Feet of Clay?

Nah grasshopper. You are overreacting. God's son is playing intellectual political & cultural judo with this one. Electorial Sun Tzu. Picking his battles. Why run 90 yards to fumble?

Why indeed friend Denmark, why indeed.....? Our boy has been muddied and bloodied by ethnic nationalist riff raff. Judging from the two interviews, one friendly, one adversarial, these are not strong challengers launching a surprise sneak attack. These are busters coming with something old, obvious and hidden in plain sight. Obama has not dealt with this artfully or deftly....., even Geraldo noted last night that the sparkle has gone out of Baraka's eyes. Look at the videos and tell me that he hasn't succumbed to some egregious conformity.

Used in the Bible in Daniel 2:34, part of the description of the huge statue in the dream of Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar.

feet of clay

(idiomatic) To say that someone, who appears strong or invincible, in fact has a hidden weak point which could cause their fall.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch......,

While ABC News fomented tribal squabbles in the theater of the absurd, the real warsocialist Spartans continued prosecuting their phalanx of geostrategic maneuvering to assert control of 240 odd billion barrels of sweet light crude oil and ensure a McCain landslide victory in the general election.

Here are six developments that may have Iran as a common thread. And, if it comes to war, they may be seen as clues as to what was planned. None of them is conclusive, and each has a credible non-Iran related explanation:

1. Fallon's resignation: With the Army fully engaged in Iraq , much of the contingency planning for possible military action has fallen to the Navy, which has looked at the use of carrier-based warplanes and sea-launched missiles as the weapons to destroy Iran 's air defenses and nuclear infrastructure. Centcom commands the U.S. naval forces in and near the Persian Gulf . In the aftermath of the problems with the Iraq war, there has been much discussion within the military that senior military officers should have resigned at the time when they disagreed with the White House.

2. Vice President Cheney's peace trip: Cheney, who is seen as a leading hawk on Iran , is going on what is described as a Mideast trip to try to give a boost to stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But he has also scheduled two other stops: One , Oman , is a key military ally and logistics hub for military operations in the Persian Gulf . It also faces Iran across the narrow, vital Strait of Hormuz, the vulnerable oil transit chokepoint into and out of the Persian Gulf that Iran has threatened to blockade in the event of war. Cheney is also going to Saudi Arabia , whose support would be sought before any military action given its ability to increase oil supplies if Iran 's oil is cut off. Back in March 2002, Cheney made a high-profile Mideast trip to Saudi Arabia and other nations that officials said at the time was about diplomacy toward Iraq and not war, which began a year later.

3. Israeli airstrike on Syria : Israel's airstrike deep in Syria last October was reported to have targeted a nuclear-related facility, but details have remained sketchy and some experts have been skeptical that Syria had a covert nuclear program. An alternative scenario floating in Israel and Lebanon is that the real purpose of the strike was to force Syria to switch on the targeting electronics for newly received Russian anti-aircraft defenses. The location of the strike is seen as on a likely flight path to Iran (also crossing the friendly Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq), and knowing the electronic signatures of the defensive systems is necessary to reduce the risks for warplanes heading to targets in Iran .

4. Warships off Lebanon : Two U.S. warships took up positions off Lebanon earlier this month, replacing the USS Cole. The deployment was said to signal U.S. concern over the political stalemate in Lebanon and the influence of Syria in that country. But the United States also would want its warships in the eastern Mediterranean in the event of military action against Iran to keep Iranian ally Syria in check and to help provide air cover to Israel against Iranian missile reprisals. One of the newly deployed ships, the USS Ross, is an Aegis guided missile destroyer, a top system for defense against air attacks.

5. Israeli comments: Israeli President Shimon Peres said earlier this month that Israel will not consider unilateral action to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. In the past, though, Israeli officials have quite consistently said they were prepared to act alone -- if that becomes necessary -- to ensure that Iran does not cross a nuclear weapons threshold. Was Peres speaking for himself, or has President Bush given the Israelis an assurance that they won't have to act alone?

6. Israel's war with Hezbollah: While this seems a bit old, Israel 's July 2006 war in Lebanon against Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces was seen at the time as a step that Israel would want to take if it anticipated a clash with Iran . The radical Shiite group is seen not only as a threat on it own but also as a possible Iranian surrogate force in the event of war with Iran . So it was important for Israel to push Hezbollah forces back from their positions on Lebanon 's border with Israel and to do enough damage to Hezbollah's Iranian-supplied arsenals to reduce its capabilities. Since then, Hezbollah has been able to rearm, though a United Nations force polices a border area buffer zone in southern Lebanon .

Talk Radio Tempest Travails

On My Faith and My Church;

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

Let me repeat what I've said earlier. All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn. They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country.

With Rev. Wright's retirement and the ascension of my new pastor, Rev. Otis Moss, III, Michelle and I look forward to continuing a relationship with a church that has done so much good. And while Rev. Wright's statements have pained and angered me, I believe that Americans will judge me not on the basis of what someone else said, but on the basis of who I am and what I believe in; on my values, judgment and experience to be President of the United States.

