The Alliance Defense Fund tapped 33 pastors in 22 states to make explicit recommendations about political candidates from the pulpit today. AP: The conservative legal group plans to send copies of the pastors’ sermons to the IRS with hope of setting off a legal fight and abolishing restrictions on church involvement in politics. Critics call it unnecessary, divisive and unlikely to succeed. Congress amended the tax code in 1954 to state that certain nonprofit groups, including secular charities...

A grim view from abroad on America’s economic predicament from John Gray in The Guardian today: Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over. … In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall...

Liberals love to point out that pundit Bill Kristol is nearly always wrong. They’d have to hand it to him on the Palin part of this one though. From the Sunday, June 29, 2008 edition of Fox News Sunday: BILL KRISTOL: Republicans are much more open to strong women, and that’s why McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket as vice president… She’s fantastic. You know, she was the point guard on the Alaska state championship high school basketball...

Andrew Sullivan finds it odd that Palin lies. As I’ll explain below, I don’t. What may be a little odd is the liberal Palin pity party going on. Ta-Nehisi Coates (also via Andrew): There are lot of us lefties who are guffawing right now and are happy to see Palin seemingly stumbling drunkenly [a cloaked reference to last night?] from occasional interview to occasional interview. I may have been one of them. But I’m out of that group now. The Palin pick was the most crassest, most...

Michelle Goldberg in The Guardian (with video): In 2005, the Kenyan preacher Thomas Muthee stood on the stage of Alaska’s Wasilla Assembly of God and called on Christians to take over the world’s economic system. “The Bible says that the wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous. It’s high time that we have top Christian businessmen, businesswomen, bankers, you know, who are men and women of integrity running the economics of our nations,” he said, his remarks...

Sullivan points to Silver: TPM has the internals of the CNN poll of debate-watchers, which had Obama winning overall by a margin of 51-38. The poll suggests that Obama is opening up a gap on connectedness, while closing a gap on readiness. Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually...

And now for something completely different…

On the heels of their success with Convention Hubs, C-SPAN has teamed up again with New Media Strategies to build online Debate Hubs. The first goes live tonight. New Media Strategies’ Innovation Manager Bill Beutler points to a few new features this time around: The Twitter roundup is on the front page and auto-refreshes dynamically Debate Timeline visually represents the transcript – speaker and subject – it really needs to be seen to be understood Word tree visually represents which...

Earlier I quoted Fred Wilson. Wilson is A VC I respect and admire. He’s taken to calling the proposed bailout “The Splurge” (a locution I may adopt myself). Today he humbly weighs in on To Splurge Or Not To Splurge. Short version: If this money is not coming back, then it’s an expenditure and we should not do it. If the probability adjusted return on this investment is $1.5bn then we should do it in a nanosecond… I’d send Paulson and Bernake to their cubicle and...

At midnight last night, Twitter launched a new sub-site called Election2008. VentureBeat: [The new site] will feature an interface that regular Twitter users will instantly recognize. There will be one major difference however. Gone is the famously outdated question “What are you doing?” (Twitter was initially just about people saying what they were doing), it has been replaced with “What do you think?” The idea of course, is to get people’s opinions on politics topics, the candidates...

Just hours before President Bush was to host Obama and McCain at the White House for a how-to on clearing obstacles, Barney says an agreement has been reached: “There really isn’t much of a deadlock to break,” said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Meantime, Media Matters reports that after Meredith Vieira claimed “political advertising suspended” for the McCain campaign, dozens of NBC affiliates ran McCain ads during Today. Obama...

She’s growing bolder: Sarah Palin took questions from her traveling press corps Thursday for the first time since being tapped as John McCain’s running mate. Speaking to a small pool of reporters following a visit to Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, Palin made a statement and then answered four questions, addressing the war on terror, the re-election bids of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, and the bailout legislation currently in front of Congress. Word is, she’s still...

The Chronicle: Who needs college credit when you have a makeshift diploma from a superstar professor? David Wiley taught an online course at Utah State University last fall and let anyone fully participate, even if they weren’t enrolled. In the end, five people the registrar had never heard of joined discussions with the 15 or so regular students and got papers graded by Mr. Wiley, who considered the extra work a public service…. Open Teaching is the name Mr. Wiley and others use for their...

