republican party this year has had an increasing push towards purity among its ranks, and its going to have an effect of narrowing its base.

They only won the Congress in 1994 because they gave the impression they were closer to the center than Democrats, and that they were a big tent party.

I just explained in my previous comment that I think most Americans are against torture, so obviously I have no problems saying it without a mental flinch. However, the picture that Bush's opponents are painting, by implication, that we're living in Terry Gilliam's Brazil and government squads are breaking through roofs to carry away people to be tortured, is just hysteric.

I'm not a Republican and I agree with Obama over McCain on several issues, but I also don't think social conservativs and neo-conservatives are evil, scary people.

Huck, Rudy, Palin all gave good speeches. They were well received nation-wide, not only in the GOP choir room last night. Is it desperation why so many of you are engaging in the most _pathetic_ fiction, mischaraterization of people and their speeches and behavior last night and four years ago, and in Shaun's case, more of his Desperately Driven sewage-swimming today?

Here's another:

Huckabee's speech was great, Guiliani's speech was great, Palin's speech was great.

No wonder the lefties on here are lying and spinning like _little_, pathetic _little_ dust devils today.

Why don't you hypocrites get real and honest and insist Obama exchange places with Biden if experience is so important? [dusting hands]

You sure know how to pack a lot of insults into a small space.

*** FACT *** This site is a Moderate Daily Kos.

Non-liberals are often treated on here worse than “heretic” Fox is treated by the rest of the media for frequently swimming against the liberal, Democratic tide.

Palin is well-received by Americans and was a surprising and appealing choice by McCain. All week her selection (and the scummy attacks from the predictable kinds, from the predictable sources) has boosted the appeal of the McCain ticket and even makes victory in November reasonable to contemplate. You hate that!

One reason this has happened was that a group of conservative front pagers and posters exited TMV in mass when they were told that they couldn't control / censor the comment sections “al la Redstate”.

Anyone to compare The Moderate Voice to DailyKos is either trying to create a new talking point OR has no working knowledge of either… Whatever the reason, it's a silly argument.

Would that “base” include people so clueless about Senator O's lineage that they have to be nudged into awareness of it? If so, show me one of those people. (it requires finding two of them to be properly referred to as “the base” by the way). Good luck.

Barack, given his manners and his upbringing and his Harvard credentials isn't going to be “scary” to ANYONE because of his lineage. What makes him potentially scary is that he's the most extreme liberal we've been asked to vote for, probably ever, and he thinks we've forgotten his OWN publically-stated assessment of himself — that is, when he said he would not be sufficiently experienced to make a run at the presidency in '08.

Could we please declare this a psychobabble-free zone? There are so few of them on the internet/

Also, to add, yeah, there are a couple bloggers here I generally ignore, without naming names, and I'm sure that's okay. There probably are a bunch of commenters who scan past my diatribes as well.

I'm not new, I know that the goal of the moderate voice, instead of being centrist, is to have people from across the spectrum, but when I read here, I almost uniformly find the blog posts left of center.

I agree that the current trend of active bloggers at TMV tends to be a bit more to the left of the spectrum. There are a couple of posts here and there that are far to the left, and I tend to wince at those as much as I would any that were from the far right.

What I particularly enjoy at TMV is the fairly decent level of discussion about those posts that happens in the comment section. As the election grows nearer, the quantity has picked up quite a bit from what I'm used to… but I still value not being called various terms from either fringe when I add my input. Besides, life's too complicated to let one label define you .

can you even say it without a mental flinch? was mcCain TORTURED in vietnam? or is it the Newspeak that you speak: “enhanced interrogation”?

i don't consider myself a leftist; i'm anti-affirmative action; i'm open to the death penalty for the worst of the worst; i believe abortion is okay for the embryo but more troublesome in the fetal stage; i think some guns should be banned but not others. it's what i like to call a “reasoned” stance.

imo, polemicists like ann coulter have pushed us so far to the right that even mcCain isn't conservative enough; hell, buchanan comes off as a “moderate” compared you some of you folks, at least to my ears. i can and do have rational conversations with paleo-conservatives; they accept “reasons” and “evidence”. they demand more than trite platitudes — they really do want answers, many of them….

it's sad, really. the neocons, assisted by the fundamentalists, have carried the whole party off into outer space, and your average member of the “base” is just along for the ride.

Bill “Slots” Bennett thinks this is the way to go.

As for the Palin speech, the Yahoo AP feed listed pretty much all of her attacks and that she has a great family. That's cool and all, but a radio show host can do that. I want to know if she's ready to be President, which involves more than attacking the bad guy. So off to read the text of her speech to see if she ever got around to her actually governing.

It all depends on whether you think the public will believe the criticism she's lodging. And I think people will see her comments about Obama's record as a way to defend her record, as she's come under fire for the last few days.

The blogroll is great though. Should be some good centrist blogs in there.