Free Republic

Flexing their political muscle, members of MoveOn.Org plan to hold a virtual town hall meeting April 10 to question some of the presidential candidates about the war in Iraq. ...“This event will give real people a chance to ask presidential candidates tough questions about Iraq, the most important issue of our time,” said Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org Political Action’s Executive Director. ...So far, Senators Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), as well as former Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), have each agreed to be available for the question and answer session. But 10 percent of MoveOn members must first say they...

MoveOn.org argues that the vicious hate speech that were posted by its Action Forum members does not make MoveOn itself a hate group, because the hate speech does not represent official MoveOn.org policy toward Jews, Catholics, Evangelical Christians, or Black people. A strong argument can be made, however, that MoveOn.org’s welcoming such hate speech in a forum over which it exercised editorial control does in fact make it a hate organization. Wikipedia provides the following definition: "A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates hate, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, religion, gender or...

...it didn't take long for a conservative watchdog to glean through the 24/7 postings of the two bloggers and come up with the sort of sound bites that leave teeth marks on a campaign. There was McEwan's description of Bush's "wingnut Christofascist base." There was Marcotte's slam on the Catholic prohibition on birth control as a way to force women to "bear more tithing Catholics." Within days, the two women resigned from the campaign and returned to the briar patch of their blogs.

The imbroglio began in late January when John Edwards' presidential campaign hired two liberal activists to promote the candidate on the campaign website. Almost immediately, it was discovered that the activists – Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan – had previously, and routinely, made intensely anti-Christian posts on their personal blogs. Marcotte used extremely profane and vulgar prose mocking core Christian theological beliefs, joked about aborting Jesus and suggested Christianity was "misogynist mythology." Meanwhile, McEwan – perhaps channeling Rosie O'Donnell – frequently referred to Christians as "christofascists." ...In the end, Marcotte and McEwan resigned from their posts (with the campaign's "reluctant...

Click here.Brilliant piece, and no foolin’ about the language. You’ve been warned.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Thursday he was personally offended by the provocative messages two of his campaign bloggers wrote criticizing the Catholic church, but he's not firing them. Edwards issued a written statement about the fate of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, two days after the head of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights demanded they be fired for messages they wrote before working on the campaign. The campaign distributed written apologies from the two women, who stressed they were writing on personal blogs and not on behalf of the campaign. Edwards said he believes...