Twenty years after Bhopal...

(Excerpt) On the night of 2 December 1984, poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal. Thousands were killed immediately. Thousands more were to die from the effects of that night in the months and years that followed.
[---]
"The disaster shocked the world and raised fundamental questions about corporate and government responsibility for industrial accidents that devastate human life and local environments," the report reads.

"Yet 20 years on, the survivors still await just compensation, adequate medical assistance and treatment, and comprehensive economic and social rehabilitation. The plant site has still not been cleaned up so toxic wastes still pollute the environment and contaminate water that surrounding communities rely on. And, astonishingly, no one has been held to account for the leak and its appalling consequences."
[---]
The report confirms survivors' claims that far more died in the immediate aftermath of the gas leak than the figure of 2,000 claimed by the Madhya Pradesh state government. Amnesty's found that 7,000 died in the immediate aftermath, and 15,000 more have died of related diseases since 1984. It reveals that 100,000 people still suffer from chronic or debilitating illnesses. "The company decided to store quantities of the 'ultra-hazardous' MIC in Bhopal in bulk, and did not equip the plant with a corresponding safety capacity," the report says.

Repeat: no one has been held to account...

Frank Rich last week, in one of the many pieces I didn't get to pass on here:

"The mainstream press, itself in love with the "moral values" story line and traumatized by the visual exaggerations of the red-blue map, is too cowed to challenge the likes of the American Family Association. So are politicians of both parties. It took a British publication, The Economist, to point out that the percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical values as their prime concern is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent)."

Now this would have been a very useful statistic for Rev. Jim Wallis to toss out yesterday on Meet the Press during the "sometimes heated discussion" he held with the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jerry Falwell and Richard Land. "Discussion" is a generous way to describe this exchange, which revealed nothing new and found very little common ground. Here's the transcript. Tim Russert moderated, albeit ineffectually, on topics of faith, politics, moral values, and whatever sound bites the participants spat out - including whether God could be pro-war, and who takes the Bible more seriously (Falwell, of course). (Disclaimer: I lived in NYC during Sharpton's Tawana Brawley years, and must confess to being somewhat flummoxed by his transformation into a social justice dignitary and apparently serious presidential candidate. Having him on this program to represent religious progressives along with Jim Wallis was... an interesting choice.) Russert brought up the fact that divorce rates are higher in the "red states," and that "Desperate Housewives" is watched as much in the red states as the blue, but the Reverends didn't really take the bait. And actually, TNR's Jeffrey Friedman makes a good case for the flawed logic in assuming that red state voters are the same folks that are getting divorces and watching "Desperate Housewives." In any case, it was pretty clear that this was little more than a chance to trumpet already established positions, not to seek compromise or agreement. And with right-wing ministers like the abominably smug and proudly intolerant James Kennedy telling non-believers and non-right wingers to "repent" in the face of a conservative Christian-controlled government, I don't expect compromise or agreement is in the offing.

A dispatch from beyond the Reality-Based Community informs us that global warming may in fact be beneficial to humankind:

The International Policy Network will publish its long-awaited study, claiming that the science warning of an environmental disaster caused by climate change is 'fatally flawed'. It will state that previous predictions of changes in sea level of a metre over the next 100 years were overestimates.

Instead, the report will say that sea level rises will reach a maximum of just 20cms during the next century, adding that global warming could, in fact, benefit mankind by increasing fish stocks.

No mention of the benefits associated with natural disasters and the concommitant economic crisis anticipated by the world's second largest insurer...

I wish I could say I'm closely following developments in Ukraine, but I'm not. I'm following other people following the developments. Julie Saltman (via Pandagon) spotted this delicious irony:

The Bush adminstration has refused to accept the Ukrainian election results because they suspect fraud. Apparently the conservative candidate has claimed victory by a narrow margin but -- and I am not making this up -- the results are under suspicion because the exit polls gave a narrow victory to his liberal challenger...

The Supreme Court was asked to overturn the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that legalized gay marriage. They declined without comment. Dang those activist judges.

Wal-Mart had a bleak Black Friday, but sales of high-end, luxury items were up. I'm sure this has nothing to do with beneficiaries of Bush's tax policies...

Coincidental to my Django Reinhardt item last week, The New Yorker reviews a new biography about him.

Postings will remain unpredictable for a couple of weeks, yet, but don't give up on me!

I haven't been very good about attending to the blogroll on the right - updating it with my new discoveries, etc. But I just noticed that at least one or two that I added some time ago weren't actually showing up on the site... because I failed to close a quotation mark! So allow me to momentarily point you to Father Jake Stops the World and FaithAsAWayofLife, because I've been enjoying them both, and meant to share the discoveries awhile ago! I'll get organized and add some other ones, soon.

Many apologies for the brown-out here this week. I have not had internet access and am easily overwhelmed, now, by the dense text and long, repetitive columns of an old-fashioned newspaper. So I limited my news media interactions to talking back to television reporters on "Today" and "Good Morning America" as I go dressed, and I've been concentrating on learning my new job and getting the house ready for yesterday's T-day gathering.

• This is good news for those of us who are concerned about the election process, but probably the kiss of death for the GAO (Government Accountability Office): They have begun investigating the many reports of election day problems and irregularities. We can probably bet the farm on severe GAO budget cuts next year?

  WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress' investigative agency, responding to complaints from around the country, has begun to look into the Nov. 2 vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.
  
  The presidential results won't change, but the studies could lead to changes.
  
  The Government Accountability Office usually begins investigations in response to specific requests from Congress, but the agency's head, Comptroller General David Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of the many comments it received about ballot counting.
  
  GAO officials said the investigation was not triggered by a request from several House Democrats, who wrote the agency this month seeking an investigation. The effort, led by senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers of Michigan, was not joined by any Republicans.
  
  Walker said in a statement that some of the election work is under way. The probe will cover voter registration, voting machine problems and handling of provisional ballots, which were given to voters who said they were eligible to cast votes although their names were not on the rolls.
  
  He cautioned that the GAO cannot enforce the law if voting irregularities are found, noting that state officials regulate elections and the Justice Department prosecutes voting rights violations and election fraud.
  
  Conyers said in an interview Wednesday that several House Democrats "want the widest, most impartial investigation that can be had. Whether they (GAO investigators) want to go as far as we want to go, we're not certain. We're at first base. Where do we go from here?"
  
  The congressman said he plans to meet with Walker and key Republicans to see whether Congress should take action to improve election systems.
  
  He said he would like the investigation to include allegations that insufficient numbers of voting machines were sent to some Democratic areas.
  
  The study also should cover how election officials responded to problems they encountered, he said.
  
  Thousands of complaints have poured in to Congress and appeared on Internet sites about problems with the elections, the Democrats said.
  
  In make-or-break Ohio, where Bush won 20 electoral votes, voters cast 155,337 provisional ballots. They are under review by state elections officials, who count them if registration is confirmed. About 78 percent of the ballots counted so far have been deemed valid.
  
  Meanwhile, election officials in two Ohio counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election, and a third county found about 2,600 ballots were double-counted.
  
  Groups checking election results have overwhelmed Ohio county boards of election with requests for information, and a statewide recount of the presidential vote appears inevitable after a pair of third-party candidates collected enough money to demand one.
  
  Other examples of problems cited by Conyers and other House Democrats:
  
  _In Columbus, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave President Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes.
  
  _An electronic count of a South Florida gambling ballot initiative failed to record thousands of votes.
  
  _In Guilford County, N.C., vote totals were so large that the tabulation computer didn't count some votes, and a recount awarded an additional 22,000 votes to Democrat John Kerry.
  
  _In San Francisco, a glitch in voting machine software left votes uncounted.
  
  _In Youngstown, Ohio, voters who tried to cast ballots for Kerry on electronic machines saw their votes recorded for President Bush instead.
  
  _In Sarpy County, Neb., a computer problem added thousands of votes to the county total. It was not clear which presidential candidate benefited from the error in the overwhelmingly Republican state.

