You've probably heard about the earthquake-induced tsunamis and flooding in the Bay of Bengal this past Sunday which has killed over 100,000 people and left many more homeless. The breakdown of medical and sanitation services threatens to increase the sad tally in the coming days and weeks. Our writers might be busy and not post much, but such a great tragedy deserves mention here.
I'd like to thank Armando and Kos at Daily Kos, who have posted front-page articles about the disaster every day since it struck and provide links to aid organizations.
Also, I'd like to repeat Zibblsnrt's sentiment of a big F.U. to EBay for this ad.
From the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2, Verses 1-20:
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.
Merry Christmas everybody. Hope it's an enjoyable and wonderful day for all our readers, and that you spend it safe and warm and mostly healthy.
Peace on earth and goodwill to all -- even Shrub and Cheney and Rummy and...mebbe I better rethink this goodwill thing. Or well, a blogger can dream, no?
Trawling the dkos diaries for interesting stuff...
Lots of stuff to go over today. First we'll start with some big news that there's been a total media blackout over: an FBI memo cites "the President's Executive Order" authorizing torture. This comes on the heels of the release of a memo showing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the use of torture, which would have been a big enough story on its own. Of course Bush's defenders are going to quibble in their tortured logic that the torture tactics approved aren't as torturously torturous as we could torture the torturees if we really wanted to, but when Ho's boys were doing the same thing to American GIs captured in Vietnam, whaddaya think it was called then?
Given the attention paid to issues of national importance, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the media would rather be whipping up a B.S. storm about ultraliberal secularists like George W. Bush, the Fox News Channel, and Brent Bozell trying to "ban Christmas" than actually informing the public that, you know, it looks like Bush authorized torture. On the big story of the season, Atrios gives a down to earth explanation:
it really feels fucking stupid saying "Merry Christmas" on December 1 when Christmas is over 3 weeks away. The "holiday season" is that period from Thanksgiving until New Years.
If you have the time and bandwidth to download ten megs of video, some guy's DKos diary has video footage of polling stations in black districts in Ohio, where lines were 2 to 3 hours long from the minute the polls opened and all day because the state allocated only one voting machine for every 300-350 registered voters, leaving several machines in storage. Assuming it takes five minutes to vote, each machine could service twelve people per hour or 144 people in the twelve hours that polling stations were open. Coming from comfortable suburban California where, starting in the longest polling station line I'd ever seen, I got in and out in fifteen minutes, a two or three hour wait to vote is difficult to comprehend.
Once you got inside, you might be told to go to another precinct and wait through the lines there to be told to go to another precint. Or, you might be given a provisional ballot and told you have to go back through the line to turn it in and never be given or informed of the extra form which must be turned in for a provisional ballot to be counted. Of about 155,000 provisional ballots in Ohio, about 20% were thrown out. Also, we hear from a NAACP assistant who was thrown out "because they said that the NAACP is a partisan organization" and they called the police on her.
In other election news that is news even though it's a month and a half after the election, the third(!) recount in Washington shows the Democratic candidate for Governor is up by 10 (ten) votes. It's at about this point where I'd say to settle it with a game of cards or just have a whole new election, but they're still finding apparently legitimate votes that haven't been counted yet.
Media Matters has announced the ten most outrageous statements of 2004 and declared Bill O'Reilly the worst liar misinformer of the year. On a similar note, FAIR has announced the 2004 P.U.-litzer Prizes.
A Christian school in Texas expelled a student for being gay.
A Christian progressive says, "I want my faith back".
And for another article related to Christianity, the Gadflyer takes a look at the Moonie cult's "tear down the Cross" movement.
Also via jmhm, a look back at Nelson Rockefeller, progressive Republican, and the origin of the War on Drugs.
Bush is changing forest regulations again:
Under the new rules, which take effect next week (also when almost nobody's paying attention, of course), "economic activity" gets equal priority with "preserving the ecological health of the forests" in deciding how much timber can be logged in a national forest
Walking about town the other day, I caught a USA Today headline to the effect that Bush was calling for action to save Social Security. That means, of course, that Bush is calling for action to destroy Social Security.
The specific action Bush is calling for seems to be to give people private savings accounts out of Social Security funds and allow them to invest it in the stock market. This is a bad idea on too many levels. The whole point of Social Security is the security, but stock markets can go up or down. If the next Enron or Black Tuesday happens, either the government will pick up the tab or people will lose part of their retirement. If you're having people invest the money from their Social Security tax, you might as well not tax them in the first place.
