Garrison Keillor, Salon, October 24, 2007 There is a natural division of labor in politics: The Republicans fuss about the sanctity of marriage and getting God back in the schools and the Democrats about healthcare and the $8 billion that vanished in Iraq, and so far the Republicans are doing a better job. God is in the schools, the same as He is in Nebraska or even in Dallas, and marriage looks to be doing OK, since the White House is not in charge of it. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the Justice Department are investigating fraud in Iraq, one grain of sand at a time, and we are likely to have answers in a decade or two. I suppose that $8 billion is not so much considering that the war will cost $200 billion this year alone, and yet one is curious to know why the G-men can't find out where it went, at a time when the Current Occupant is so very concerned about keeping medical benefits away from undeserving children. Hundreds of millions paid to the gunslingers of Blackwater, but an American family with a seriously ill child has to tap-dance backward through a gantlet of government forms to prove they really, really, really are desperate. As the old adage says, the little thieves get hung and the big thieves get richer and richer. When it comes to larceny, it pays to be ambitious. If you were looking for a political platform, God and marriage would be a good bet, sort of like promising to make the sun rise. A part-time job with time left over to supervise the moon and the stars. It is so much more satisfying than the dreary business of investigating what happened to those suitcases full of bricks of $100 bills in Iraq during the Bremer years and tracking down the good Republicans who served over there -- the young folks with no prior experience in accounting or finance who were put in charge of the stock exchange and the national budget. Read More Here

BartCop.com Volume 2060 - No more years. In Today's Tequila Treehouse...

	Double Standards
	Madness as Method
	Americans are dumb
	What's wrong with W?
	Gestapo Inheritance
	Kurds attack Turkey
	Suicide is not Painless
	Sopranos Finale
	Victoria Principal flees

BartCop radio show 128 is now online and available to BartCop subscribers. Bart comments on segments of Bill Maher including the 9-11 truth crowd heckling, Chris Matthews actually says something intelligent and other surprises. The California fires have got Bart's attention and somebody better do something about global warming right #@$@# now! Some Mike Malloy, other bits and great music round out this week's show.

David Plotz, Slate, October 24, 2007 The Colorado Rockies and Boston Red Sox will play for the World Series starting Wednesday night. Colorado and Boston aren't just the best teams in baseball—they're also perhaps the two most faith-based organizations in the game. The Colorado Rockies' emphasis on Christianity was first reported by USA Today in 2006 and has recently received more coverage. In recent years, the Red Sox have also had an abundance of evangelical Christians in their clubhouse, including Curt Schilling, Tim Wakefield, and Jason Varitek. In 2000, David Plotz asked why so many athletes have strong religious beliefs and tried to figure out whether God is ever responsible for on-the-field heroics. It wasn't so long ago that sports fields were the devil's playground. Babe Ruth could commit five of the seven deadly sins before noon and hit three home runs by dinner. In Damn Yankees, it was Satan, not God, who offered the Washington Senators a pennant in exchange for a player's soul. (Lesson: Offense wins games. Demons win championships.) But today there are Angels in the Outfield, and God seems to be following pro sports more intently than any Vegas bookie. Several months before the Super Bowl, St. Louis Rams quarterback Kurt Warner, a devout Christian, declared, "The Lord has something special in mind for this team." The Rams won the Super Bowl last week because of a Warner touchdown pass. As the clock ticked to zero, the quarterback yelled, "Thank you, Jesus!" In post-game interviews, Rams receiver Isaac Bruce—who claims that uttering the word "Jesus" saved him from injury in a car crash and healed a pulled groin—described catching the winning pass: "That wasn't me. That was all God. … I had to make an adjustment on the ball, and God did the rest." (Thanks to God's invisibility, the Rams were not penalized for having 12 men on the field.) Why is God so busy on the gridiron? Read More Here