MySpace Music launched today. Michael Arrington: Basically, everyone who controls rights to music is part of the new venture. MySpace Music allows users to stream virtually any song ever published for free. Users can also create playlists that contain up to 100 songs and share them with others. Any song can also be downloaded in non-DRM MP3 format, for a fee, from Amazon’s music download service. And if you want that song as a ringtone, you can get it as well via Jamster. Song streaming is supported...

First 5 minutes of a 13 minute, 42 second speech delivered on March 12, 1933. History Matters has the full transcript: When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work nationally, but in some cities and some industries unemployment was well over 50 percent. Equally troubling were the bank panics. Between 1929 and 1931, 4,000 banks closed for good; by 1933 the number rose to more than 9,000, with $2.5 billion in lost deposits. Banks never have as much...

What might have been a routine preliminary hearing in the Oxnard, CA, trial of 14-year-old Brandon McInerney became newsworthy yesterday when Brandon’s father moved to fire the public defender representing him and bring in criminal lawyers from LA. You’ll recall that McInerney is being prosecuted as an adult for first-degree murder and a hate crime in the Feb. 12 killing of his classmate, Larry King, 15, who sometimes wore makeup and told friends he was gay. The public defender, William...

Ars Technica is reporting that while a grand jury is investigating the Palin e-mail hack, there are no charges yet: The ongoing investigation into the hacking of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account now appears to center on the son of a Democratic state legislator in Tennessee. A federal grand jury convened Tuesday morning in Chattanooga to hear testimony from friends of David Kernell, a 20-year-old economics student at the University of Tennessee whose apartment...

Lessig blog: I was intrigued by Governor Palin’s hint in her ABC interview that her experience was comparable to other VPs across history. I was surprised by how incorrect she was.

LATER — SCOTUSblog: The stay order is here.  It was issued about two hours before the execution was to be carried out. The Court is to consider Davis’ petition for review (08-66) at its Conference next Monday.  The stay of execution will be lifted automatically if review is denied, the order said.  If review is granted, the stay will remain in effect until the case is decided. Amnesty International praises the stay. ********** AJC: The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a stay of execution...

THE MORNING AFTER: Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan offers up Android and T-Mobile G1’s Five Most Obnoxious Flaws and Wired’s Gadget Lab judges it Neither Open nor Exciting. +++++++++++ It’s promised to be in 22 markets by commercial launch on October 22nd; by mid-November 27 markets. Wired’s epicenter: The long-awaited, breathlessly-rumored, Google-powered (and still unavailable until next month) G1 phone was unveiled today with a list price that undercuts Apple’s iPhone...

Cory Bergman at Lost Remote: I’ve been playing with “CBS EyeMobile,” a new iPhone application (iTunes link) from the folks at CBS News, built by Seattle’s Treemo Labs. You can submit photos straight from your iPhone, and browse photos and video clips uploaded by other citizen reporters. As you may know, you can’t shoot video from your iPhone unless you’ve hacked it. (Like many iPhone users, I’m waiting for Apple to unlock the phone’s video capability, both recorded and live.) “Soon...

With hours to go a devastating blow: Davis’ only hope for a reprieve lies with the U.S. Supreme Court after the state high court by a 6-1 vote rejected his stay request Monday. Supporters say the doubts merit a new trial. The courts have consistently disagreed. A divided Georgia Supreme Court has already rejected his request for a new trial by a 4-3 vote. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has turned down his bid for clemency. In a sign of the intense publicity surrounding the case, the...

Download your own set of FREE papercraft candidate finger-puppets (w/spouses) at FoldUScandidate.com. The big letdown: where are the puppet VPs? Via Cory Doctorow @ BoingBoing

You’ve probably already heard that David Foster Wallace committed suicide at his home in California on Friday, Sept. 12. A brilliant writer and thinker, he was 46. His father said Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years, had gone off the medication in June 2007 and, when the depression returned, no other treatment was successful. “Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.” Remembrances have been piling up through the week. I’ve...

In an echo of the cell-phone scares that have been with us for years (driving, honey bees, cancer), the NY Times today headlines, As Text Messages Fly, Danger Lurks: [T]exting at the wrong time can be extremely dangerous. Over the last two years, news accounts across the country have chronicled the death or serious injury of people who walk into traffic while texting or who drive while doing so. Police officials said last year that a crash that killed five cheerleaders in upstate New York might have...