Last night was last night, and it's all there was, and it's all there is. There isn't going to be anything more between us.

Life is pretty good (though busy.) There are only three things making me bang my head on my desk today: politics, religion and sports. Other than those small things I haven't a care in the world.

With regards to politics the Lieberman vote yesterday by Senate Democrats has me seeing red. There are tons of theories as to the thinking of Reid and company to why they let Lieberman keep his chair. Many are willing to write it off simply to Senate collegiality. Others point to Ted Stevens' loss and the growing probability of hitting the magic 60 senators number (although the idea that Lieberman, not to mention Blue Dog Democratic senators, will vote the right way when is counts is beyond absurd.)

Personally, I subscribe to Jane Hamsher's opinion that the Democratic Senate just gave the base of the party the middle finger. Putting the base in our place after we all worked so tirelessly and donated so much to seeing Democrats increase numbers in the Senate and House and win the White House was the entire point of the Lieberman exercise. We can't let the moonbat rabble thing we're beholding to them or anything. They're sending us the message to not expect ANYTHING out of them even with Obama in the White House.

Yeah, well fuck you too Senator Reid.

While I'm on the subject of messages; many Catholic bishops are sending their flock the same message in light of the election results. 54% of Catholic voters went for Obama and these bishops are not happy.

Chicago Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is preparing a statement during the bishops' fall meeting that will press Obama on abortion.

The bishops suggested that the final document include the message that "aggressively pro-abortion policies" would be viewed "as an attack on the church."

Between the direct involvement of the church of LDS in the passage of Proposition 8 in California and the growing direct involvement of big churches in endorsing similar measures and candidates around the country I'm starting to feel a little victimized here myself.

We subsidize these churches through their tax-exempt status. I don't have a problem with that and consider it wholly constitutional. But when churches are engaging in the types of political advocacy we've seen lately, they're crossing a church-state line. Essentially they're taking my money and using it for something that, as in the case of Proposition 8, I violently disagree with.

Church leaders- take your tax-exempt status and shove it up your ass.

College football sent president-elect Obama and fans of the sport a message yesterday when the BCS signed a deal to move the broadcast of the bowl games from Fox to ESPN for the years 2011-2014. Besides the fact that this is a giant rasberry aimed at fans who don't subscribe to cable the real news here is this effectively locks in the stupid BCS system until that contract expires six years from now.

The end of the ESPN deal coincides with the date — 2014 — through which the B.C.S. commissioners have agreed to keep their current championship system in place. The commissioners met last April and considered a playoff proposal by Mike Slive, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, but voted against it and put off considering any changes until the end of the next television deal.

I can't think of any other sport where fans consistently root for the thing to go FUBAR so we can get rid of it as they do in college football with the BCS.

Dear BCS- message recieved. Now kiss my ass.

I think that's enough outrage for today.

They say he has grit. I wanted a man with grit.

I was trying to figure out why this debate over the democratic debate this week was leaving me so bummed-out. I've always considered that these sorts of arguments over the candidates are the very essence of democracy. That's certainly the first thing that drew me to the democratic party many years ago.

I guess the first thing that I find off-putting is the concentration on Clinton's gender as a point of contention for both sides. We should first ignore the fact that the fact that Clinton's a woman as a question of governance should really remain the province of the Republican party flat-earthers and not something progressives should be arguing about. Republicans are really the guys the miniature units that should be threatened by a female president. On this side of the aisle we shouldn't need to compensate.

With this in mind I find it more than a little offensive that any Clinton supporters would resort to gender framing to defend Clinton in her debate performance a couple of nights ago. In presidential politics the person leading in the polls is going to take the most hits in a debate with the other candidates. That's the simple political reality and has nothing to do with what position the candidate takes while peeing (I'm personally fond of the "leaning drunkenly against the wall of the police station position" myself.)

I don't want Hillary Clinton to be the democratic candidate for President. I've said it many times and remained more convinced of that position as the campaign has progressed. She's not alone, however, on the list of democrats I don't want to see nominated. All of the declared candidates are less than inspiring IMHO. Obama, Edwards, Dodd, Richardson, etc. leave me flat.

In 1984 when I was just a pup when it came to politics I went and saw Jesse Jackson on a campaign stop in his own run for the presidency. I'll never forget that speech. I remember distinctly how he started out slowly, speaking in an almost monotone voice. I was initially disappointed and wondered if Jackson was really the firebrand he'd been portrayed as on television.

