the Republican-backed Green candidate in Pennsylvania falsified signatures.

His rivals, including Mrs. Palmer, came up short when the signatures were re-examined.  The article you cite quotes Senator Obama as having mused about whether or not they should remain on the ballot illegally in the interests of fairness, once he discovered the ballot problems.

He decided to challenge the signatures, and with a day's worth of trouble, the clerks threw out enough signatures to disqualify Mrs. Palmer and the other two minor candidates.

That's not "do whatever it takes to win."  That's following the rules.  Should he have left it alone, although she didn't have enough legitimate signatures to qualify?

Would Senator Clinton have let it slide?  I hope not.

and I got the impression that he will align himself with anyone, as long as he wins.

Why would he seek out the Wright church?  After all, Wright news stories keep coming up, like this one related by the blog Lavender Liberal:

Jeremiah Wright on Italians again: Now we're "garlic noses"

As a woman, I know how the c-word rings in my ear. As a lesbian, I know how "dyke" sounds when it's thrown at me as a slur.

But I never thought, in this day and age, I would feel the sting of anti-Italian hate. That should have died out with my grandparents' generation -- but it appears that the Wrong Mr. Wright has been keeping that brand of discrimination alive and well, thankyouverymuch.

*

"(Jesus') enemies had their opinion about Him," Wright wrote in a eulogy of the late scholar Asa Hilliard in the November/December 2007 issue. "The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans.

"From the circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth (in a barn in a township that was under the Apartheid Roman government that said his daddy had to be in), up to and including the circumstances surrounding Jesus' death on a cross, a Roman cross, public lynching Italian style. ..." Wright wrote.

I wonder if Obama will talk about this sermon when he campaigns in the Italian sections of Pittsburgh.

Ryan Lizza is a good, liberal writer.  He's the one who exposed former Sen. George Allen as a bigot.  I don't even mind someone who plays hard politics -- you need hardness as a President.  But aligning oneself with the likes of Wright, and Rev. Meeks really tells me something.

I felt after reading the article that Obama really isn't very religious, and just adopted these preachers for their political following.  I don't read too much into that -- except why would he choose these two particular -- I want to say hate-mongers but I think they're delusional more than anything.

I wanted to cite something I mentioned earlier about Obama becoming a church member because it was helpful in politics.

From Wright and others, Obama learned that part of his problem as an organizer was that he was trying to build a confederation of churches but wasn't showing up in the pews on Sunday. When pastors asked him the inevitable questions about his own spiritual life, Obama would duck them uncomfortably. A Reverend Philips put the problem to him squarely when he learned that Obama didn't attend services. "It might help your mission if you had a church home," he told Obama. "It doesn't matter where, really. What you're asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you're getting yours from."

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright's church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for "Buppies"--black urban professionals--and didn't have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity's guiding principles--what the church calls the "Black Value System"--included a "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.'"

The crosscurrents appealed to Obama. He came to believe that the church could not only compensate for the limitations of Alinsky-style organizing but could help answer the nagging identity problem he had come to Chicago to solve. "It was a powerful program, this cultural community," he wrote, "one more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing."

As a result, over the years, Wright became not only Obama's pastor, but his mentor.

http://www.pickensdemocrats.org/info/The Agitator_070319.htm

I trust Lizza to get this right, and it actually relieves me, because I'm a secularist (though one who has studied theology quite a bit) and it worried me that Obama bought into too much of the hocus pocus -- which has been a real liability to Bush.

But why Wright?  There are lots of churches from which to choose in Chicago.  And Wright has a divisive message.

Well, who knows.

Just so I have your logic straight here, 4 of Obama's primary opponents to the state senate had their petitions challenged by the Obama campaign and at the hearing to determine the viability of those petitions it was determined that they were, in fact, illegal. Your point seems to be that Obama should have allowed four opponents to falsify their signature petitions and simply let them get away with it. Is that right?