It's interesting to note that Bush was making the same "Social Security in crisis!" claim in 1978.
Conspiracy Theory Time! David R. Hoffman of Pravda is accusing Bush of complicitcy in the Sep11 attacks. I don't agree with it, but it's no less objectionable than your average conservative opinion piece attacking "liberals". This guy, apparently, used to be a correspondant for the Washington Post. Can you imagine that column being printed in the Post today?
Breaking news, as in, I've spent so long writing/editing this post that news broke. Russian President Vladimir Putin is accusing the US and the West of trying to destabilize his country. There's an on-again, off-again relationship between the Russia and the Bush Administration. Sometime in between Bush giving refuge to a contingent of Chechen (Russia said Qaeda) soldiers in Pankisi Gorge, Georgia, and Russia's diplomatic objections to the invasion of Iraq, Putin gave a State of the Union address declaring that the greatest threat to Russia was the United States, and this is a country which has been suffering from Qaeda-backed terrorist attacks, killing dozens or hundreds at a time, for a decade. Then Putin strongly and inexplicably endorses Bush for election, just as so as McCain, who I haven't figured out either. Now Putin is butting heads with the US again.
More breaking news just bruk: Firefight in Falluja, which means there's still fighting going on there. 3 US Marines dead and an unknown number of rebels. The US had to call in air support to blow up the building the rebels were hiding in. The US is still idiotically calling them "anti-Iraq forces".
The continuing saga of Yukos, the bankrupt Russian oil giant, just took a mysterious step forward with the sale at government auction of Yukos's most productive facility, Yuganskneftegaz, to a company that nobody has heard of and, until recently, did not exist. Without any known assets or property, the Baikalfinansgroup managed to secure a $1.7 billion loan from Sberbank as down payment for its $9.3 billion bid for the Yuganskneftegaz property, half the property's estimated value. If Baikalfinansgroup can't come up with the rest of the funds in two weeks, Justice Ministry division director Alexander Buksman suggests that Russia will seize Yuganskneftegaz as part of its tax claims against Yukos.
The media this Christmas season is raising a ruckus about some supposed "war on Christmas", stringing together a bunch of disconnected events and claiming they are part of an organized culture war against Christians. Let's look at the facts.
This year, Target banned the Salvation Army bell-ringing charity solicitors from its stores, implementing a no-solicitors policy that until now had been unenforced. This has been cited as a uniquely grievous affront to what we're all familiar with as an old Christmas tradition. However, many retailers, including Toys R Us, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, Kroger, and the Home Depot also have blanket bans on using theirproperty for soliciting donations, and do not allow the Salvation Army on their property (Cox News Service, Dec 2004; also 'Ask Us', North Iowa Globe Gazette, Dec 2004).
Such blanket bans benefit retailers in several ways. By allowing customers to enter and exit the stores unimpeded by distractions, people will feel more comfortable with the idea of going to the store and be more likely to shop there. Blanket bans also simplify the management issues of deciding how many solicitors to allow, which ones, and for how long, without leaving the company open to a discrimination lawsuit, and allow businesses to legally bar union organizers from their premises. Even Wal-Mart, which offered donations to match the Salvation Army's losses from no longer being able to collect money at Target stores, limits Salvation Army bell-ringers to 14 days on its premises (Jessi Hempel, 'The Salvation Army's Leaky Kettle', Businessweek, Dec 2004; also Cox). Target claims their motivation was the second: they were so swamped by different groups asking permission to solicit on their property, that they just gave up on allowing anyone. ('Ask Us').
There is also an accusation floating around that Target's management is so favourable to a "homosexual agenda" that they banned the Salvation Army to protest its discriminatory hiring policies. Unfortunately for that claim, Target CEO Robert Ulrich's recent history of political donations shows no sign of a pro-homosexual agenda, with numerous contributions to conservative individuals and groups including George W. Bush; Senators Mel Martinez of Florida, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and Kit Bond of Missouri; Senatorial candidates Jack Ryan of Illinois and Richard Burr of North Carolina; Congressmen John Kline and Mark Kennedy of Minnesota; and Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman's Northstar Leadership PAC. (Open Secrets database, Dec 2004).
At another retail chain, Macy's has signs saying "Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays". This is supposedly some horrible offense to Christianity because they fail to explicitly say the word "Christmas", but isn't it obvious that these messages are inclusive of Christmas? For the final word, go to the Macy's website and see their greeting: "Macy's wishes you a merry Christmas and happy holidays!" So much for the horrible Macy's assault on Christmas.
