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What marketing dunderhead decided that the envelope of Barack Obama’s latest fundraising letter should read:

“James, This Time Will Be Different…”

Oh, I don’t disagree with the “James” part. Jim is short for James, after all. They got my name right. But who thought it would be a good idea for a presidential fundraising letter to read:

“This Time Will Be Different…”

This is the classic line of the lover who has done wrong, begging, begging to be let back in, promising the moon. It’s the line of the used car salesman who’s sold one too many lemons. It’s the line of anyone who has done someone else wrong and is looking for easy redemption.

“This Time Will Be Different…”

That’s what you say, Barack Obama. But what do you mean? Do you mean that this time you won’t support the FISA Amendments Act? Do you mean that this time you won’t promise to engage in warrantless wiretapping when president? Do you mean that this time you won’t endorse the empirically unsupported practice of diverting government money to churches? Do you mean that this time you won’t shove a plank into the Democratic Party platform that tells Americans how important it is for them to be religious? Do you mean that this time you won’t flip flop on offshore oil drilling? Do you mean that this time you won’t shove convention protest into a cage in violation of free speech and free assembly rights?

… no. I just opened the letter. By “this time will be different,” you meant that this time I would “rush a generous contribution — of $545, $820, $1090 or even more” to your coffers.

I tell you what, hon: I may have been jilted, but I’m not stupid. Why don’t you enter a constitutional rehab program, reread the First and Fourth Amendments, develop a new platform, and then come by and ask me again? Until you do, I can’t believe you. Besides, I can still smell the beery morning-after stench of intoxicating power on your breath, and there’s that lipstick from those hussy authoritarians still on your collar. Clean up your act, then call me again… but not today, Barack Obama. Not when you show up on my doorstep looking like this.

John McCain has come out with an TV commercial suggesting that Hillary Clinton PUMA supporters ought to support John McCain… because Hillary Clinton has endorsed Barack Obama. It calls Hillary Clinton passed over… with a prime time television speaking slot, and another slot for Bill Clinton.

Sure, it all makes sense. In a Republican kind of way… kind of like how the Iraq War makes sense.

The oddest culminating moment in a speech last night had to be Senator Claire McCaskill’s. Just before she closed her speech, she offered this penultimate thought as an emotional climax:

You know, a week ago I walked into my 80-year-old mother’s room to find my two daughters there. The three of them were huddled around the computer. My mother turned and said with a proud smile, “We are chatting with Obama volunteers from all over the state.” Don’t tell me this campaign is not special!

Special is a Senator’s daughters showing grandma how to do an internet chat? Shivers!

Oh, I know I’m being a curmudgeon, but I can’t help it. Mixed in with an evening’s dose of concentrated syrup, the bullshit just tastes that much more bitter.

Sometimes it’s useful to turn off the sound when the advertisements come on; the pictures themselves can speak volumes. When I turned off the sound on this August 2008 John McCain spot about Barack Obama, this is what the pictures told me:

I saw non-black people looking scared of Barack Obama. What do you see?

Has anyone else noticed the predominance of white people in John McCain’s TV ads, juxtaposed with the black face of Barack Obama? This is an unapproved spoof of McCain’s ads on the subject of war.

Sure, John McCain actually introduced the legislation to the Senate that authorized George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq. Sure, John McCain spread lies about the whole weapons of mass destruction thing. Sure, economists say this war will cost us $3 Trillion. We could give every public high school kid in America their very own teacher for that much money. Sure, Barack Obama opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. If Obama had been in charge, we could have saved that $3 Trillion, not to mention so many thousands of lives.

But see, what you have to understand is that Barack Obama is… oh, how to put this?… black. Obama was right, but he isn’t white. Not white like all those people on the John McCain advertisements on TV. Not white like John McCain. So what are you going to pick: right but black or wrong but white? I know what the McCain advertising people are betting on.

The faith-based press release for the Democratic National Convention in Denver makes it clear: The Democratic Party now envisions itself as a religious party with the goal of using the power of government to establish and promote religion.

The document begins by asserting “Barack Obama’s personal commitment and the commitment of the Democratic Party to put faith in action”. The Democratic Party is committed to put religion into action? Before reading this press release, I didn’t realize that enacting religion through government was one of the goals of the Democratic Party. I thought that the Democrats were a political party, not a religious party.

The press release continues, “‘Senator Obama is a committed Christian, and he believes that people of all faiths have an important place in American life,’ said Joshua Dubois, Obama For America Director of Religious Affairs.” And what about people of no faith? Apparently, we do not have an important place in American life, as far as Barack Obama is concerned.

