Obama will try to overcome that resistance by fingering McCain for Bush's economic bumbles. This is the one issue that should resonate with blue collar whites who are hurting more than anyone else from a near decade of bad Republican economic policies. But economic misery hasn't been enough for any Democratic presidential contender or even president to dent that resistance in the past three decades. And Hillary's lousy word play notwithstanding their resistance can't be shrugged off solely as racial bigotry, guns and religion fetishes, and cultural gaps between blue collar whites and blacks and the so-called elite.

Bill Clinton said and did all the right things about the economy and snatched the White House from Bush Sr. in 1992. But he didn't do it by getting a majority of blue collar white votes. Bush Sr. narrowly beat him with them. Four years later, the economy boomed, jobs were plentiful, and Clinton got the credit for this. Yet he still lost to GOP challenger Robert Dole by an even greater margin among blue collar whites than he did to Bush Sr. four years earlier. If women had not turned out in large numbers and voted heavily for him, Dole may well have beat him out, and he would have done it with the massive backing of blue collar whites.

There are two big reasons for the locked in resistance of blue collar white males to Democratic presidential contenders that have been totally missed in all the usual talk about cultural differences and sneaky racism. That is that many of them perceive the messages that GOP male candidates convey and the code words and terms they use to convey them much different than women, blacks and upper income, college educated whites.

GOP presidential candidates and presidents in past decades have at various times skewered social programs and nakedly played the race card in presidential campaigns beginning with Goldwater in 1964. Since then other Republicans at times artfully stoked male rage with racially charged slogans like "law and order," "crime in the streets," "welfare cheats," and "absentee fathers." Bush's John Wayne frontier brashness, and get tough, bring em' on rhetoric in talking about the Iraq and the war against terrorism was calculatingly geared to appeal to supposed male toughness.

The other reason is that Republicans have just as artfully played hard on the anger, frustration, and visceral dislike of many white workers harbor toward government. The angry white male was more than a cleverly coined buzz word in the 1990s to describe the fear, frustration, and the sense that males, particularly white males, were losing ground to minorities and women in the workplace, schools, and in society. The trend toward white male poverty and alienation actually first became evident in the early 1980s when more than 9 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls and more than half were from white, male-headed families. Two decades later, the number of white men in poverty or among lower income wage earners continued to expand. The estimate was that more one in five white males who voted in 2004 made less than $45,000 in household income.

The main culprit was always a big, bloated federal government that tilted unfairly in spending priorities toward social programs at the expense of head of household male wage earners and taxpayers, at least that's how the GOP politicians were able to craft the reason for the anger and alienation that many white males felt toward government and that translated out to even more fear anger and distrust of liberal Democrats.

McCain will again snatch this well-worn page from the GOP playbook, and do what every GOP presidential candidate has done going back to Reagan and that's tag Obama as a far out left liberal who's wildly out of touch with and even threatens blue collar white males. He'll endlessly cite Obama's moderately liberal voting record and statements on abortion, taxes, and judicial appointments. Republican strategists are rubbing their hands in giddy anticipation that the freshly minted "Hillary Democrats" (blue collar whites that traditionally vote Democratic) are very much in play for McCain.

The idea is to bag the blue collar white male vote, especially in the South, by reinforcing the deep suspicion of many conservative males that the Democratic Party is a hopeless captive of special interests, i.e. minorities, gays, and women, and that white men especially are still persona non grata in the party.

Hillary said it wrong but got it right about the hard working, white Americans that back her and not Obama. The supreme test for Obama is to prove that Hillary said it wrong and got it wrong. The West Virginia primary is yet another litmus test to see if he can.

The facts in the Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, of course, refute Limbaugh's hogwash claim. The polls consistently showed that Clinton would likely score a single to double digit win over Obama in these three states. Her core base of supporters, Latinos, rural and blue collar whites, and Reagan Democrats were solidly behind her. In Ohio she got an eleventh hour boost from an alleged memo that painted Obama as waffling on his opposition to NAFTA. That's a red flag issue to economically strapped Ohio workers.

