There’s a line somewhere in Mel Brooks’ second-best movie, Blazing Saddles, about "horn-swoggling cracker-croakers."

This WaPo story tells of "voting problems" in 10 states: "The report by Electionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on Election Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules."

In a post whose title tracks Steve’s (with a somewhat different intent, however), MOJ’s Rob Vischer points to an interview with Nancy Pelosi. Says she:

Q: I think the issues that brought you into politics were the environment and also choice. [You had] five children in six years, a Catholic background. . . Was embracing choice an issue with your family?

Pelosi: To me it isn’t even a question. God has given us a free will. We’re all responsible for our actions. If you don’t want an abortion, you don’t believe in it, [then] don’t have one. But don’t tell somebody else what they can do in terms of honoring their responsibilities.

Says Vischer:

I’m not even sure where to begin. In the world according to Pelosi, whether abortion should be legal "is not even a question." We should not outlaw abortion because God gave us free will. (Under that logic, could anything be prohibited by law?) We can effectively register our moral opposition to abortion by not having one. And honoring responsibilities is an inescapably self-defined endeavor.

Financial columnist Jim Jubak notes that prospective Democratic replacements for key House Republican committee chairman might not make environmentalists’ hearts go aflutter:

But Barton’s likely replacement [as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee] would be John Dingell, D-Mich., a fierce advocate for the U.S. automobile industry. In other cases, the effect of the change is easier to extrapolate. Pombo’s likely replacement as chairman of the House Resources Committee would be Nick Rahall, D-W.Va. Can you say "coal," boys and girls?

E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes about the "radical center," which he thinks may comprise a portion of a new Democratic majority. As he describes it, those who are part of sound to me a lot like the Perotistas of the early 90s. I can’t imagine that they’d coexist comfortably with the netroots.

Then there’s the WaPo/ABC News poll, which shows independents favoring Democrats. But look at the actual results, not what the reporters wrote about. Note, first of all, that it’s a "registered voter," not a "likely voter," poll. Note, second, that trends in voter enthusiasm favor Republicans, not Democrats, and that those who favor Republicans are actually favoring Republicans, whereas a substantial portion of those who favor Democrats say that they’re voting against Republicans. Sounds kinda Perotista to me.

Third, the numbers on Congressional disapproval and on approving of one’s member of Congress are, predictably, reversed. What’s more, the levels of approval of one’s member of Congress are significantly higher than in 1994 (51-38 in the final ’94 poll, as opposed to 62-32 among registered voters now).

Here and there one can see Democratic paranoia that somehow, either Karl Rove will pull a rabbit out of a hat, or, more likely, Democrats will find some way to blow it themselves. Harold Ford crashing Bob Corker’s press conference in Tennessee last week looks like an unforced error. And then there’s this ad in Missouri, with Michael J. Fox trying to lay a partisan guilt-trip on voters. Was this focus-grouped? Seems likely to backfire to me. I wonder what the NLT focus group thinks?

Jay Cost calls himself a "methods hound" and on that basis has a "methodological critique" of some who talk of a GOP "meltdown." Almost Greek to me, but not quite.

USA Today provides Heather MacDonald with yet another venue for her critique of religious conservatism, which I’ve discussed here, here, here, and here.

A couple of new thoughts from Mac Donald with Knippenberg responses:

President Bush says his belief that "God wants everybody to be free" informs his foreign policy. This declaration is disquieting, for it means that the president’s war-making decisions are not wholly amenable to worldly evidence. Even if the Iraq adventure were to appear to human minds as patently counterproductive, reversing course would violate a higher mandate.

That "God wants everyone to be free" clearly doesn’t imply that it is always and everywhere my duty to bring freedom to everyone. There is room for prudence, informed by reason and evidence, to respond to this sort of demand. And of course, what GWB has repeatedly said is that freedom is God’s gift to humanity, which at most affords us a principle for evaluating regimes and for informing our action, rather than supplying an imperative that we must fulfill, posthaste, here and now.

And there’s this:

Conservative atheists and agnostics vigorously support the two-parent family because the life chances of children raised by both their biological parents are demonstrably superior to children raised by single mothers. Moreover, when marriage disappears as a community norm, so do civilizing constraints on male behavior. It doesn’t take Bible study to see this. Conservatives do not need God to prove the value of marriage; the sad state of the inner city is testament enough.

As a matter of public policy judgment, she’s right, but people don’t choose to get married (or not), or divorced (or not) in response to public policy judgments. Those judgments might lead us to create some incentives and disincentives to inform these choices, but lots of people take their vows seriously because of the setting in which they made them (and I’m not thinking of city hall or the Elvis wedding chapel on the Strip in Vegas).

E.J. Dionne, Jr. reviews this book by Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Hout, which purports to complicate our view of conservative Christians.

One example of how the complications work: did you know that lots of African-Americans are conservative Christians, yet they hardly vote in overwhelming numbers of Republicans? If the authors and reviewer mean to say that thee’s no straight line between theological affirmation and political position, I agree wholeheartedly. But let’s at least look for what might the factors are that might be complicating the relationship. And let’s not lose sight of how those factors are present or absent in other conservative Christian communities.

And how about this?

[C]onservative Protestants were marginally more likely to watch PBS news programs daily than other Americans-with the exception of those who say they have no religion, who watched at about the same rate. “If one finds the temptation irresistible to picture all ‘Jesus people’ as religious fanatics,” Greeley and Hout write, “one should picture a fifth of them glued to PBS stations every evening.”

Without knowing more, this doesn’t tell me anything. How are they watching? What else are they watching? Is this a rejection of network news, or is it just preparation for the nature and cultural programming that follows?

And, finally, there’s this:

Interestingly, the authors report that conservatives were “more likely to admit infidelity in the course of a marriage than were Mainline Protestants.” On this point, they choose to depart from the data to make a moral point. “We wondered in passing why the leaders of the conservative denominations, so eager to denounce threats to the institution of the family, seem disinclined to criticize these relations (about which they claim to be ignorant), which are either fornication or adultery by their own moral standards,” they write. “Homosexuals, it would seem, threaten the family but not infidelity or living in sin.” Greeley and Hout are right to call our attention to this moral inconsistency.

Jean Bethke Elshtain takes on AS, skewering him even more elegantly than David Brooks, to whose review I linked here. Finding AS full of simplifications and distortions, she observes:

These distortions and simplifications occur because Sullivan cannot hold doubt and truth together within a single frame. Those who can are not, perforce, fundamentalists. The fundamentalist mindset is quite different, emphasizing rigid moralisms rather than claims to moral truths and norms.

John von Heyking called my attention to this, from former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s memoirs. Bush, according to Schroeder, is a religious fundamentalist, with whom there can be no conversation, just like the fundamentalist elements in the Muslim world.

But, he assures us elsewhere, his criticism of the Bush Administration doesn’t make him anti-American, "[o]therwise, half of US society would be as well." Do you think that the no-holds-barred domestic criticism of the President has licensed these sorts of public statements from foreign figures? And the interviewer from Der Spiegel points out, Schroeder is more tactful regarding Putin (effectively his employer) than he is regarding GWB.