It's going to be difficult for a large segment of McCain's base to look the other way concerning his family's alcohol fortune and lobbying for distribution of sweet-tasting beer concoctions aimed at the youth markets.

"You can't run a beer company out of the White House," said Samuel L. Popkin, a political science professor at UC San Diego. "You can't run any company from the White House. McCain is leaving a live hand grenade on the table, a major embarrassment."

It looks like "Swiftboating" the Democratic candidate isn't going to be as easy for the Republicans this time around.

Wow.

Amazingly, it appears that the Republican Party has some sense of shame at long last -

--Editor

Courtesy of the recent Republican Texas Convention. No kidding.

What's your favorite reason?

It's so difficult to choose JUST one.

I don't mean to gloat and upset my conservative republican family, but oh, how sweet this recent quote from former House Majority Leader and Texas Republican Tom "The Hammer" DeLay:

"The conservatives refuse to accept that the left is cleaning their clock, and until you hit some bottom, wherever that is, to where it says, 'Well, maybe we ought to do something different,' little or nothing's going to change," Mr. DeLay told editors and reporters at The Washington Times last week.

"I think it's going to take years to rebuild the party."

You may recall how Mr. DeLay's own federal indictments on campaign finance and money laundering charges contributed to sinking the GOP's "brand."

Update: McCain Extends His Outreach, but Evangelicals Are Still Wary

Update: McCain's Evangelical Problem 

Sometimes a lesson in contrast is the best way to explain what a “brand’ is and how it resonates value and meaning.

Today, parts of the world responded to the Obama "brand" and here's what they had to say:

"He has a very appealing persona—elegant, fluent, strings lots of sentences together into paragraphs."    - Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics

“Obama's mixture of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy very attractive."    - Karsten Voigt, Germany’s gov’t coordinator on U.S. relations.

Obama's campaign "has rekindled America's faith in its prodigious powers of reinvention—and the world's admiration for America."    - The Times London news headline.

NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

This story was originally reported in the Israeli press two weeks ago, right after Bush's visit.

Congress seems to understand the seriousness of this possibility.

So, in a few short months, we'll find out if this is tinfoil hat stuff, or reality ... and either way, we'll go back to watching "American Idol" reruns and putting our houses up for sale.

UPDATE: Here's some information about negotiations with Iran to help stabilize Iraq.

Follow this logic:

Presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, opposed an equal pay bill in the Senate last week because it will lead to more lawsuits.

So ... the problem is so rampant and widespread, that if passed, tens of thousands of women (your wives, mothers, sisters, females of all related sorts ... remember that John Mayer song?) would have a legal way to be justly compensated for their work ... and we just can't let that happen. That problem cannot be solved through the courts.

One might wonder how else you would solve it in a civilized society.

The Center on Wisconsin Strategy gives a breakdown about what's going on closer to home. "Wisconsin women make 78 cents to the dollar compared with men."

Sweet!

via MAL Contends

When an American politician in the presidential general election campaign says his/her opponent is out-of-the-mainstream, it's a lie.

The losing opponent will garner at least some 45 percent of the vote, disconfirming out-of-the-mainstream status, though election votes are imprecise indicators of public opinion.

The complex reality of the American political culture sees support for universal health care, social security for our seniors, full employment, as well as a mass base for fascism, racist policies at home, a decided antipathy to civil liberties, and near-genocidal wars of aggression abroad, amid what can most accurately be described as a depoliticized electorate.

But the he's-not-like-us charge is aimed at the person; a personal attack that the opponent is somehow alien, out-of-touch, different, elitist, not-of-this-culture, even malicious and the related charge that he/she is dangerous and unpredictable.