more good news for Ohio

from In Final Weeks, G.O.P. Focuses on Best Bets - New York Times:

Senior Republican leaders have concluded that Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio, a pivotal state in this year’s fierce midterm election battles, is likely to be heading for defeat and are moving to reduce financial support for his race and divert party money to other embattled Republican senators, party officials said.

PS - just found this, deeper in the article:

Normally, a party would be averse to scaling back its help for a senator in a state with as many as five competitive Congressional races also on the ballot. But in this case, Ohio Republicans said, Mr. DeWine and Republican Congressional candidates face the added problem of being dragged down this November by the party’s candidate for governor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who polls show is facing a double-digit loss to the Democrat, Representative Ted Strickland.

*emphasis mine

a new low

Talk about a sore loser - the election is still several weeks away, and, in a desperate move, Ken Blackwell is already acting like he lost the race for governor of Ohio! from And the Winner Is ... Me - New York Times:

Voters in Ohio can be forgiven if they feel they have been beamed out of the Midwest and dropped into a third-world autocracy. The latest news from the state’s governor’s race is that the Republican nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, who is also the Ohio secretary of state, could rule that his opponent is ineligible to run because of a technicality.

Of course, Blackwell is down by 28 points, so you can't blame him for feeling desperate. But acting like this ... well, it's yet another instance where Blackwell has proven himself unqualified for Governor.

a voice crying out in the wilderness

from an AP piece:

"As a critic of the administration, I will be damned if you can get away with calling me the equivalent of a Nazi appeaser," [Keith] Olbermann [of MSNBC's "Countdown"] told The Associated Press. "No one has the right to say that about any free-speaking American in this country."
...
His latest verbal attack, this past Thursday, criticized the president's campaign attacks on Democrats.

"Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?" he asked.

Read one great commentary ("A Special Comment about Lying") here. Here's a teaser, including the line from the AP piece above:

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.’”

The hell they did.

One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.

Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn’t be listening to the conversations of terrorists.
...
No critic, no commentator, no reluctant Republican in the Senate has ever said anything that any responsible person could even have exaggerated into the slander you spoke in Nevada on Monday night, nor the slander you spoke in California on Tuesday, nor the slander you spoke in Arizona on Wednesday ... nor whatever is next.

You have dishonored your party, sir; you have dishonored your supporters; you have dishonored yourself.

But tonight the stark question we must face is — why?

Why has the ferocity of your venom against the Democrats now exceeded the ferocity of your venom against the terrorists?

Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?

In less than one month you have gone from a flawed call to unity to this clarion call to hatred of Americans, by Americans.

Okay, one more great line:

But if we know one thing for certain about Mr. Bush, it is this: This president — in his bullying of the Senate last month and in his slandering of the Democrats this month — has shown us that he believes whoever the enemies are, they are hiding themselves inside a dangerous cloak called the Constitution of the United States of America.

*emphasis mine

peak oil? try peak Earth

from Earth's Ecological Debt Crisis: [Humankind's] 'Borrowing' from Nature Hits New Record:

Today is a bleak day for the environment, the day of the year when [humankind] over-exploits the world's resources - the day when we start living beyond our ecological means.

So much for being good stewards of God's creation. We don't need to wait around for God's Armaggedon/Rapture/whatever the world-annihilation term du jour is for evangelical Christians today; we're driving ourselves toward it at break-neck speed. Some highlights from the article:

Global Footprint estimates that the human race is over-using the Earth's resources by 23 per cent. While each individual should use up no more than the equivalent of 1.8 hectares of the Earth's surface, the actual area we use is 2.2 hectares per person.
...
Consumption is particularly profligate in the West, where individuals consume air-freighted food, buy hardwood furniture, enjoy foreign holidays and own cars. Global Footprint estimates the world would need five planet Earths to sustain a global materialistic society such as that in the US while almost three would be needed for the UK.

By contrast, developing countries such as Kenya use a fraction of the resources. Nef highlighted the energy wasted in trade. In 2004, for example, Britain exported 1,500 tons of potatoes to Germany and imported the same amount. We [Britain] sent 10,200 tons of milk and cream to France and imported 9,900 tons.