Then there are a bunch of stories about religious displays being removed from public property. The unmentioned elephant in the living room is that it is illegal, and has been for 213 years, for agents of the federal government to promote religious beliefs or favour one religion over another. Our Founding Fathers had in living memory the abuses of the government-run churches of England and church-run governments of the Colonies, and they intentionally created for us a federal government which respects everybody's right to pray how they want. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, imposes these federal restrictions on the states, and hence onto public schools and other recipients of state funding. Such grating moments as New York Mayor Bloomberg's reference to a "holiday tree" evidence awkward recognition of, and sometimes overreaction to, the fine line between respecting a religious group and showing governmental favour to their faith.
Meanwhile, the media, led by dishonest political activists like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, wants you to believe that Christmas is being threatened by secularist liberals and these con men are the only ones "defending Christmas". The real reason that nobody else is "defending Christmas" is because Christmas is not under attack. There is nothing to be afraid of, other than these people who manufacture threats in order to frighten faithful people into giving them more money and power. They tried the same thing around Thanksgiving with scare stories about a California school firing a teacher for showing students the Declaration of Independence, when in reality the teacher had been spreading political propaganda which included a contextless quote from the Declaration, and the school still has the Declaration posted in its hallways. In the few times secularists do overreach and try to restrict the rights of religious people, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are there to defend the rights of Christians to freely practice their religion and preach their message on their own time (ACLU Supports Right of Iowa Students to Distribute Christian Literature at School, Jul 2002; also Candy-Cane Suit Great Fit for Lawyer, Springfield Union News, Feb 2003).
So don't worry about the controversy because there isn't one. Nobody's threatening to take away your right to put up a Christmas tree in your house, go to church, give presents, or be happy this Christmas season. Drink your eggnog because it tastes good, not because you're worried some phantom threat will snatch it away from you for being too seasonal. There is no threat. Christmas is a time to be happy with the ones you love and to respect the birth and teachings of Jesus Christ, and nobody is going to take that away.
Former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb, whose series on Central Intelligence Agency connections to Nicaraguan Contra drug smuggling brought nationwide attention in the '90s, was found dead December 10 of multiple self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head.
Robert Parry has an informative eulogy.
There's also an article on K5.
A fellow blogger over at guppychild recently wrote an article about the indifference about politics these days.
The main, and probably self-evident, point of her argument is that people get apathetic about politics - in the sense that most Americans and probably even more Canadians truly are - because we've convinced ourselves that it Doesn't Really Matter. Not in the sense that votes are irrelevant - although that cynicism is particularly virulent too - as much as the fact that people believe that there's no real possibility for bad things to happen if they give up on caring about it. It's kind of a case of It Can't Happen Here, only applied to just about everything and not "just" the all-too-possible idea of a dictatorship.
Sometimes it takes actual political unrest (as opposed to those high-profile flash mobs we call protests [I particularly like this phrase - Zibb] or those riots on paper we call elections) to remind people like me how good we have it. Right now, there are some thousands of Ukrainians pouring into the chestnut-tree lined streets of Kyiv, and they’re not going home until the man they elected, Yushchenko, is recognized as the legitimate president. This isn’t a weekend thing for them. They aren’t there because they think protesting is “fun;” they’re there because their lives depend on it, and they all very much know it.The thing about western democracies is, most of the current generation has no experience with real tyranny. We’ve a relatively secure political and economic system, and have had since the early 1900s. When the rest of the world calls us insensitive, it’s because we haven’t been through what they have. We go to the polls not honestly expecting our standard of living to change with the administration. Sure, gas prices might go up, and the lower classes might feel the effects of outsourcing, but no one is going to starve to death; we can all go home and plug our iPods into the walls. If the price of denim goes up, we’ll just wear shorter pants. There’s no danger of us not surviving.
No percieved danger, anyway - which is, in the long run, the same thing in terms of political mindsets. It's also just as wrong, and just as dangerous if it becomes too pervasive at the wrong time.
But yeah, s'worth a look-see, and reminded me that I haven't been giving the attention to the electoral jamboree in Eastern Europe that it deserves. (Have you?)
Haha! Contrary to your nefarious plans, I survive mostly unscathed to trouble your dreams - er, I mean, sorry I've been so out of touch lately, guys. Trying to put together a big article which ran away from me, along with some other writing projects, so here I am trying to play catchup. Not sure how well I'll do it, but I'll try to have some substantive stuff for y'all in the next little bit.