In Pennsylvania nearly 2 million registered Democrats voted. Exit polls showed that out of that number roughly 100,000 voters or 5 percent of the overall number claimed that they changed their registration from Republican to Democrat. An equally small percentage of the Democratic voters said they were new voters or had no party affiliation before the primary. In any case, exit polls showed that the new voters, suspect Democrats or not, backed Obama, not Clinton, by a wide margin, and those that were openly admitted Republicans and that voted as Democrats split evenly down the middle between Obama and Clinton.

The number of new, and unaffiliated voters, and those that claimed to be ex-Republicans at least for the primary was simply too small to seriously say that they made a difference in Clinton's win, escpecially given the gaping margin that she beat Obama by in the state.

Now there's Indiana. Few paid much attention to Limbaugh's absurd blather about Operation Chaos before Obama lost the state by a narrow 14,000 votes. And even then Limbaugh's stunt might have been laughed off as another of the gas bag's ratings grab, that is until Obama backer, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, and some Team Obama staffers bought into his taunt and cried foul. And since Indiana is an open primary state, Limbaugh's boast seemed plausible.

But as always, facts have an irritating way of spoiling a good yarn, or in this case, a hokey claim. Even if we take the word of the roughly ten percent of the Democratic voters in Indiana who claimed they were Republicans, the percentage that went for Clinton was less than ten percent.

That hardly represents a Republican stampede to Clinton. If there was any rush to a Democrat by Republicans anywhere it was to Obama. He got the greater percentage of alleged cross over Republicans in seven of eight states he won according to exit polls. And he got them before Limbaugh allegedly sat out to make mischief by propping up Clinton.

Clinton eked out her win over Obama in the state not with cross over Republican voters but by beating him with the Democrats that she beat him with in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and even North Carolina and that's blue collar white voters who are Democrats and vote Democratic. In Indiana Obama's anchor voter demographic, blacks and college educated younger voters, made up a smaller percentage of the vote than in North Carolina.

By dignifying anything that comes out of the mouth of talk radio's champion huckster, Kerry and Team Obama do a disservice to the success that Obama's retooled stump tactics had in making the Indiana race closer than it could have been. He barnstormed the state through small towns and rural areas and touted a quasi populist working fellow's pitch and softened his image as a regular guy in photo-op stops. This helped take the spotlight off of the Wright fiasco, and bury for the moment his verbal gaffes about guns and religion that Clinton and the GOP giddily waved in the face of Pennsylvania voters.

Limbaugh declared and says that he's shutting down Operation Chaos. Why not? He worked this latest con job to masterful perfection. He got a legion of talking heads actually giving serious credence to his screwy boast. He got a ratings bump up. He got some Democrats who should know better to pay perverse homage to his supposed political prowess. And he further bolstered his stock as the GOP's main man of the airwaves.

Not bad for the guy that Franken branded a big fat idiot. Kind of makes you wonder just who the idiot really was in all of this.

So stay tuned for my column on this matchup, where Klitschko -- who holds a Ph.D., incidentally -- confesses that politics is much more difficult than boxing. He also uses his upbringing in a Soviet state to craft his vision of how the Ukraine really needs to embrace true democracy and knock out corruption.

(Klitschko, btw, lived in L.A. for a while -- all of his three kids were born at Cedars-Sinai.)

"Sadly, as we marked this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, 'never again' seems further from reach than ever. Jews continue to be targeted, be it in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or the repeated desecration of Jewish graves in Berlin. Holocaust denial has became accepted as legitimate thought in some circles and has become a foreign-policy talking point in the regimes of others.And when I, a gentile columnist, have written about the outrage of Holocaust denial, I've received far too many letters defending the deniers.

'Jews don't care about anybody but the Jews,' wrote one Canadian reader. '...Only a fool would trust a Jew to play fair with gentiles. ... They're laughing at you for falling for their lies. Don't be such a sap.'

Hamas is doing its best to stoke that disbelief in the true nature of the Holocaust, while fanning the flames of hatred for the Jewish people.

On April 18, Al-Aqsa TV - which brought Palestinian kiddies Farfour the martyr mouse and Assoud, the Bugs Bunny rip-off who vowed to 'eat' the Jews - aired an 'educational' program that accused Jews of perpetuating the Holocaust to weed out the weak among their ranks and simultaneously gain international sympathy.

