Four years ago at the Southern Baptist Convention, the Bush-Cheney campaign held a reception for pastors right across the street. At this year annual meeting, held this week in Indianapolis, the Republican nominee’s campaign is nowhere to be found. The SBC’s outgoing President Frank Page sees that as a good thing:

“I have admonished—lovingly but firmly—our convention not to get too close to any political party. Parties change. I think we need to stay close to issues, and not hold allegiance to political parties.”

According to the Associated Press, Southern Baptists are “warily waiting for McCain to inspire them” on the issues. But they acknowledge that they’ll likely vote for him anyway, now that Sen. Barack Obama, “far too liberal for most Southern Baptists,” is the Democratic nominee.

A study released this week by Calvin College’s Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics confirms that evangelicals will most likely vote for McCain. The survey, which was taken before Obama was declared the nominee, shows McCain winning 59 percent of the evangelical vote, just six points below where President Bush was at the same point in the campaign four years ago. The study also indicated that 10 percent of evangelicals plan to sit the election out this year, about the same number as in 2004.

Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission, told AP:

“What I hear from people is, ‘John McCain was not my first choice, John McCain was not my second choice, John McCain was not my third choice. However, I would rather have a third-rate fireman than a first-class arsonist.’ And they view Obama as a first-class arsonist.”

In other news from the SBC:

• Johnny Hunt, pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., was elected the SBC’s new president on the first ballot.
• Delegates, or “messengers,” approved a resolution condemning the California Supreme Court’s recent ruling on gay marriage and supported the upcoming vote on a state amendment to overturn it. The resolution also called for a federal constitutional amendment that would define marriage as being a union between one man and one woman.
• Messengers passed another resolution that called on Congress to stop funding Planned Parenthood.
• Southern Baptists were urged through another resolution to be engaged politically but warned leaders of the dangers of endorsing candidates and “politicizing the church and the pulpit.”

In a tell-all book, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has made some bold, revealing, and, for those close to him, surprising and confusing accusations against the current administration. An overlooked report, however, may explain his actions.

In his book (What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception), McClellan claims that the administration was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” that the president “veered terribly off course,” and that he “confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed . . . during a time of war.”

He also says that “the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation” during the run-up to the war in Iraq, and that “if it had, the country would have been better served.” But while critiquing the president and the administration is welcomed, even necessary, many are surprised by the comments and feel they are uncharacteristic.

Karl Rove, mentioned extensively in the book, classified McClellan’s comments as those befitting “a left-wing blogger.” One Republican close to the White House dubbed the book “a desperate attempt to salvage [McClellan’s] reputation by junking the one positive attribute people saw in him—loyalty.” McClellan’s ex-boss, former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the book “perplexed” him.

The White House agrees, calling it the work of an angry former staffer. “Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” Press Secretary Dana Perino said. “For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad—this is not the Scott we knew.”

But one largely ignored fact may explain the Jekyll and Hyde McClellan. The Wall Street Journal reports that only after working with publishers and editors did McClellan begin to formulate his critiques. “Many of the conclusions I’ve reached are quite different from those I would have embraced at the start of the process,” he writes in the book.

That secrets abound in an administration should not be surprising. All presidencies have their skeletons. Some secrets are even important to national security. What is surprising is that a group of outside writers were able to “shape the thinking” of a man known for his unquestioned loyalty.

And as numerous others release accounts criticizing the Bush administration, an important question arises: have these confidants prostituted their loyalty for the sake of popularity and book sales? For those who say yes, the irony is apparent: the liberal media may finally have lived up to its reputation. The debate now is whether we are better served because of it.

On Wednesday, President Bush vetoed the $290 billion farm bill. Almost as quickly, the House voted to override it. And even though a small glitch hasn’t made the override official, in only days it will be. With Congress and the President facing off, who’s right?

The bill subsidizes millionaire farmers and expands government control. As the Wall Street Journal highlights, the subsidies for corn alone are enormous: “If corn prices return to $3.25 a bushel from today’s $6, farmers would get $10 billion a year in support payments.” Simply, when prices fall, taxpayers will make up the difference, and farmers get rich.

