We just noticed something: It’s hot outside! So hot, in fact, that we at Various Things & Stuff are heading to beautiful Southern California for a summer respite. Don’t worry, we won’t be abandoning you for long. New blogs will be back Monday, Tuesday at the latest.

In the meantime, our agenda includes, in no particular order, the delicious hand-crafted India Pale Ale made exclusively by the Steelhead Brewing Co. outlet in Irvine, Calif.; the even-more-delicious hand-crafted cigars in our travel humidor (whose origin, we’re afraid, must remain classified); the sumptuous delights of the Crab Cooker in Newport Beach, Calif., more beer, a side trip to the  soon-to-close Acres of Books in Long Beach, Calif., and of course the best little beach in all of North or South America, the one called “Huntington.”

See you all when we return!

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author Ron Suskind went on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night to talk about his latest book, The Way of the World. The central contentions: The Bush administration knew full well there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, yet ordered the war anyway. In addition, officials allegedly faked a letter from an Iraqi informant to create a fake link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Sept. 11 conspiracy. The Los Angeles Times has more.

Now read that first paragraph again.

And think about this:

The administration knew there were no WMD in Iraq.

Before the invasion.

But they told us there were WMD, and that’s why we had to invade.

And they went in anyway.

There’s a name for that: It’s called conspiracy to commit murder. And it’s been something that author and former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has been talking about for months, with scant media attention, following the publication of his own book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Bugliosi made a pretty damn good case before, and Suskind’s work will only buttress it.

In his Countdown appearance, Suskind said the book raises issues of “constitutional significance,” implying that impeachment was a probable result of the charges. We agree; if lying to the American people and taking the nation to war under false pretenses doesn’t qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” then the phrase has no meaning.

Unfortunately, although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has allowed the Judiciary Committee to hold impeachment hearings, she has said flatly that no articles of impeachment will be drafted or introduced on the House floor. (It simply wouldn’t do to rattle cages this close to an election, you understand.)

But impeachment is only a provision to remove a corrupt official from office, and Bush’s term ends in about five months from now anyway. The real question is, will America allow the president to get away with causing the deaths of more than 4,100 brave American soldiers, and thousands of Iraqis, all based on a goddamn lie?

Buglosi says no. And so do we.

This is the second-best Paris Hilton video ever uploaded to the web. Or so we’ve been told.

See you at the debates, bitches!

Is U.S. Sen. Barack Obama full of hubris?

Some people think so, including our corporate overlord, Stephens Media LLC President Sherm Frederick. He said as much in his Sunday column in the Review-Journal.

Frederick cites Obama’s excellent adventure overseas, and a visit to Washington, D.C., quoting a Washington Post item about the event:

“The 5:20 TBA turned out to be his adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, as if for the State of the Union. Capitol Police cleared the halls — just as they do for the actual president. The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door — just as they do for the actual president.

“Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, ‘This is the moment … that the world is waiting for,’ adding: ‘I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.’ ”

Sounds fairly arrogant, right? But let’s take a closer look.

First, there’s little doubt that Obama’s going to generate applause overseas. He’s the first American with a chance of sitting in the Oval Office that most Europeans have seen in eight years who’s not a warmonger. If the Germans and the French opposed the war, and Obama is all about ending the war, what would surprise anybody about the fact that they like Obama but dislike, say, President George W. Bush?

Second, Obama is under the protection of the U.S. Secret Service. They do things like ask police to clear hallways, move protectees around in motorcades and bring people in side doors. It’s called doing their job.

Obama’s rival U.S. Sen. John McCain is also under Secret Service protection. We don’t hear much about McCain being arrogant, even after a legitimate news reporter was kicked out of a holding area.

Third, the quote in question was taken completely out of context by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, whom Frederick is quoting in his own column. Obama’s actual quote was this:

“It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol.”

“It’s not about me at all.” Well, that certainly sounds like hubris, doesn’t it?

No, actually the hubris belongs to Milbank, who instead of apologizing for his error (which appears to have been based on another Washington Post writer’s reporting) called critics whiners. And when some of those critics turned out to be the staff at Countdown with Keith Olbermann — where Milbank had appeared for four years but which banned him from appearing on-air until he issued an explanation — Milbank simply decided to jump ship and join CNN instead.