For now, though, the time-honored tradition of pretending not to slack off by offering MLP! Here's some events from the past week or so that I thought were worth a look:
A group calling themselves IRI claimed responsibility for bombing a Hydro-Québec tower last week. Canada exports a good amount of electricity - about one-twelfth of our total output - to the United States, and especially in the current climate that causes some friction among Canadian nationalists. IRI's bombing didn't actually take out the tower, which I suppose says something this country these days - even our bomb-flinging terrorists are polite and relatively nonintrusive.
Rumsfeld seems to be calling off a trip to Germany because a human rights organization filed a complaint with the Federal German Prosecutor's Office, accusing the defense secretary of war crimes. People tried to make similar complaints when the president came to my hometown of Halifax, Canada earlier in the month, and I predict the response in Germany will only be slightly more favorable than the deafening silence it got here. Technically, both countries are probably legally obliged to snatch up senior US government officials, but this is one of those cases where the real world comes by and kicks the on-paper world's ass. Another bit of evidence towards the administration's apparent abject fear of encountering public criticism.
CNN talks a bit about some undescribed spy program snuck into the intelligence reform bill. Apparently this one was odd in that it led to actual public criticism of intelligence policy by Intelligence Committee members, going so far as to call the new plans (which are obviously classified) "dangerous to the national security." The geneal tone of the grapevine is that they're weaponized satellites of some sort, or something related to missile defense. Given the Bush Administration's increased discussion about military assets in space, it's probably one or both of those. Not sure what to make of it; if any countries are going to place weapons in space, then I do kind of hope that at least two major ones do it to prevent a monopoly on orbit.
Prime Minister Martin and the Liberals have introduced legislation to give anti-telemarketer regulations just a few more teeth. All I can say here, really, is "woohoo!"
In other Canadian legal news, the Supreme Court completely took the wind out of the sails of Canada's right wing's "activist judges" argument by leaving the door wide open for Parliament to finally legalize gay marriage. Predictably, the Conservatives (who had been agitating for Parliament to address the issue, rather than the courts) started demanding a referendum, which was bluntly shot down by the Prime Minister yesterday, noting that "you don't subject minority rights to a referendum."
China got whomped with some meteorites last night by the sounds of things, though for some reason what news there is about it is claiming that it was a UFO crash or something similarly weird. I call BS on that (as much as I'd like it to be true), of course. I still find myself vaguely curious as to what's going to happen the first time a meteorite of any significant size takes out a small town or hits a city, though. Maybe that's what it'll take to get some kind of interest in space affairs started. Who knows?
Around the world, military tensions seem to be rattling up this month, as Cuba launches into a military drill to prepare for invasion, Iran holds another huge series of wargames on the Iraqi border, the Pentagon begins wargamine Iranian invasion scenarios, and China and Russia plan joint training exercises of their own shortly after Russia announced it was beginning to field new, innovative missile systems. Not that there's increased militarism in the air or anything, but you know.
Well, that's it for now. I'll see if I can't actually get into the meat of my planned article in the next couple of days. Really. I mean it. Stop laughing at me!
Previously on the NFZ, we tried to determine Congressman Herger's stance on the DeLay rule. At the time of my first call, I wrote:
I got the following response. "Caucus votes are kept secret." In other words, the man on the phone could not tell me how Congressman Herger voted on such a thing, and he told me quite honestly that this rule change brought them in line with the Democrats, which makes me suspect that Congressman Herger did indeed vote for the DeLay rule.
Well, on my second call, I got told that the Congressman would send a letter to any constituent who was wondering his stand on this thing. That letter showed up here in RedStateVille today. The entire text of the letter is under the fold. It's worth the read.
Please note the part where he accuses the prosecutor down Texas way of only going after Republican candidates:
Dear Katrina:Thank you for contacting me with your opinion regarding a recent administrative rule change in the U.S. House of Representatives Republican Caucus.
As you may know, previously, internal House Republican caucus rules required that any party leader or committee chairman indicted for an alleged felony had to step aside until the case was resolved. Unfortunately, this rule opens up leaders to politically motivated and not-fact-based criminal investigations. For this reason, the caucus voted to change the rule, leaving it up to the caucus to decide if an indicted leader should step down. In addition, the new rule will require removal of a member of the leadership, a committee chairman or a subcommittee chairman upon conviction of a felony offense.