• At dinner yesterday, one guest remarked that the US government could never be taken over by religious fundamentalists... Meet Phil Burress and reflect on his plans.
  
  
• Congress is threatening to withhold aid to any country that refuses to grant US personnel immunity from war crimes tribunals.
  
  
• Which reminds me... apparently anyone can grow up to be a torturer.
  
  
• Granted, Mr. Bush's plans to privatize social security and restructure the tax code (to provide even more relief to the very rich) weren't the centerpieces of his stump speech - so even hardcore believers might have been surprised to learn that their top priorities were not actually his top priorities, but given this post-election poll, one really wonders what the hell those 59 million thought they were voting for.

  At a time when the White House has portrayed Mr. Bush's 3.5-million-vote victory as a mandate, the poll found that Americans are at best ambivalent about Mr. Bush's plans to reshape Social Security, rewrite the tax code, cut taxes and appoint conservative judges to the bench. There is continuing disapproval of Mr. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, with a plurality now saying it was a mistake to invade in the first ple.

• Worldwide, the number of women infected with AIDS is now higher than men:

  (Excerpt)In every region of the world - including the US, where Aids is one of the biggest killers of African-American women, and Europe - it is the same story, said Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of UNAids, yesterday, and it means that a new strategy must be adopted.
  
  "The prevention strategies now in place are missing the point when it comes to women and girls," she said. The ABC mantra favoured by the US - abstinence, be faithful and use a condom - is useless to women who do not have the power to refuse sex, sometimes from an older, sexually experienced husband who already has HIV.
  
  Social and cultural change is the only way to check the pandemic in countries where women have no status or power, UNAids says - although it accepts that revolution is not on the cards.
  
  "What we're talking about is very specific actions that are do-able, moving to a situation where every woman gets to keep her house and her land and her furniture when her partner dies," said Ms Cravero. "It doesn't mean turning society on its head. It means getting the right laws in place and making them enforceable.
  
  "We have to work against the fatalistic idea that you can never change these things."

  Folks, our delusional president and his Republican congress is not going to take the lead on this. (Unless you call withholding funds from agencies that provide family planning and birth control "leading.") Here's the UNAIDS site.
  
  
• "Dead-checking" -- that's what marines call the actions of the young man who executed a wounded Iraqi in a mosque a couple weeks ago. A wounded Iraqi can still shoot you as you walk away. A dead one can't. "What does the American public think happens when they tell us to assault a city?" one of them said. "Marines don't shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people." Evan Wright's column on the reality of war dead is pretty harrowing reading.

Djangled

Djangled
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

(Django Reinhardt photo by the great William Gottlieb.) I stumbled across this terrific CD in a used bookstore (where else?) and have been listening to it all weekend. I first heard a Django Reinhardt recording when I was about 17 -- I'd found a cheap re-release of some kind, along with several other guitar-instrumental LPs I was collecting for inspiration. The sound quality was lousy, and I didn't spend much time really appreciating Django's stylings. 25 years later he's one of many, many guitarists I listen to, but I only recently learned this: his right hand was badly burned when he and his young family were trying to escape a fire. The last two fingers - you can see the scarring in the photo above - were permanently curled from tendon damage. To accomodate his new reality, he reconfigured all of his chord patterns, and developed solos he could play with his two good fingers! That makes his playing all the more amazing to me. Give him a listen some time, if you haven't. (He also couldn't read or write music, so he never played a solo the same way twice.)

• And God created Pierolapithecus catalaunicus and madeth it to appear very old (13 million years) and buried it near Barcelona, deep, but not too deep... (If your kids are in Philly's Dover school district, they probably won't be hearing about this fascinating find; then again, if you've got your kids in that school district, you probably don't want them hearing about this, eh?)
  
  
• Point - Counterpoint:
  
  

  "I guess you could say I'm a good steward of the land..." GW Bush, in the second presidential debate this year.
  
  "The Sierra Club today released documents showing that the Bush administration gave special treatment to Texas-based Davis Brothers Oil Producers, Inc., when it reversed a longstanding policy in order to allow oil and gas drilling underneath certain national parks, preserves and refuges regardless of potential environmental impacts. More than a dozen National Park Service areas could be impacted by the rule, including Big Thicket National Preserve and Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, New River Gorge in West Virginia, and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida.
  
  Documents obtained by Sierra Club through the Freedom of Information Act show that the Bush administration changed the rule specifically at the request of Ross Davis, who runs Davis Brothers Oil Producers.
  
  Moreover, the administration made its decision in secret and bypassed the regular rulemaking process, which allows for public input and a high degree of transparency."

• "It's like experimenting with drugs," Davies said. "You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?" Can someone please get Delana Davies the help she so desperately needs? Her children, too, if they're to have any hope of a normal life. Davies forced her son's school district to cancel one of its traditional homecoming week gags, a "cross-dressing" day. They will all wear military camouflage gear instead.
  
  
• Ohio's Green Party and Ohio Honest Elections Campaign will try to force a recount after gathering mounds of evidence on deliberate vote suppression, electronic voting disparities, and confusion over provisional balloting. Meanwhile, the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study suggesting that electronic voting machines "may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election." The study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/. (Kevin Drum links to a couple of studies that question the Berkeley findings, however.)
  
  
• Just trying to keep up here: the Pentagon is pressing for US-imposed "regime change" in Iran, even as the US considers boosting troop levels in the existing mess in Iraq, which we apparently can only do by calling up aging and out of shape military retirees? By the way, Bob Simon had a segment on 60 Minutes tonight dealing with the military's shameful disregard of non-combat casualties from the Iraq war. Between 15,000 (military estimate provided to Simon in a letter - not provided to news media on a daily basis!) and 30,000 (estimate from Globalsecurity.org) men and women have been evacuated from Iraq due to illness or injury. That's a far cry more than the approximately 5000 figure we're more likely to hear in the press. That's because the military - undoubtedly concerned about losing public support for the "action" - doesn't include the men and women injured in "non-combat" situations (in once case, a tank awaiting action tumbled into the Tigris when the land beneath it gave way; two men were killed, and another was paralyzed from the neck down. None of them are listed as casualties.). Conveniently, this also denies a host of benefits to these men and women. Beyond reprehensible.
  
  
• Harold Myerson and James Carville are among the latest to opine that Democrats need a "theme." Someone somewhere else derided the Democratic party's "laundry list." (I can't find the link.) Oliver Willis has gone so far as to create a whole (admittedly creative) "branding" campaign. Even ZZ Packer, in a smart piece on Democratic marginalizing of the religious voices in the party, plugs the "theme" theme: "...What we Democrats need is our own political brand of evangelism. The conservatives have a well-wrought message, but no works. We have the substantive works, but no message, and certainly no overarching vision..." I have fallen on both sides, and smack on the fence, on this issue, but today, I'm of this mind: it's pathetic that we are talking this way. It's gross. It's Republican. I know that great segments of the electorate are giving other segments of the electorate good reasons to puzzle deeply over their cognitive processes, but at this moment, the whole idea of branding and creating a party "theme" strikes me as the height of manipulative cynicism. If Democrats are not recognizeable by their works, convictions and priorities, then it is because we are losing sight of them ourselves, and are beginning to hybridize and mutate. (I might be picking up on some of Thomas Frank's observations here.) There is nothing uninformative about a "litany" or a "list" if it reflects the priorities of the person(s) who created it. I run my whole life on lists: I make a "to-do" list, and trust that the items I put on it are going to bear some approximation or relationship to the values I hold. To the world around me, those values will - I hope - become clear in my daily conduct. Not once has one of my lists tricked me into doing something against my convictions! "Let's see... #4... 'Support legislation to lower vehicle emission standards and open more roadless areas in national forests to off-road vehicles.' Done. Wait! Dammit! How'd that get on my list?!" Perhaps we can trust that the American people -- maybe at least half of them -- have the inductive reasoning abilities to recognize a few governing principles, and to develop expectations, from the actions we Democrats take? (OK, true, we'll need to work fast, because this administration is working doubletime to restrict advanced education.)
  