  Brent Budowsky, The Hill, October 23, 2007 As the president speaks of World War III and potential war with Iran with fevered rhetoric in a near-hysterical atmosphere, the world stands at a moment of great danger. For Democrats as a leadership party and the Congress as a co-equal branch of government, it is a moment of truth, and recent history does not augur well. World War III? For the president to speak in terms of World War III is extreme, irrational and distempered, and for a Democratic Senate to pass an Iran resolution in this atmosphere of fear and frenzy makes 2007 and Iran look ominously similar to 2002 and Iraq. It has not been widely noted, but the original version of the Iran resolution included a section calling on the United States to use all economic and diplomatic means to address the problems surrounding Iran. This section, amazingly, was dropped from the final version that passed. Which senators did not support including diplomatic and economic means of achieving American goals in a resolution that passed at such a dangerous moment? Read More Here

Hey kids! This is my first attempt at posting something for the BartBlog, so I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Tom, and I've been blogging for a little more then five years now. My current digs can be found here, at the Funny Farm. I'm also contributing to the American Street from time to time. And there's all the regular stuff that ordinary people have to deal with - job, family, friends, etc. etc. - eating up the hours. So I wouldn't expect too much bloggy goodness coming from these parts to be appearing on these pages, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. Anyways,... I wanted to share a few tidbits with you: - I personally experienced a small taste of the Reich wing intimidation machine on the job; - another personal anecdote to share with you: on Sunday, I had lunch delivered to my home from one of the local restaurants. When I answered the door for the delivery man, I was wearing one of these: Well - the response was very positive and almost immediate - " I really like your shirt!" - but the rest of the exchange (paraphrased below) was slightly disturbing to Your Humble Narrator: YHN: "Thanks! I got it from a good friend who sells them on the web." Deliveryman (DM): "Yeah, I served two tours in Iraq. I wish somebody would frag him. Soon." YHN: "Well, I can't go that far. Prison time for his crimes, yes. But there's no need for you to have to go to jail just to get rid of that clown." DM: "Well - I can. Frag the bastard and be done with it." THN: "I certainly can appreciate your perspective." Coincidentally I had recently been turned on to a blog from a former ditto monkey who served in Iraq called Army of Dude, where I found a a good response to PigBoy's 'phony soldiers" remark, among other things. It seems there are a lot of military personnel who aren't too keen about the Dunsel In Chief any more... - I recently read about Pete Stark being pressured to apologize for his remarks about the Cokespoon Cowboy recently (even though they pale in comparison to the remarks from Republican'ts about Democrats, and especially even though they pale in comparison to what the Republican'ts said about the last legally elected president while he was in office). And I put together a response, in the "shorter" blog post style, to Stalkin' Malkin's screeching about the situation, which I'd like to share with you:

Shorter Our Lady Of The Concentration Camps: Pete Stark didn't commit hara-kiri after saying true mean things about the pRetzelDunce, so his apology is not sincere enough. Shorter concept pioneered by D-Squared and perfected by Busy Busy Busy

And with that, it's time to take my leave from here and get back into the rat race for another day. I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I look forward to finding more to tell you again soon. Take care!

For years feminists and prochoicers have pointed out that women have abortions whether or not the procedure is legal. That was true here before Roe v. Wade, and it is true today in countries where abortion is restricted or banned. The difference is that when abortion is legal it is a remarkably safe procedure; when it is illegal, women are injured, women die, children are left motherless. (True, these are already-existing, sinful children, not embryos or fetuses, but still.) This simple public health argument has gotten lost in a thicket of theology, sexual morality, "family values," politics, spin and outright disinformation. The coat hanger has become a political cliché, a relic of the '60s, like the peace sign. Oh, that old thing. Now comes an article in The Lancet that shows in cold hard data how right we've been all along. "Induced Abortion: Estimated Rates and Trends Worldwide," a study conducted by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, is the first global analysis of abortion incidence since 1995. It finds that rates of abortion (the number of abortions per 1,000 women) are relatively unaffected by whether it is legal. Thus, in South America, where abortion is largely illegal, the rate is 33; in northern America, where it is legal, the rate is 21. "The legal status of abortion doesn't predict whether abortions occur," study co-author Gilda Sedgh told me by phone. "It predicts whether they are safe. South Africa liberalized its abortion laws in l997, and maternal deaths from unsafe abortion have plummeted by 90 percent." Around the world 48 percent of abortions are unsafe--that's more than 20 million. Some 67,000 women die from unsafe abortions--13 percent of maternal deaths, almost all of them in the developing world, where abortion is mostly restricted or banned. Many times that number are injured or maimed. Link to full article