During the vote, which was taken by voice vote, I supported the rule change because I believe that the party should be responsible for selecting its leadership -- and deciding when they step aside -- not a local prosecutor who has previously brought charges against Republican candidates only to drop after an election. Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison was targeted in this manner prior to winning her special-election Senate bid in 1993.
Again, thank you for contacting me on this issue. Should have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesistate to contact me in the future.
Sincerely,
(signed) Wally Herger, Member of Congress
At least he didn't pull out the "We're just bringing our votes in line with the Democrats" canard his staffer tried pulling on me. But still. It's funny just how beholden the House Republican party is to Mr. DeLay...
Bill O'Reilly has earned himself a special place in the Hall of Stupid by compensating for his ambiguously anti-semitic remark, one that could have been chalked up to an honest yet embarrassing miscommunication, by digging a deeper hole and making a big issue out of it!
Yes, Bill responded by launching a full-on assault with both barrels not only on the Anti-Defamation League for being mildly deeply concerned about it and Media Matters for reporting about it, but he also blasts Peter Jennings, Brian Williams, Jim Lehrer, Larry King, and my dead grandmother and her poodle for not vocally taking his side. Here's a sampling of his ire:
I am attacking these people for being the worst element in American society. Lemme repeat that. The left-wing websites who are responsible for all of this kind of stuff, and the journalists in the newspapers who print it without any context -- are the worst element -- non-criminal element in the country. The worst. All right? They undermine freedom of speech. They undermine all fair play. They are despicable, vile human beings -- ankle biters.
Ooh, he used mean words! Left-wing websites? I think that might mean us! I'm quivering! I'd better get a book deal ready in case he sues me, so I can make a tidy profit from it! And just like in the Glick situation, O'Reilly has real trouble getting a grasp of the actual, recorded, widely available facts of what went on; and yeah, here's where I admit I made up the bit about my grandmother and her poodle. Back to the issue, Media Matters didn't take anything out of context; they had the entire exchange in text and audio from start to finish. No, Mr. O'Reilly, that's not taking things out of context. This is taking things out of context:
Every day The Radio Factor's on the air, we have these creeps -- and they really are the most vile, despicable human beings in the country -- who listen to every word of the program.
O'Reilly's ultimate vocal cry for help is that he's just "defending Christmas" by saying Jews ought to feel oppressed in this country and should go to Israel if they don't like it. The way he puts it, everybody who isn't "defending Christmas" with him wants to prevent you from celebrating Christmas in your own home. Remember, kids: If you don't hate Jews, you're not a real Christian!
TV News LIES!@!!1 has compiled a nice list of important news stories that are "missing and presumed dead". Among them are old classics like Dick Cheney's energy task force meetings and the PNAC, and new hotness like the Swift Nuts and military torture. Give a look. Anything you'd like to see the media pay more attention to?
Retiring Health and Human Services head Tommy Thompson: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do." I was going to do a satirical exaggeration until I looked again and saw my parody words were merely a rephrasing of what he really said. It reminds me of the days after Sep11 when San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was upset that the terrorists didn't attack San Fran. We have this nice beautiful bridge and this pyramid building that's a major landmark, the Coit tower, and so on... we're feeling left out! At least blow up the ugly green Coke bottle at China Basin, it's a friggin' eyesore...
Hey, Bush, say something stupid. Thank you. Now the Moslem world knows that Pakistan is the model of "democracy" which Bush seeks to bring to all of them. That's good, Bush, but it's not humiliating enough. You probably don't even realize how dumb that was what you said. Could you get into an even more embarrassing situation? Great! Yeah, going to a photo-op to have your moral values heralded by a guy who gets picked up the next day for statutory rape is quite the embarrassment. Quite the shame, indeed, that this jerk is getting sexed up by teenage girls and I'm not...
Quick, we need something anti-semitic! Bill O'Reilly, help us out! Yes, tell the Jews that this country is for Christians and if they don't like having someone else's religion pushed down their throat, they should leave. That's just common gutter bigotry, though. We need something so mind-blowingly stupid and ignorant that it takes someone of the highest stature, like a Supreme Court justice, to say it in public. Hooray, Antonin Scalia!
