I am a 49 year old professional classical musician and educator and not a democrat. Your quote today from Margot Mifflin of Salon in her 'therapy' session perfectly describes the reaction I have stirred up in a new girlfriend. Like many musicians, she is zealously left-liberal. Her heroes are Ted Kennedy and Hillary. (not Sir Edmund) We share everything in common except politics. I am able to accept and understand her values while not agreeing with them, but am perplexed by her difficulty with mine. She is like the robot on the old Lost In Space TV show. When I explain rationally that I do not think that Rush Limbaugh is 'evil', and that perhaps Al Qaeda might better illustrate that concept, she starts spinning around and yammers "It does not compute, It does not compute". Furthermore, she is constantly asking questions about my views on one aspect of politics or another with every question beginning with either 'Why'? or, 'How could you possibly?'........ In other words, I am viewed as some kind of double anomaly, on the one hand I am one of those neanderthal Republicans, and on the other I SEEM to be a reasonable and civilized one. This is causing her no end of confusion. She is actually having dinner with and making love to one of "THEM". So much for inclusiveness and ending 'Us against Them' thinking in our lifetime. Sigh...

Things have been busy here. You know I can't say much about it. However, I do know two things. One, POTUS has given us the green light to do whatever we needed to do to win this thing so we have that going for us. Two, and my opinion only, this battle is going to have far reaching effects on not only the war here in Iraq but in the overall war on terrorism. We have to be very precise in our application of combat power. We cannot kill a lot of innocent folks (though they are few and far between in Fallujah). There will be no shock and awe. There will be plenty of bloodshed at the lowest levels. This battle is the Marine Corps' Belleau Wood for this war. 2/1 and 1/5 will be leading the way. We have to find a way to kill the bad guys only. The Fallujahans are fired up and ready for a fight (or so they think). A lot of terrorists and foreign fighters are holed up in Fallujah. It has been a sanctuary for them. If they have not left town they are going to die. I'm hoping they stay and fight.

This way we won't have to track them down one by one.

This battle is going to be talked about for a long time. The Marine Corps will either reaffirm its place in history as one of the greatest fighting organizations in the world or we will die trying. The Marines are fired up. I'm nervous for them though because I know how much is riding on this fight (the war in Iraq, the view of the war at home, the length of the war on terror and the reputation of the Marine Corps to name a few). However, every time I've been nervous during my career about the outcome of events when young Marines were involved they have ALWAYS exceeded my expectations. I'm praying this is one of those times.

I don't think Moqtadr Sadr is what we have to worry about. He's a nuisance whose movement will probably not survive him, and it seems likely he'll be dead or in prison by this time next week. The problem is what he represents: a conspiratorial worldview that, without evidence, holds America responsible for every ill that befalls Iraqis, and refuses - not rhetorically, but emotionally and intellectually - to acknowledge the difference between the American occupation and life under Saddam Hussein. The people who follow that line seem to be better organized and more willing to fight than anyone else in the country. Significantly, the same mindset that causes al Hawsa to blame the US for bombing Ashura comes into play when Shi'ites deal with Sunnis, when Sunnis deal with Kurds, and when Kurds deal with Shi'ites. The ethnic divide has been papered over so far, but may be impossible to overcome.

Again, it would be comforting to believe that we blew it - that if we'd done something different everything would have worked out for the best. But it may be that what we've got is pretty close to the best we could have expected. I don't think the invasion was a bad idea, necessarily, but we probably need to lower our expectations of what a free and independent Iraq might look like. This may be an overreaction based on being too close to events. But even though it looks like Sadr has made his play and lost, things have been very tense in Baghdad lately. My friend Howard said an Iraqi crossed the sidewalk to bump into him with his shoulder the other day, and a British journalist here said that, for the first time, he's considering "tooling up." You can get a very reliable pistol in Baghdad for about $500.

Bishop blames this heightened partisanship on the proliferation of "landslide counties." He defines a landslide county as one in which the presidential nominee of one party receives at least 60 percent of the vote. In 1976, 26.8 percent of American voters lived in landslide counties. By 2000, that proportion had nearly doubled, to 45.3 percent.
And it's getting worse. The GOP has a lot more landslide counties where the partisan imbalance continues to widen (939) than do the Democrats (158). But because the Democrats' landslide counties are much likelier to be more populous urban counties, the aggregate number of growing-landslide-county Democrats (15.2 million, or 14 percent of the national vote) comes out roughly the same as the aggregate number of growing-landslide-county Republicans (16.5 million, or 16 percent of the national vote).

Two points, then, should emerge: First, there are differences between evangelicalism in general and the subset called fundamentalism; and second, those differences are hard to specify because they are matters of tendency and preference rather than doctrine or belief. Basically, all evangelicals (fundamentalist or not) believe that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins; that people need to repent of our sins and "accept Jesus as Lord and Savior"; that we must preach the Gospel to those who don't know or don't believe; and that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God. The hard part begins when we get down to asking what the Bible actually says.
For many fundamentalists, the way other evangelicals (such as myself) interpret the Bible makes us indistinguishable from liberals: when we say, for example, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old, or approve of the ordination of women, or a hundred other things. You know you're an evangelical if the fundamentalists think you're a liberal and the liberals think you're a fundamentalist.

The just-gay-enough metrosexual hipster, the uxorious one, the guy who tattooed his baby son's name on to his back in Gothic script... suddenly he looked like every nylon-shirted commercial traveller sleeping with a drunk stranger in a motorway services hotel on a three-day break from his wife.