Churches on both the left and the right are getting more and more involved in the political process. That isn’t a bad thing (as long as the churches on the left win). The United Church of Christ is offering a new web site on how churches can become involved in the political process and still adhere to IRS laws for non-profits. Churches cannot, for example, endorse political candidates and maintain their tax exempt status. Yet churches can endorse ballot measures or reversely urge their congregants to oppose measures. Visit Our Faith, Our Vote and learn how your congregation can become involved in Election 2004.

thanks to jj of cookies in heaven, we find this washpost story about the administration flunky who accidentally left his notes and phone log from his office at the defense department on a table at a dc starbucks:

did you hear the one about the guy at starbucks? no? okay. a guy walks into the starbucks at connecticut avenue and r street nw on sunday to get his favorite latte, and sits down at a table.

on the table, he spots four pieces of paper. one is stationery with the heading “office of the secretary of defense,” and right under that “the special assistant.”

it has a penciled map of directions from the pentagon to defense secretary donald h. rumsfeld’s house in northwest washington. another sheet says, “eric’s telephone log.” someone has written “conf. call” at the top and some notes, some in partial shorthand, on one side. these apparently were taken by eric…

our good citizen, no dummy he, concluded these were significant papers and should be turned over to the appropriate people. so that would be the pentagon or the white house?

oh, no. he turned them over to none other than that most left-leaning think tank, center for american progress, headed by none other than former clinton chief of staff john d. podesta.

you can download these papers for your own perusal at cap’s website.

we pretty much ran all over blogtopia (yes! we coined that phrase!) this morning announcing that air america radio was not airing in los angeles at 9 am real time, which would have been simultaneous (what we in the media call “live”) with the 12 noon airing on the east coast.

as two spanish dj’s introducing “funky town” and “hotel california” graced our los angeles radio at 1560 am, we listened to the live feed coming out of san francisco’s kabl. our opinion of al’s debut comes a bit later.

however, later in the day, we tuned the radio into the los angeles affiliate kbla at shortly after 12:30 pm. and what did we hear? a taped delay of the o’franken factor, pretty much the exact same thing we heard a few hours earlier.

now, this is troubling. los angeles has got to be the second biggest market in the air america radio network, yet the shows are coming to us three hours after the fact. we don’t need to point out that this is going to be very bad for any radio call-in listener interactive format that they would want to promote.

we don’t know who is in charge of scheduling, but we can assure you that if we can’t get to an internet connection to hear air america radio live, we probably won’t be tuning in. the three hour tape delay, along with kbla’s poor signal that we can barely pick up on our boom box, makes it hardly worth our while. it makes no sense how san francisco, in the same time zone as los angeles, can carry the feed live, but the los angeles radio cannot. it made us want to listen to “hotel california” in spanish.
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A poll conducted by Gallup last week shows some interesting results in the wake of the Clarke news. I’d say it’s premature to know what effect it will have in the long term (I expect a slow erosion), but even at that, the findings are instructive.

On terrorism, his support has slipped among Democrats and Independents, which is bad news for his re-election. I don’t need to remind you that he won the election by getting a half-million few votes than Gore. If he loses the battle outside his base, he loses the election.

Handling of Terrorism (Percent approving), Dec 7, March 28
Republicans: 93%, 93%
Independents: 64%, 49%
Democrats: 42%, 26%

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