Dawg, baseball, white evangelicals, Iraq.

First off - the dawg is feisty and her spirit has healed in advance of her body. This means we have to slow her down to recover; doggie valium? The leg bandage comes off tomorrow - she had a cyst removed there.

I was hanging with some dudes tonight and one of them was bitching about the new Twins stadium, which is a travesty of public monies going for private profit - and the rich get the view and the bleachers get screwed. What's new?

So the guy says that the line between home, the pitcher's mound, and second base has to be north by northeast. I've spend two whole minutes trying to confirm this, but I can't. So we'll roll with it. So this means that the new location, right next to the garbage burner, gives the cool view of downtown to the rich boxes, and the shitty view of the garbage burner to the bleachers. "All the mercury and crap will drop on everyone, though, so it's OK." he says.

Juan Cole at Informed Comment has this to say about the collapse of the Bush base - southern white evangelicals.

In the past 30 days, support for the Iraq War among white evangelicals has fallen from 70 percent to 58 percent.

These numbers matter because evangelicals are a quarter of the people who actually bother to vote, and 78 percent of them voted Republican 2 years ago. Only 58 percent say they are satisfied with the party now, and Iraq and the Foley scandal are driving the discontent...

The only explanation of which I can think for the general collapse of this pillar of War party is that the political contests in mid-Atlantic and Southern states are generating television ads, candidate appearances and debates that highlight the catastrophe that is Iraq--and it is getting through to the church-goers at long last.

Mostly political discourse in the United States is dictated by the ruling party in Washington, and the mass media and press are most often nervous about getting out in front of the elected officials. But in an election season, the press is suddenly allowed to cover at least a narrow range of dissident views intensively-- that is, the views of political opponents of the incumbents. Since the vast majority of incumbents in the mid-Atlantic and Southern states are Republicans, the upshot is that a Democrat point of view is suddenly getting aired and reported on. And the Dems are mostly pretty critical of Bush's Iraq War.

Pretty cool. The article covers more, so I recommend you read it (it's short-ish).