Barack Obama also seems to believe that part of the duties of the President of the United States is to make governmental decisions about “religious affairs”. Whether those White House religious affairs include delivering Bush-style religious sermons, establishing official forms of worship, or just channeling public money, through expanded faith-based initiatives, back to the churches that supported his campaign, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Apparently, the new position of the Democratic Party is to deny that any of its members are now or have ever been nonreligious. The press release quotes Leah Daughtry, a Pentacostal minister and Chief Executive Officer of the Democratic National Convention Committee “Democrats have been, are and will continue to be people of faith.” That’s just plain wrong. Democrats include people of faith, but many Democrats choose to live within the bounds of reason and humanist values instead of following the murky path of faith.

All week long, the Democratic National Convention is holding official religious prayer ceremonies and organizing the leaders of tax-exempt religious organizations to make plans for how those tax-exempt organizations can be involved in the Democratic Party’s campaign, and then use the power of government to enact religious policies that please those organizations. Secular, non-religious leaders asked to be allowed to be part of these events and meetings, so that the interests of non-religious Democrats would be heard. Those requests were denied.

This year’s Democratic presidential convention excludes not just non-religious Americans, but also religious Americans who support the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America and the separation of church and state. The Democratic Party isn’t just ignoring us - it’s working against us. The Democratic Party has begun to work, at its highest levels, on taking down the wall between church and state.

Now that the Democratic Party attacks our constitutional right to live under a government that gives nonreligious Americans an equal position under the law with religious Americans, it is against the interests of nonreligious Democrats to remain Democrats. Atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, brights, skeptics and just plain unreligious voters ought now to leave the Democratic Party. Religious Democrats of good conscience should leave too.

It’s what I’ll be doing today. Earlier this year, I registered as a Democrat, because I hoped that the Democratic Party would pull out of its position of accommodating the right wing agenda of the Republicans. However, since that time, I have seen the Democratic Party get worse, joining the Republicans in working to undermine the separation of church and state and to attack the equality of nonreligious Americans.

I will be going down to my county’s Board of Elections office today and re-registering as a voter of no party - because there is no political party that recognizes and defends my right to equal protection by our constitutional, representative government as a nonreligious American. The Democratic Party has decided that people like me don’t matter enough to bother with, that we’re not as important as religious Americans. Let’s see if they’re right.

Whether it makes any difference to the Democratic Party that I am leaving its ranks matters less to me than knowing that I am not contributing to the new Democratic Party goal of using government to establish and promote religion. There’s a word for the form of government the Democrats now seek to promote. It’s theocracy, and I will not join the Democrats’ support of it.

It’s about my moral values - which include separation of church and state.

The formal introduction of Joseph Biden as the vice presidential running mate of Barack Obama suggests to me that the Obama-Biden campaign needs to do some quick remedial work with the two candidates to get their speaking skills more finely tuned for the Democratic National Convention.

For example, Barack Obama said of Joe Biden, “For decades, he has brought change to Washington.” That line struck me as odd right away - the sort of thing that any good speechwriter would catch and toss away before it could ever leave the lips of the candidate.

How is it possible for a United States Senator to bring change to Washington D.C. for decades? If Senator Biden really has been working for change for 36 years, well, then he hasn’t been very effective in his work, has he? When you’ve had almost 40 years in a powerful position in the government to make change, and you’re still working on it, that’s not really change, is it? Moreover, having the same person occupy the same Senate seat for more than an entire generation isn’t emblematic of bringing change to Washington D.C.

This single line exposed one of the greatest weaknesses of Barack Obama’s pick of Joe Biden to be Vice President: Biden undermines Barack Obama’s claim to be the candidate of change. That’s not the sort of vulnerability that ought to be introduced on the very first day of a new political partnership.

Since the campaign of Barack Obama announced this morning that Joseph Biden would run as Obama’s running mate, our most popular-selling shirt is…

Yep. Look for other signs of discontent among people who are, to put it mildly, bummed that Hillary Clinton will not be on the top or the bottom of the presidential ticket in 2008.

8/24/08 Update: With a day and a half passed since the announcement, Hillary Clinton 2012 Shirt sales have tapered off, and Obama-Biden 2008 T-Shirt sales have rocketed up. Is the disgruntlement converting into gruntledom?

Back in June, I wrote a summary of the many reasons that Chet Edwards would be a rotten pick for Vice President, in spite of the fact that Edwards has the support of Nancy Pelosi. At the time, I could not imagine that Barack Obama would give Chet Edwards serious consideration as a running mate. Chet Edwards is a minor member of the lower house of Congress with fringe right wing views and a lack of relevant experience to enhance the Democratic ticket. To top it off, Chet Edwards is nowhere near ready to become President if Obama should die or be forced out of office.

