Obama gets his just desserts:

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Obama's anti-gay religious right activist used the opportunity Obama gave him last night to preach his hate to thousands of African-Americans. That's just great. And the white preacher who Obama picked to help explain to the audience that gays aren't minions of Satan? CNN reports that he said nothing at all - just a short little prayer, then he left. As for Obama, he did a taped introduction in which he praised McClurkin, the religious right activist, as one of his favorites. That's nice, because the way to help combat homophobia in the black community is to make sure the gay-basher is first endorsed by someone as high-ranking as Obama, who then chooses to say nothing about the gay-bashing.

The San Francisco Chronicle today features the sad story of Kurdish-American auto mechanic Hamid Sayadi. It's an example of what happens when reason gets left behind in our post-9/11 world.

A witty and eloquent Kurdish-American in his 50s, Sayadi waved the flag of his adopted country and cheered its military for three decades — all to end up stripped to his underwear one day, in the boiler room of his workplace, he says, a ragged and sobbing husk of his former self.

The workplace was New United Motor Manufacturing, called NUMMI. It's the largest auto manufacturer in Fremont, Calif, building both GM and Toyota vehicles.

He was a passionate supporter of the US military when it invaded Iraq -- but to his co-workers at the plant, he says, he was just "Ali Baba" and a potential terrorist. The harassment got worse and worse until one day he snapped.

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James Carroll in the Boston Globe provides a decimating assessment of Rudy Giuliani. The theme:

Where the world once looked toward all that Giuliani embodied with admiring compassion, today it flinches.

Why? Here are some choice quotes:

COULD THE United States actually elect as president a Yankee fan who has been rooting for the Red Sox? A father whose own children would boycott his inauguration? A husband whose first wife was his cousin and whose current wife can't remember how many times she married? Could the United States, for that matter, elect a cross-dresser? The Rudy Giuliani surge would be comic if its broader implications were not so grave.

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The New Eagles album, Long Road Out of Eden, releases tomorrow. Only at Wal-Mart. Why Wal-Mart? Keep reading, I'll explain in a bit.

It's their first album of new songs in 28 years. Some of the themes sound familiar. Instead of "Life in the Fast Lane" there's "Fast Company." Henley and Frey wrote it for their daughters. It's about peer pressure.

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In a report released today, the American Bar Association is calling for a moratorium on executions in the U.S.

The ABA studied the death penalties in 8 states. It found:

• Spotty collection and preservation of DNA evidence, which has been used to exonerate more than 200 inmates;
• Misidentification by eyewitnesses;
• False confessions from defendants; and
• Persistent racial disparities that make death sentences more likely when victims are white.

It's conclusion:

"After carefully studying the way states across the spectrum handle executions, it has become crystal clear that the process is deeply flawed," said Stephen F. Hanlon, chairman of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project. "The death penalty system is rife with irregularity."

I'll update with a link to the report when it's available.

How do you stay enthusiastic after three big losses in a row? I can't. What do I conclude? The Red Sox play better baseball.

It's hard to call the Rockies 21 game winning streak a fluke. Maybe they just choked with the national attention and hoopla over their getting to the series at all. Woody Paige in the Denver Post writes:

What are you going to do? The rest of the country is amused. We must laugh, too....And the really good news: We still live in Colorado.

The game is only in the 5th inning and the Rockies could win tonight. But that might just prolong the agony. On the other hand, there's something to be said for positive thinking.

Go Rockies!

So Barack Obama is going to go after Hillary Clinton now. Umm, what took him so long? Anyway, this part bothered me:

[Obama] accused [Clinton] of “straddling between the Giuliani, Romney side of the foreign policy equation and the Barack Obama side of the equation.” He said that she was trying to “sound or vote” like a Republican on national security issues and that that was “bad for the country and ultimately bad for Democrats.”

Very true. But what about trying to sound like a Republican on social issues? What about all that appealing to "values voters" that Obama does? We all know about Obama's willingness to attack Democrats in front of "values voters" and this statement is ominous:

Mr. Obama suggested that she was too divisive to win a general election and that if she won, she would be unable to bring together competing factions in Washington to accomplish anything. “There is a legacy that is both an enormous advantage to her in a Democratic primary, but also a disadvantage to her in a general election,” he said. “I don’t think anybody would claim that Senator Clinton is going to inspire a horde of new voters,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic that she is going to get a whole bunch of Republicans to think differently about her.”

But they are going to like the way Obama panders to the "values voters?" Excuse me Senator Obama, it will be good to see you draw sharp distinctions with Senator Clinton on certain issues. But how about you drawing some distinctions with Republicans on other issues? Your Joe Lieberman imitation on "values" is a serious problem.

Thanks to talking "sources," details of a Seattle grand jury investigation into alleged rape allegations against magician David Copperfield are available for the world to see.

The story: A 21 year old woman attends a Copperfield show with her family. Almost as soon as they enter, they are ushered to the front. Copperfield has her come onstage to be a part of the show.

He invites her to his private island in the Bahamas, assuring her there will be other guests. There were no other guests, she says.

When the woman, 21, made the trip in late July -- after exchanging e-mails with Copperfield, 51 -- she found herself the only guest on the island with him, she told investigators. She has told Seattle police, and later the FBI, that Copperfield raped and struck her during her two days on the island, said sources familiar with her allegations.

She said that, afterward, Copperfield threatened her, telling her she'd better keep quiet, and then escorted her onto a plane, sources said.

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New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has given in to the feds and agreed to water down his plan to grant drivers' licenses to undocumented immigrants.

Now, there will be a three-tier system with the undocumented getting licenses that make them prime targets for state and local law enforcment officials who want to turn them over to ICE for removal.

The licenses for the undocumented are the equivalent of a scarlet letter.

“What a huge political flip,” said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “He’s now embracing and letting his good name be used to promote something that has been widely known in the immigrant community as one of the most anti-immigrant pieces of legislation to come out of Congress,” Ms. Hong said.

She said having separate licenses would amount to a scarlet letter for illegal immigrants. ....”The separate licenses could also serve as an invitation for law enforcement to arrest anyone carrying one on immigration charges, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She added that the new proposal could send illegal immigrants further into the shadows, compelling them to drive with forged or no licenses and without insurance.

Wasn't it just last month that Spitzer said: "The D.M.V. is not the I.N.S."?

The Washington Post devotes 3 pages on the burgeoning cocaine trade in Venezuela.

It sounds like a low-budget version of Scarface. The drug kingpins are in cahoots with the Venezuelan military officers. The blame is given to Bush:

The Bush administration's dismal relations with Venezuela's government have made matters worse, anti-drug agencies say, paralyzing counternarcotics cooperation.

Venezuela did cut back on U.S. intervention efforts, but here's why:

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Despite chiding from John McCain and the pulling of federal funding this week, the Woodstock Museum will go forward.

In recognition of the war protests today, this clip is Country Joe and the Fish, Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag.

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This is the front page of today's Rocky Mountain News (larger version here.)

Will the home team advantage kick in? I hope so. Game updates at the Colorado Rockies website and MLB.com

Go Rockies!