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Remember Kieffe & Sons, the California Ford dealership that ran a radio ad saying that they were Christians, and non-believers could therefore “sit down and shut up” and stop demanding separation of church and state?

Remember how they apologized for saying this really dumb thing?

They take it back.

The owner of the dealership says that he was forced to issue the apology by Ford, and he doesn’t stand behind it, and he only issued it to appease “blog-lo-dites.”

“I don’t regret the sentiment at all,” said Kieffe, who bought the 48-year-old dealership from his father in 1974. “It’s what we believe.”

Kieffe & Sons has sites in Mojave and Rosamond.

The dealer’s Web site Thursday bore a statement about the ad that included an apology “to all who were offended.”

Kieffe said he’d been contacted by Ford Motor Co. after the manufacturer heard complaints from numerous “blog-lo-dites.”

Remember, this guy doesn’t actually attend church.

Link

See also:
Sit-down-and-shut-up “Christian” Ford dealership is run by a non-church attendee who is sorry about the ad
Ford dealership uses bigoted radio ads to sell cars

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“me.com” is currently a placeholder page hosted by MarkMonitor, a company that specializes in brand-related DNS management. You can see that it’s handled by MarkMonitor by checking the whois information for the domain. Apple uses MarkMonitor for most of its domains, including “apple.com”, and it’s where they’ve previously parked domains for future use.

Two additional tidbits:

• Via Clint Ecker, the name server for me.com changed today.
• Via Matthew Yohe, Netcraft’s report for “me.com indicates that the “DNS admin” for the domain is Apple.

“mobileme.com” is parked at MarkMonitor, too, but “me.com” is a bit punchier, no?

Only a week more until the WWDC, so we’ll know soon enough..

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Democratic Party leaders agreed Saturday to seat Michigan and Florida delegates with half-votes at this summer’s convention with a compromise that left Barack Obama on the verge of the nomination but riled Hillary Rodham Clinton backers who threatened to fight to the August convention.

“Hijacking four delegates is not a good way to start down the path of party unity,” said adviser Harold Ickes.

[..]

Clinton’s camp insisted Obama shouldn’t get any pledged delegates in Michigan since he chose not to put his name on the ballot, and she should get 73 pledged delegates with 55 uncommitted. Obama’s team insisted the only fair solution was to split the pledged delegates in half between the two campaigns, with 64 each.

The committee agreed on a compromise offered by the Michigan Democratic Party that would split the difference, allowing Clinton to take 69 delegates and Obama 59. Each delegate would get half a vote at the convention, according to the deal.

The deal passed 19-8. Thirteen members of the committee had endorsed Clinton for president, so she wasn’t even able to keep her supporters together.

Allan Katz, a Rules Committee member and Obama supporter, said the Obama campaign had enough votes on the committee to support the campaign’s proposal to split the delegates 50-50 in Michigan. Ultimately, the campaign agreed instead to support the compromise negotiated by the Michigan Democratic Party as a way to resolve the matter.

So, let me recap:

1. States decide to move the primary to “very early”
2. Party says: if you do that, the rules say your votes won’t count
3. Candidates pledge not to campaign, remove name from nomination. Both promise to do so, but only Obama removes his name in Michigan
4. Almost nobody shows up for the election, and the outcome isn’t really representative. (for example, 40% in Michigan votes “uncommitted”)
5. Nothing happens for a while.
6. Hillary discovers her campaign isn’t as succesful as expected, starts whining and threatens a scorched earth approach if she doesn’t get it her way
7. A compromise is reached, she’s still way behind. She continues whining.
8. Later this week: Obama gets the nomination.

Did I miss anything? Oh, and point 8 is based on this:

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Today’s Rules and Bylaws Committee decisions mean that Obama has, in the bag, 2052 delegates, just 66 short of the 2118 needed at the convention.

Tomorrow in Puerto Rico he will pick up about 24 delegates. And on Tuesday in South Dakota and Montana he will pick up about 17, for a total of 41 more pledged delegates, bringing him to at least 2093 delegates, which means he needs only 25 superdelegates to clinch the nomination.

There’s an interesting comment in that thread:

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At the beginning of the day, all of the Hillary supporters sitting around Carthage, Keirsten and I were quite vocal and energetic. Even up to the time the committee returned from their “lunch”, they were still quite vehemently pro-Hillary.

However, as the hecklers and yellers in the room got more and more vitriolic, most of the Hillary supporters grew quiet and by the time we left, were having awesome conversations with Obama people about unity and moving forward.