But, wouldn’t you know it - news has leaked out this afternoon that Barack Obama has included Chet Edwards on his short list of potential running mates, and may actually be Obama’s final pick. I’ve been slapping my head so much since I heard this news that I may soon have a concussion.

Let’s break this down to one essential point: Chet Edwards must not be allowed to join Barack Obama on the Democrats’ campaign for the White House because Congressman Edwards worked as a tool for George W. Bush in the House of Representatives, helping Bush get the power to rush into war in Iraq.

The speech Chet Edwards gave on October 9, 2002 shows all the sloppy, simple-minded deception of George W. Bush himself. In that speech, Representative Edwards declared himself a believer in Bush’s vision of the Iraq War, as if going to war should be based upon beliefs and not facts. “I rise not as a Democrat, but as an American who shares the belief with President Bush that, once and for all, the time has come to end the threat of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction,” Edwards said.

Like Evan Bayh, Chet Edwards made ignorant proclamations about the inadequacy of diplomacy, when in fact diplomatic efforts had already rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. When Edwards declared, “The world community, acting through the United Nations, has tried to use diplomacy to convince Saddam Hussein to destroy his weapons of mass destruction. Once again, the world community and diplomacy have failed,” he was just plain wrong. The world community and diplomacy had succeeded, but Chet Edwards didn’t have the intelligence to recognize that fact.

Like George W. Bush, Chet Edwards tried to frighten the American people so that they would support a rush into a war that had not been adequately planned. Edwards said of Saddam Hussein that “with his weapons of mass destruction he is a genuine threat to his declared enemy, the United States.” The plain truth is that Saddam Hussein was not a genuine threat to any country outside of his borders. He had a devastated military, and his weapons of mass destruction were long gone. Saddam Hussein could not have even successfully invaded the little country of Armenia.

Chet Edwards admitted it himself: “I respect President Bush, as I do his father, for standing up to the menace of Saddam Hussein . I applaud the President’s recent challenge to the United Nations.” When it came to the decision to rush to invade Iraq, Chet Edwards was solidly on the side of George W. Bush. Chet Edwards was against those of us progressive Democrats who tried to stop this stupid war before it started.

Chet Edwards lied. People died. No way in hell should he be Barack Obama’s running mate.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has been marked by a shameless use of organized religion as a campaign tool. Never mind that it’s against the law for churches to engage in political campaigning - Barack Obama has incorporated them into his campaign anyway. The result has been one disaster after another, from Donnie McClurkin’s cures for homosexuality to the Reverend Rick Warren’s false witness about the cone of silence… oh yeah, and Jeremiah Wright too.

Democratic politicians have justified their increasingly absurd mixture of Christianity into politics and government by saying that it’s a necessary strategy in order to win elections. They insist that, if they just talk about how much they love Jesus, use churches as campaign tools, and say God bless America a lot, swing voters will come running.

Research contradicts these claims. The results of a new study out by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life indicate that the majority of Americans don’t approve of the mixture of religion and politics. That majority exists among Republicans as well as Democrats. As for independents, those supposedly God-talk hungering swing voters? They disapprove of the mixture of religion and politics even more than the Republicans and Democrats.

The Democrats’ religious campaign strategy hasn’t brought victory, even among the most unabashedly religious voters. After all these years of religious pandering by Democrats, Barack Obama is actually getting less support from evangelical supporters than Al Gore did. Obama is getting less support from other Protestants too. How about the Catholic vote? You guessed it - Obama is getting less than Al Gore did. Even among African-American churches, Barack Obama is only getting 6 percent more support than Al Gore did, and only 4 percent more support than John Kerry did.

In spite of all the conspicuous talk about Christianity and Jesus and God and the Bible by Barack Obama, those voters who say that it’s important to have candidates talk about religion during a campaign are overwhelmingly giving their support to John McCain. That suggests that mixing religion and politics does not really persuade people to change their votes, even with those voters who say that they clamor for more religious preaching on the campaign trail.

On the contrary, Barack Obama gets the strongest support from voters who say that hearing candidates talk about their personal religious beliefs makes them uncomfortable. So, it seems that Obama isn’t accomplishing anything with his righteous Christianity except to make his supporters less comfortable with him.

Besides, it isn’t as if most voters are rejecting the Democratic Party because it isn’t religious enough. The Pew study found that only a minority characterize the Democratic Party as not having enough of a religious character - and that minority is most likely to vote for the Republicans anyway.

When will these politicians get it through their heads? Almost nobody votes for a Democrat because the Democrat acts like a Republican. Republicans will always do that better.

