The problem with blogging so sporadically (necessarily, these few weeks - I've had limited internet access, AND too much assigned reading) is that I know you've already encountered this stuff elsewhere... but I'm compelled to "share" it anyway.

First of all, it's World Aids Day. Or it was before I finally got online. But we all know it takes more than a day of recognition and observance to have a prayer of getting a handle on things like this and this. It's nearly impossible hard to get one's head around the magnitude and scope of the crisis - present and future. For instance, what happens when this many children are orphaned? Last year I had the incredibly good fortune to visit northeastern Tanzania. My companions and I spoke with a nurse who told us the crisis was nowhere near peaking. She told us "the women ask us, 'how can I have AIDS when I have been faithful to my husband?' How do we tell them, 'your husband goes to the city and sleeps with other women and comes home and infects you'?" She told us that one nurse urged her patients to pack condoms in their husbands' suitcases when they left for the city, but the husbands would beat their wives for the implication. Yes, drug users, sex workers and their clients contribute to the crisis... but if women don't get some immediate practical options for protecting themselves, this will not stop until there's no one left to infect.

And speaking of unforgiveable losses of human lives, the US approached a record number of military casualties in Iraq last month...

As long as we're spreading democracy, why won't the US sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Lots of liberal sites are all over this story, but there's very little in "mainstream" media. CBS and NBC are refusing to air this ad by the United Church of Christ, because it's "too controversial." CBS went so unbelievably, frighteningly, ridiculously far as to say their decision was due to "the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman..." So when will the Executive Branch be taking "Will and Grace" off the air?

Arianna Huffington provides an uplifting historical perspective on the fix we're in:

"...In 1992, the Republican Party found itself in very much the same position as Democrats do today: out of power (with the opposition controlling the White House and both houses of Congress), lacking a compelling core message, and facing the prospect of becoming what any number of pundits at the time deemed — all together now — “a permanent minority party.”

Indeed, reading the post-mortems of the 1992 election is like coming across the original template for the post-mortems of the 2004 election.

If you take away the names, you would swear that the Republican quotes from back then were being delivered by the Democrats from right now.

Take this Bill Bennett quote from November 1992 placing the blame for the Republican drubbing on “the lack of a clear, coherent, compelling core message.” Doesn’t it sound like any number of Democrats complaining about 2004?

Or how about this ’92 analysis from John Ashcroft, then governor of Missouri, writing in the Washington Post: “The Republican Party needs to shake itself loose from top-down management, undergo a grassroots renewal and adopt a vigorous, positive agenda that flows from the priorities, views and values of citizens who involve themselves in that process. ...Our party needs to frame its priorities more in terms of what we’re for rather than what we are against.”

These are precisely the sentiments now being echoed throughout Democratic circles.

And then, just as now, a sense of long-term gloom and doom hovered over the losing side. “All that is clear about the GOP’s future,” forecast the Los Angeles Times in November ’92, “is that its comeback trail will be long and rigorous.”

It turned out to be short and sweet. Just two years after being given their political last rites, Republicans rose from their deathbed and seized control of both chambers of Congress, picking up 52 seats in the House and nine in the Senate. The shift was so dramatic that President Clinton, in the wake of the GOP victory, felt the need to insist at a press conference that he was still “relevant.”

This is but one example of how the political landscape can and does change overnight..."

And she has some very practical strategic suggestions:

For starters, they need to make sure that there is never another election held with electronic voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail, or voter suppression caused by long lines and not enough polling places in poor neighborhoods.

Next, they should — to paraphrase Shakespeare — kill all the consultants (and, while they’re at it, do away with the bullheaded pollsters, too). The Party needs to find and develop campaign teams that can run winning races in the 21st century, not keep rehiring the same professional losers election after election. Shouldn’t there be an “eight strikes and you’re out” rule?

Democrats also need to retool their party infrastructure. Conservatives have spent the better part of the last 30 years building a potent message machine — a network of think tanks, policy centers and media outlets — that spends more than $300 million a year to promote its agenda. Instead of sitting around complaining that the big, bad GOP has them overmatched, Democrats need to open their wallets and build their own well-funded message machine.

A key part of this apparatus will inevitably be the Internet, which must now assume a central role in all Party efforts. One of the underreported achievements of the Kerry campaign was its startling success in Internet fund-raising, taking in over $82 million in online donations. This same combination of cyber-savvy and sophisticated marketing must be used to help Democrats spread their message and build citizen participation.

To do this, Democrats have got to nationalize the 2006 Congressional races — just as Republicans did in ’94. They don’t necessarily need their own version of the Contract with America, but they do need to make their stands on the crucial political battles of the day — including taxes, the environment, the war in Iraq, Social Security and the Supreme Court — part of a larger narrative and not just a laundry list of policy positions and four-point plans.

And, finally, Democrats need to forge ahead with nascent efforts to recruit, train and fund a better crop of candidates. As one film-director friend of mine put it: “It’s ultimately about casting; I’m tired of voting for some guy who isn’t right for the role but got the part anyway.”

Ruy Teixeira also has a good historical analysis that makes mincemeat of the Bush Mandate.

One of the better barbs in the meeting of the Reverends on Meet the Press Sunday (someone referred to the exchange as a "food fight," but I can't find the link) came when Al Sharpton (yes, the one whose very presence puzzled me so) said to Richard Land, " Does your Bible have Esther and Ruth in it?" Dr. Land: "Sure. Of course." Rev. Sharpton: "I mean, do you have the whole Bible?" Dr. Land: "I do."

It's the kind of question both Christian camps (progressive and conservative) ask of the other when they detect, shall we say, glossing over of texts that don't fit a particular worldview. (However, one camp - I'll let you figure it out - believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God as dictated to the scribes and apostles and capably edited by King James' committee, where the other considers that perhaps the merest hint of an agenda or prejudice could have crept into the transcription process here and there.) And it seems particularly relevant to ask when, for instance, hundreds of references to loving and caring for one another are brushed aside in order to highlight a half dozen passages about homosexuality. Here, Sean Gonsalves tries to educate a bible thumper about some of the missing pages in his Bible...

Back to the books, for now. I have a term paper deadline looming for a professor/advisor who just doesn't give me any credit for blogging...