Very shortly, for Reason:

Look around you, try to calm down, and please don't hate on people. Be secure in the knowledge that religious fundamentalists will probably never be as powerful as they are now, barring, of course, some rapid regression into "Mad Max-hood" brought on by peak oil. Yes, I feel for the children out there who have been told that there is science behind creation myths, but you've got to trust in our robust democracy and educational system to make self-corrections.

And Cary:

I almost appreciated what you've done here: thinking about fundamentalists as a primitive tribe. Fundamentalists have a word for your philosophy: moral relativism. In conceding that fundamentalists have their own definition of the word "science," and that this should be tolerated, you have conceded the Enlightenment principles that have done us very well for the past 400 years or so. Well, at least one of those principles -- the one that says, "People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts."

Someone's probably found this already, but anyway, from an Obama speech on August 1, 2007, "The War We Need to Win":

" This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.

That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary. "

Does Obama expect us to understand his flip-flop? Maybe that's the worst part, that he doesn't think we have the intelligence or attention spans to realize how awful this is. What he definitely doesn't appreciate is how one single moment of weakness on an issue as important as this will follow him into the White House.

Although, as you tell it, this Atkins guy made it sound as though they were. The difference between cosmology and religion is, as I'm sure you know, the former is actually trying to think of a model compatible with the laws of physics, even if the ideas scientists come up with cannot be tested in the near future (Nothing says models must be tested as soon as they exit a scientist's brain, but I do agree that cosmologists excitably telling us about the "latest" untestable theory is getting annoying.) Religion, however, has long given up on any rational, observation-based method of investigation. Yes, I know there are Vatican astronomers, but whatever they find will never change core Catholic dogma. I believe what frustrates Atkins, Myers, and Hitchens more than people having blind faith, is that they view blind faith as giving up on the search for meaning, and instead settling on one arbitrary meaning that was decided for them centuries ago.

Let us ignore all of the arguments that Kilgore himself lamely shrugs off later in the article, when he gets to the most insidious of his arguments: the irrelevancy of the net-roots in an Obama administration. He claims that none of this "vengeful" activism will matter in an Obama administration because the White House and Congress will be pulling in the same direction. See, this is the precise problem. Obama has already communicated his loyalty to Democratic leadership in Congress, the same Congress that has let the Blue Dog swing vote dominate their agenda. This puts him at odds with the activist base of the party. Now, normally such a situation would be politically unstable, but Democrats have been scared so thouroughly by the authoritarian right that Obama, Reid, Pelosi and Hoyer believe that they can continue to appease Bush supporters on national security questions. And yes, even after Bush is gone there will still be Bush supporters in our government who will argue that the terrorist threat is too great to dismantle Bush's authoritarian machinations, and they will have a sympathetic and supportive audience in both Republicans AND Blue Dogs. I enthusiastically support Glenn's and Jane Hamsher's efforts to provide leftward pressure to the Democrats by targeting Blue Dogs. It's the most rational way for the left to send its message to the Democrtic leadership, and it will serve to oppose the Bush right during the post-Bush era.

So, there was never any bentonite found in the anthrax. This is interesting. The first question I asked myself was, "Why not just put the bentonite in there? It's a pretty ubiquitous clay material used in drilling mud." But then, if you don't have access to Iraqi bentonite, why would you put Wyoming or any other kind of bentonite in the anthrax? Specifically, why would you want to leave a chemical or isotopic trace of anything except Iraqi bentonite? Well, the answer to that is that you can't get your hands on Iraqi bentonite, so it would have just been easier to lie to the press about Iraqi bentonite being in the anthrax.

So, what does that line of reasoning mean? I'm thinking that someone in our government or inside an oil or drilling company (ie, Halliburton) has Iraqi bentonite. That's just a hunch, but if they did, why not put it in there? Well, because again, it was probably easier to just lie to the press, plus if the FBI always suspected a domestic source, the last thing you would want to do is throw in a rare ingredient that would implicate more people in and outside the government.

Hope that helps. Keep digging Glenn!