This, of course, walks a fine line with Hamas' contention that the Holocaust never happened..."

Read the whole thing!

And if you want to be even more depressed, read the reader comments, which include this gem from a woman in Redondo Beach:

"Holocaust 'denial' is a misnomer. Nobody denies the Holocaust. Some people have noticed irregularities with some aspects of the official holocaust story and have raised questions. For example, why haven't the mass graves at the death camps been opened up to estimate the number of victims and see what we can find out about who they are or how they died? Why hasn't anybody demanded information about a relative they believe was murdered in one of the death camps? How exactly did the gas chambers work and how did they dispose of all the bodies?

All reasonable questions but instead of answers, you get called a bigot and anti-semite for asking them. For that reason, people will continue questioning the holocaust. It's not bigotry that leads people to holocaust revision, it's simply curiosity."

To which one reader from New York responded:

"Christina, I could not agree with you more. It's not bigotry to find the truth. The real bigots here are the stiff-neck mutated counterfeit jews that reasons with their own vile vehement that spews forth without intelligences, along with their brain dead following.."

Feeling truly ill yet? There was a positive comment over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to lift one's spirits (the last line cracked me up, anyway):

"I'm surprised the PI let Bridget Johnson's opinion on here.

The popular opinion on the far left is that the Jewish people and Israel are the root cause of all violence, poverty and hate in the Arab world. Without Jews, none of it would exist.

I'm sure they would have felt sorry for them as they were being cooked early in the late 30s, had they been around to see it, but now that they have recovered, prospered and are white and wealthy, they are a target.

Hamas could fry babies, and they do in a sense, and they would be the noble ones to the far left, because they aren't wealthy.

Keep the faith Bridget and if your letters smell of lattes and incense, save yourself some grief and throw them away."

Could one love L.A. any more???

Republican presidential candidate John McCain feigned fury at Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama for voting against the confirmation of Supreme Court justice John Roberts. This was not simply a cheap political shot at Obama, since Hillary Clinton, and 20 other Democrats also opposed Robert's confirmation. He didn't knock any of them. McCain had two reasons for slamming Obama. One, it's part of the openly boasted GOP attack strategy to tar Obama as a far out liberal pro abortion, gay rights, and tax and spend Democrat who's out of step with mainstream voters. The other reason is less transparent but much more crucial to McCain's seeming compelling need to reassure conservatives, especially Christian evangelicals, that they have nothing to worry about from a McCain White House.

How about a third option: McCain didn't hit Clinton or any of the other 20 Senate Democrats because he doesn't think any of them will be his opponent in November. Politicians don't usually waste their time chasing phantoms, and criticizing an opponent's views is hardly a cheap shot.

Then Earl makes two remarkably contradictory claims:

1. "(McCain) has been anything but the maverick, thumb his nose at GOP conservatives sometimes depicted when it comes to the prime evangelical litmus test of abortion."

and ...

2. "Despite McCain's occasional soft peddle of the high court's Roe v. Wade ruling, he once said that he'd let it stand, that never diminished his standing with a wide swatch of evangelical voters."

Earl's trying to have it both ways here, but it won't work. Either McCain is a party-line pro-lifer, or he's OK with letting Roe v. Wade stand. But it's simply impossible for someone to be both, when overturning Roe v. Wade has been the preeminent goal of the pro-life movement for the last 35 years.

Earl is right when he notes that McCain has work to do in persuading conservative Christians that they can trust him. But this is precisely because of McCain's record, not in spite of it.

This is pretty funny. At the very time McCain is trying to make up with conservative Christians for his differences with them, Earl and various Democrats are trying to convince liberal secularists these differences don't exist.

This is, I think, a remarkable endorsement, considering that I called the movie's tactics "nasty" and "unfair," and described some of its main arguments "a stretch" and "a cheap shot."

That Miller doesn't take offense to these descriptions suggest that I was right in my understanding of the movie:

Stein's film is part parody of, part rebuttal to, the crusading atheists who have risen to prominence in recent years - such as Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. And it employs the same nasty tactics they have perfected.

