So says one Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blues:

As a Capitol Hill chief of staff, I often drank at Bullfeathers and was invited to join the throng at McCain's table one evening. A few minutes listening to the racism, bigotry and homophobia of the Arizona Congressman told me all I needed to know.

McCain loved to tell jokes about lesbians, blacks, Hispanics and the Vietnamese community that occupied a large section of Arlington County, Virginia, just south of the District of Columbia.

Of course, McCain didn't use polite language in the jokes: He used names like "fags" or "queers" or "dykes" or "niggers" or "spics" or "wetbacks" or "gooks."

More below the fold.

I have picked up an interesting little book recently, "The Undercover Economist" (quite good), and in it I read the following passage:

We all know that in most countries the Ministry of Defense is in charge of attacking other countries and that the Ministry of Employment presides over the unemployment lines. Cameroon's Ministry of Tourism is in that noble tradition. Its job is to discourage tourists from getting into the country.

Now this was obviously a joke, and I immediately got the part about employment and tourism. Then I stared at the page in stupefaction, trying to figure out what was the joke about the Ministry of Defense. It took me about 5 seconds to work that out.

I always thought that if the pro-life people consider abortion to be murder, they should react to it as if it were murder. If you saw a murder happening in front of you, wouldn't you feel obligated to stop it by any means necessary, up to and including killing the murderer? Yet abortion doctor killing are few and far between. I always took that to mean that the pro-life people don't actually consider abortion to be murder (which is the point of this line of argument, not the suggestion that they should kill abortion doctors), but an alternative explanation has been suggested to me; an explanation which, despite my initial revolted rejection, I now find plausible but incredibly depressing.

Someone suggested that instead, the answer might be simply cowardice. Human cowardice in general.

The 'whitey' tape is the latest tempest in a teapot. A few diaries looked at the issue, but i think they all omitted an important factor.

As many of you know, the Green River formation in Colorado has more oil in its shale deposits than the entire world's proven and unproven reserves of liquid crude (plus canadian tar sands reserves). Yet, a week and a half ago, Senate Appropriations Committee refused to lift the moratorium on the Colorado shale exploration. The vote was strictly along party lines.

Another diarist has tried to compute Obama's popular vote margin as adjusted for lower caucus turnout. His analysis wasn't quite correct. here, I present my stab at it, with actual adjustment computed for all caucus states.

I have decided to trawl the TX and OH exit polls to determine just how much gender and racial prejudice influenced the outcome.

This diary inspired me. Recommend and mojo it -- this is what Hope is all about!

I often forget, in my current comfortable life, what hope is -- most of my dreams have been fulfilled. However, just a decade and a half ago, I was a penniless teenager, fresh off the airplane, working 80-hour week for $2/hr under the table, trying hard to support my single mom and kid sister while my mother was hashing out her employment papers.

This is a diary largely in response to the 'Capitalism is DEAD-- GET OVER IT!!!' one, and more specifically, to the tree of comments I spawned there. I knew there were people on the left who completely lacked the understanding of the realities of socialism, but I didn't realize it was this bad here on DKos.

Our great nation is suffering from an acute deficit of wit. To solve this problem, I intend to propose a plan for universal humor coverage. To achieve this worthy goal, I suggest we implement a universal mandate which requires, under threat of tax penalty, that everyone be witty.

I intend to offer subsidized whoopie cushions and rubber chickens to all. Your left of funniness will be evaluated yearly by a panel of tax experts.

Anyone who disagrees with me is obviously against people having fun. Only my plan will ensure that everyone is humorous!

What are you, some sorta boring depressive freak? Are you into emo?!. You make me sick, you hear that? Sick! Now I need my health insurance coverage!

Many high-placed democrats have been lining their support up behind Obama, and recently some have even been switching their support to Obama, even though Clinton is clearly the establishment candidate. I don't think it's hard to figure out why.

Someone wrote to me:

There was a panel on C-Span discussing this a week or so ago. The consensus was, including people on the panel who praised Obama, that an overwhelming number of the new young voters are completely wedded to the personality and young-fresh-new image of Obama himself. And that they have close to zero interest in the Democratic Party. That in fact they reject the old party apparatuses nearly completely and have little interest in any other candidates except for people who are totally aligned with Obama.

I think what is being missed is the strategic dimension of it. Obama, if elected, will have effect for a long, long time.

Pvt. Beauchamp seems to have signed a sworn statement affirming that both 'Hock Troops' and his two TNR columns were exaggerations and fabrications.

From my blog:

Recently I have asked myself: Why, even though Arabs are a people among peoples, not really different from any other, does their culture today seem to exhibit a set of very strange pathologies? This question has mystified me, but recently I have come across a very interesting interview with five different psychologists, arabists, historians, and scholars of Islam, which I think sheds some light on this question. It seems we may be dealing with a very interesting religious phenomena here &mdash the possibility that Islam exists for the sake of Islam, with no goal other than expanding its power; that at the root of the aforementioned cultural pathologies, such as technological stagnation, suicide bombings, etc., lies the nature of Islam as the product of faith evolving through monotheism, faith expanding in power to the point where no constraint on its own power is recognized, not even reason or empirical reality.

Or: Human progress as Stratification of Being (from my blog)

Human progress can be seen as a series of advances, each advance being a new form of stratifying reality, separating the world into layers of abstraction. Think about this series of steps:

I often see conservatives argue about whether fascism is left or right, and just how horrible socialism is. I think a great deal of conceptual confusion exists about these matters, most importantly that we miss our real Holy Grail -- freedom -- and I hope the following thoughts will offer some alternative perspective.

I have decided today that not only does the universe run on Irony (a principle which I call Ironic Design, or ID for short), I can prove it!