• Another Jim Wallis puff piece

Anyone have a clue what St. Petersburg Times Political Editor Adam Smith is trying to say here?

Leaders on the religious left contend gay marriage and abortion are just two of many fundamental moral issues for political leaders and that the Bible makes the the [sic] fight against poverty, protection of the environment and a host of other issues moral causes often ignored by the religious right.

I’m afraid that sentence cannot be parsed.

• Kerry goes back to preaching

Senator John Kerry doesn’t “go around preaching [his] faith,” except always. Like he did again Friday:

“I went back and reread the whole New Testament the other day. Nowhere in the three-year ministry of Jesus Christ did I find a suggestion at all, ever, anywhere, in any way whatsoever, that you ought to take the money from the poor, the opportunities from the poor and give them to rich people.”

“And Teresa can vouch for me here — beccause, boy, did we look hard,” Kerry added.

• Truth challenges the status quo

William F. Buckley, amidst a column on media bias:

It is a planted axiom of our democracy that there should be a formal and bristling separation of church and state. Those who believe otherwise are thought unreliable beneficiaries of American history, or else creeping, and creepy, evangelists.

So it goes.

Is it redundant to say “an excellent Buckley article,” well worth reading? [That sentence is both redundant and rhetorical. - Ed.]