Nuggets of internet gold:

• Nancy Hanks at The Hankster has a thing or two to teach the Obama administration about independent voters.

• MyCue at RANDOM THOUGHTS is unimpressed with President Obama's new clay feet. Who's afraid of big, bad Massachusetts?

• The Vigil's Vigilante doesn't much care for Obama's new role as Mr. Freeze, fulfilling the campaign promises of John McCain.

• Conservative James Wigderson has conservative thoughts about problems Democrats have with the politics of health care. Wigderson provides a perpetual demonstration that conservatives can write well.

• Jack Jodell, friend of the working blogger, has an angry piece at THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON POST about the wordless Republican response to the State of the Union.

• Gwendolyn Barry with New Global Myth likes the truth telling done by Rachel Maddow. Turn off the playlist before watching the video.

• Manifesto Joe of Texas Blues mourns the loss of a great author, J.D. Salinger, Joe's fellow misfit.

• Max's Dad notes the loss of a great author who is not J.D. Salinger.

• Chuck Thinks Right deplores atheists who oppose a US stamp that honors Mother Theresa. Chuck is on a roll. He get's it right again.

• Slant Right's John Houk notes the slaying by US forces of another al Qaeda terrorist. He doesn't mention the Obama administration's aggressive policy, but you can't have everything.

• A new reason for denying the evidence about catastrophic climate change: Ned Williams at WisdomIsVindicated notes that terrorists believe in global warming. No, I'm not making it up.

  Ned, poor Ned. You were doing so well.

• The World of Doorman-Priest finds and deplores occasional hostility toward refugees and denial of climactic causes of tragedy.

• David Everitt-Carlson of The Wild Wild East Dailies in Munich turns out to look a lot like David Bowie. Lucky him. I look like the illegitimate offspring of Kojak and Uncle Fester's sister. Beware automatic music on your PC speakers.

Have a safe weekend. Pray for those who suffer. Be careful out there.

This political ad is actually being run in New Orleans by a convicted tax felon now running for coroner.

Basis: The Coroner's office was once allowed by law to permit hospitals to claim bodies for organ donation in cases in which no next of kin was found. The coroner's office was not paid for this. The law was changed years ago.

Power corrupts, begins the old saying. But an alternate temptation, I think, is associated with ideology. The quest for victory carries its own siren call. Over the years, I slowly developed a grudging empathy with the Watergate criminals. I completely agree with the condemnation by such luminaries as the late Stewart Alsop, who contrasted that Republican dirty tricks campaign with the OSS, and declared it to be outside the realm of politics. "They were making war, special kind of war," he wrote. "The kind of war they were making has been made between nations for a long time now, but it has not before been made within a nation, certainly not within this nation."

The special form of warfare waged by OSS against Adolf Hitler was morally justified by the moral necessity to destroy Nazism...(but in) the internal American political process...Any person proven to have used these techniques should not only be punished by the law; he should be banned forever from participation in American politics.

Yet I could see how an ambitious, committed individual could be tempted. More than that, I could see myself drawn in, if the circumstances were right. My thoughts were reinforced in the final months of the Reagan Presidency, as Oliver North testified, defending his own criminality. Add a North type charisma to the mix, and I would have been doomed. Following that fellow to the dark side of the moral universe would have been hard to resist.

So it is hard for me to work up the passion to equal that of others at the arrest of James O'Keefe, who until Monday was a folk hero to conservatives. O'Keefe was the undercover dirty trickster who, hidden camera in hand, tried to convince employees of ACORN that he needed money to expand a prostitution ring. One employee ordered him out. But he would not give up. Another listened, then, after he left, called the police. Eventually, O'Keefe put together enough material to make it look, with some creative editing, as if ACORN was encouraging pimps to apply for federal funding. Conservatives were thrilled. An organization that not only helps poor people, but encourages them to vote, was discredited.

O'Keefe, a young and impressionable man, was apparently so intoxicated by his newly adoring fans, he needed more. He has been arrested and charged with federal criminality for, depending on the source, attempting to wiretap or sabotage the phones in the offices of a United States Senator. Fox News, which gave hours of coverage to the ACORN video, now seems to have forgotten their initial fascination with O'Keefe. They have accumulated 4 minutes and a few seconds so far.

We are human. We are sinners. Many of us can rejoice at having escaped the soul robbing temptations sponsored by the darkest forces of American political life.

... Watergate has been an attempt to alter the very nature of the ancient American political system. Politicians have played tricks on each other since politics was invented. But this is not politics, this is war.