I love a good conspiracy theory, and the surprising results of the election have spawned several. The most interesting deals with the exit polls. You see, independent groups ask random people coming out of the voting booths who they voted for, and their results generally tend to come close to the actual election outcome, usually within a percent or two. After the exit polls in 2000 had Gore ahead by a decent margin in Florida, the universal understanding was that the exit polling system was flawed to the point of doing more harm than good, and we were lucky to get any this year.
This year, the exit polls had Kerry winning Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, and New Mexico and being within a hairsbreadth of Florida, all states that Bush won with sound margins. In nine of ten 'battleground' states where earlier opinion polling suggested the results could go either way, the exit polls were significantly different from the actual polls. In all such cases, the difference went to Bush. Have a look:
| Bush-Kerry Exit Polls | Bush-Kerry Result | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colorado | 49.9-48.1 | 52.1-46.8 | Bush 3.4 |
| Florida | 49.8-49.7 | 52.1-47.1 | Bush 4.9 |
| Iowa | 48.4-49.7 | 50.1-49.2 | Bush 2.2 |
| Michigan | 46.5-51.5 | 47.8-51.2 | Bush 1.6 |
| Minnesota | 44.5-53.5 | 47.6-51.1 | Bush 5.5 |
| Nevada | 47.9-49.2 | 50.5-47.9 | Bush 3.9 |
| New Hampshire | 44.1-54.9 | 49.0-50.3 | Bush 9.5 |
| New Mexico | 47.5-50.1 | 50.0-48.9 | Bush 3.7 |
| Ohio | 47.9-52.1 | 51.0-48.5 | Bush 6.7 |
| Pennsylvania | 45.4-54.1 | 48.6-50.8 | Bush 6.5 |
| Wisconsin | 48.8-49.2 | 49.4-49.8 | No diff |
| Ukraine | 43-54 | 49.4-46.7 | Y'vych 13.7 |
Oops, that last one was from the Yanukovych-Yushchenko election in Ukraine, where the difference between exit poll and election results is clear, absolute, and irrefutable proof of election fraud. My apologies.
Worth noting about the exit polls is that they only polled about 2,500 people per state. I'm not a statistician, but this seems to me to be a too-small sample size which might be susceptible to such errors as concentrating too many exit pollsters in areas which lean towards one candidate or another. In a metaconspiracy, CNN changed their exit poll data, showing a 52-48 Kerry vote win, to make it look more like the official results. This change reduced not only Kerry's percentage, but the total number of declared Kerry voters in CNN's exit polling data.
Much of the controversy settles around electronic voting machines, through which there are two major angles of attacking the vote: collecting the votes and counting them. Regarding the former, some models of computerized voting machines don't leave a physical paper ballot that can be recounted if deemed necessary. Since it is trivial to program a computer to tell the user they voted one way and internally record something completely different, this leaves many people very worried. On the second issue, BlackBoxVoting.org has investigated vote counting machines and found them very susceptable to untraceable, undetectable vote fraud. To inflame some partisan sentiment, all the voting machine manufacturers lean heavily Republican, and the maker of Ohio's vote counting systems promised to deliver the state to Bush this year. Is that 6.7% shift starting to look a little more suspicious? We don't see a blantant 14% shift like in Ukraine, but as jwz puts it, "You don't steal an election with a landslide, you steal it with 3%. You stay within the margin of error across the board so that it's not obvious." In addition to all the above, there are suggestions that machines in some heavily Democratic precincts of Ohio were rigged to shave Kerry votes to the benefit of third-party candidates.
You don't even need to believe in electronic chicanery to believe the election was stolen. Like Florida in 2000, we have a situation in Ohio where the Republican Secretary of State certifies the count while the Republican is ahead even though (or if you're cynical, because) there are still enough uncounted votes that it could swing either way if they were all counted. When they finally counted all of Florida's 2000 election votes for the first time, Gore came out ahead by the thinnest of margins. Greg Palast, who did some of the best (and only) journalism on Florida in 2000, is so convinced the same thing is happening again that he shot his mouth off and his reputation in the foot to prematurely declare "Kerry Won!". Palast cites 90,000 uncounted 'spoiled' ballots that the machines didn't read and 150,000 provisional ballots, notes that the number of uncounted ballots is above Bush's margin of victory, and assumes that circa 60% of these ballots are both valid and for Kerry. If he's right, then Kerry wins the Electoral College and the whole deal without any accounting for the possibility of voting fraud.
