So, here it is: I’m moving the blog to a new home, In3rds.com.

The reason is twofold: 1.) I’ve become increasingly interested in the ways culture, politics and media are intertwined, the ways they work together (and oftentimes against the interest of each) and what it says about modern American society. 2.) While WordPress.com offers a lot of great things, ultimately I decided it’s better to run my own thing, offering me more flexibility in design and hopefully offering readers the best features possible.

You’ll notice, at the new site, that I’ve added a “Share This” button at the ends of posts; this is in case, someday, I write something you might actually be interested in sharing with your social network of choice. StumbleUpon, Digg, MySpace, Facebook and more are supported, and it’s all done with a simple click. I’m also hoping, in the future, to recruit a few particularly observant and articulate people to add their thoughts.

For now, expect the same frequency of posting that you’ve come to expect… Shelley made me promise not to let the new project get in the way of family life and running a fledgling business.

Oh, and make sure to update your RSS feeds (delete the old one, and click on the coffee cup in the upper-right corner of the new site).

Big news coming soon. Stay tuned…

Because they twist words into utterly unrecognizable pretzels of B.S.

Double demerits for camp McCain… is this how he plans to bring “change to Washington”?

1.) Lipstick on a pig

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new “change” mantra.
“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”
“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink.”
“We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

Camp McCain says Obama called Sarah Palin a “pig,” and is of course a rabid sexist. Ambinder puts the lie to this, noting that McCain himself used the phrase in a similar way while describing Hillary Clinton’s health care ideas.

2.) Sex ed???

This has to be the worst misrepresentation of the year. Really.

Basically, the ad links Barack Obama with sex-ed for kindergartners.  It implies that Obama favors teaching these kids dirrrty, explicity, sexual things. The bill … was intended to sanction the teaching of basic boundary lessons to young children, as in: if someone touches you or makes you uncomfortable, tell an adult. Those who oppose this believe that parents ought to be the ones imparting those lessons, so it’s not entirely a non-issue.

But the gap between the implication (Obama has liberal, radical views about sexuality) and the reality in this ad is pretty big and fairly consequential. [bold mine—R]

McCain should fire whoever made the ad, whoever sold him this line (I can’t believe he’d approve it if he knew what it actually referred to).

1.) McCain gets swiftboated!

(longer version VodPodded at left)

2.) You knew it was coming: The Wright sex scandal

He almost wrecked Barack Obama’s presidential dreams, and now firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright has helped destroy a Dallas church worker’s marriage – and her job, The Post has learned.

Elizabeth Payne, 37, said she had a steamy sexual affair with the controversial, racially divisive man of the cloth while she was an executive assistant at a church headed by a popular Wright protégé.

When word of the unholy alliance got out, Payne’s husband dumped her, and she was canned from the plum job at Friendship-West Baptist Church, she told The Post.

Full article here.

3.) Obama talks up Palin’s cool factor!

Palin’s bio is “compelling,” Obama said.

The crowd booed. “No, it’s an interesting story.” More boos. “No, no, it is. I mean that sincerely. Mother, governor, moose shooter.”

The crowd broke out in laughter. “That’s cool. That’s cool. That’s cool stuff,” Obama said.

From Ben Smith’s blog.

This article by conservative stalwart David Frum in this week’s New York Times magazine dovetails nicely with some socio-economic reading I’ve been doing lately. The full text is here.

In short, the trend to (economic) inequality is real, it is large and it is transforming American society and the American electoral map. Yet the conservative response to this trend verges somewhere between the obsolete and the irrelevant.

Conservatives need to stop denying reality. The stagnation of the incomes of middle-class Americans is a fact. And only by acknowledging facts can we respond effectively to the genuine difficulties of voters in the middle. We keep offering them cuts in their federal personal income taxes — even though two-thirds of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes, and even though a majority of Americans now describe their federal income tax burden as reasonable.

What the middle class needs most is not lower income taxes but a slowdown in the soaring inflation of health-care costs. If health-insurance costs had risen 50 percent rather than 100 percent over the Bush years, middle-income voters would have enjoyed a pay raise instead of enduring wage stagnation. John McCain’s health plan, which emphasizes tax changes to encourage employees to buy their own insurance rather than rely on employers, is a start — but only the very beginning of a start.

Blogging, if it happens at all, will be light for the next week or so as I work toward a move to my own site, which will enable me to add more features. If you haven’t subscribed to my RSS feed, please do so now by clicking the RSS link at the top left. That way you’ll know when I’m back up and running.

Headed home for the night, I stumbled upon this very even-handed and relatively encouraging (from a Christian perspective) profile of Sarah Palin’s faith in the New York Times. Given my last post on her, I felt it only fair to include this.

Interviews with the two pastors she has been most closely associated with here in her hometown … and with friends and acquaintances who have worshipped with her point to a firm conclusion: her foundation and source of guidance is the Bible, and with it has come a conviction to be God’s servant.

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson thinks he knows (and I’m inclined to agree):

In this campaign, McCain’s story is an epic novel, while Obama’s personal experience is an inspiring article from Reader’s Digest.

Let me warn you: You are about to embark on a conversation that a.) will make most non-Christians angry, b.) will make many Christian women angry, and c.) is politically incorrect in the strongest terms. But, if you share my faith in Christ and his father’s words, read on. (If not, please forgive me this spiritual time out. My usual everyman approach will return shortly.)