  For those who continue to insist on a theme, I think the terrific Pax Christi campaign covers everything: Life does not end at birth.
  
  
• Here's how members of the Moral Values Party react when a journalist, in the process of doing his job, reports an unpleasant truth about an American soldier...
  
  
• Republicans yesterday tried to sneak a line through a massive omnibus spending bill that would have given any committee chair and his/her staffers the right to look at ANY AMERICAN'S TAX RETURN. Daily Kos contributors caught the action on CSPAN. That spending bill passed, by the way - and includes the very special provision that allows hospitals and doctors to refuse abortions without sacrificing state or federal money. The Senate added a "range of priorities" that included a presidential yacht. In what moral value system can a "yacht" appear as a "priority"? Why, that of the ruling majority, of course. MyDD has more on the urgency of that budget item, and Atrios thinks the DNC should have some commercials out this week.
  
  
• I guess now that Bush is safely back in office, Greenspan can admit that we're nearing economic catastrophe...
  
  
• If the Washington Post doesn't have an apology or a good explanation for this, I will join the boycott. You'll have to find your WaPo links elsewhere. Here is some follow-up on the quackpot whose work the supplement cites. I'll check WaPo a few times to see if they've accounted for their judgement, but no further.

My cold medicine is kicking in. I'd better get back to my books while the words still appear in straight lines.

• Ah, Powell. The good soldier to the end. And we should believe him now because he's been so accurate in the past, right? Not that it matters; Kevin Drum sees ominous signs...
  
  
• Dowd today pretty much sums up the administration in one sentence: "First, faith trumped facts. Now, loyalty trumps competence."
  
  
• Barbara Ehrenreich:

  Of all the loathsome spectacles we've endured since Nov. 2 – the vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his "mandate" – none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the "moral values" edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib. The cries for Democrats to overcome their "out-of-touch-ness" and embrace the predominant faith all dodge the full horror of the situation: A criminal has been enabled to continue his bloody work with the help, in no small part, of self-identified Christians.
  [---]
  In the aftermath of election 2004, centrist Democrats should not be flirting with faith but re-examining their affinity for candidates too mumble-mouthed and compromised to articulate poverty and war as the urgent moral issues they are. Jesus is on our side here, and secular liberals should not be afraid to invoke him. Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is for the most part silent, or mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion. At the very least, we need a firm commitment to public forms of childcare, healthcare, housing and education – for people of all faiths and no faith at all. Secondly, progressives should perhaps rethink their own disdain for service-based outreach programs. Once it was the left that provided "alternative services" in the form of free clinics, women's health centers, food co-ops and inner-city multi-service storefronts. Enterprises like these are not substitutes for an adequate public welfare state, but they can become the springboards from which to demand one.

• Speaking of... The Party of the Moral Values Voters has voted to let members of Congress retain leadership positions even if they have been indicted, you know, just in case anybody tries to give poor Tom DeLay a hard time. They owe him, after all that effort he put into a potentially illegel redistricting scheme in the state of Texas that won them five more seats. One of the delicious ironies about this is that Republicans concocted this rule in 1993 in order to cripple Democratic Ways and Means Chair, Dan Rostenkowski, during his own "challenges."
  
  
• Good question, Father Jake. Where go the moral values voters when US soldiers are slaughtering terrified families:

  "Why is there little moral outrage about this? I thought the American people recently claimed that "moral values" were at the top of their list of priorities?
  
  I suppose that there's only so much moral outrage to go around. So much has been expended on legislating sex and denying health care for women that there's not much left for war crimes."

  Meanwhile, Margaret Hassan is gone. A terrible, terrible shame that accomplishes nothing but increased hardship for the Iraqis she served, and would probably go a long way toward turning sympathies against her kidnappers, if only the US could keep its own savageries and war crimes off the front pages for a few weeks.
  
  
• I'll have to consult with a couple of learned Hebrew expert friends to get their take on this, but it sounds spectacular and I can't wait to read it: Robert Alter has published a new English translation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible...

  "...His argument is that past translations either get the Hebrew wrong or mangle the Bible's syntax or lose the power of the work or even are so up-to-the-minute that they become too conversational to be accurate or interesting.
  
  He was also determined to get back into the book every single "and" that other translators left out, saying that part of book's majesty is built by its use of repetitions.
  
  The 1611 King James version, perhaps the most famous book ever written by a committee, may reach poetic heights, but Alter says it is fraught with "embarrassing inaccuracies" and often substitutes Greek or Latin words and Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones..."

Thanks for your patience this week. I'm getting settled in to the new schedule, and still bouncing between offices. Things should lighten up after Friday!

I started my new data consulting job today, and had no computer access. What an interesting feeling. Count on postings to remain light and unpredictable this week, as I get adjusted. And they'll probably come online at night. But I'm trying to get caught up!

I'll have more to say about this topic eventually (no promises when), because it relates to my developing masters thesis. Just please cogitate on Wangari Maathai's wise words, for now. She is Kenya's Assistant Minister for Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife, founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mount Kenya is a World Heritage Site. The equator passes right on its top, and it has a unique habitat and heritage.

Because it is a glacier-topped mountain, it is the source of many of Kenya's rivers. Now, partly because of climate change and partly because of logging and encroachment through cultivation of crops, the glaciers are melting. Many of the rivers flowing from Mount Kenya have either dried up or become very low. Its biological diversity is threatened as the forests fall.

"What shall we do to conserve this forest?" I asked myself.

As I tried to encourage women and the African people in general to understand the need to conserve the environment, I discovered how crucial it is to return constantly to our cultural heritage. Mount Kenya used to be a holy mountain for my people, the Kikuyus. They believed that their God dwelled on the mountain and that everything good – the rains, clean drinking water – flowed from it. As long as they saw the clouds (the mountain is a very shy mountain, usually hiding behind clouds), they knew they would get rain.

And then the missionaries came. With all due respect to the missionaries (they are the ones who really taught me), in their wisdom, or lack of it, they said, "God does not dwell on Mount Kenya. God dwells in heaven."

We have been looking for heaven, but we have not found it. Men and women have gone to the moon and back and have not seen heaven. Heaven is not above us: it is right here, right now.

So the Kikuyu people were not wrong when they said that God dwelled on the mountain, because if God is omnipresent, as theology tells us, then God is on Mount Kenya too. If believing that God is on Mount Kenya is what helps people conserve their mountain, I say that's okay. If people still believed this, they would not have allowed illegal logging or clear-cutting of the forests.

Do read the rest.

It somehow seems appropriate to put these items together: the US is blocking medical aid to Falluja civilians, shooting injured insurgents at point blank range (you think the one they happened to catch on film is the only one?) and the blogger of Baghdad Burning cries "WHERE IS EVERYONE???"

Have you seen this site? Click on "gallery" for the myriad of photo postings and apologies. It's an international hit.

Word came down this weekend that new CIA director Porter Goss has been authorized to purge the CIA of anyone who appears to lack loyalty to President Bush. That should take care of the "dissenting opinion" problem. Then we had the cascade of cabinet resignations: Powell, which isn't a big surprise, along with Agriculture Secretary Veneman and Energy Secretary Spencer. Rice, God help us, appears to be replacing Powell, and a Rumsfeld resignation is just too much to hope for.

Shoot. Starting next year, I'm not gonna be able to studiously ignore William Safire anymore.

Ah ha! Exeedingly useful trivia! I occasionally get confused about Red States and Blue States (though certainly not this year) because it seemed to me that I was "red" one of the times I voted for Clinton. I chalked it up to my aging memory. But the colors really have switched!

Hey, the good people of Moving Ideas have added Left At The Altar to their progressive blogroll! So if you're just starting to visit from there, welcome! Please entertain yourself with the archives until I get my new job/school act together and start posting more predictably!