And instead of helping needy farmers, the bill subsidizes those earning up to a meager $750,000. Loopholes and spousal qualifications increase that limit to around $2.5 million. Sounding like a true fiscal conservative, the President chastised these millionaire subsidies. “The American taxpayer,” he said, “should not be forced to subsidize that group of farmers who have adjusted gross incomes of up to $1.5 million.”

Among Democrats and Republicans, the President’s words have fallen on deaf ears.

But why? Even the historically liberal Los Angeles Times agrees with the President. Considering the evidence and the calendar, the reason for Congress’s support seems clear: it’s an election year, and law makers want extra favor with constituents. “The farm bill is the ultimate lobbyist triumph,” the Journal reports. “Every special interest gets massaged.”

No doubt there are some benefits from the bill. It reduces the irresponsible ethanol subsidy by six cents, requires meat to be stamped with country of origin, and boosts nutrition programs. But unless you’re a law maker, the costs outweigh the benefits.

This vote, however, highlights a trend. Many Republicans, once fiscally conservative, have strayed from the party line. Just last year, 147 House members claimed to be “born-again fiscal conservatives,” pledging to block override attempts by Democrats. Wednesday’s events prove otherwise.

Being the presumptive Democratic nominee for president has its downside—like being slammed by your own leader in front of an entire foreign government. Barack Obama interjected himself into the “Israel at 60” birthday bash in Jerusalem, by calling out President Bush for what he called a “false political attack” on himself.

In a speech Wednesday to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, President Bush said, “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Given that Obama has said, if elected, he would meet with the leaders of nations hostile towards the United States—Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea—the assumption is that Bush was talking about his potential successor.

The White House denied that the president’s comments were aimed at the Illinois senator, noting the president has largely stayed out of the current race and wouldn’t use this opportunity to change that.

The controversy brings to light an important issue in the campaign this year: the American attitude towards Israel. Obama’s Muslim heritage (despite his conversion to Christianity) and his desire to extricate all American forces from intervention in the Middle East has some worried he would leave Israel alone. McCain has pledged his loyalty to the partnership America and Israel have forged over the past six decades, and his closest friend in the Senate is Jewish advocate Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.).

However, Obama made it clear in his remarks against the President that, while he would talk to the leaders of totalitarian states, he would not negotiate with terrorists nor would he abandon American allies in the Middle East. He sees his policies as rectifying damage done by the current administration. He also said he considers Israel a “stalwart ally.”

Nevertheless, Mort Kondracke says that while noble, Obama’s vision is naïve. The likely Obama-McCain race sets up two very different approaches to foreign policy and will be a key issue. What America’s foreign policy in the Middle East means for the future of Israel is a matter both candidates will have to handle carefully.

President Bush showed his lighter side this weekend, invoking the smile and chuckle we’ve all come to know from watching him speak about how few problems we have in Iraq. At the White House Correspondents annual dinner Saturday night the president said good-bye and worked the crowd with a rousing comedic performance, something we’ve also come to know over the past eight years, though not usually with this much intention.

During the speech Bush noted that none of the Presidential candidates were present: “Hillary Clinton couldn’t get in because of sniper fire and Senator Obama’s at church.” He opened the speech by explaining John McCain’s absence, “He probably wanted to distance himself from me a little bit. You know, he’s not alone. Jenna’s moving out too.”

The quips were not all just for current candidates. With a house packed full of celebrities Bush wondered aloud if having Pamela Anderson and Mitt Romney in the same was a sign of the apocalypse. No word yet on if NASA has noted any killer locust swarms or falling mountains coming from space to confirm the president’s suspicions.

President Bush ended his evening by by conducting the US Marine Corps Band in a medley of patriotic tunes. The unofficial rumor is that his arms were slightly off beat, requiring a surge of violinists to stabilize the music.

Next up was the late-night entertainer Craig Ferguson, who recently became an American citizen. Asking Bush rhetorically about his future plans Ferguson suggested, “You could look for a job with more vacation time,” seizing on the criticism of the president’s frequent trips away from the White House during the past eight years.