Daniel Larison pointed me to this discussion at his excellent blog, Eunomia. But let me offer some background.

There is a magazine called Chronicles. It is unabashedly Christian, and its mission statement contains the phrase “defend(ing) Western Christian civilization.” Here, you will find the editor’s evaluation of the Palin phenomenon (I urge you to read the whole thing, but only after you read through this and comment thoughtfully); it includes this deep and thought-provoking paragraph:

If Ms. Palin is a truly a Christian conservative, she is certainly not a conservative Christian.  Christians are supposed to understand the implications of “male and female created He them” and, at the very least, realize that a mother’s primary obligation is not to the taxpayers but to her children and husband.  It is all very well to celebrate her prowess as a politician and moose-hunter, but I do not recall these as feminine qualities in the Scriptures. I or we are not saying that we cannot vote for a woman who did not stay home to take care of her family, but only that this decision is incompatible with traditional Christian morality. [bold mine—RJ]

Now, even for a conservative Christian magazine, this takes some guts to write. (It wasn’t so long ago that Shelley and I were pretty well ostracized at our relatively Biblically-conservative church for simply asking some tough questions when the elders decided they wanted to change the constitution to allow women to serve as elders.) And, as early as May or June, is was probably a notion that you could hear in the sanctuaries of a great many politically conservative churches, railing against the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. This week, though, I have not encountered a single fellow Christian who expressed any concern over the idea that a woman might be elected vice president.

Why such enthusiasm? Partly, I think, because McCain is such an uninteresting, uninspiring, ultimately DULL candidate — but one whom staunch conservative Christians, convinced that it cannot possibly be OK to vote for someone who favors abortion rights but disfavors uninitiated military action (which lives are we “pro”?), were going to hold their nose and vote for anyway. Now, we think, we don’t need to hold our noses, but simply point them in Palin’s direction: Staunchly pro-life, with her five kids (one with Down’s, God bless her) and her appropriate credentials on those essential Christian conservative tenets of taxes and judges and earmarks and such.

But what does this say about our votes? That they are bought SO easily, bought with a mere phrase (“sanctity of life” — which, we must note, has not brought any solace to any aborted children, nor their poor mothers, nor brought any significant changes to abortion rates or the impetus behind such a tragic decision). We are the ultimate sellouts, if this is our motivation to vote for a particular party, regardless the circumstances. And what have we gotten in return? A lousy economy, a misbegotten war, a supposed “faith-based initiatives” program that was pure politics and an utter sham. Abortion rates, meanwhile, have increased under President Bush; his Supreme Court appointees both testified before Congress that they felt Roe v. Wade was now a “super-precedent,” meaning they’re not about to overturn it (are they sinful pro-choicers, or pro-life liars?).

But back to my main point. At my church, at least (a great PCA plant called Grace & Peace), I feel safe in saying that not one member would favor a woman being named as an elder — or, God forbid (and he does), a pastor. Yet willing to put a mother of five a heart attack away from being leader of the free world — a leader who, we say, should be a “spiritual man person” and who we think MUST be pro-life? It just doesn’t jibe.

If you’re so concerned about voting pro-life, vote for Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin or just sit the thing out. But to cast a vote against the legalization of a sin (many others are just as legal) that the Bible never explicitly mentions, while going against the centuries-old standard set forth clearly in scripture, is absolutely senseless.

P.S.: I do NOT advocate sitting out elections simply because neither candidate fits all your Christian proscriptions.

Charlie Neibergall/AP
John McCain makes his way through Hurricane Palin on Thursday night at the RNC.

“My friends,” we knew most of this going in.

John McCain is not a great orator. John McCain’s body language is awkward. John McCain’s attempts to rally the base seem unconvincing, while he seems most at ease when talking of bipartisanship and “reaching across the aisle,” which the base is not too interested in. John McCain’s campaign is just not good at backdrops — he was back in front of a lime green sea once again Thursday night, months after being mocked incessantly on the cable outlets for a similar scene.

But, then again, John McCain’s not your average politician, and he doesn’t need to be.

Seldom has there been a more stark difference in styles: Barack Obama’s cool, laid-back attitude and utter mastery of cadence; McCain’s stilted but (dare I say it?) straightforward speaking style and his obvious grasp of the seriousness of his task. And this speech was no different: The biggest rounds of applause he got all night were when he mentioned Sarah Palin, and later when he was joined onstage by Sarah Palin.

His speech, like hers, was relatively short on policy — and unfortunately, in my view, the policy he did offer often sounded like Republican boilerplate (“Education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century” is almost word for word from Bush circa 2000) — but it was candid, and lighthearted, and certainly helped to reinforce the idea that this is a man of CHARACTER. It’s hard to imagine someone telling you all about their POW days (especially after it was told by others constantly over the course of three days) without seeming boastful or arrogant, but he did. In fact, it was the best part of the speech, I think… it doesn’t give you a good reason to vote for him, but it at least gives you the sense that if he wins, it’s going to be OK.

Where Obama is too cocky, McCain seems a little too comfortable dealing in generalities (tax cuts are good, health care reform is bad), but I was thankful he’s stopped quesitoning Obama’s patriotism and instead shifted to why people should invest their time FOR McCain and not against Obama. Yet his was a speech urging people to vote AGAINST something: Against “Washington,” a “culture of corruption,” a “do-nothing” Congress and politics as usual.

Two very different men, two very similar messages — and one overarching question: Can either of these guys really change the system — and will they?