By the way, some have asked where they can find the video I wrote about in my column's lead. Here ya go:

This is the editorial, mind you, in which we all but called for the firing of said official's boss.

Someone alert the admiral -- a mutiny appears to be under way.

So only now that I'm back in town, do I have a chance to return to the blogosphere.

Anyway, my apologies for my absence, and my thanks to all the great bloggers here who have kept things interesting!

Republican presidential candidate John McCain feigned fury at Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama for voting against the confirmation of Supreme Court justice John Roberts. This was not simply a cheap political shot at Obama, since Hillary Clinton, and 20 other Democrats also opposed Robert's confirmation. He didn't knock any of them. McCain had two reasons for slamming Obama. One, it's part of the openly boasted GOP attack strategy to tar Obama as a far out liberal pro abortion, gay rights, and tax and spend Democrat who's out of step with mainstream voters. The other reason is less transparent but much more crucial to McCain's seeming compelling need to reassure conservatives, especially Christian evangelicals, that they have nothing to worry about from a McCain White House.

The constant buzz during much of 2007 and into 2008 was that a larger segment of evangelical voters than ever would be receptive to the Democrats. And with the supposed residual bad feeling many evangelicals had toward McCain, evangelicals would be less than thrilled to storm the polls for him. Even if they didn't vote Democratic, which was still unlikely for many evangelicals, a lackluster vote would be the same as a vote for a Democrat.
There are several glaring problems with that. One is McCain's actual voting record. He has been anything but the maverick, thumb his nose at GOP conservatives sometimes depicted when it comes to the prime evangelical litmus test of abortion. He opposed any federal funding for abortion, backed parental consent for abortion, and supported the ban on women in the military getting an abortion at an overseas hospital even if they paid for it. He enthusiastically backed Roberts and every conservative Supreme Court as well as the federal court judge Bush nominated. In almost all cases, the judicial nominees toed the GOP line in opposing abortion.

Despite McCain's occasional soft peddle of the high court's Roe v. Wade ruling, he once said that he'd let it stand, that never diminished his standing with a wide swatch of evangelical voters. McCain did almost as well with evangelicals in some primary states as short term GOP presidential contender Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who was regarded as being more in tune with their traditional views and beliefs. The reason for this is that the big majority of evangelicals are traditional Republicans, and are concerned about a wide range of public policy issues such as terrorism, national security, taxes, and smaller government. McCain reflects those views and their philosophy on these issues.

Some Democrats have talked wistfully about going after some evangelical voters. A couple of polls and surveys have shown that the younger ones are more concerned about poverty and global warming than abortion and gay rights and might be ripe for the Democratic pickings. The problem with that is the powerful and cohesive organizational structure of the flagship evangelical churches with their top down leadership. The Democrats would have to convince these leaders that they can work in sync with evangelicals, young and old, on such issues as poverty and war opposition, while not totally betraying their long standing support of religious tolerance, gay rights and abortion. That's a tough, if not impossible, political contortion for moderate and liberal Democrats to make.

McCain can also bank on political tradition. Conservative evangelicals have voted solidly for conservative Republicans for nearly three decades. A sharp reversal to back Democrats in the relatively short span of four years would require a total volte face, an almost superhuman political fete. It's not impossible but with the deep seated loathe of many evangelicals of Hillary as a walking religious sacrilege, and the knock of Obama as an out of touch lefty, only the most wishful thinking Democrats could believe that such a dramatic political transformation could happen.

The hard reality is that no matter how much saber rattling some Christian evangelical leaders do against McCain, they are still Republicans, and even the worst Republican by their standard is still heads and shoulders above a moderate to liberal Democrat, no matter how much some Democrats talk about their Christian beliefs as both Obama and Clinton occasionally do.

Though an embittered Focus on Family President James Dobson in 2007 loudly proclaimed that he wouldn't vote for McCain, it wasn't clear whether Dobson spoke for anyone other than Dobson. In the showdown between McCain and Obama or Clinton, Dobson and other disgruntled Christian evangelical leaders will move quickly to bury the hatchet with him. McCain will get a stamp of approval from Huckabee, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback whom Christian evangelicals like and respect despite his conversion to Catholicism, and all other political evangelicals. They have little choice. The prospect of losing the White House and the power and political dominance it represents is just too frightening a prospect for them.