Please, in this presidential election, let’s talk about the business that actually pertains to the work of the government, not the business of churches and Bible study groups.

Memo to Barack Obama:

For months now, your political advisors have telling you that you’ve got to tack to the right, that you need to balance out your Democratic Party credentials with Republican Party credentials, that you need to pick a running mate who acts more like a Republican.

This same conventional wisdom led to defeat for Al Gore and John Kerry. Where, outside of the questionable arena of focus groups and abstract political theory, has this strategy been proven?

Nowhere. It is a justification. It is an excuse for you, and your profit-seeking aides, to engage in the dirty old politics of policy by campaign contributions. It is a mask for the easy path of following what’s been done before instead of forging a new path out of America’s expanding pit of failure.

A week ago, over on a web site called The Point, a right wing activist set up a page through which other right wingers like himself would pledge to vote for you, Barack Obama for President, but only if you selected a Republican as Vice President. The way that The Point works is that people come together to commit to take political action when joined by others of like mind. It’s a way to organize spontaneous grassroots action outside of the ordinary channels of power. Sometimes it can be very effective.

When it comes to the effort to pressure you to select a Republican running mate, however, The Point was not an effective tool at all. Only one person has signed that pledge to vote for you only if you choose a running mate from the GOP - and that person is the same person who initiated the pledge in the first place. That person, what’s more, has chosen to remain anonymous, too timid even to commit his name to the effort.

It seems that nobody much wants you, Mr. Obama, to choose a Republican running mate - not even Republicans. There is no popular clamor demanding that you select a right wing vice presidential candidate. In fact, there is the contrary - a strong grassroots movement of people trying to stop you from selecting a right wing running mate from the Republican or Democratic Party.

You don’t have long, Mr. Obama to swerve away from the easy path of politics as usual. Choose the running mate that the Democratic D.C. insiders want you to pick, and your political identity will be beholden to their broken vision from that point on.

For a year and a half, Barack Obama campaigned as a progressive candidate for President. For all that time, Obama had a significant lead over John McCain in the polls.

Then came this Summer of Disappointment. Barack Obama supported the death penalty, handguns in big cities, Big Brother government spying against Americans, offshore drilling for crude oil, and expanding Bush’s faith-based initiatives. Obama pandered to right wing evangelicals at the Saddleback Church with dishonest “cone of silence” preacher Rick Warren. Obama began courting an almost exclusively right-wing, pro-war group of Democrats as contenders for his running mate slot.

Barack Obama’s standing in the polls has gotten worse as the summer has progressed. In some polls, Obama and John McCain are dead even. In one poll, John McCain is actually ahead.

Now, some mainstream media pundits are saying that Barack Obama is suffering because of attacks against him by the McCain campaign. However, Barack Obama has been the target of nasty attacks for well over a year now. Those attacks didn’t hurt Obama at the polls before, and I don’t believe that they’re what’s hurting Obama now.

The popularity of Barack Obama is diminishing because Barack Obama, who had previously been consistent in his pledges to end the policies of George W. Bush, has begun to break his promises. For Obama’s Democratic base, Obama’s new support for the Bush agenda feels like a betrayal. For Republicans and independent voters, Obama’s shift to oppose progressive values looks like a flip flop.

From this poorly calculated change of character, Barack Obama gains no new support, but he loses a significant portion of his original supporters. If Obama continues this poorly advised move to the right with the pick of a right wing Democratic VP, look for a small convention bounce, followed by a continued drop in the polls in September.

If Barack Obama had only waged an honest progressive campaign, the election would have been in the bag for him. As it is, Barack Obama’s betrayal of his supporters is on the brink of giving John McCain a victory that should never have been possible. If Obama loses, he will have no one but himself to blame.

For years now, sales have been strong for a bumper sticker that reads simply: Bush Lied. People Died.

You all know what it means. It refers to George W. Bush’s lies, claiming to have certain intelligence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had so many weapons of mass destruction that Iraq threatened the entire world.

The truth is, though, that George W. Bush wasn’t alone in his lie. Many in Congress were complicit. They voted to support George W. Bush’s lie, and worked hard to make sure that Bush’s lie led us into war.

Among those was Senator Evan Bayh. Yes, I’m talking about the same Evan Bayh who is now supposed to be one of Barack Obama’s top three picks for the spot of vice presidential running mate.

Evan Bayh didn’t just go along with the rush to war in Iraq. Bayh worked hand in hand with George W. Bush, Joseph Lieberman and John McCain to organize the passage of a resolution allowing Bush to invade Iraq.