I know I'm gonna hear it for the snarky caption on the map graphic. And for my evolution education diatribe. I suppose my thinking grows a little more polarized and heuristic (can I use that as an adjective?) when I'm several hundred pages behind on my homework, and several hundred minutes behind on sleep, and still absolutely disgusted by the results of the election! (Dang! I've been trying to keep that under control!)

I've been meaning, since the "moral values" post-election day explanatory narrative started to take shape in the media, to link back to an oldie-but-goodie, a terrific column by Anna Quindlen entitled "At then Left Hand of God." I linked to it way back in April, I think, when I started this blog -- because it's one of the things that made me want to. An excerpt:

When did it first become gospel that only conservatives knew God? It sure wasn't true 40 years ago for a Roman Catholic kid in a Catholic neighborhood, when the knock on John F. Kennedy was that religion was likely to be too much a part of his politics and he'd be on the phone to the Holy See so often, the pope would be a de facto cabinet member. Jimmy Carter's faith was as much a part of his persona as that Chiclets smile, and I'd like to meet the guy who could go head to head with Mario Cuomo on theology and not cry for mercy by the end of the exercise.

All that made perfect sense to me because I had long ago concluded that I had become a liberal largely through religion. Loving your neighbor as yourself, giving your cloak to the man who had none, blessed are the peacemakers: taken together, all of it seemed a clarion call to social justice and the obligation of individuals and institutions to help those who needed help. Jesus was the first radical rabble-rouser I'd ever read about in school, and the best.

Yet the other night I listened to Bill O'Reilly speak of "secularists" on Fox News, and as I tried to parse out who those secularists might be, I discovered to my surprise that they would be me...

My good friend Anne Carey filled in for our vacationing pastor at church today. Speaking to the Gospel text Luke 21:5-10 and the need for Christians to have the courage of their convictions, she worked her way to this elegant statement:

"It is crystal clear today that our national discourse on religion desperately needs to hear the voices of those who find in the gospel message of Jesus something more, something greater than the so-called 'moral values' of private piety. So I'll go out on a limb here and propose that, according to the Gospel, eliminating povery is a moral value. Seeking peace is a moral value. Loving your neighbor is a moral value. Making an effort to understand who you neighbor is is a moral value. Caring for God's good earth is a moral value. Working to heal divisions among God's people and within the Christian family is a moral value. Welcoming the stranger and the alien, the widow and the orphan is a moral value. Justice for all, regardless of social position or economic status or any other form of classification, is most definitely a moral value. I didn't just make all this up; every single value I mentioned is grounded in scripture."

Amen.

From the Department of Says It All...

uselectionmap
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

A future contributor to this blog sent me this graphic (thanks, J!). I deleted the email before I grabbed the source, so I'm still trying to track down the original creator/context. (I see this blog has it, too, but has no more information than I can find.) Yeeesh. No comment needed?

I think I am going to impose my own "litmus test" on future scientific and medical practitioners who have anything to do with my body: if you graduated from this school system or one like it (which includes some school systems in Georgia, Kansas and Ohio), don't touch me unless your actions will be limited to stitching shut a gaping wound or applying defibrillator paddles. If my doctor gets through school while willfully ignoring scientific evidence of evolutionary processes (hellooooooo, anyone seen a domesticated dog today?), I probably don't want her in a position to weigh the variety of options for my medical treatment. (For the one of you who is going to write to me and complain about this attitude, wait until I've had a little more sleep. Perhaps I'll reconsider and apologize, or I'll at least pay lip service to appreciating diverse points of view.)

Anyway, in honor of this Pennsylvania School Board decision, I have searched the far corners of the internet for a document I first read some 15 years ago. I kept a paper copy of it FOREVER (I thought), photocopied it for others, passed it around... But when I went to my collection of cherished articles this afternoon, in order to type it in here, it was gone. But this person has it on his web site (thank you, Thomas Batzler, whoever you are!). I don't know who wrote it originally - perhaps an as-yet undiscovered Priestly Writer? - but it is a work of art:

The Book of Creation

Chapter 1
1
In the beginning God created Dates.
2
And the date was Monday, July 4, 4004 BC.
3
And God said, let there be light; and there was light. And when there was Light, God saw the Date, that it was Monday, and he got down to work; for verily, he had a Big Job to do.
4
And God made pottery shards and Silurian mollusks and pre-Cambrian limestone strata; and flints and Jurassic Mastodon tusks and Picanthopus erectus skulls and Cretaceous placentals made he; and those cave paintings at Lasceaux. And that was that, for the first Work Day.
5
And God saw that he had made many wondrous things, but that he had not wherein to put it all. And God said, Let the heavens be divided from the earth; and let us bury all of these Things which we have made in the earth; but not too deep.
6
And God buried all the Things which he had made, and that was that.
7
And the morning and the evening and the overtime were Tuesday.
8
And God said, Let there be water; and let the dry land appear; and that was that.
9
And God called the dry land Real Estate; and the water called he the Sea. And in the land and beneath it put he crude oil, grades one through six; and natural gas put he thereunder, and prehistoric carboniferous forests yielding anthracite and other ligneous matter; and all these called he Resources; and he made them Abundant.
10
And likewise all that was in the sea, even unto two hundred miles from the dry land, called he resources; all that was therein, like manganese nodules, for instance.
11
And the morning unto the evening had been a long day; which he called Wednesday.
12
And God said, Let the earth bring forth abundantly every moving creature I can think of, with or without backbones, with or without wings or feet, or fins or claws, vestigial limbs and all, right now; and let each one be of a separate species. For lo, I can make whatsoever I like, whensoever I like.
13
And the earth brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, with and without backbones, with and without wings and feet and fins and claws, vestigial limbs and all, from bugs to brontosauruses.
14
But God blessed them all, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and Evolve Not.
15
And God looked upon the species he hath made, and saw that the earth was exceedingly crowded, and he said unto them, Let each species compete for what it needed; for Healthy Competition is My Law. And the species competeth amongst themselves, the cattle and the creeping things; and some madeth it and some didn't; and the dogs ate the dinosaurs and God was pleased.
16
And God took the bones from the dinosaurs, and caused them to appear mighty old; and cast he them about the land and the sea. And he took every tiny creature that had not madeth it, and caused them to become fossils; and cast he them about likewise.
17
And just to put matters beyond the valley of the shadow of a doubt God created carbon dating. And this is the origin of species.
18
And in the Evening of the day which was Thursday, God saw that he had put in another good day's work.
19
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, which is tall and well-formed and pale of hue: and let us also make monkeys, which resembleth us not in any wise, but are short and ill-formed and hairy. And God added, Let man have dominion over the monkeys and the fowl of the air and every species, endangered or otherwise.
20
So God created Man in His own image; tall and well-formed and pale of hue created He him, and nothing at all like the monkeys.
21
And God said, Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth. But ye shalt not smoketh it, lest it giveth you ideas.
22
And to every beast of the earth and every fowl of the air I have given also every green herb, and to them it shall be for meat. But they shall be for you. And the Lord God your Host suggesteth that the flesh of cattle goeth well with that of the fin and the claw; thus shall Surf be wedded unto Turf.
23
And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It just goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken billions of years.
24
And the evening of the fifth day, which had been the roughest day yet, God said, Thank me it's Friday. And God made the weekend.

(There are two more chapters...)

Earlier this week I warned that postings would be light, but I hate letting multiple days go by without an update. I hope to get back on track shortly. Thanks for checking back!