For that record, that’s what hubris looks like.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But there is, we suspect, something wrong with kicking out legitimate news reporters who are simply waiting to interview U.S. Sen. John McCain. Or has the Arizona senator morphed once again to become more like George W. Bush?

We understand the legitimate purpose of security for the candidates, both of whom enjoy protection from the U.S. Secret Service. But the reporter in question, who just happens to be black, had not only press identification issued by his newspaper, but also press credentials to cover the McCain event that day!

So he was standing in the wrong place? Yeah. OK.

Access to the senator is tightly controlled,” [McCain advance man Jonathan] Block said. “I would first express regret that your reporter was moved, and I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that race had nothing to do with it.”

You no doubt read recently that the Nevada Supreme Court ruled in favor of former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, who is waging a lonely, misanthropic quest to cut funding for the firefighters, police officers, doctors, nurses and schoolteachers who make up the backbone of our communities in Nevada.

(We thought Angle had, once again, failed, until the ruling gave her vicious quest new life.)

The high court — quite correctly — found the Legislature had set a date too early for the filing of initiative petitions, such as Angle’s latest attempt to impose California-style property tax limitations in Nevada. The ruling expanded the signature-gathering period by nearly a month.

And, you’ve probably read that Angle’s initiative — thanks no doubt to the extra time — qualified in Clark County. (Under a highly suspect and probably unconstitutional law, the initiative also has to qualify in each of the other counties, with a varying number of signatures required in each. We are waiting now to hear the results of the canvass. The deadline is today.)

Now, you would think with Angle’s three previous failures to qualify this initiative, the experience of her failed bid for Congress and the extra time granted by the state Supreme Court, that she’d have finally made it, right?

Not so fast.

A law firm hired by the Nevada State Education Association has reviewed the petitions filed in Clark County, and discovered that the affidavit that’s supposed to be signed by the person who circulated the petition was not notarized on at least 832 pages, as required by law. And in the “vast majority” of those cases, the pages weren’t signed by anybody. That means those signature pages must not be counted as valid, the union’s attorneys say. (See the complaint for yourself, below.)

But wait, there’s more: Up in Carson City, one person signed the affidavit, but the address listed belongs to a different person, who also notarized the affidavit. That means either the notary circulated the petitions, and then notarized them, which makes the signatures invalid, or the first person circulated the petition and improperly filled out the affidavit, which also makes them invalid.

The Secretary of State has sent Angle a letter with the complaint attached. We’re guessing she’ll say something about the union wanting big, fat paychecks for its members, which only proves that Angle has no idea what they pay teachers these days. Besides, no amount of rhetoric can fill out defective petitions after they’ve been turned in.

Another Angle failure? It looks that way right now.

nsea-complaint.pdf

UPDATE: This just in, from the secretary of state’s office. According to county clerks across the state, Angle’s property tax petition does have enough signatures to quality. However, because of the challenge lodged by the NSEA described in this post, Secretary of State Ross Miller will not certify the petition for the ballot until the charges have been resolved. And that means Angle cannot celebrate victory just yet, or perhaps ever, since Miller has strictly interpreted the petition requirements on a series of other would-be ballot measures this year. Stay tuned, readers.

And just when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was becoming a hometown hero for firing a bunch of state workers and cutting pay for even more. Now he goes and proposes a tax increase.

We suggested not long ago that if state Sen. Bob Beers and conservative activist Chuck Muth learned that the California governor was slashing and burning because the Golden State’s Legislature had yet to pass a budget, they’d wonder why Nevada wasn’t doing the same to deal with its budget crisis.

But now, our beloved home state is turning once more to that tried-and-true answer to a gaping budget hole: An increase of 1 cent in the sales tax, supposedly only to last three years.

Granted, California’s budget is bigger, deficit is wider, and governor is less skanky than Nevada’s, but when push comes to shove, reality breaks through and the state does what it must to keep services flowing to the millions of residents in the nation’s most populous (and popular!) state.

We will shortly be visiting California, and, even though it won’t be in effect yet, we’d still be glad to pay that extra penny on the purchase of, oh, let’s say, a box of Avo Intermezzo cigars there at the Tinder Box in South Coast Plaza. Why? We believe in a little thing called civilization, that’s why, and we know it’s not free.

