"And while it wasn't the church itself that donated the money..."

For this reason, I feel funny about targeting Mormonism, specifically, for its retrograde social attitudes and dogmas. The Catholic Church is, in and of itself, a kind of anti-abortion lobby. The fiscal relationship between specific Catholic churches, dioceses, lay organizations, and the political anti-abortion and anti-family planning movements in the U.S. seems quite murky to me. But because Catholics are Just Like Us (are us, in many cases), no one's staging rallies against Catholicism as a religion. Nor should they.

As an outsider to the LDS church, I find Mormonism to be among the more asinine of human religions, maybe because it was concocted right here in the U.S., assembled entirely from U.S. components. It reflects our forefathers' racism, Anglo-Saxon parochialism and patriarchy, belief in the Big Rock Candy Mountain, etc. right back at us. I found the indictment of Mormonism in Jodi Mardesich's article to be essentially unanswerable; the LDS church is implicated in America's racist, sexist, and authoritarian history, big time. However, if certain kinds of attacks on people's religion are out of bounds when the religion is part of the perceived mainstream, they should probably be out of bounds when the religion is perceived as cult-like by the mainstream.

I give O'Rourke credit for taking note of the existence of African-Americans, but he should watch this:

http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=34614

And then shut his pie hole. Not one of the things he says has any meaningful relationship to American history as it actually occurred.

He's a slightly funny dude who peaked at the National Lampoon and has been trying to get anybody, anywhere to pay attention to him ever since. The conservative schtick got him the most laughs, so he stuck with it. He's the quintessential baby boomer who has not aged gracefully.

By 1804 the Federalists were on their way to regional significance and national irrelevance. By 1816 they were irrelevant by any metric. They dwindled and vanished in large part due to demographics and geography.

Is anybody at GOP headquarters studying the Federalists and their fate? The answer ain't in more appeals to Revelation, the Flat Tax and gay-bashing. Just as the country once outgrew the hegemony of east coast merchants and bankers, we are now outgrowing the hegemony of the purveyors of wedge issues and fundamentalist cant.

The analogy isn't perfect, but what goes around does tend to come around. Just as the moneyed classes in the 1820s saw the writing on the wall and became nominal Jeffersonians, today's investors and CEOs will become situational Obama supporters if he can pull our chestnuts out of the fire stoked by Reaganomics and Bush's recklessness. Then a new alignment will undoubtedly take place.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one freaked out by the sentence, "Inevitably the period of Hamiltonian reform was followed by a Jeffersonian backlash that lasted from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush."

Even if Nixon and Dubya are "Jeffersonians" in some ultimate, reductionist sense, I think the Hemings and Jefferson families should sue to get their ancestor's name taken off the brand.

but Barack Obama owes less to the traditional African-American power structure than Bill Clinton ever did. There's a reason Sharpton & Jackson have been so invisible; they're no more influential than anyone else this year, after having been Democratic Party power brokers for decades. Comments like Rove's are directed at white voters, of course--they're part of the usual Rovian attempt to access the reptilian hindbrain of the sheeplike masses. But you know what, Turdman?

The sheep have woken up.

It's going to be sobering to wake up tomorrow and realize that Obama has to govern a country that hasn't been this fractured since the Civil War. And we supporters have to find a way to translate today's enthusiasm into four years of sustained hard work as citizens to support him when he's right and correct him when he's wrong. Given the messes we have to clean up, living under an Obama presidency will require active, positive, participatory citizenship of a sort that Americans have, for the most part, forgotten how to do.

I wish us all luck.

I've been phone calling for Obama in southern Louisiana. Black voters, especially black woman voters, are typically friendly, supportive, and courteous. White men are almost entirely hostile. One told me that "if you believe what he believes, you're in a lot of trouble." Whatever that means. Another told me that he was going to keep his money. "But I just want to remind you to vote," I replied. "I know what you want, and he wants..." he replied.

Obama viscerally threatens the manhood of southern white males whose entire identity has been constructed out of exclusion and a sense of racial and class supremacy. As a northern transplant, I have to ask: is this what not having labor unions and immigrants in your background leads to?

must take several months to reach Earth. Probably a good thing.

The Republican ticket's attacks on Obama as a socialist are only viable among people who think that a graduated income tax equals Marxism--who are too bedazzled or inattentive to realize that (1) the income tax has ALWAYS been graduated, (2) the topmost bracket was, under Eisenhower and even Reagan, MUCH higher than it is now, and (3) taxes are a tool of capitalist, not Marxist governments, so shut up already.

Such people can probably also be persuaded that speed limits on highways are a tool of totalitarian control.