McCain really didn't need to rap Obama for voting against Roberts to send the message that he's still the evangelical's go to guy. They already knew that.

Oh, and I don't wear a flag pin anymore. I did following 9-11, but this regime has trained me not to wear my love of country on either my sleeve or my lapel. Still, I am an American, love my country and therefore this week I took the president's words to heart and reluctantly followed orders, acceded to his request and did my duty.

Yes, despite the fact that there is nothing to watch on TV--except news, I took my wife's and my rebate check and bought a large flat screen Hi-Def digital TV. Mister President, I hope you're happy.

Instead of paying down long-term debt, I chose to do the right thing, my civic duty and give our shared economy the shot in its sagging butt that the president asked me to. I cannot live selfishly and must take into consideration not just my economic situation or desires but those of my fellow Americans. I understand that this economy depends on people spending money to buy things we don't need in order to keep people employed so they too can buy more things they don't need. After 9-11 the president said that the best thing for the American people to do to defeat the terrorists was to go shopping. Ok. If I'm now a Jonathan come lately to the cause, my wife, the Fair Helenkela, is a super patriot. She got the message, and was ready on day one. She has been spending us to prosperity.

I know that the Fed has been complaining that they bailed out a lot of financial institutions but too much of that money has gone to their reserves and not back into the economy. I know that the Feds are afraid that the people will also be stingy with the largess of our government, and we will save our money. Well, I'm here to tell you that I have joined a mighty throng in trying to set a good example and shaming those miserly banks, brokers and investment houses. No savings for me!

Now it's true that I don't understand how our system works. I'll just have to take it on faith that if we are broke as a nation, running huge deficits and borrowing money from China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (and by Gulf States, I do not mean Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama), the best thing for all of us to do is spend money like drunken sailors. (Sorry about that, you sailors--drunk or sober. Make that "drunken congressmen"). I further can't quite grasp how buying things will really help my fellow Americans, few of whom actually make any of the things we are likely to buy.

Knowing little about economics, I can't figure out how buying TVs made in China, electronics from Korea, and cars from Japan, fueled by oil from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (still not Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama) help with either our national or our personal debt.

But I'm tired of being a cynic, tired of being misunderstood as anti-American, so I'm joining in and doing my part. I'll spend till we are all economically in the pink. I'm now an optimist and filled with the audacity of hope.

The added benefit of my new-found patriotism is that I can now see on my 52 inch flat panel TV how bad BillO's complexion is, KeithO's heavy makeup and exactly how fake the CGI effects are when seen too closely. I know that true patriotism is not manifest in only one purchase. It is, like dieting, a way of life. Having climbed on the bandwagon, I'm in this for keeps. A big Hi-Def digital TV is worth little without theatre quality sound and a Blue-Ray DVD player. I'm on a path way beyond the amount of my refund and my rebate. But hey, this is the American way. Count on me to do my part. We all owe a great debt to this nation--just as this great nation owes a debt to China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. What we owe to our Gulf States of Louisiana. Mississippi, Texas and Alabama we have not begun to pay.

I often puzzle over the difference between bona fide libertarians and conservatives who pay lip service to small government. True libertarians seem intellectually consistent -- they don't believe that government is an effective mechanism for most things, so they seek to allow the free market and private enterprise to handle many matters; and they have reduced expectations for what they can accomplish overseas.

A distrust of government can be founded on a view that human folly, fueled by taxes, is a recipe for disaster. But such thinking often evaporates in the mind of the small-government conservative when our government begins to plan $50 billion wars that become $500 billion wars that are on their way to becoming $3 trillion wars.

We may need one qualification, though: If Bill Clinton says that we must send out troops, he's just a naive, big-spending nation-builder; if a Republican says that we must send out troops, he's a new Churchill, and all nay-sayers are latter-day Chamberlains.

So maybe it begins with us vs. them politics domestically, then becomes an us vs. them issue globally. And it could be summed up as, "it's not big, wasteful government when I'm doing the wasting."