Please read this. 61 million votes, more than half of the votes expected this fall, will be counted by the computers of Election Systems and Software - one privately held company. Are you comfortable with that? Keep checking Black Box Voting and Working for Change to see how you can help ensure a fair election.

Wherever your treasure lies, there your heart will be --
The NYT religion reporter David Kirkpatrick, out watching with admiration as #43's conservative Christian foot soldiers jeopardize their tax-exempt status, missed a good sermon Sunday at #41's Kennebunkport church. The supply pastor implored the wealthy congregation to give up their material possessions (he probably won't be invited back). He must've been preaching on the same text I heard Sunday. #43 was at his daddy's church, too. (Someone could maybe tell him there's a lot more like this in all those pages between Leviticus and Revelations.)

Oil for food --
No, not the apparently criminal UN program, but the bigger picture -- what it costs the earth, in energy, to feed us. You really should read the whole article, but here are some sobering reflections:

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's "primary productivity." There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
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The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

I've been working through the ecological footprint calculations in Jim Merkel's Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth to measure my own footprint, and it's pretty sickening. (Here's an online eco-footprint calculator, if you're curious about your own.) As long as we're on the subject of perspective-taking, see where you rank among the wealthiest of the world (thanks, BB).

When is it OK to leak?
Apparently only when it makes the administration look like it's on top of the "war on terror" -- even if it actually weakens the "war on terror." But the administration trotted out Condi Rice yesterday to defend their honor and integrity (why do they do that? She invariably makes things worse) and insist that they most certainly did not leak the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan to the press and thus compromise on ongoing investigation. Joshua Marshall explains here why her explanation - that the name of the detainee was part of background information and was not intended to be printed - was just plain wrong. Background information can be used by journalists; only the identity of the speaker is withheld.