Jackson slowly became more animated and changed his cadence until, by the end of the speech, he was essentially preaching to the crowd. We went nuts. We were on our feet screaming our agreement as he ticked of problem after problem that Ronald Reagan had failed to address and how we could do better. My favorite line was when he said he'd take "Franklin Roosevelt in his wheelchair over Ronald Reagan on his horse any day of the week." I left that rally exhilarated, full of hope and convinced that politics could be used to changed the world for the better.

What Americans are screaming for is this kind of leadership. The vast majority of us want the war in Iraq to be brought to an end. We want the the problems of health care and inequity to be addressed. We want action on global warming. We want America's role in the world, as a partner not a bully, restored. We want hope.

I don't give a rat's ass about the gender, race, sexual orientation, religious orientation or whatever the hell else even progressives seem to be debating as qualifications for the presidency. We have real problems. Until a candidate can give me that kind of hope I and millions of others crave then I refuse to give them my attention or my support.

They will all suffer for this outrage.

I'm with Jane.

Jabba has no business on Armed Forces radio.

Well, I guess it just goes to prove that you never really know a man until the chips are down and you need him the most.

No matter what one's feelings are on abortion today's USSC ruling can't be seen as anything but contemptible. The standard of what is and isn't necessary medical care should be set by doctors. Not insurance companies and definitely not politicians with alternate agendas. It is absolutely absurd that congress - Republicans and Democrats - passed this ridiculous law and it's equally absurd that the conservative members of the court chose to continue play political games rather than do their god damned job.

This is why elections are important and even an affable clown like Bush should have been kept out of office in 2000. It's also another example of Joe Lieberman and the Gang of Fourteen should have been tossed out on their collective asses. The effect of their muddling, directionless centrism is not moderation. It's conservative extremism run amok.

La-hoo-sa-her.

Should there be any doubt as to the mental makeup of the typical right-of-center blogger I'd encourage you to run over to firedoglake and read Kevin K's awesome guest post on the subject. The whole thing had me alternating between bits of hysterical laughter and shaking my head at the inanity of the bedwetting little losers. Just a taste:

I didn’t really follow the explosion of bedwetting blogs post-9/11 because I was too busy languishing in my pre-9/11 NYC liberal mindset, but apparently the blogosphere was flush with dorks in crouched-down, defensive positions who pecked away at something they called "warblogs." These, ahem, "warbloggers" (must … stop … tittering) thought they were at war and no amount of fear of Blogger’s registration process and/or HTML interface was going to get in their way to fight the good fight. They were G.I. Jonesin’ for some seriously manly cutting ‘n’ pasting as they bravely stormed the frontlines of HyperText Transfer Protocol. And some of them, primarily "9/11 Republicans" and alleged libertarians, were so addicted to the notion that "everything changed after 9/11" that they discarded large, important chunks of their belief systems because they figured the "everything changed" doctrine applied to their very beings as well. A few of them have circled back to reality and well-earned rounds of raspberries, but a substantial number still cling to what are becoming increasingly razor-thin threads of dignity, and generally when you take it that far, you never come back because, let’s face it, it’s really, really embarrassing to do so. The Roger L. Simons and Charles Johnsons of today are the ex-lefty David Horowitzes and Michael Savages of tomorrow, except, as Pantload Media has proved, we don’t ever have to worry about Rog and Chucky being anywhere near as popular, successful or influential. Or handsome.

It’s been funny watching nutter bloggers cheer on Iraqis for standing up to terrorists when it’s quite evident that guys like John Hinderaker and Hugh Hewitt clearly wouldn’t have the balls to do the same in a similar situation. If you put Hinderaker in a scenario where white supremacists had taken over his perfectly-named hometown of Apple Valley, Minnesota and were setting up IEDs around town and blowing up shit at random, a teary-eyed John would be the first one out of his house waving a white dress shirt and bellowing in desperation, "I’m on your team!" before collapsing on his well-manicured lawn in a puddle of urine. Hewitt, for cripes sake, has to be heavily sedated and diapered before he enters the Empire State Building, which he seems to believe is a bullet-strewn frontline in the war on terror (like Sadr City, but taller!), with its spine-tingling Skyride and elevators stuffed with fanny-packed tourists in ESPN Zone t-shirts. I mean, for all of the chest-thumping-and-puffery these proud patriots do you can’t help but notice through their squeals of store-bought muscular bravado that a majority of them are pinched-up, picked-last-in-dodgeball mega-dweebs. We’re talking central casting material for the remake of Revenge of the Nerds, except in this version they just read Drudge and Instapundit all day and curl into a ball every time they get within 20 yards of an Arab or one of the Satellite Sisters.