I think this is a subject that a lot of people are finding very hard to come to terms with.  I've seen various public discussions that sort of dance around the issue, or state it implicitly.  But the issue is, WVa, and much of the rest of Appalachia, will never vote for Barack Obama because he is black.  If you have trouble believing this, follow me over the jump for an appalling video.

Ever since Hillary Clinton rolled out the new theme "solutions," contrasting her own proposed ability to provide them against the supposed empty rhetoric of the Obama campaign, I've been having flashbacks to GW Bush using that awkward emphasis of his while he belted out "a reformer, WITH RESULTS!"  I think it's essentially the same message and I have the gut feeling that it's no accident.  I guess it makes a kind of sense to try to steal the playbook of the team that's winning, but it also runs the risk of showing the Clinton campaign to be as calculating and shifty as opponents have been claiming.

More after the jump..

This will not be a long diary and I assume others will take up this torch and bear it better than I can, but let's get on it NOW.

Denny Hasterts says his justification for NOT resigning his position as House Speaker is "because that would be giving into the Democrat party's best wish."

Leave aside how true (or not) this assertion is.

Since it's nearly time for the 2008 Presidential campaign to start in earnest, I've decided to do my part for democracy by adopting a candidate and completely understanding his positions, where ever he gives them.  I'll write diaries on the candidate and be both an advocate and a critic, depending on what seems appropriate to me.

I'm going to choose Mark Warner for several reasons.  First, since I'm a Virginian, I already know a little about him (while probably, a lot of us don't know that much).  Second, I am not fanatical about him so I can probably be more or less objective.  I don't think he's my first choice for 2008, for instance.  In 2003 I was a major Dean supporter.  My second choice then was Edwards.  Right now, I find myself wishing that Al Gore would run, though I wonder if he wouldn't simply energize the Republicans who seem to have an irrational hatred of the man. Those are my inclinations, and given them, I think I can be pretty objective about Mark Warner even if we are from the same state.

Emory University has done a study that shows when people are engaged in political thinking -- well, they aren't really thinking.

It's a fascinating read.  Probably not something we haven't all thougth about the other side but as it turns out, maybe we need to look deep into the mirror ourselves too.

Behavioral data showed a pattern of emotionally biased reasoning: partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. Importantly, in both their behavioral and neural responses, Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush.

Link on the other side..

Even if you hate him, you should follow the dictum "know thy enemy."

more..

It looks like it's going to be Kerry.

So let's hope Kerry is a hella candidate.. I just started reading Tour of Duty, the new book out about John Kerry's Vietnam years.  I'm inspired by his story.  Really, I was shocked at this John Kerry from 30 years ago.. I cannot imagine George W. Bush looking good in contrast.

My lovely wife wrote the Dean campaign with a very good point, I thought, and I wanted to share it with you dKossites.. (posted with her permission of course).

I watched a program on Nero and his amazing palace the other day.  A very interesting program, which, among other things, points out we don't really know much about Nero if all we know comes from the Hollywood stereotype.  I won't go into all the details qua Nero, but one thing that stood out for me, though I did not know exactly why, was the idea that Nero always felt like he had to prove he deserved to be Emporer, because he wasn't one of the Warrior Emps.  No, he was really kinda soft: a singer, poet, and charioteer.

Bush's new "Moon proposal" suddenly makes sense to me.

An essay on science and spirit.

Reading the right wing pundits, you'd think that being intelligent was a capital offense.  I won't pull quotes for you, but I'm sure if you've bothered to read anything written by Coulter, O'Reilley, et al., you've seen, oh, a kind of anti-intellectual drift.

And who can blame them when anti-intellectualism sells so well that it actually helped elect a President?  (Or to be more precise, get him close enough that a "supreme" anti-intellectual could put him over the top).