...the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website takes the phenomenon [auto-correct] one step further with its AP articles. The far-right fundamentalist group replaces the word “gay” in the articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

That means — you guessed it — the track star was renamed “Tyson Homosexual.” The headline on the piece read, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”

Don't let Steve Schale fool you, just because he looks like the kid who won the spelling bee, in wire-rimmed glasses and rumpled khakis. Or because Tallahassee is the biggest city he's ever lived in. Or because he lists Eagle Scout on his résumé.

Recently tapped to lead Democrat Barack Obama's presidential campaign in Florida, Schale may be the savviest Democratic operative in the state.

He helped his beleaguered party do something it hadn't done in more than 20 years: pick up a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. Under his steady hand, Democrats netted nine seats in the past two years.

Statewide, the latest polls show Obama with a slight edge over Republican John McCain, foreshadowing a knockdown, drag-out fight in the nation's largest battleground state. The Republican Party has already begun trying to undermine Obama among the state's Hispanic and Jewish voters, and it's easy to picture attack ads questioning his stated willingness to meet with hostile governments in Cuba and Iran.

Schale, 33, is a Southern gentleman who hasn't been in the trenches for very long. But he'll likely have more money, staff and volunteers at his disposal than McCain's team -- "the largest and most comprehensive organization that my side of the aisle has ever seen in Florida," he said. His allies warn: Don't let the nice-guy demeanor fool you.

"Steve does best when people take him for granted," said former state Rep. Doug Wiles of Jacksonville, who gave Schale his first job in politics. "I would never want to be on the other side of him in a campaign. He's very competitive, very focused and very driven."

Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans in Florida, but the state has voted only twice for the Democrat in a presidential race since 1976. Partly to blame: clumsy coordination with the presidential campaigns and a second-rate operation of turning out voters and absentee ballots. The man who ran John Kerry's 2004 campaign was chief of staff to New Jersey Sen. Jon Corzine and had never run a race in Florida.

In contrast, Schale is the resident scholar of the Florida Democratic Party. A Southerner from North Florida, Schale has spent his entire career helping Democratic candidates, from a sixth-generation farmer outside of Gainesville to a retired firefighter in Little Havana, run against the Republican tide.

Call Schale up in the middle of the night and no doubt he could rattle off voting trends in Okaloosa County.

As much as any place in the Arab world, Dubai is a symbol of modernization and change. It's a bit over the top, to be sure, with an artificial ski resort, man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree and rococo hotels with make-believe canals and Arab castles. What's likable about Dubai is that, as a boomtown, it's a city that's "too busy to hate," as was said a generation ago of Atlanta.

What? See, when people are kept busy by capitalism and disney they are "too busy to hate" so presumably all those other countries where they have free time to hate, or to fire mortars at occupation forces, or attack the allies or whatever? Its because they are just plain lazy and under-occupied. If only they had good jobs and rococo hotels and stuff in Iraq, or an autocrat to make them show up at those jobs and clean those hotels, there'd be no insurgency at all. The Iraq war, the enmity of the Arab states towards Israel, is really just a failure of capitalism and the resulting discontent, not an expression of it.

aimai

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

[...]

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership--Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections--were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of ambiguity, duality and ferocity in Unity.

Just as Hillary was testing out the unfamiliar familiarity “Barack and me” Friday and talking about “his grace and his grit,” Carmella began loudly booing and waving her sign.

“We want Hillary!” screamed the 57-year-old retired ad saleswoman and Clinton delegate.

“It’s over, lady!” yelled some Obama supporters a few yards away.

Standing between the Sharks and the Jets, David Axelrod took pity on an older friend of Carmella’s who was suffering from aridity in the Unity humidity. The chief Obama strategist fetched a glass of water and brought it to the woman, who was wearing five Hillary buttons.

This amenity did not stop the disunity. Carmella and her friends continued to cry, “Nobama!” “We love you, Hillary!” and “We need Hillary!” as Barack Obama sat onstage on a stool behind his former rival, his finger studiously at his lips.

Carmella was not impressed with all the kissing, laughing and whispering that Hill and Bam were diligently doing for the cameras, so that the moment could produce, as Obama press aide Robert Gibbs put it on “Larry King Live,” “a great picture.”

When it was Obama’s turn to speak, Carmella announced loudly, “I wish I had ear plugs.” Then, as Obama tried to ingratiate himself with the Hillary partisans in the crowd by saying that because of the New York senator, his daughters “can take for granted that women can do anything that the boys can do and do it better and do it in heels,” Carmella put her fingers in her ears.

As Obama tried to curry favor with Hillary, looking over at her sensible, sturdy shoes and marveling, “I still don’t know how she does it in heels,” Carmella tore up a tissue and stuffed it in her ears.

When Obama pandered with a line about how he wouldn’t “perpetuate a system in which women are paid less for the same work as men,” she put her hands over her tissue-stuffed ears.

“Maybe she’d like what she heard if she listened,” sighed Axelrod.

When Obama talked about moving beyond “all the petty bickering,” as Hillary robo-nodded at his side and CNN’s Candy Crowley applied pre-broadcast lipstick above her, Carmella glared at people applauding.

Gregory: “Hello, Susan. While we are talking about the prospect of nuclear terrorism, which is what is behind the concerns of North Korea and Iran. I have a broader question for you and really for Senator Obama. Why is it, does he believe that America has not been attacked in this country by terrorists since 9/11? And does George W. Bush, President Bush deserve credit for that?”

Rice: “I think what we have to acknowledge, David, that we haven’t been attacked but we are nonetheless less safe as a sequence of the policies of this administration has pursued. Our standing in the world is at an all-time low. Al Qaeda is more dangerous now in Afghanistan and Pakistan than it has been. Our intelligence community is warning they are reconstituting and more deadly to U.S. forces than Iraq.”

Labels: aimai, hope, whilestevewasout

Last week, the Center for American Progress Action Fund released a new report by Michael Ettlinger estimating that under McCain's tax plan, he and his wife, Cindy, would save $373,429. That's nearly $400,000 -- per year, not over the course of their lifetimes. (Under Barack Obama's plan, the McCains would save less than $6,000. The Obamas would save nearly $50,000 under McCain's plan, and slightly more than $6,000 under Obama's plan own plan.)

By the standards the media applied to Edwards, the fact that McCain supports tax policies that would save him and his wife nearly $400,000 a year -- and require massive cuts to public services to pay for those tax breaks -- should surely be news. Unlike the media's focus on Edwards' wealth, which did nothing to help voters understand the substance of his proposals, McCain's potential savings under his tax plan actually would help illustrate how much the wealthy would benefit from the plan.

h/t Media Matters and Atrios

Does it strike readers as somewhat odd that the Dems who screech at the very mention of the word gun would be backing a candidate who threatens to use one in a fight?

Or how about the fact that he stole that line from Sean Connery in "The Untouchables," which is from Chicago too, come to think of it.