The weakest of the election-stealing conspiracy theories involves Dixiecrat counties in Flordia which voted for Bush in 2000 and voted for Bush in 2004 by about the same margin despite having a large majority of the population registered in the Democratic party. This was discounted within minutes of it being raised on Daily Kos, where even the hard-core Democratic partisans there saw through it. The Miami Herald homed in on this issue and when, to no surprise, they found no evidence of a miscount in a few of these counties, the rest of the papers echoed a big half page story declaring that all of the above issues had been debunked.
Now let's get into the really fun stuff.
Wayne Madsen reports that Congressman Tom Feeney hired a programmer to write a vote-changing program. Madsen is a guy I once referred to as "utterly loony" for accusing Bush, without evidence, of having Colombian Archbishop Isaias Duarte Cancino assassinated. This time, he's working off a sworn affidavit from the person claiming to be the programmer, one Clint Curtis. Madsen brings up a whole load of connections and allegations to spin a wonderful web of a tale tying together the Bushes, a division of NASA so partisan that they paid their employees to campaign for Feeney, Nigerian scammers, and Saudi boogey^Wbusinessman Adnan Khashoggi. Just taste this line and tell me you're not interested:
as with all modern American political scandals, we have at least one dead body, a number of whistleblowers and anonymous "Deep Throats," powerful but corrupt politicians, counterfeit and real documents, con men, and a money trail tied to off-shore foreign bank accounts.
Madsen wasn't the only person to receive the Curtis affidavit, as BradBlog also received a copy and reports that somebody killed Curtis's dog for the second time, the last being about two years ago. There might be something to this, or it just might be someone seeking attention for themselves (under penalty of perjury). Curtis seems to be a real person with a history, a website, and a personal domain name (with no website) registered in 2003. Cannonfire has more.
Getting off the election track into other conspiracy theories, Booman23@DailyKos has pulled a bunch of information off Lexis-Nexus to create a series of diaries on Sep11, Mohammed Atta, Sibel Edmonds, and so on. He/she/it posits that Sibel Edmonds (see earlier articles) discovered evidence of al-Qaeda's plans for Sep11 in an Azeri intercept and couldn't get the government to do anything about it because of al-Qaeda's drugrunning financiers' connections to the government, and implies that Wally Hilliard, owner of the flight school where some Sep11 terrorists trained, knew the kind of people he was dealing with.
And finally, Daniel Hopsicker, mentioned in another conspiracy theory posting earlier, alleges that Porter Goss was in a Cuban Mafia connected CIA assassin unit called Operation 40, whose members Hopsicker elsewhere accuses of involvement in the Kennedy assassination.
Via the Ceeb rather than the Beeb for once, we've got this:
TORONTO - Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board will hear Monday why Jeremy Hinzman, a former paratrooper with the U.S. army, should be granted refugee status in Canada.Rather than serve in Iraq, Hinzman deserted the army and came to Canada in January seeking sanctuary in a Quaker hall outside Toronto.
...
Canada has not granted refugee status to American citizens in the past, but Hinzman's supporters are counting on a precedent in international law to help the American.
Gerry Cordon, a Hinzman supporter, says a soldier who refused to fight in Saddam Hussein's army in the invasion of Kuwait, successfully sought refugee status.
The potential international-incidentacularity of this particular case is causing me to simultaneously cringe and chortle with misplaced glee.
In all fairness, I hope the guy gets what he's seeking, but I'm also assuming there's some not-very-subtle backchannel threats over this coming up over the border as well. I have a feeling he'll get thrown to the dogs, who will in turn pass him along to the lions, for this one.
Not much to say beyond that, not least for the fact that I'm more than a little tired right now. Just figured I'd bring it to folks' attentions so they could at least have the chance to say "uh-oh" before the storm that'll break if Hinzman's status is granted.
So yeah. Keep an eye on it. And if his status is granted, it can't hurt for us Canadians to cheer the guy on while diving under the nearest bed or table.
NBC and CBS have caused a ruckus by refusing to run an advertisement from the United Church of Christ. The ad portrays bouncers at a church preventing certain people from attending services, then cites Jesus's tolerance to promote the UCC's policy of welcoming people of all stripes: "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here."
The stations rejected the ad as too controversial for suggesting that a Christian church could accept homosexuals into its ranks. However, the advertisement doesn't make it obvious that it's about homosexuality except that homosexuality is the issue of the day that people would implicitly connect it to. The most apparent factor in the rejected churchgoers is their melanin level. There's only a quick glimpse of two men holding hands at the beginning. I had to watch the ad several times to see it, and I was looking for it. Also, when showing the happy faces of people in the church, you see a woman put her arm around the shoulder of another woman, but that doesn't mean they're homosexuals. They could be sisters.