Now if only we could smoke those Intermezzos in a bar in California. The search for civilization continues…

We’ve been following, with ever-diminishing interest, the flap over the alleged playing of the so-called “race card,” whatever the hell that is, and we’ve got to tell you, we’re confused. Is Sen. John McCain a racist or not? Is Sen. Barack Obama? Just what the hell is going on?

To catch you up, here’s what we know, in chronological order:

On July 31, Obama told crowds (as he’s been telling them for months) that Republicans are trying to scare them out of voting for him, because the only thing their party has left is fear, baby. “Nobody really thinks that [President George W.] Bush or McCain  have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.”

Side note: Ironically enough, Republicans HAVE said almost all of those things, including saying Obama isn’t patriotic enough (remember flag-pin gate?), they HAVE made fun of his name (remember the detestable provocateur Ann Coulter?) and they HAVE said he’s risky (including McCain himself).

But, insisting that McCain has never said anything about Obama “not looking like all those other presidents on those dollar bills,” the Republican’s campaign insisted that Obama “played the race card.” (And, to our knowledge, McCain hasn’t said anything remotely approaching the issue of race in a pejorative sense in the campaign.)

“Barack Obama played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

Side note: Isn’t it interesting that we should hear the echo of O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro in Davis’s remarks? Shapiro, lamenting his role in the not guilty verdict in Simpson’s murder case, was the first to coin the “…from the bottom of the deck,” lingo, to illustrate the use of race as an inappropriate diversion from the truth. So, too, it seems is Davis trying to divert us from the reality of what Obama was actually saying. It buttresses our personal theory that, in eight cases out of 10, when somebody claims something is racist, they’re trying to make a cynical political play. 

Anyway, Obama set the record straight by noting that he thinks McCain is cynical, not racist. And that’s probably an accurate enough description of McCain, who has predicted “more wars, my friends, more wars” and who has said, absent casualties, he doesn’t mind if Americans were in Iraq for up to 10,000 years. Sure, McCain opposed making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a holiday in Arizona, but he apologized for that.

Then, on Aug. 1, McCain said Obama had “retracted” his remarks and thus, “let’s move on.”And, to an extent, Obama did retract his remarks. He admitted the McCain campaign wasn’t using race improperly in the campaign, but he stuck to his statement that the Republican senator was trying to scare voters into thinking Obama was a risky choice. And as we’ve confirmed above, the McCain campaign specifically and Republicans generally are doing exactly that.

So, are we done? Have we established that Republicans, including McCain’s campaign, have used all manner of disreputable attacks against Obama, but have held their tongues when it comes to his race? Are we all agreed that McCain isn’t a racist, and can we now, as McCain suggests, move on?

“John McCain is the whitest candidate you could possibly have,” said comedian George Lopez, in a Saturday Las Vegas campaign appearance on behalf of Obama. “But Barack Obama isn’t the blackest. I’m darker than he is!”

Oh, damn it all. Lopez is playing the race card, and dealing it from, like, the top third of the deck, or something….

OK, let’s see if we have this right:

1. Exxon Mobil breaks all known records and records a profit of $11.68 billion for a single quarter, the largest profit ever made by any company in the history of mankind on planet Earth.
2. Other oil companies also record huge quarterly profits, ranging from Conoco Phillips at the low end with $5.43 billion to Royal Dutch Shell, just less than Exxon Mobil with $11.55 billion.
3. Totaled, the top six Big Oil companies posted quarterly profits of $51.47 billion.
4. Gasoline is selling for more than $4 per gallon in most places.
5. Confronted about the huge profits by reporters demanding an explanation, the company’s Vice President of Public Affairs Kenneth Cohen says this: “Our Congress needs to give us access to areas currently off limits to the industry. The best way to bring downward pressure on prices is by bringing on new supply while doing everything we can to use energy efficiently.”
6. The industry currently has access to thousands of acres of offshore drilling sites which it is not using.
7. It is well-known that, even if permission to drill anywhere the industry wants to drill was granted today, the supply would not reach the market for years.
8. Despite that, however, Republicans in Congress — including our own U.S. Rep. Jon Porter and U.S. Sen. John Ensign — have jumped to do precisely what the industry says it wants done, which is to allow drilling in places where it’s currently prohibited, for damn good reason.