Obama legitimizes ethnic nationalist projection and perturbation....,

McCain's Senior Strategist Rejects Ethnic Nationalist Tactics

Once again, McCain's camp appears to cleave to the high road in contrast with the talk radio demagogues...,

Ethnic Nationalists Losing It

On the heels of affirmative action mafia daughter Geraldine Ferraro's deep Archie Bunker moments - one of the architects of Nixon's southern strategy and an avowed ethnic nationalist - loses his cool with an uppity negress.



Projective casualities continue to mount in the face of overwhelming rorschachian ambiguity....,

McCain's Spiritual Guide

Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a "war" against the "false religion" of Islam with the aim of destroying it.

On February 26, McCain appeared at a campaign rally in Cincinnati with the Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, a supersize Pentecostal institution that features a 5,200-seat sanctuary, a television studio (where Parsley tapes a weekly show), and a 122,000-square-foot Ministry Activity Center. That day, a week before the Ohio primary, Parsley praised the Republican presidential front-runner as a "strong, true, consistent conservative." The endorsement was important for McCain, who at the time was trying to put an end to the lingering challenge from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a favorite among Christian evangelicals. A politically influential figure in Ohio, Parsley could also play a key role in McCain's effort to win this bellwether state in the general election. McCain, with Parsley by his side at the Cincinnati rally, called the evangelical minister a "spiritual guide."



Why would McCain court Parsley? He has long had trouble figuring out how to deal with Christian fundamentalists, an important bloc for the Republican Party. During his 2000 presidential bid, he referred to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance." But six years later, as he readied himself for another White House run, McCain repudiated that remark. More recently, his campaign hit a rough patch when he accepted the endorsement of the Reverend John Hagee, a Texas televangelist who has called the Catholic Church "the great whore" and a "false cult system." After the Catholic League protested and called on McCain to renounce Hagee's support, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee praised Hagee's spiritual leadership and support of Israel and said that "when [Hagee] endorses me, it does not mean that I embrace everything that he stands for or believes in." After being further criticized for his Hagee connection, McCain backed off slightly, saying, "I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics." But McCain did not renounce Hagee's endorsement.

McCain's relationship with Parsley is politically significant. In 2004, Parsley's church was credited with driving Christian fundamentalist voters to the polls for George W. Bush. With Ohio expected to again be a decisive state in the presidential contest, Parsley's World Harvest Church and an affiliated entity called Reformation Ohio, which registers voters, could be important players within this battleground state. Considering that the Ohio Republican Party has been decimated by various political scandals and that a popular Democrat, Ted Strickland, is now the state's governor, McCain and the Republicans will need all the help they can get in the Buckeye State this fall. It's a real question: Can McCain win the presidency without Parsley?

The McCain campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding Parsley and his anti-Islam writings. Parsley did not return a call seeking comment.

"The last thing I want to be is another screaming voice moving people to extremes and provoking them to folly in the name of patriotism," Parsley writes in Silent No More. Provoking people to holy war is another matter. About that, McCain so far is silent.

Obama as America's Rorschach Test - III

The proxy war continues and escalates. Obama in the crosshairs via the proxy of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. It's new news on ABC today and Bill O'Reilly has clamped his jaws down it far more ferociously than he did with his misguided attempt on Baraka via Michelle Obama.



Obama's pastor's sermons scrutinized
"Attention must be paid!" That line from a famous play is certainly appropriate when we talk about Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial sermons are now being listened to for the first time by the public at large. In his sermons, he rails not only against Hillary, but white America and its supposed ills. Judge for yourself if this man's influence helps or hurts Sen. Obama.

Plus, we'll have the latest on Geraldine Ferraro's critique of the Obama candidacy and her resignation from the Clinton campaign. Don't miss these two hours of the Radio Factor today.

As Above, So Below, As Within, So Without....,

This article is available in its entirety to registered users at Technology Review. So click the link and go and register, abundant good material with an underlying dot-connecting editorial sensibility. Anyway, the discussion of neural density, dendrites, synapses, and so forth was serendipitous to me in view of the beautiful blogospheric visualizations presented in the current issue of the magazine. Here are a couple of those visualizations - look an awful lot like the bioflourescent and fMRI visualizations of cytoarchitechtonic structure in the human nervous system, don't they?

Blogosphere
The core of the blogosphere, made up of several thousand popular blogs that are heavily connected to one another, divides into two regions when seen up close. The region on the left, at the center of which are two areas showing a lot of pink, contains political blogs; the region on the right, divided from the first by the triangular indentation at the bottom, contains blogs focused on gadgets and technology. The two regions are held together by popular blogs with ties to both subject areas. The size of the ­circle representing a given blog is proportional to the number of other blogs linked to it. Hurst notes an apparent difference in culture between the two regions: pink lines, which represent reciprocal links, are much denser among the political blogs than they are among blogs focused on technology.


Twitter Social Network
People have different intentions when they share information through social networks, says Akshay Java, a member of the eBiquity Research Group at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He cites three purposes that bring users to the microblogging site Twitter, where they share brief updates via text message, instant messenger, and the Twitter website: finding information, sharing information, and having conversations. These images show the different networks produced by the different types of communication. When all connections as of April 2007 are mapped (top image below), news sources appear as huge nodes. When maps show only mutual relationships (bottom image below), in which all users both share and receive information, nodes are smaller and the network appears more tightly knit. (The different colors reflect a loose attempt to group close contacts together.)