• I tuned into Science Friday today as I drove back from school and caught the tail end of a discussion of the report I linked to early this week about Arctic melting. One of the participants doesn't seem to be listed on the link above, but she had some good points to make. First, she explained the physics of the issue: there's a "pump" action in Arctic sea water -- cold salt water is heavy and sinks to the bottom, making room for warmer water from the Gulf of Mexico, which passes Europe on its way. This current is called the "North Atlantic Drift," and it is responsible for Europe's relatively mild climate. Melting ice "floods" the Arctic sea waters with fresh water, which disrupts this pump action and, in turn, that warm water current. Continued disruption of that current could eventually plunge temperatures in Europe. (Here's a good graphic and a better explanation than I'm giving.) So in addition to the devastating near-term effects on indigenous people and wildlife, the impact goes "global" in a big way. This woman then answered a question about the recommendations for reducing global warming. She said a "political" body is responsible for writing the policy recommendations, and they will be presenting their report on or around November 24. She said they took the scientists' findings, created policy recommendations, took the recs back to the scientists and asked if they were saying anything that couldn't be backed up with the science, and the scientists gave their blessing. But, she says, this committee is encountering resistance. 8 countries that make up the Arctic Council (those countries with some part of their landmass in the Artic Circle) - Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US. 7 of them are supporting the panel's recommendations for policy changes to slow the melting. One wild guess who's not...
  
  I've tried to tell myself that even with their majority in Congress, some Republican senators will have a hard time selling constituents on drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it really looks as though ANWR's days are numbered. A foot is already in the door.
  
  
• I really am - for the moment, at least - tired of the electoral post-mortems. I'm especially tired of the easy "moral values" story that misses what are sure to be far more proximal causes. I'm also just plain tired; my brain isn't working very well. So maybe someone can help me figure out what Brad Carson is saying here. I watched Carson - Democratic senate candidate from Oklahoma - on "Meet the Press" a few weeks ago, when he appeared with his opponent Tom Coburn (who brought the crisis of "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools to national attention). I didn't realize who I was watching, at first, and thought they were both conservative Republicans. Just "shows to go ya" (as my father would say) what passes for a Democrat in some parts of the country. So the tone of his column here doesn't surprise me, but I can't figure out what he's advocating here by blaming "modernity."

  The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself. Banning gay marriage or abortion would not be sufficient to heal the cultural gulf that exists in this nation. The culture war is about matters more fundamental still: whether nationality is, in a globalized world, a random fact of no more significance than what hospital one was born in or whether it is the source of identity and even political legitimacy; whether one's self is a matter of choice or whether it is predetermined, before birth, by the cultural membership of one's family; whether an individual is just that--a free-floating atom--or whether the individual is part of a long chain that both predates and continues long after any particular person; whether concepts like honor and shame, which seem so quaint, are still relevant in a world that values only "tolerance." These are questions not for politicians but for philosophers, and, in the end, it is the failure of liberal philosophy that we saw on November 2.
  
  For the vast majority of Oklahomans--and, I would suspect, voters in other red states--these transcendent cultural concerns are more important than universal health care or raising the minimum wage or preserving farm subsidies. Pace Thomas Frank, the voters aren't deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones. The political left has always had a hard time understanding this, preferring to believe that the masses are enthralled by a "false consciousness" or Fox News or whatever today's excuse might be. But the truth is quite simple: Most voters in a state like Oklahoma--and I venture to say most other Southern and Midwestern states--reject the general direction of American culture and celebrate the political party that promises to reform or revise it.
  
  That is what Antonin Scalia famously called the Kulturkampf. And there can be no doubt either that this is a fundamental dynamic in American politics or on which side of this conflict the electorate rests. Last Tuesday, I ran 7 percent ahead of John Kerry, and my opponent ran a full 13 percent behind President Bush. In most states, this would have been more than sufficient to ensure my victory. But not in Oklahoma. At least not last Tuesday. And, while the defeat was all my own, the failure was of the party to which I swear allegiance, which uncritically embraces a modernity that so many others reject.

• Jac Wilder VerSteeg asks "is there a 'Christian' tax code?" in this great piece (via The Revealer):

  Liberals are elitists, and that's one reason John Kerry and his ilk lost. To reverse their inclination to elitism, liberals must study at the feet of the heartland's Christian conservatives, the only people on Earth who know what God wants and therefore possess a mandate to make all creatures conform to His will. Such depth of humility will be difficult to match.
  
  With the transformation from Grand Old Party to God's Own Party, every aspect of Republican policy must be imbued with "values."
  
  Interestingly, of all the domestic policy issues he might take on, President Bush has put tax reform at the top of his second term's to-do list.
  
  The dry tax code might seem the opposite of a values-rich opportunity; in fact, it is anything but. The "value" of money is different from the "values" that played such a key role on Nov. 2, but how an individual or an individual nation expends money's value is a clear expression of core moral values.
  
  My grandfather, John M. VerSteeg, a minister who spent most of his career in Ohio, regularly preached on the connection between money and morals. He even wrote a book about it in 1943, When Christ Controls, in which he advocated, "Having preached that Christ needs some of our cash, let us preach that all of our cash needs Christ."
  
  Christian conservatives have been very clear about how they don't want their tax money spent. None of it must go to abortions here or abroad, none of it must pay for sex education that goes beyond abstinence, none of it must pay benefits to gay partners of public employees. If they could, some Christian conservatives would add all public education to their must-not-support list. While these items involve serious moral issues, aside from education they don't make much budgetary difference.
  
  On a federal level, even public education isn't that big a deal. States and local governments pay more than 90 percent of public education's cost.
  
  Less clear is what Christian conservatives think the federal government should spend its money on. Defense, for sure. Because aggression isn't a moral value, however, the government should expect Christians to be aware of the dividing line and withdraw support from politicians who cross it. Revenge isn't a moral value, either, and it would be disappointing to find Christians supporting politicians who spend the Pentagon's billions for that purpose.
  
  Some conservatives, Christian and otherwise, would stop after defense and, perhaps, transportation infrastructure. Let families and private charities fill in for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are government's other major expenditures, aside from debt. How would those private entities afford it? With money they don't pay in federal taxes, of course.
  
  Two major problems pop up. Replace comprehensive programs such as Social Security with a patchwork, and more people will fall through the cracks and suffer — not an example of Christian charity. Equally troublesome is that just cutting what people pay in taxes could not possibly cover what government spends on social programs. There's a huge deficit, remember? It's hard to imagine Christians being content with the outcome if they take over the levers of government power and use them to drop the trap door from under the nation's needy and infirm. Christian control of government would seem to argue for more money spent on medicine, shelter and other essentials.
  
  No matter how President Bush reforms the tax code, it is likely that the major government expenditures will remain the same. In reality, the tax code reforms he's talking about involve not so much how the money is spent but how the money is raised and from whom. President Bush's first-term policies shifted the tax burden from wealthier people not so much onto today's less affluent people as onto our children. There's that deficit again. Several reforms that will get a look this term — such as a flat tax, a national sales tax and its first cousin, the value-added tax — would, in their pure forms, shift the tax burden even more from the wealthy onto the middle class.
  
  Is there such a thing as a Christian tax code? Certainly, there's a tax code that embodies Judeo-Christian values. It cares for the sick and recognizes the obligation of the wealthy to aid the poor. Call it a values-added tax. If that is what the values voters who returned George Bush to the White House really want, this elitist liberal would humbly support them.

  (Recall that conservative Republican evangelical Alabama governor Bob Riley tried to propose a Christian tax code, and was eaten alive for it, even by his own kind.)
  
  
• One of the many reasons we won't miss him:

  ...In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called "a profoundly disturbing trend" among some judges to interfere in the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war.
  
  "The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas an put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers' group...

• Finally, in honor of Veteran's Day yesterday, please reflect on these faces.

• In the Washington Post today:
  

  Liberal Christians Challenge 'Values Vote'
  
  By Alan Cooperman
  Washington Post Staff Writer
  Wednesday, November 10, 2004; Page A07
  
  Liberal Christian leaders argued yesterday that the moral values held by most Americans are much broader than the handful of issues emphasized by religious conservatives in the 2004 presidential campaign.
  
  Battling the notion that "values voters" swept President Bush to victory because of opposition to gay marriage and abortion, three liberal groups released a post-election poll in which 33 percent of voters said the nation's most urgent moral problem was "greed and materialism" and 31 percent said it was "poverty and economic justice." Sixteen percent cited abortion, and 12 percent named same-sex marriage.
  