Do we have all of that right? Because it seems to us that there is the makings of a pretty good anti-incumbent election-year ad in that list. Oh, say, something about doing the bidding of the most profitable companies in the world while the constituents who actually vote for members of Congress are getting totally screwed while oil companies use record profits, not to explore for new sources of oil, but to buy back stock and ensure future profits.

That might be a pretty good ad. If only a certain challenger hadn’t already endorsed the idea of drilling, too.

Remember back during the special session, when we wrote that Nevada Democrats shouldn’t have rubber-stamped Gov. Jim Gibbons’s simpleminded approach to the state budget (i.e. cut the hell out of it)? Remember when we said that everybody in Carson City (except perhaps the governor) knows what needs to be done to set Nevada aright? Remember when we said … well, let’s just reprint what we said, back on the night of June 27:

Throughout the state, Gibbons is derided as a punchline to a joke, a man too stupid to lead, beset by scandal of his own foolish making. But that same governor managed to call the Legislature to Carson City and get precisely the thing he wanted: budget cuts. And nobody stood up to say no.

Who’s laughing last at that joke?

Apparently, the governor is. According to Molly Ball’s Political Notebook in today’s Review-Journal, the governor isn’t too worried about the new website launched by Nevada Democrats last week that derides him in the title: www.americasworstgovernor.com.

Why not? Here’s why, in a quote from gubernatorial spokesman Ben Kieckhefer:

“If they [Democrats] think so poorly of him, why are they following him in lockstep when it comes to solving the worst budget crisis in the history of the state?” he said. “They’ve offered zero solutions. If he’s the worst, what does that make them?”

Bingo! Kieckhefer is precisely right: Democrats love to bash the governor, they love to talk about standing up to the governor, they often threaten that they will “never again” cut the state budget the way the governor wants them to, but at the end of the day … they did precisely what the governor wanted them to do.

So what does that make them? Feckless enablers of a bankrupt policy, we’d say.

Now, standing up to a governor in Nevada is difficult, especially when you have a state Senate controlled (barely) by Republicans, some of whom are rhetorically very skilled (we’re looking at you, state Sen. Bob Beers, you handsome devil!). The requirement (authored by then-Congressman Gibbons) to get two-thirds to raise taxes is difficult to achieve, as history has shown. The goes-down-easy anti-tax rhetoric of the Republicans is hard to uproot from the minds of people who are worried about other things. Low-voter turnout means elections can be turned with 1,000 votes or so, so taking political risks could lead to the end of a career.

But somebody should at least try. Somebody should at least suggest another path, rather than joining in to cut to ribbons our universities, our road-building budgets, our K-12 schools and our social safety net.

Maybe if somebody did that, they’d earn the right to note that Jim Gibbons is, in fact, America’s worst governor.

But they’re still fresh enough to enjoy for Friday morning! Here we go!

• “My goal is to make Nevada a greener state, energy-wise,” says Gov. Jim Gibbons, after a report from his committee on climate change comes out, saying more polluting power plans are OK. Does this mean he’s abandoned his idea for a coal-to-liquid-fuel plant in the state, as advocated in his State of the State address last year?
• Speaking of Gibbons, he thinks the Legislature intended to tax comped meals all along, so the state shouldn’t have to give back $143 million. Well, if he thinks that, why did he allow the Republican state Senate in the June 27 special session to kill a bill that said that? Because that bill might have been helpful when the state Supreme Court was telling Nevada to give the money back. We’re just saying.
• U.S. Sen. John Ensign all of a sudden won’t repeat his earlier endorsement of now-indicted Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. But why not? The case against Stevens has been building for years, and Ensign had to know that when he endorsed Stevens in the first place (and took almost $25,000 from Stevens’s PAC). What a fair-weather friend Ensign is.
• The House Judiciary Committee votes to hold Karl Rove in contempt, a resolution which may or may not be forwarded to the entire House. Ah, we say do it: Rove clearly holds Congress in contempt, so why not return the favor?
• TV news reports the same story a lot, and they do lots of weather and traffic pieces, new column finds. Also, those people reading the stories sure are pretty, huh?
• U.S. Sen. Harry Reid says Republicans don’t support the troops because they didn’t vote for a defense authorization bill, which contains a pay raise. “Republicans rejection of this bill is indefensible,” he said in a statement. “It shows a lack of support for our troops.” Damn. Are those balls we see?