 - - Stewart Alsop, conservative Republican columnist, September 1973

Don't Ask Don't Tell seemed like a good compromise at the time. It is an idea whose time never was. President Obama is right to want its demise. Opposition to gays has been emotional, often hate filled, and almost always irrational. It is difficult to reason with those whose position is not based on logic, evidence, or common sense, but rather on cultural disapproval.

The court debate over the California anti-gay-marriage initiative has not been a showcase of constitutional reasoning. Instead, myth and superstition have been introduced as if factual. Opponents have unwittingly revealed themselves to be ignorant of even the most basic factual truths.

Recently Richard Socarides, a one time adviser to President Clinton on gay issues, wrote about evolving attitudes toward gays. “People understand that our military needs every talented American it can get, and that excluding gays from the military detracts from our ability to win wars.”

Most people also understand that we are long past the point where our military personnel need to be reminded about appropriate behavior on duty, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Men and women serve side by side today in combat, as do gay and straight service members, without incident.

Comparison of the plight of gay people with that of other historically oppressed groups sometimes draws ire. Occasionally, a commentator will object to the comparison of people who were enslaved several generations back with a sexual life style. The obvious answer is that human rights should not require winning the oppression Olympics. What is identical is not the degree of suffering, but rather the quality of the arguments of bigots.

But the most prominent argument against Mr. Socarides comparison takes a different turn. Conservative activist Elaine Donnelly first dismissed Socarides opinion on this basis: "Well, Richard Socarides, the author who is open and professed as a gay person, seems to think that the LGBT faction rules the world." She then attacked the idea of women in the military. They were the cause of the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, along the same lines that Eve was responsible for Adam's eating the forbidden fruit. "It started out as misconduct between men and women and then it steadily deteriorated into abuse of prisoners," she said. "...Once you break down discipline, good order and discipline and morale, everything that’s required for unit cohesion, you undermine the culture and the strength of the armed forces. This man obviously doesn’t get that." So much for women in the military.

The interviewer, Frank Gaffney, did not let Ms. Donnelly's argument go without comment. "Which they perceive, Elaine Donnelly, if I’m not mistaken as a vehicle for, sort of a backdoor way, imposing it on the rest of society." Hard hitting, that Gaffney! Such is the quality of opposition to gay equality.

One should no more deplore homosexuality than left-handedness.

 - - London Yearly Meeting. Home Service Committee, 1963
     Towards a Quaker view of sex : an essay by a group of Friends

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about being trapped in a flash flood with an elderly friend as I drove her to church. The car was lost, and we were rescued by workers at a nearby gas station. "My friend complained bitterly at the damage to her expensive shoes and the loss of her umbrella," I wrote. "Folks in pain do not want to hear that it could have been worse. Desperate people are outraged by even the best excuses."

My friend was obsessed by trivial concerns, only dimly aware of the fate we had been spared. I had not intended to trivialize the panic experienced by folks who lose their jobs, or the hardship that awaits many. But a fair minded reader could easily have read that implication into my comparison.

A few months ago, I defended Representative Nathan Deal (R-GA) after he made an unfortunate reference to "ghetto grandmothers." The context was the key. He was proposing that proof be required of citizenship for medical care. It reflected a harshness toward immigrants. But he was expressing concern for the elderly poor who might lack such documentation. There was no intentional offense. My vote was to give him a pass.

A Republican Congressional representative a while back told a cheering crowd that the country needed a new Great White Hope to defeat President Obama. A spokesperson later said she had not been thinking of race, but rather about the bright luminaries within the GOP. She had no history of race baiting. So I suggested we take her at her word.

Some episodes do grate. Every few weeks some major figure in the GOP makes headlines with a racial slur, or a broadly racist joke. The First Lady has been compared with a gorilla, the President has been portrayed as a half clothed witchdoctor, and the Obama children have been targets.

Andre Bauer, the Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, came under some criticism recently. He compared poor people to stray animals. "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals," he recalled fondly. "You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

Time constraints, impulse, or (in my case) limitations of space, can cause us to abbreviate our thoughts, with unintended verbal consequence. People get offended, and rightly so. That is why heartfelt apologies should be accepted at face value whenever they are reasonably plausible.

Lieutenant Governor Bauer has also apologized. "I never intended to tie people to animals," he says. He talks fondly of taking in a stray cat, feeding it, loving it. He points out that he has raised money to protect animals. He is "not against animals," he says. As with others, we can take his regret as genuine. He does seem sorry at having offended any four legged creatures.

"Hunger can be a positive motivator. What is wrong with the idea of getting a job so you can get better meals?"

 - - State Representative Cynthia Davis (R-MO), June 4, 2009
     On why school children in poverty will do better if they are not fed