Twenty years ago, as a 34-year-old grad student at Pat Robertson’s farm for churning out fundie nutbags, Regent University, McDonnell wrote a master’s thesis charmingly titled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade” (those grad students, they sure love them some colons in their paper titles!). In it he trumpeted all the tired hash those hacks always go on about: contraceptives shouldn’t be legal for unmarried people, women should be in the homes raising kids (seriously, no shit!), gays should have no legal rights, blah, blah, blah.

Unfortunately for him, Virginia’s pretty purply these days, and he’s been trying to appear kind of moderate, but this ain’t gonna help. To be fair to him, it sounds like he’s come a few steps out of the 4th century, considering one of his daughters fought in Iraq and both have master’s degrees, but the article I read didn’t say nothing about whether they have JOBS or anything.

Anyway, he’s already put the smooth spin on this, trying to turn it around on his democratic challenger, some guy named Creigh Deeds, but we’ll see how it goes for him. The other guy who posts here probably ought to say something about this, since he lives in that state and all.

Imagine this scenario: a 17-year-old Christian girl starts a Facebook friendship with a Muslim family in another state. After the girl has a fight with her mother, she runs away to that Muslim family (let’s say about 900 miles away) where she takes up residence and says that her father will kill her if she goes back home. The Muslim family insists that the Bible calls for killing a child who disobeys (hey, see Deuteronomy 21:18), so they are duty-bound to not return the child to the parents. In the meantime, the child’s parents insist they love their child and have never threatened her. But also in the meantime, the governor of the state in which the Muslim family lives says he’s committed to protecting this child and will put the full weight of the state’s power behind that commitment.

Implausible? Sure it is. That Muslim family’s home would be surrounded by gun-toting Christian yahoos before you could burn a Koran. Oh, and there’d be some Koran burning, too. Glenn Beck would shed tears and express his terror for the girl’s soul, and Bill O’Reilly would ball his fists and talk about how he’d personally kick the asses of the every Muslim in this great country before he’d let this girl be brainwashed. And presumably the government would come down on them like a whirlwind.

But, on the other hand, make that a Muslim girl running away to a Christian family, and you’re talking Florida reality. Riqfa Bary, 17, ran away from her family after a fight with her mom from Columbus to Orlando to live with the crazy reverend Blake Lorenz, head of the Global Revolution Church (which believes that the end times are upon us,  that the red cow coming into Israel portends the beginning of Armageddon, and other retarded bullshit). Lorenz and his nutbag Jesus-fuckers insist that the girl will be honor-killed if she goes back, despite the fact that the Bary family is from Sri Lanka (hardly a home of hard-core muslims, historically) and seems pretty secular. The girl is an honor student and cheerleader, and as local Orlando columnist Mike Thomas opined, it’s unlikely that a father who would allow his daughter to wear a cheerleader outfit in public regularly would be the type to kill her.

Anyway, the girl was remanded to a foster family by a judge, and we should find out on Sept. 3 what will be done. Charlie Crist will try desperately to hide his homosexuality and general moderateness by continuing to offer to defend the girl if the judge insists she’s to be sent back, and the yahoo blogosphere will explode in crazy indignation if that happens. If nothing else, it will be fun to watch. But it’s sad to know that there are parents back in Columbus who probably miss their daughter terribly and are unlikely to get anything like a fair shake in this whole mess.

PS–I’m back, bitches!

PPS–Fuck you, Christian wingnuts!

Mr. Kiffin surely thinks he has brass balls: he’s got a hot model wife, he’s coach of a major program at 33, his dad is the great Monty Kiffin, formulator of the Tampa 2 defense and now his defensive coordinator. When ol’ Lane was hired at UT, at his first press conference he barked about looking forward to singing “Rocky Top” all night after beating Florida. Well, you know, I’m sure Urban Meyer didn’t sweat that one too much; after all, a new coach needs to fire up the faithful a bit. But Meyer’s a pretty intense and bitter motherfucker, and I suspect Urban filed that one away to wave like a red cape in front of Tim Tebow on September 19, the day the Gators hook up with the Vols in the Swamp. But still, no real biggie.

But that wasn’t enough for Lane. This morning, in front of a crowd of UT boosters, he suggested that a phone call that Meyer made during the open contact period of recruiting to former Gator commitment Nu’Keese Richardson while Keese was visiting with UT coaches was a recruiting violation. (It’s not). Quoth Lane: “I love the fact that Urban had to cheat and still didn’t get him.”

After being called out by UF Athletic Director Jeremy Foley for stating a falsehood and slandering Meyer, and after being formally reprimanded by SEC kingpin Mike Slive, Kiffin apologized this evening.

But the damage has been done.

A little advice from a Gator, Lane: don’t fuck with Urban. He’s going to want to beat you badly enough without you poking at him. But I’m guessing that you just rocketed to the top of his list of things to do. And I can picture Timmy and Brandon Spikes pushing each other through bench press reps or stadium repeats by hollering your name at one another. Seriously, dude, you just entered the SEC East: the nastiest shark tank of hyper-driven little fascist coaches ever assembled. Spurrier, Richt, and Meyer are just waiting to torch your ass, and Rich Brooks and Bobby Johnson aren’t slouches. And keep in mind that the Great Satan, Nick Saban, and his ridiculous recruiting classes, are on your annual schedule, too.