The transcript of Evan Bayh’s speech on the Senate floor shows how eager Bayh was to rush American soldiers into Iraq, and how thoroughly he was to repeat the lies of George W. Bush. Here are just a few selections of the kind of things that Bayh said that day:

“To those who say regime change is not an appropriate reason for acting, I say weapons of mass destruction and the regime of Saddam Hussein are one and indivisible. To remove weapons of mass destruction, we must remove that regime. To think anything else is to delude ourselves.”

“To those who say, what is the rush? why can’t we wait? I respond by asking the question: How long must we wait? Until the missiles have been launched? Until smallpox, anthrax, or VX nerve agent has found its way into our country? Is that how long we should wait?”

“We conducted a simulated exercise of a smallpox attack - I believe it was called Dark Winter - simulating a smallpox outbreak put into a ventilation system in a mall in Oklahoma City. The consequences were catastrophic: Tens of thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of illnesses; civil law broke down. These are the kinds of consequences that would be all too real were we to stay our hand.”

Evan Bayh lied. People died.

Evan Bayh claimed that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had enough weapons of mass destruction to kill tens of thousands of people right here in the United States. The truth is that Senator Bayh had seen no evidence to back up that claim.

Evan Bayh didn’t just argue for a war in Iraq. Bayh argued in favor of a hurried up, rushed invasion - precisely the mistake that led the USA to become bogged down in an Iraq quagmire.

If Barack Obama chooses Evan Bayh as his running mate, Obama will be endorsing the historic mistake made by Bush and Bayh. Obama will be endorsing John McCain’s support for invading Iraq those six long years ago. Obama will be tossing away his initial opposition to the Iraq War, and saying, “Never mind.”

That, Mr. Obama, is a recipe for losing the election.

Read the full text of Evan Bayh’s speech on October 8, 2002.

In this presidential election, Barack Obama has been pandering to religious Americans from day one, and working to get religious tax-exempt organizations involved directly in his political campaign.

Obama attacked “secularists” for trying to maintain the Democratic Party as a sphere clean of illegal infiltration by tax exempt churches. “Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square,” Obama warned.

Obama is bringing church-based campaigning right into the Democratic National Convention, with the first event of the entire convention being a supposed “unity” event:

“How do you kick off a week-long celebration to showcase our Party’s nominee, our strength, our diversity and our shared values? …the first ever Convention interfaith gathering — the first official event of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. See how you can join delegates, elected officials, clergy from many communities of faith and special musical guests as we gather in a spirit of unity.”

This supposed Democratic Party “unity” only goes so far: Nonreligious Americans are not invited. Ron Millar of the Secular Coalition for America wrote to the Democratic National Committee pointing out that “I have received complaints by people who identify as atheist and humanist who feel that this event excludes them as full participants in the convention.”

The Democratic National Committee has refused to even write a letter back to the Secular Coalition, much less to include nontheistic Americans in the event.

Imagine how it would seem if the Democratic National Committee made a European-American Inter-Ethnic Assembly the first event of the convention - and did not hold any event for Democrats of other ethnicities at any time during the convention. Americans of non-European descent would rightly regard themselves as excluded from full participation in the convention.

That’s exactly what the DNC is doing to non-religious Americans. Giving religious Democrats, and leaders of tax-exempt religious organizations, special access to political leaders in the Democratic Party, while excluding non-religious Democrats from that access, is not a way to demonstrate unity. It’s a way to promote divisiveness and discrimination.

The DNC put a Pentacostal minister, Leah Daughtry, in charge of organizing the Democratic National Convention, who declared, “For me as person of faith who has made God first in her life, it is symbolically important that the first thing we’re doing is coming together as people of faith to celebrate our faith traditions and to ask the blessings of God on us as we undertake this great civic responsibility.” Has no one in the Democratic Party explained to Ms. Daughtry that this convention isn’t supposed to just reflect her personal preferences as a Christian?

If the Democratic National Committee does not want to allow non-religious Americans to have equal access to the Democratic National Convention, then why should non-religious Americans give the Democrats their support? If the Democrats refuse to make an equal place for us at their convention, then the only place there is for non-religious Americans within the Democratic Party is the place of second-class citizens.

That is not a place that non-religious Americans ought to accept. As Barack Obama takes leadership over the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly hostile to non-religious Americans.

If the Democratic Party is going to be a religious party instead of a political party, then it’s time for politically aware non-religious Americans to leave the Democratic Party, and re-register as independent voters. Perhaps that will demonstrate to the Democratic leadership what the cost of faith-based pandering can be.

Activism opportunity: Send a message to Leah Daughtry about her decision to have the Democratic National Convention discriminate against non-religious Americans.