  But the religious leaders acknowledged that the Christian right had reached more voters than the Christian left. Some said it was time for "moderate and progressive" religious groups, as well as the Democratic Party, to rethink their positions.
  
  "One of the things a few of us are talking about is a reassessment of how the Democrats deal with an issue like abortion -- could there be a more moderate ground, where even if they retained their pro-choice stance, they talked about uniting pro-choice people together to actually do something about the abortion rate?" said Jim Wallis, editor of the liberal evangelical journal Sojourners.
  
  If the Democratic Party were to "welcome pro-life Democrats, Catholics and evangelicals and have a serious conversation with them" about ways to reduce teenage pregnancy, facilitate adoptions and improve conditions for low-income women, it would "work wonders" among centrist evangelicals and Catholics, Wallis said.
  
  In a conference call with reporters to discuss the election and the new poll, Wallis and three other Christian leaders argued that many religious Americans do not fall neatly into liberal or conservative camps.
  
  They contended that there is a vast religious middle, including "progressive evangelicals," "resurgent mainline Protestants" and "socially conservative African Americans," that could be attracted by biblically based "prophetic" appeals to make peace, fight poverty and spread social justice.
  
  "The values that were promoted most within the conservative religious community were almost always tied to a fear factor, and that was not necessarily the case in the Democratic strategy, and I would say should not be the case," said the Rev. Welton Gaddy, head of the Interfaith Alliance.
  
  The nationwide telephone poll of 10,689 voters was conducted by Zogby International for the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, the New York-based civic advocacy group Res Publica and the Washington-based Center for American Progress, a think tank allied with Democrats. It had a margin of error of plus or minus one percentage point.
  
  The poll found that 42 percent of voters cited the war in Iraq as the "moral issue" that most influenced their choice of candidates, while 13 percent cited abortion and 9 percent same-sex marriage. Asked to name the greatest threat to marriage, 31 percent said "infidelity," 25 percent cited "rising financial burdens" and 22 percent named same-sex marriage.
  
  Tom Perriello, an organizer at Res Publica, said the poll shows that "while there may be a solid 20 percent who are very focused on abortion and gay marriage, for most Americans of faith, there are other moral issues of greater urgency, and that's where the religious middle is."
  
  Throughout the presidential campaign, opinion polls showed that frequent churchgoers were far more likely to support Bush than his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry. Exit polls on Election Day found that 22 percent of voters cited "moral values" as the key to their vote, and they tilted 4 to 1 toward Bush.
  
  The answer to this "God gap," Perriello said, "is that progressives need to embrace the deep moral critique that people are looking for and make that case on poverty and Iraq, and not just try to talk more about God or outpace the Republicans on gay marriage or abortion."
  
  According to Perriello, liberal religious groups registered 500,000 new voters, made 400,000 get-out-the-vote phone calls, and raised $1.75 million for newspaper and radio ads during the campaign. But he said the post-election poll found that 71 percent of voters had heard from the religious right while 38 percent said they had heard from the religious left.

• What finer choice for Attorney General than the man who wrote the torture memo!
  
  
• Keith Olbermann continues tracking the electronic voting glitches in Ohio and North Carolina... Ohio Dems say they're all over it. And William Rivers Pitt has a very comprehensive round-up of the problems which he summarizes thusly:

  "In short, we have old-style vote spoilage in minority communities. We have electronic voting machines losing votes and adding votes all across the country. We have electronic voting machines whose efficiency and safety have not been tested. We have electronic voting machines that offer no paper trail to ensure a fair outcome. We have central tabulators for these machines running on Windows software, compiling results that can be demonstrably tampered with. We have the makers of these machines publicly professing their preference for George W. Bush. We have voter trends that stray from the expected results. We have these machines counting millions of votes all across the country..."

  If objective analysts can prove that votes were stolen, will right-wing evangelicals still say it was God's Will? Probably. Here's another one of those letters, via The Revealer.
  
  
• Another observer who takes issue with the idea that moral values won Bush this election - Rick Perlstein. According to his analysis, rich Republicans won him the election:

  Pundits blow hot air. Political scientists crunch numbers.
  
  On his blog Polysigh, my favorite political scientist, Phil Klinkner, ran a simple exercise. Multiplying the turnout among a certain group by the percent who went for Bush yields a number electoral statisticians call "performance." Among heavy churchgoers, Bush's performance last time was 25 percent (turnout, 42 percent; percentage of vote, 59 percent). This time out it was also 25 percent—no change. Slightly lower turnout (41 percent), slightly higher rate of vote (61 percent).
  
  Where did the lion's share of the extra votes come from that gave George Bush his mighty, mighty mandate of 51 percent? "Two of those points," Klinkner said when reached by phone, "came solely from people making over a 100 grand." The people who won the election for him—his only significant improvement over his performance four years ago—were rich people, voting for more right-wing class warfare.
  
  Their portion of the electorate went from 15 percent in 2000 to 18 percent this year. Support for Bush among them went from 54 percent to 58 percent. "It made me think about that scene in Fahrenheit 9/11," says Klinkner, the one where Bush joked at a white-tie gala about the "haves" and the "have-mores": "Some people call you the elite," Bush said. "I call you my base."
  [---]
  What about gay marriage? Even here the results prove inconclusive. The Diebolds had hardly cooled before Clinton operatives leaked to Newsweek that if only the Democratic campaign had listened to the 42nd president—who urged Kerry to come out in favor of the 11 state anti-gay-marriage initiatives—the Democrats would have won. Tina Brown contributed the thought the morning after the election that advances in gay rights were "the trade-off for 45 million Americans without health care." But Klinkner ran a regression analysis comparing his 2000 and 2004 totals by state, and it suggested that though the measures didn't hurt Bush, they didn't help him either. "If anything," he writes, "Bush's vote was a bit lower than expected in states that did have such a measure on the ballot."
  [---]
  How did the "people voted for the Republicans because of moral values" meme become the gospel truth about this election? The exit poll question, after all, signifies little: If a pollster went up to you and asked what was more important, your moral values or your economic well-being, what kind of cad would you be to tell a stranger that money meant more to you than morals?
  
  All that the message about "moral values" dominating the proceedings last Tuesday means is that the Republicans have succeeded in their decades-long campaign to get what should plainly be called "conservative ideology" replaced, in our political language, by this word "morality."
  
  They have reworked the political calculus so thoroughly that liberal definitions of what is or isn't a moral value don't count. It's as if liberals didn't have any morality at all...

• Salon's Eric Boehlert finds the press already donning knee pads for the president, granting him a popular "mandate" now that he appears to have actually been, you know, elected, however narrow the margin.
  
  
• Powell comes right out and warns us to expect more international bullying. James Wolcott's response is typically pithy:

  Yesterday the face of Colin Powell glared out from the front page of the Financial Times. He sounded ominous, too, announcing that with his electoral mandate, the Red King would not be trimming his sails or pulling back from his foreign policy. That he would continue to be "aggressive" in pursuing American interests.
  
  Usually it's Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bolton or Rice or Wolfowitz who's sent out to look ominous and spew ash. Perhaps it was simply Powell's turn in the pitching rotation, or perhaps he is continuing his own policy of being a stand-up guy in public for the administration while pouring out his Qualms and Grave Reservations to Bob Woodward's tape recorder to give himself some wiggle room in the historical record.
  
  Whatever the explanation, Powell's declaration of further independence was a double slap to European allies and others, his Expression of Steely Resolve being all the more dispiriting since Powell was the one power player they semi-respected for being on speaking terms with reality and willing to consult with others. Now he was politely slamming that door in their faces and telling them to get used to the new rugged reality.
  
  The truth is that the US can no longer back up the big mouths of its leaders. If America chooses to go it alone in future conflicts, it'll be because it has no choice...

  (Glad to hear someone finally addressing the patent silliness of "Operation Phantom Fury," as Wolcott does later in that post. After the "Shock and Awe" of "Mission not-quite-Accomplished," I would think the Military Marketing wordsmiths would aim a little lower. Perhaps "Operation Blow Up Homes And Schools While The Insurgents Regroup In Surrounding Towns?")
  
