Sorry, porn-trollers who've gotten here by mistake. This is about the other p-word: politics. Specifically the Kerry-Edwards combo that doesn't seem to be able to keep its hands off each other. It's so embarrassingly awful that the late-night talk shows wasted no time making fun of it.

Played right into the hands of the president's weekly radio address, which was about how he is going to support the FMA - federal marriage amendment. As Bob Schieffer said on his CBS Sunday morning show, the FMA is a gigantic waste of time and taxpayers' money, designed only to supply candidates who are standing in this election with fodder they can use against their rivals, in terms of which way they voted on it.

The federal government has no business deciding what is and isn't marriage, and a constitutional amendment requires a much vaster number of yes votes than the proponents of the FMA have in either the Senate or the House. Both Kerry and Edwards, it seems, plan on scurrying back to DC to cast their vote on this tawdry piece of electioneering-disguised-as-legislation.

Perhaps they really think it is that important; or perhaps Kerry, for one, has been backed into a corner by the ads Bush has been running in swing states that suggest that Kerry's priorities aren't the same as the voters', because of the way he picks and chooses which votes to participate in. "Priorities" is, of course, "values" by another name.

Meanwhile, the TV news here in the East Bay has resorted to showing Bush on a recent campaign meet and greet shaking hands with the crowd with a Secret Service agent holding him around the waist from behind, up close and more personal than is surely comfortable for a man trumpeting the God-given superiority of heterosexuality as an arbiter of what's acceptable to society.

On a completely different note, I'd like to warn any aging and/or ill movie stars out there that their time may well be nigh. The alacrity with which the Saddam meme was removed from the front pages of newspapers and the top of the news lineup when Marlon Brando died has surely alerted campaign mangers to a new weapon they might add to their arsenal of story-topplers as they count down to November.

And speaking of stories, the filming of the Chronicles of Narnia is receiving a great deal of attention amongst the Christian community here in the States. The little on-line story at http://www.christianpost.com/dbase.php?cat=culture&id=962 is nothing to what appeared in the Christian Post's July 6 paper edition, where the filming was the above-the-fold story of the second section and ran to a second page.

Oddly, most of the article was taken up with speculation about whether Flock Hill is going to be used as a location for the filming. Pardon me for being surprised that two spokespersons for the Selwyn District Council are quoted at some length. Was the story lifted from a New Zealand paper, or does the CP have contacts there? Somehow I don't think any NZ newspaper subeditor thinks that "casted" is a word, which pretty much casts the first supposition into doubt.

Hey, while you're over at the Christian Post, you might as well click on the link to their home page and follow the FMA debate from the conservative right's point of view. Who knows? Maybe Bob Schieffer is wrong, and this is just democracy taking its course: a lobby group, sensing its potential in an election year, forcing the legislation through that it favors. A constitutional amendment? It's just a way of keeping one issue--to do with values--before the public for a very, very long time.

Oh, and then there's the story about the South Korean who was recently beheaded in Iraq. I don't think any major news outlet here in the States mentioned the fact that Kim Sun-il was an evangelical Christian, who had graduated in theological studies, and went to Iraq to perform missionary work while employed as a translator. Not that it justifies his fate, but it may help explain why he ended up in that predicament in the first place.

ENDS