The days when Republicans can feel confident Democrats won’t aggressively court religious voters are over, CNN reports. Also, look at the lead of the CNN report and you’ll see an error (presumably) that is likely to raise some eyebrows among Democrats and possibly be the subject of some blog posts. Tired of being seen by religious voters as too secular or even hostile toward religion, the Democrat party and its presidential candidates have launched an all-out effort to win their votes. We’ve...

Paresh Nath, National Herald, India

VIETNAM AND IRAQ Counterinsurgency = Political Action + Civic Action + Counter-guerrilla Operations — BERNARD FALL The great war correspondent Bernard Fall understood Vietnam better than the French, whom he predicted would fail in their war against Ho Chi Minh’s national liberation movement, as well as the Americans, whom he also predicted would fail although they went about doing so a great deal more creatively. Fall, who reported from Vietnam from 1953 until he stepped on a landmine...

Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post, Dry Bones

This is your government addicted to the War on Drugs: Any questions? NOTE: This ad courtesy was courtesy of the Drug Policy Alliance. My thanks to Radley Balko and Jacob Sullum for the link.

They could spark some debate. Watch this space.

To add to already increased tensions and frictions between the United States and its purported ally in the war on terror, Pakistan, now a NEW argument has broken out: Is bin Laden alive, or isn’t he? And if he is, who is to blame for that? You can almost guess the positions on this one: Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden is alive and sheltering in lawless parts of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, US intelligence chief Mike McConnell said yesterday. Mr McConnell blamed President Pervez...

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch

The uneasy relationship between the United States and Pakistan has just gotten a lot uneasier: One of President Bush’s counterterrorism advisers said today that the United States would consider using military force inside Pakistan if it identified key Al Qaeda targets there, but the Pakistani foreign minister angrily rejected such talk as “irresponsible” and said American attacks in the sensitive border area could cause civilian deaths and enrage Pakistani opinion. It’s a...

A round up of recent posts by a few centrist, moderate, and independent bloggers. McQ evaluates divergent libertarian views on the war in Iraq, cued by a WSJ opinion piece from earlier this week. Andrew Sullivan zeroes in on Hilzoy’s “Ten Lessons from Iraq,” and picks the two that resonate most with him. Nancy Hanks encourages Independent voters to watch Monday’s Democratic debate and make their voices heard. Carol Gee offers an interesting round up of how the media in certain...

To read about the elections in Turkey, click here. These elections are incredibly important. A couple of weeks and months ago, secularists took the streets in several Turkish cities to protest in favor of Turkey’s secular system and against the AK Parti which wanted to make Abdullah Gül President of the Turkish Republic. Secularists opposed (and continue to oppose) Gül because he is an Islamist (obviously) and because his wife wears a headscarf. Many Turks believe that today’s elections...

You have to ask yourselve: when will they ever learn? TMZ.com has the pictures above of Mitt Romney — a supposedly slick political candidate — getting himself into the most fundamental kind of political pickle: he allowed himself to be standing next to and be photographed with a supporter with a sign saying “NO TO OBAMA OSAMA AND CHELSEA’S MOMA” with a big smile on his puss. Even WORSE: in one of the photos he’s holding it. Is Mitt ready for Prime Time?????? And...

As someone with strong (and sometimes too strong) opinions about people, I was surprised at how sad I felt when I read in May that Tammy Faye Bakker Messner had decided to stop taking treatments for the cancer that was well on the way to killing her. Why, I asked myself, would I feel common ground with the mascara-impaired wife of a televangelist who had famously cried for the cameras when her hubbo got caught with his pants down? First of all, because anyone who has had to battle cancer has my...

….at News Groper, a truly unusual and remarkable site. Just imagine a news site with more and more stellar bloggers than The Huffington Post. If you do, News Groper is it. The truly A List bloggers include President George Bush, Al Gore, Ann Coulter, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and a mind-blogging list of many more. They probably never dreamed they’d see a day when they’d be blogging. And actually, the day hasn’t arrived yet. Because News Groper is a world-class political parody...

Vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid, is a critical food preservative and a favorite vitamin all over the world. But now 80 percent of it is made in one place in the world — a place that has come under fire recently for quality control. And there are concerns that with the price of Vitamin C rising and a near monopoly on its production and export, the world is now too dependent on this one country for this essential nutrient. The county: China. And, in a special report, Christian Science...

This is a picture of Tammy Faye Baker Messner. It looks a little bit like an outsider art portrait done by Francis Bacon or by Egon Schiele, doesn’t it? Two days ago, in this video still, Tammy Faye weighed 65 pounds. She had cancer that went to her lungs. My reason for bringing her image here is not to discuss her life, but this act, her last public act, that she initiated, calling Larry King and asking to be on his show… to literally give an ‘end time’ public view of...

THIS JUST IN from investigative reporter Andy Borowitz: Cheney, Briefly Assuming Bush’s Duties, Says He Enjoyed The Downtime President’s Colon Procedure Offered Welcome Break From Grueling Vice-Presidential Schedule Vice-President Dick Cheney, having briefly assumed President Bush’s duties while the President underwent a routine colon procedure on Saturday, told reporters today that he “enjoyed the downtime immensely.” The two hours and fifteen minutes spent doing...

Sometimes things can go hideously wrong:

Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire: Quote of the Day “There once was a man named Vitter/Who vowed that he wasn’Â’t a quitter/But with stories of women/And all of his sinninÂ’/He knows his careerÂ’s in the — oh, never mind.” – Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), quoted by The Hill, on Sen. David VitterÂ’’s (R-LA) prostitution scandal.

In yet another stinging rebuke to the Bush administration’s extralegal policies and practices, a three-judge federal appeals court has unanimously ordered the government to turn over virtually all its information on the 360 detainees being held at the Guantánamo Bay brig. The New York Times reported that “The ruling, which came in one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees, effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the...

A lot of Republicans are hoping that Fred Thompson makes a run for the presidential roses, but as British cartoonist Kal notes, American voters prefer hair on the presidential cranium. Writing at Democracy In America, the U.S. blog of The Economist, Kal writes that: “Not since 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower defeated an equally dome-headed Adlai Stevenson, has baldness prevailed in the presidential race. Since then America has been led by a succession of shampoo-users. One man to buck the trend...

A judge has removed copies of a satirical magazine depicting an (quite definitely) adult cartoon featuring Spain’s royaty. Details (and WARNING a copy of the offending magazine cover) are HERE.

If Michael Vick knew about this he could have sent his dogs that couldn’t do well in dogfights here: NORTH Korea’s state media is talking up the virtues of dog meat, saying the controversial cuisine is a prized delicacy for coping with the summer heat. Dog soup, called dangogi-jang or boshintang (health soup), is “the best cuisine” served over the summer season, the official Korean Central News Agency said, yesterday touting its nutritional properties. Dangogi, literally...

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who campaigned for George Bush for President and is a noted foe of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has dropped his support of the Iraq war and now wants the troops to come home. In a column in The Politico Koch says the time has come to realize the Iraq government is not up to the task and that Iraq is too divided for the U.S. to continue its presence there. And he also issues a wake-up call for the U.S. — and the American public, to get its focus back...

The movie version of the Broadway musical based on the movie version (get it?) of “Hairspray” is out — generally getting great reviews. We just got an email that said it’s wonderful…so it’s soon time for a trip to the theater. The trailer (can you spot John Travolta? Rudy Giuliani apparently wasn’t available..):