  
• Paul Roberts, author of The End Of Oil, tries to help us to get real about oil and alternative energy.
  
  
• And if you need a little humor after all that, see Donald Asmussen's Nov 10 Bad Reporter.

Ashcroft is gone. (I love it that AP used the infamous "naked female statue" photo* to illustrate their story.) He is now free to pursue a career writing and singing schmaltzy, cliched religious ballads on the 700 Club. Somehow, it's small comfort; we have long imagined that there could be no one worse than Ashcroft in that office, but I trust that Bush will find someone worse. (*Update: shoot! They changed it.)

I'm staying late at the office in order to work on some SAS code that I don't want to stick my successor with, so I really shouldn't dawdle here, but in the interest of ethnography, I want to share some things being said on "the other side."

First, a friend in PA spotted the following letter to the editor from the 11/8 edition of her local paper, the Allentown "Morning Call":

"Jesus Speaks Through the Republicans

I hope the election of George W. Bush is seen as a wake-up call to all the liberal Democrats who oppose God's will.

It is His doing that George W. Bush is still our president. Millions of born-again Christians helped win this election through our prayers and votes. Jesus speaks through the Republicans.

The Democrats will not be able to win elections until they renounce their sinful ways and stop encouraging abortions, gayness, and trying to take away our guns.

Earl Balboa
Washington Township"

I wrote to her and said "maybe it's a joke?!", but she says there've been more in that vein. And then I read this Deborah Caldwell piece on Beliefnet:

On the day after President Bush was re-elected, he gave much of the credit to his political adviser, Karl Rove, whom he called “the architect” of his campaign. But in evangelical churches, on Christian radio, and in voter precincts dominated by conservative Christians, the credit is going instead to someone a whole lot more powerful: God.

The Almighty intervened in the U.S. election, these evangelicals believe, to allow Bush to remain president. They say God has “blessed” America with Bush--and had Sen. John Kerry been elected, God would have “cursed” the U.S. By allowing Bush to be re-elected, God has given America “more time” to stop its slide into evil...

There follow many, many paragraphs quoting various evangelicals espousing this theory.

Well, Mark Twain's "War Prayer" hasn't been "forwarded" a zillion times this week for nuthin':

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

There's also this gem -- Mike Thompson's "satiric... (but) nevertheless serious" (how's that for RNC-like editing?) proposal in Human Events that Blue states be expelled from the Union, leaving what sounds decidely like an Arian Nation:

BUSH USA is predominantly white; devoutly Christian (mostly Protestant); openly, vigorously heterosexual; an open land of single-family homes and ranches; economically sound (except for a few farms), but not drunk with cyberworld business development, and mainly English-speaking, with a predilection for respectfully uttering "yes, ma'am" and "yes, sir."

GORE/KERRY USA is ethnically diverse; multi-religious, irreligious or nastily antireligious; more sexually liberated (if not in actual practice, certainly in attitude); awash with condo canyons and other high-end real estate bordered by sprawling, squalid public housing or neglected private homes, decidedly short of middle-class neighborhoods; both high tech and oddly primitive in its commerce; very artsy, and Babelesque, with abnormally loud speakers.

If you have the intestinal fortitude for it, read the whole thing (then purge your cookie folder and wash your hands), which was brought to our attention by Atrios.

And Matt Welch provides this stomach-turning round-up of popular conservative opinionators.

Now... If you can regard the opinions above with the kind of graciousness that Rabbi Michael Lerner urges here - where he also spells out what a "religious left" could do for the Democrats and what Dems need to do to get one - you are definitely a better person than I. But I'm trying to choke it down:

"Yet to move in this direction, many Democrats would have to give up their attachment to a core belief: that those who voted for Bush are fundamentally stupid or evil. It's time they got over that elitist self-righteousness and developed strategies that could affirm their common humanity with those who voted for the Right. Teaching themselves to see the good in the rest of the American public would be a critical first step in liberals and progressives learning how to teach the rest of American society how to see that same goodness in the rest of the people on this planet. It is this spiritual lesson--that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and on the well-being of the earth--a lesson rooted deeply in the spiritual wisdom of virtually every religion on the planet, that could be the center of a revived Democratic Party.

Yet to take that seriously, the Democrats are going to have to get over the false and demeaning perception that the Americans who voted for Bush could never be moved to care about the well-being of anyone but themselves. That transformation in the Democrats would make them into serious contenders.

The last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by Martin Luther King. We cannot wait for the reappearance of that kind of charasmatic leader to begin the process of re-building a spiritual/religious Left."

(There's some good stuff on the righthand sidebar of that feature, too.)

I'm going to leave you with this pastoral letter from Rev. Peter Storey, a former Methodist Bishop in South Africa. I'm not sure of the source of its original publication; it seems to be circulating widely (thanks, JK). If anyone has more information about it, feel free to drop an email.

Dear Friends in the United States,

We have had notes from many of you, expressing your struggles with what happened on November 2.

Thank you for caring about the impact of the election on countries far away. We are sad for you and for the world. It is one thing to have leaders who walk mistaken and destructive roads, but when their actions find such support from ordinary people - neighbours and associates, friends and especially fellow church members - it is the more hurtful.

Don't be too shocked, however. Every politician chooses between calling people to better things, or exploiting their fears and insecurities. The latter is as old as humankind, and - because of the nature of our fallenness - can all too often be the winning strategy. Thinking of the many such heartbreaks in our South African saga, Desmond Tutu once confided to me: "We should not be surprised because we know our theology, but we are allowed to be disappointed."

Neither ought you to think that your participation was a waste. For forty years, in more than ten elections, a small number of white South Africans campaigned persistently against the apartheid that kept us in unfair privilege and we had our expectations dashed every time. In spite of this, our disenfranchised black compatriots always let us know that it counted for them. In the wider world, we are grateful for the many millions of Americans who chose responsibility and concern over fear and selfishness on November 2. Also, in our four decades of almost despair in South Africa, it was important to remember that while God prefers to work with enlightened, committed and compassionate servants of the people, God has extensive experience of advancing the Kingdom in spite of the arrogant and shallow people we often get instead.

What God does appear to find helpful in such circumstances, is a Church obedient enough to live and proclaim the alternative - the 'otherness' of the Gospel. This is where transformation can and must begin. The saddest thing about November 2 was that it was primarily declared Christians, manipulated by diverse fears about their own safety and others' sexuality, who tipped the scales against change. In South Africa too, we were up against a "Christian" government, acting in the name of Christ, supported by significant numbers of members of our churches. It became crucial to expose the false gospels, of nationalism, militarism, racism, and security right within the church, ensuring that the voice of Jesus was heard declaring firmly: "Not in my name!" It meant intentionally re-evangelizing the church in Jesus' way of enemy-love, of inclusion, of not fearing Caesar, of standing for the most marginalised. It took a long time, but it helped bring transformation.

Perhaps the message of this election is that this is truly a time for Gospel, and as so often in history, it is the church that must hear it first. The liberation Jesus speaks of in Luke 4 begins with evangelizing frightened and reactionary Christians out of their bondage. I'm not sure we can be the church unless we are learning to engage the world where decisions like that of November 2 happen, and I'm not sure that is possible unless every congregation becomes intentional about wrestling Biblically and theologically around the crucial areas where the church struggles most to be open to Jesus, and therefore has been least honest with the world.

They are: Wealth, Poverty and Good News to the Poor, Flag and Altar, Violence and Non-violence, and Inclusion and Exclusion. There is no reason why that should not begin now. I believe God would honour such wrestling with the gift of new vigour, clarity, courage and charity, so that the nation would begin to hear a different witness from the followers of Jesus.

It seems to me that this might be a good time to sit down and read Isaiah 40:27-31 and and 42:1-9, pray for the long view of God, and then get on with the tough business of witnessing!