I’m sure your players will appreciate your big mouth when Tebow is still throwing deep routes with 90 seconds left in a 73-3 game. And one last suggestion: keep Nu’Keese off the field if you want him to be available past his second college game.

So why do I feel so underwhelmed by all this? Out of all the people I watched it with, I surely donated way more money to the campaign, and only one other person there did any canvassing like I did (though mine was a paltry two days’ worth right before the election). Shouldn’t I have been clapping and standing and misty-eyed and such?

Nah. I was willing to do a lot to get Barry elected, but the Hopey-McChange rhetoric can’t help us now that he’s in. I’m no pie-in-the-sky optimist. He’s facing some of the biggest difficulties any president has since FDR, and the lovefest will die out pretty fast when tough choices get made. And keep in mind that we elected a guy who’s a little too conservative for my tastes: note his opposition to gay marriage, willingness to sabre rattle with Pakistan, etc. I mean, douchebag-driven Rick Warren delivered the invocation, and I snickered when he said something about loving all the people on earth (you know, except those gays, the love for whom should be displayed by sending them to some place where reading the bible can cure them of their unnatural lusts).

Yeah, yeah, I know–he has to do these things to triangulate and get elected, but hey liberals: don’t be too sure that he doesn’t actually believe in some bearded, sandal-wearing, Caucasian god and hold other views that don’t match yours. Still, this doesn’t mean he’s not a damn far sight better than anyone we’ve had in that office since I’ve been alive. He is. But don’t let the ground hit you too hard the first time he legislates against something near and dear to you.

And really that’s as it should be. For years the Heisman has been about gaudy offensive numbers. That’s why uninspiring players such as Andre Ware and Ty Detmer and Eric Crouch have won. Timmy’s reward is in Heaven, aka the BCS Championship Game.  What are your thoughts and predictions, o readers?

Our latest evidence is the (so-far) unattributed memo sent to Senate Repubs urging them to vote down the auto bailout package. It contained three bulleted suggestions, including this one:

This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

If there was any doubt among any sentient beings that the decision the Repubs made has no relation to what’s best for the country, this memo eliminates it. Their vote was purely based on an effort to take a shot at unions and hurt a key Democratic constituency. Union-bashing works for the GOP in many places, of course, where non-union people have allowed attention to the (sadly, real) corruption in some of the very biggest unions (UAW, SEIU) to lead them to ignore the VERY NECESSARY protections and comforts offered to workers by unions. The auto companies helped the Repubs by not fighting the nonsense “Auto union workers make $73/hour! They need a pay cut!” arguments they levied against line workers, not explaining that that number included their retirement, health benefits, and group pool payments into one big number and then divided it by the number of workers. Given that kind of calculation, the assistant manager at your local Burger King makes $35/hour. It’s bullshit, and they know it.

The Bushies’ efforts to gut worker safety and other OSHA provisions, coupled with the Repubs’ desperate fight against card check and any other methods of organizing that give workers a better chance of coming together to protect their rights and pay, show that class warfare is always alive and well in this country, but it’s almost always the upper class making war on everyone else. Try it in the reverse direction and you’re a SOCIALIST (not a designation this author, obviously, would resent, but which still amazingly carries a taint in our mentally ill society).

Using tax money to rescue automakers from their ridiculously bad business models disgusts me, but the alternative (potentially up to three million lost jobs, the collapse of the economy in many of the Rust Belt states, bands of cannibal Michigan State fans howling through the woods of the Upper Peninsula) is certainly worse. How ironic that W. and Dick see the need to do this bailout, recognizing that whatever shred of a chance they have to not be seen as the men who completely ruined this great country rests on their ability to get this bailout done.

Alabama Crimson Tide: you bitches is on notice–we’re coming for you next week, and you can’t shoot all of us after the game!!!

Also, Barry the Uniter needed to not have his party going all tribal and stringing up dissidents, so I’m sure his public two cents suggesting no punishment for Lieberman mattered. But Barry came from Chicago’s hard-core political scene: I can assure you that he has Lieberman firmly by the short and curly hairs, and Joe knows it. The next time Barry needs something from that committee, I bet he gets it. The evidence was all in Joe’s fawning and thankful comments about Barry, and his mewling apology for the things he said about him on the campaign trail.

I’m still one of those ancient holdouts who doesn’t really mind the current system that much. I’m not fully against the idea of a playoff if  indeed a way is found to do it that maintains some lower bowl structure and fairly includes the truly best teams (not as easy as it sounds). But you’d have a hard time convincing me that the best team didn’t come out on top in the last five years. The last time a team that had no business winning got over was probably Ohio State in 2001, and even then the problem wasn’t that they were in the game but that the ref boned the ‘Canes with his late bullshit interference call. Anyway, when Barry starts pushing for the playoff, I’ll be standing athwart him for the first time.