Cross-posted at Clintonistas for Obama.

I really wish the VRWC would make up their minds already.  Last week, it was the terrorist fist jab. Today, he's bad a Christian, this smear, via the Dr. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family. Dr. Dobson resurrected a 2006 speech by Senator Obama on the need for progressives to reach out to people of all religious faiths, including the traditionally Republican evangelical Protestants:

But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of "thou" and not just "I," resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.

Here is the offending passage:

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.

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BREAKING NEWS: Blumenthal Uses Former Right-Wing Foes To Attack Obama

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-drei er/sidney-blumenthal-uses-fo_b_99695.htm lSidney

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For my own general amusement, I'm compiling a list of right-wing sources used to attack Barack Obama by Democrats. I'm certainly not violating the site guidelines or trying to call out other diarists. I love you, other diarists! I'm just laying out some amusing facts for you folks. The following sources were used as unbiased authorities on Obama. They were used with no apparent sense of irony:

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Update: I have received an email from another credible source that insists that Jordan Lieberman was never an Associate at Alexander Strategy Group, and that it was a typo made by the American Association of Political Consultants once, in 2004. Also, Lieberman resigned from the Publius Group January 2002. The source further claims that that at that time there were no partners in the group, although some claim otherwise--Chris

Last summer, I wrongly accused PoliticsPA and all PoliticsXX sites of being funded by the Claremont Institute, a major arm of the right-wing noise machine. When it came out that I was wrong, I think I was listed as the "loser of the week" on PoliticsPA three out of four weeks in the late summer. It was a little embarrassing, but not really that embarrassing, because the entire incident did result in nearly every local progressive blogger to stop linking to, and even reading, PoliticsPA. That caused a very real downturn in their traffic at the time. I'll gladly exchange that for a personal loss of credibility within the Pennsylvania political establishment.

Even though I was wrong, the incident was revealing to me on a number of fronts. First, it brought the insider / outsider dynamic within politics to the forefront of my attention, an idea that eventually led to what I think is my useful activist class war formulation. It served as an object lesson that made it patently clear to me how severely those individuals well-ensconsed in the power structure of any political establishment, be it national, state, or local, would guard their power when faced with the rising tide of grassroots, outsider, reformer activism. In time, that has become even more clear to me, given the struggles to replace the ward leaders we have faced in my neighborhood, the legal challenges to people running for committee person we have faced in the city, the Philadelphia Democratic Party organizing "to battle the bloggers on their own turf", and a whole list of other, uglier crap that I'm not going to go into here (here is the tip of the iceberg, read Young Philly Politics regularly for more).

Second, the incident also revealed to me the total market failure for local news in America, especially local political news. During the incident, I talked with a number of people who worked in local and state politics, and they indicated that while they thought something odd may or may not be taking place with the funders of the Publius Group, it didn't really matter to them. PoliticsPA was the only news outlet that provided the sort of up to date, detailed information on Pennsylvania politics, and so they were going to keep reading it until another outlet came along to do the same thing. In short, even if the right-wing noise machine was behind these local sites, it was still providing a unique service invaluable to local political activists and operatives. It thus also became obvious to me that any properly done vast left wing conspiracy was going to need to match and surpass these efforts in order to do real damage. In a total market failure for local news, progressives could step in and create active, solid local blogospheres to fill the void and counter the Republican Noise Machine at a local level.

So even if I was wrong, the experience was extremely useful to me. However, new information from commenter NJprole has appeared that suggests I may not have been that wrong after all

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