With love and respect,
Peter Storey

Last night, I wrote the following, but I didn't post it because it didn't quite fit the "mood" of the rest of that entry:

"By the way, there are lots of murmurs about discrepancies in the electronic voting; a couple sound legitimate but might not have made a difference, and some sound pretty crazy. I'm putting a few up here because I've already had a "haven't you heard?" email. I'm not really ignoring the possibility (as I said the other day, I would feel a heckuvalot better about humanity if I thought the election was stolen!), but I want to see more. So, we re-blog, you decide..."
Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6

Well, it's a new day, and darned if there isn't a little more to see:

...there is a small but blood-curdling set of news stories that right now exists somewhere between the world of investigative journalism, and the world of the Reynolds Wrap Hat. And while the group’s ultimate home remains unclear - so might our election of just a week ago.

Stories like these have filled the web since the tide turned against John Kerry late Tuesday night. But not until Friday did they begin to spill into the more conventional news media. That’s when the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that officials in Warren County, Ohio, had “locked down” its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there.

Suspicious enough on the face of it, the decision got more dubious still when County Commissioners confirmed that they were acting on the advice of their Emergency Services Director, Frank Young. Mr. Young had explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security.

Gotcha. Tom Ridge thought Osama Bin Laden was planning to hit Caesar Creek State Park in Waynesville. During the vote count in Lebanon. Or maybe it was Kings Island Amusement Park that had gone Code-Orange without telling anybody. Al-Qaeda had selected Turtlecreek Township for its first foray into a Red State.

The State of Ohio confirms that of all of its 88 Counties, Warren alone decided such Homeland Security measures were necessary. Even in Butler County, reports the Enquirer, the media and others were permitted to watch through a window as ballot-checkers performed their duties. In Warren, the media was finally admitted to the lobby of the administration building, which may have been slightly less incommodious for the reporters, but which still managed to keep them two floors away from the venue of the actual count.

Nobody in Warren County seems to think they’ve done anything wrong. The newspaper quotes County Prosecutor Rachel Hurtzel as saying the Commissioners “were within their rights” to lock the building down, because having photographers or reporters present could have interfered with the count.

[---]

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

We will be endeavoring to pull those stories, along with the Warren County farce, into the mainstream Monday and/or Tuesday nights on Countdown. That is, if we can wedge them in there among the news media’s main concerns since last Tuesday:

Who fixed the Exit Polls? Yes - you could deliberately skew a national series of post-vote questionnaires in favor of Kerry to discourage people from voting out west, where everything but New Mexico had been ceded to Kerry anyway, but you couldn’t alter key precinct votes in Ohio and/or Florida; and,

What will Bush do with his Mandate and his Political Capital? He got the highest vote total for a presidential candidate, you know. Did anybody notice who’s second on the list? A Mr. Kerry. Since when was the term “mandate” applied when 56 million people voted against a guy? And by the way, how about that Karl Rove and his Freudian slip on “Fox News Sunday”? Rove was asked if the electoral triumph would be as impactful on the balance of power between the parties as William McKinley’s in 1896 and he forgot his own talking points. The victories were “similarly narrow,” Rove began, and then, seemingly aghast at his forthrightness, corrected himself. “Not narrow; similarly structured.”

Gotta dash now. Some of us have to get to work on the Warren and Florida stories.

In the interim, Senator Kerry, kindly don’t leave the country.

And on Truthout over the weekend...

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

• As you know, this "mandate" fraud has been driving me crazy, but Josh Marshall finally did the math:

  "The fact that the president got more popular votes than anybody in the past isn't a measure of the margin of his victory. It's a measure of population growth, which (unless he's more of a bounder than we know) he is not responsible for, and a high-turnout election, for which his unpopularity is as responsible as his popularity."

  Marshall links to this very enlightening electoral map which weights geography with population size; that red doesn't look so monolithic, now, does it?
  
  
• I've got a short-term online subscription to The New Republic and it has a great new piece by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, in which they dismember said Bush/Cheney "mandate" and point out the "bait and switch" herein:

  There is a more fundamental objection to Republicans' claim of a clear mandate for an ambitious domestic agenda:
  
  It is, put simply, a bait and switch.
  
  If one can bear to recall events of only a week ago, the Republican campaign was based on two main pillars: fear and mud. Overwhelmingly, the "positive" case for Bush's reelection rested on the relentless drumbeat of the war on terror. Cheney's remarks typically focused not on domestic issues but on veiled or explicit references to the lurking threat of nuclear incineration.
  
  Meanwhile the second pillar of the Bush campaign was to destroy Kerry's image as a credible alternative through any means necessary. Gross distortions of his record and proposals, shameless efforts to rip his words out of context, and the lowest forms of surrogate-based character assassination were central to the campaign.
  
  The GOP may well have waged the most negative campaign by an incumbent president in modern political history. As The Washington Post reported back in May: "Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented--both in speeches and in advertising."
  
  Karl Rove would not have needed to campaign that way if he believed he had a popular domestic agenda. He knew that he did not. Indeed, in the one setting--the three presidential debates -- where popular attention was focused on the major issues of the day and the differences between the candidates, the popular verdict was clear: Kerry defeated Bush decisively.
  
  In fact, everything we know about American opinion suggests that Bush is out of step with the public on all the issues he is now putting at the top of his "to do" list...

  (there's more, but I don't want to get in trouble for copying the whole thing here)
  
  
• Michael Tomasky nails exactly the point I was trying to make to a friend via email over the weekend, but he does it better - and probably gets paid for it:

  The age of skepticism has won a few and lost a few since Reagan's time. But let's face it: That age is now, in this country, dead.
  
  Today, religion and politics do mix. And they will keep mixing for the foreseeable future.
  
  This does not mean that Democrats and liberalism should placate the Christian right or willingly succumb to Christian Nation. They should not. But it does mean that Democrats and liberals should work much harder to understand and win over the voters of the religious center. The Democratic Party should invest money in talking to -- not polling or focus-grouping; talking to -- these voters, learning the true extent to which they feel alienated from the party, finding out how they think about their religious and political selves, how they weigh their own interpretations of the Scriptures with regard to gay rights on the one hand and helping people in poverty on the other. And liberal intellectuals -- who do tend to be secular, myself admittedly included, and who do sometimes exhibit contempt for religion, myself (I hope) very much not included -- need to understand clearly that the religious right is hardly speaking for every religious person. And we need to understand that we're beyond the point in history when the old arguments will be persuasive.
  
  The religious right has opened up a new battlefield, and, like it or not, we have to play on it.
  
  And the way to begin is by understanding clearly the difference between religious extremists and religious people.

• If you were hoping to show your kids any of our remaining natural wonders in the US, better start making vacation plans.

  "The election is a validation of our philosophy and agenda," Michael O. Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview. "We will make more progress in less time while maintaining economic competitiveness for the country. That is my mission."
  
  [---]
  
  For now, the Bush administration has no intention of regulating the heat-trapping gases, like carbon dioxide, which scientists believe contribute to global warming.
  
  A top priority of powerful Congressional Republicans is the 31-year-old Endangered Species Act.
  
  Representative Richard W. Pombo of California, chairman of the Committee on Resources, has made efforts to raise the hurdles that scientists must clear to ensure a government determination that a species is endangered and cut back the amount of critical habitat required. Habitat designations pave the way for land use controls.
  
  [---]
  
  The energy bill will pass, (Pombo) said, adding that any bill produced in the House would open 2,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for energy exploration.

  Conveniently, for Pombo et al, as the Arctic melts it will make the drilling easier:

  Rising global temperatures will melt areas of the Arctic this century, making them more accessible for oil and natural gas drilling, a report prepared by the United States and seven other nations said on Monday.
  
  [---]
  
  Warmer temperatures would make it easier to drill and ship oil from the Arctic, the report said.
  
  It did not attempt to quantify the costs of drilling and shipping Arctic oil and gas, or estimate how high energy prices would have to be to justify drilling in the region.
  
  [---]
  
  Energy companies would find it easier to transport oil and gas because the warmer temperatures would open sea routes.