Perhaps the greater source of controversy is the strong insinuation that churches and religious leaders who reject a class of people are un-Christian, since this would include most of the popular public leaders of Christianity in the United States. The ad is a subtle repudiation of a lot of powerful people who claim to be the sole arbiters of the meaning of Jesus's teachings. One of those people might be a certain George W. Bush, who has made a habit of impugning the faith of any opposing politicians who are famous for making their Christian faith public, especially Senators Patrick Leahy and John Kerry.
CBS seems to think so. Among the reasons they gave for rejecting the ad is "the fact that the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman". In other words, they wouldn't run the ad because they didn't want to show opposition to Bush's policies. Given that the ad doesn't reference homosexual marriage, just showing a homosexual couple, this citation of Bush seems unnecessary and out of place.
There's an outside possibility that CBS is citing Bush in order to place blame on him for a manufactured scandal. As much as I love a good conspiracy theory, I doubt this is the case. CBS might be one of the media outlets least hostile to Democrats, but they also got rid of Dan Rather for the sort of thing that happens every five minutes on FOX, CNN, or MSNBC except for the fact that Rather apologized. One of the things that makes me doubt this is that the ad was initially rejected by CBS and NBC nine months ago. If someone wanted to make this an anti-Bush issue, they could have done it during the Presidential campaign when it could have effected the outcome of the race. I'm more inclined to believe the marketing/business people at CBS rejected the ad because they really wanted Bush to win and thought that public promotion of Jesus's willingness to preach to the undesirables of his day, instead of rejecting them as the Pharisees did, might have hurt the Bush campaign.
Don't trust those elitist intellectuals? Hate ivory-tower Democrats with their snobbery and big words like "egalitarian" and "unconstitutional"? We don't blame you; it's a simple truth that most people, regardless of their level of native wit or education, are most comfortable around people of similar intelligence. Hey, the "average Joe" angle basically got this President re-elected -- quite a few voters apparently would rather have a President with whom they could watch the big game than one who doesn't have to rely on his advisors to handle the hard decisions. And Bush is human, after all: he seeks a comfortable intellectual level to surround himself with in his associates.
Take the new Cabinet Secretary of Homeland Security: Ridge's replacement, Bernard Kerik, is a high school dropout.
Go ahead. Check any short biography on the Web. I'll wait.
He apparently got a GED somewhere along the way, thank goodness. But there goes the "we can elect an average Joe as long as his advisors can carry the load" notion. Me, I'll take an uncommonly smart President any day. Though I won't have the opportunity for *checks calendar* 1433 days.
Not that I'm counting.
US Congressman Henry Waxman's office has produced a disturbing report saying that federal abstinence-based sex education programs aren't merely leaving children uninformed about sex, they're lying to your kids about the facts of life. Out of the thirteen programs used by five or more Special Programs of Regional and National Significance grant recipients, Waxman's people found factual errors in eleven of them.
Left out of the report was a clear statement of which programs were more or less prone to error, excepting the clean bill of health given ETR Associates' Sex Can Wait and the Grady Health System's Managing Pressures Before Marriage programs. Amusingly, the FACTS program and the two programs produced by Project Reality fail to have all their information straight. Instead, the Waxman report simply states that an unnamed program makes a factual error and leaves it for the reader to either dig through the footnotes for the specific program name or gain the impression that all the programs are making the error.
Also missing are the numbers on how widespread the error-prone programs are compared to better programs. SPRaNS grant recipients are being singled out because SPRaNS funding is ballooning while other federal abstinence-based sex education funding has been steady over the years. We can still use the data in the report to deduce the portion of SPRaNS recipients whose programs are singled out for condemnation. In 2004, SPRaNS had "over 100 grantees and a budget of $75 million", up from $50 million in 2003 according to a provided graph. In 2003, "the eleven [erratic] curricula are used...by 69 grantees...these 69 grantees received over $32 million in funding". From this, a fair estimate is that 60% of SPRaNS-funded abstinence-based programs contain errors, though we still can't tell the bad ones from the really bad ones without digging through the footnotes, which I'm too lazy to do at the moment.
If that doesn't leave you worried about the state of biological education in the US, check out a recent Gallup poll of Americans' beliefs on evolution, where as many or more say all the scientific evidence refutes evolution as say that there's evidence to support it.