The Scottish-born comedian was a big hit for the evening, finding middle ground between Rich Little’s tepid impersonations last year, and the merciless satire of Stephen Colbert from 2006. But the Vice-President was unable to avoid some heat as Ferguson threw out that Cheney “is already moving out of his residence. It takes longer than you think to pack up an entire dungeon.”

In an “unscientific”—and a bit premature—poll of 109 historians released last week by George Mason University’s History News Network, 61 percent of respondents said George W. Bush will go down in history as the worst president ever. Asked to rank him among all 43 U.S. presidents, only 4 percent put Bush at 30th or better, and 98.2 percent said his presidency was a failure.

The historian who conducted the poll — which has been hailed by the Left and called bunk by the Right — excerpts historians’ fervid claims in a summary of the findings. They read like DailyKos boilerplate: Bush “lies, constantly and often, seemingly without control;”he “grandstands and mugs in a shameful manner, befitting a snake oil salesman;” he “is emotionally immature due to, among other things, his lack of recovery from substance abuse;” his presidency “is the pernicious enemy of American freedom, compassion, and community; of world peace; and of life itself as it has evolved for millennia on large sections of the planet.”

Though a much-discussed New York Times/CBS News poll recently revealed that 81 percent of Americans (a poll record) think “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” Bush has mostly acted unfazed. He told Fox News in February, “As far as . . . people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, you know, I take great comfort in knowing that they don’t know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach.”

Despite the Bush disillusionment, HNN’s poll hasn’t been the talk of the town; the GWU project isn’t the most august outfit. (Though a minor back-and-forth has ensued in the blogosphere.)

Nor, obviously, is this the first historiograpic hyperbole meant to tar and feather the sitting president. Students of history typically agree that it takes years to properly adjudge a president’s legacy and policies.

In 2006, Rolling Stone ran a cover piece by historian Sean Wilentz that, while arguing Bush’s across-the-aisle hostility is partly what makes him the “worst” president, also didn’t shy away from its own partisan claims. Vanity Fair also had a lengthy contribution in December from Nobel laureate and Bush critic Joseph Stiglitz about how Bush has supplanted Herbert Hoover as “claimant for the mantle ‘worst president’ when it comes to stewardship of the American economy.”

These too-early judgments are what prompted the Social Security Administration’s public historian, Larry DeWitt, himself no Bush fan, to rebuff the poll. His claim is growingly common in academia, where enmity toward opposing ideologies has reached a nadir. He writes this:

We have gotten ourselves into such a state in this regard that most historians . . . no longer see a principled distinction . . . between our present politics and our historical judgments. Indeed, I suspect few of my colleagues see anything wrong with this kind of poll, and think I am out on some fringe somewhere with my concerns.

And Wilentz doesn’t seem to disagree, at least on paper. He wrote in his Rolling Stone piece that historians “are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent.”

President Bush talked about his alcohol use with former prisoners at a faith-based program, calling his alcoholism an addiction for the first time and sharing the role faith played in his recovery. Here’s a video of the men’s response.

GodTube is tapping its pool of 250,000 registered users and taking an unscientific presidential election poll. Mike Huckabee wins the Christian vote, and Obama comes in second.

The Pew Forum finds some common themes in this year’s raucous presidential primary. The election matters to voters, Republican turnout lags behind Democratic turnout, independent voters are playing a big role, and for Democrats, race and gender matters more than issues.

It’s the Super Bowl Blitz, and companies are exploring ways to expand the impact of the $2.7 million they pay for a 30-second Super Bowl ad. This means taking ads online, so check Yahoo, Google, YouTube and MySpace this Sunday.

The world’s aging population will have an effect on international politics. Researchers say a high youth population and high unemployment rates can be an environment to breed resentment and terrorism. As the youth population gets older, areas like Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are due to stabilize soon.

A family buried their son, only to discover years later that they’d left his brain behind in the hands of a coroner. Their lawsuit may change the way we treat the deceased.

American scientists have taken a step towards creating artificial life. They have created all the genetic material for a synthetic chromosome. If they can successfully insert it into another bacterium and make it reproduce, they can claim to have created life. Controversial scientist Craig Venter says, “It puts a lot of power in the hands of humans.”