We’ve already noted how state Sen. Dina Titus has taken flak for apparently trying to switch sides on the offshore oil drilling question, ostensibly in the hopes of taking the issue away from her congressional opponent, U.S. Rep. Jon Porter. It didn’t take Porter (who is pro-drilling) long to note that Titus had a contrary position in 2007 when she was debating a non-binding resolution on the issue in the Nevada state Senate.

Two things: First, you never win when you abandon principle, although Titus argues she was never really against the concept of allowing individual states to decide whether drilling should be permitted off their coasts. (We, by contrast, are.) Second, you most certainly never win when you adopt the positions of your opponent. They do.

If the hypocrisy charge was strike one, strike two came in today’s Review-Journal. Porter — no doubt at his party’s suggestion and with its backing — has filed a petition seeking to get a vote on an offshore drilling bill.

“It is also time for my opponent to call on [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to do the same thing  [vote to allow drilling],” Porter said. “This legislation is exactly what [Titus] says she is supporting. The question is how many Democrats can my opponent get” to embrace more offshore drilling.

And there you go: Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. It’s not enough that Titus has surrendered and been slapped for flip-flopping. Now, Porter’s demanding that she call on fellow Democrats to do the same. And if Titus did that, he’d slam her for being unpersuasive unless her party went along. And even if her party did that, Porter would slam them for taking so damn long to become Republicans. The point: You. Can’t. Win. At. This. Game.

The Republicans are always going to find something with which they can criticize the Democrats, no matter what. (John McCain bitched about Barack Obama not visiting the Middle East; when he did, McCain bitched about Obama getting so much attention and publicity in the Middle East.)

So instead of trying to triangulate, or deny Republicans the use of certain issues, or race to the middle, Democrats such as Titus might as well stand on their principles, and have the virtue of doing what they think is the right thing.

And that brings us to strike three, an R-J editorial slamming Titus for her alleged drilling flip-floppery, a charge the newspaper couldn’t have made had she stayed consistent.Sure, if she was against drilling, the R-J would slam her for that. If she simply said, “Drilling off the coast is like cramming your hand into the Pringles tube to get those last little chip fragments stuck at the bottom. Sure, they’re there. But there’s not enough to make it worth your while. So why the hell don’t we use the money we’d otherwise give Big Oil in tax breaks to research green energy, and tell these drill-happy Republican fucks they can’t despoil the coast on a desperate search for the last few drops of Texas tea, which won’t do jack for oil prices today anyway?”

Or some version of that. Some people find the phrase “Texas tea” offensive.

Sure, Titus would have taken fire if she’d done that. But at least she’d be standing up for something. And she’d have had the added virtue of being right in the process.

Nevada Democrats — having some fun with the Internets, or what the newly indicted GOP U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens likes to call “a series of tubes” — launched a new website today dedicated to cataloging the flaps, flip-flops, foibles and fuckups of Gov. Jim Gibbons.

It’s called America’s Worst Governor, and it’s got everything from classic Gibbons quotes to details of his many and varied scandals, with links to news reports that document them. Because some of this stuff you simply couldn’t make up.

Why didn’t we think of that? Probably because a full list would require several terabytes of data storage, and we’re fresh out of isolinear chips here at Various Things & Stuff headquarters. We blew them all on our own profile of America’s worst governor in April, urging him to quit. (Yes, by the way, that story is linked among others on the site, although our work is now dated because it took place before  text-gate and property-tax gate.)

Review-Journal reporter Molly Ball, in a conference call about the site’s launch with Democratic Party Executive Director Travis Brock, asked a deliberately provocative question, something along the lines of this: “Does the Democratic Party have a vision for the state, or is it just interested in tearing people down?” We assume Ball was just playing devil’s advocate, but here’s the answer: In this rare instance, it’s possible to do both. In tearing Gibbons down, a positive vision for the state (i.e. one without Gibbons at the helm!) emerges. And that’s something we can all get behind.

We’d pretty much thought we’d seen everything our beloved home state of California could produce in terms of wackiness, from Gary Coleman running for governor to taxing orbiting satellites in space under the doctrine of air rights, but this one has got to take the cake. (Literally.)

The Los Angeles City Council is prohibiting any new fast-food stores in South Los Angeles, where poor people have higher-than-usual rates of obesity. And it’s being done in the name of public health.

We must confess both a fondness for the occasional fast-food meal, as well as an unqualified acknowledgment that the same is no good for us. We don’t stop by In-N-Out for a Double-Double (or two) because it’s good for us. We stop by because it tastes good, although we do so less often than in the past.

We must also confess a certain libertarian compassion for our fellow human beings, inasmuch as we think anybody else should be able to enjoy that same delicious In-N-Out Burger whenever the mood strikes, and as often as it does. Who are we to tell somebody — whether poor, or fat, or a resident of South Los Angeles — that he or she must go to a salad bar instead? Blasphemy!

Not the Los Angeles City Council. They want people to get healthier, and they think that will happen a lot sooner if there are fewer KFCs, McDonald’s, Jack-in-the-Boxes, Burger Kings , Del Tacos and Taco Bells about.

But we suspect a black market will soon crop up, with Whoppers, Big Macs, Jack’s Spicy Chickens, and Macho Combo Burritos smuggled in across city lines from Gardena, Compton, South Gate, Torrance and Inglewood. We happen to know from our college days that there’s an In-N-Out in Sante Fe Springs, which isn’t too terribly far away.

It’s not just the fecklessness of this maneuver that gets us, however. It’s the presumptuousness. What right does the city of Los Angeles have to tell anybody what to eat, or not to eat, even if some of that food isn’t very good for you? That’s a decision a person can and must have the right to decide for himself, damn it all! If we think that drugs should be legal (and we do) then it necessarily follows that the devilish gut-bomb that is the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese shouldn’t be considered contraband.

In short, if Americans truly enjoy a right to life, then they have the right to kill themselves if they so choose, whether by handgun or hamburger.

And that’s why they’ll take our Double-Double when they pry it out of our cold, dead (and French-fry stained) fingers!

Evangelical Christians can sometimes be an unforgiving lot. Take this story from today’s Washington Times, in which prominent evangelicals say they’ll abandon the John McCain ticket should former Massachusetts governor (and Nevada Republican caucus winner) Mitt Romney be on it. Why? Romney just happens to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Some excerpts:

“McCain and Romney would be like oil and water,” said evangelical novelist Tim LaHaye, who supported Mr. [Mike] Huckabee. “We aren’t against Mormonism, but Romney is not a thoroughgoing evangelical and his flip-flopping on issues is understandable in a liberal state like Massachusetts, but our people won’t understand that.”

…

The Rev. Rob McCoy, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, Calif., … told The Washington Times, “I will vote for McCain unless he does one thing. You know what that is? If he puts Romney on the ticket as veep.

“It will alienate the entire evangelical community - 62 million self-professing evangelicals in this country, half of them registered to vote, are going to be deeply saddened,” Mr. McCoy added.

…

“In our online poll, Romney won a plurality, and Mike Huckabee ran a strong second,” said Mr. [Gary] Bauer, who also told The Times that he does not think Mr. Romney ought to be a drag on the ticket. “But a lot of the Huckabee supporters said if Romney is McCain’s choice, they would bail out in November.”

Why the hate? It’s because evangelicals don’t think of Mormons as Christians. So what, you ask? We’re electing a president, not a pastor. Why, that’s just what Romney said, so it must be evil!

Now, we have no dog in this fight. Personally, we think both McCain and Romney are nuts, but it has nothing to do with their respective religions. They’re both vapid flip-flopping warmongers who (we think) would say almost anything to gain purchase on the White House, and, as far as we’re concerned, that is neither a very Christian nor a very Mormon thing to do.

But while we’re on the subject of religion, let’s not forget that the evangelicals themselves were (and in many cases, still are) considered to be a splinter cult by members of the Roman Catholic Church, which itself is considered to have fallen away from the true path by the Greek Orthodox Church. The point: There’s always somebody who is more orthodox than thou, and we’re pretty sure that really pisses Jesus off.