Several days into the New Year! I had intended to pop online to post something quietly salutational - something befitting heartbreaking disasters both natural and manmade - a little closer to, oh, New Year's Day. I don't know what I've been doing since then, frankly.

But today - in my wierd new parttime schedule, with classes 3 weeks away - is a "day off." I spent many hours purging the garage, hoping that by creating physical space through which we can remove the dead Volkswagon-sized furnace, I will cause it to be replaced faster. There is the reality-based factor of a landlord who has yet to contract with someone to bring the new furnace... But a girl can dream. Inside, the house is 50 degrees, with 87% humidity. We're our own little northwest winter rainforest. I haven't stepped from the shower into a dry bath towel in weeks, and the toilet paper feels like someone has already used it. I wouldn't so much mind feeling like I was living in the great outdoors if I was doing it on purpose and we weren't actually paying rent to live indoors. But this too shall pass... Presumably...

How odd was it to turn on TV to "watch the ball drop" on New Year's Eve, with the confetti and the balloons and the people smiling and jumping and cheering and hamming, and, spanning midscreen, right through the festivities, the Times Square 24-hour news ticker displaying updated estimates of the number of people killed and missing in the tsunami? Party on. It just keeps getting worse.

Shirley Chisholm, 1924-2005

And Rep. Matsui, 1941-2005, among many, many things, a talented and skillful opponent of the Bush Social Security Privatization Sham, whose voice will be missed in this debate.

More on that sham from Paul Krugman:

Today let's focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis.

That claim is simply false. Yet much of the press has reported the falsehood as a fact. For example, The Washington Post recently described 2018, when benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues, as a "day of reckoning."

Here's the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the restof the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund.

When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052, says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

If you couldn't quite put your finger on why you've been feeling a little despondent since November 3, Scott O'Reilly helps...

At America’s founding, a woman stopped to ask Benjamin Franklin what kind of government we would soon have. “A republic,” the founding father replied, “if you can keep her.”

As historian Gore Vidal notes, Franklin was certain that America’s grand experiment would someday end in tyranny. Is that day upon us? I’m sure Franklin would turn in his grave at the irony that a nation that cast off the yoke of an oppressive hereditary monarchy -- exemplified by the mad King George -- now finds itself in the thrall of yet another hereditary dynasty headed in recent years by a father and son pair of American aristocrats, both named, as fate would have it, George.

Contrary to some caricatures, America is not yet tyrannous. However, the past four years under the Bush administration have ushered in some ominous trends: one hijacked election; a radical right cabal that controls all three branches of government; journalists facing prison time for not divulging their sources (what has happened to freedom of the press under the First Amendment?); and an administration that has demonstrated a selective disregard for the Constitution, international laws and agreements, not to mention “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

That the American people, by a slim margin, essentially endorsed the administration’s course in 2004 is discouraging, but it should not be surprising; civilizations and societies have frequently embraced disastrous leaders in times of strife, danger, and challenge. If the past is prologue, the future portends many perils on the path America is taking. Let me explain why.

The historian Arnold Toynbee studied the life cycle of civilizations. Of the roughly two-dozen great civilizations --Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Inca, etc. -- all but our present Western civilization has met its fate. There is a common pattern, Toynbee argues, by which civilizations flower, mature, and ultimately disintegrate because they fail to address challenges in creative and constructive ways.

Read the whole thing.

A worthwhile question from George Monbiot:

...Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets?

The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq.

The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn). The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war.

It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid: less than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq.

The figures for war and aid are worth comparing because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were stripped away, both governments explained that it was being waged for the good of the Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil, but were, in fact, components of a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless generosity, assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid programme than lost.

To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe assumptions, George Bush and Tony Blair would have to show that the money they spent was a cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering. As it was sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and as there are only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if you ignore every other issue - such as the trifling matter of mass killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such calculations suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms.

But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja.

Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used for military assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent trust). For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness.

While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry.

Another horrible day in Baghdad. As Juan Cole remarks rather drily, "If things go on like this the real question won't be whether you could hold elections but rather whether the members of the new government could be kept alive."

And everything's under control in Afghanistan (remember that place?)

"It would have been the right thing to do, but it was becoming a distraction..." Ah, I see. So the House has momentarily backed off what Atrios called the "Republican Ethics Repeal Act of 2005." But not without a little bipedal swaggering at Nancy Pelosi - threatening to go after her for a campaign financing violation for which she has already been fined. But that would trigger intense examination of a dozen or so Republicans who probably don't want the attention, and thus they retreat - glaring over their shoulders. Well, if limiting the powers of the House ethics panel can be considered a "retreat." Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But James Dobson has his priorities in order! He's threatening "a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea" if his judicial candidates are not confirmed this year, and he'll personally target half a dozen Democratic senators. Yes, this would be the same humble servant of God who believes he personally delivered the election to George Bush this year.

Does this mean it's no longer cool to be a lesbian? After reading several different obits about Susan Sontag, including the one I posted here last week, a friend said, "I could have sworn she was lovers with Annie Leibovitz, but none of them mentioned that." Apparently, they thought it in bad taste?

I guess we're supposed to "give it a rest" in Ohio? Suck it up and declare ourselves legitimately (if not fairly and squarely) beaten, as Kos recommends (of course, he has a good point about the buggability of paper trails)? It will be a very dark day when Congress officially accepts this vote, and some dark years if some major electoral reform is not accomplished. The mainstream media has definitely moved on, if they ever tarried on this at all, but not the Columbus Free Press. Via Common Dreams, here's a segment of their ongoing coverage:

Some 14.6% of Ohio votes were cast on electronic machines with no paper trail, rendering them unauditable. But on election night, electronic machines and computer software were used throughout the state to tabulate paper ballots.

The contrasts are striking. Officially, Bush built a narrow margin of roughly 51% versus 48% for Kerry based on votes counted on election night. But among the 147,400 provisional and absentee ballots that were counted AFTER election night, Kerry received 54.46 percent of the vote. These later totals came from counts done by hand, as opposed to counts done by computer tabulators, many of which came from Diebold.

Many of the electronic voting machines with no paper trail also came from Republican-dominated companies, including some from Diebold, whose owner, Wally O'Dell, infamously guaranteed in 2003 that he would deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush. Diebold also manufactured many of the tabulators used to count punch card ballots. In the vast majority of Ohio precincts, those tabulations were not rechecked or recounted. In at least two counties, technicians from Diebold and from Triad dismantled all or part of such tabulating machines prior to the recount. In Shelby County, election officials admitted that they discarded crucial tabulator records, rendering a meaningful recount impossible.

In many cases, the recounts were conducted not by public election officials, but by private corporations, many of them with Republican ties.

In other precincts, impossibly high voter turnout figures -- nearly all of them adding to Bush's official margin -- remain unexplained. In the heavily Republican southern county of Perry, Blackwell certified one precinct with 221 more votes than registered voters. Two precincts -- Reading S and W. Lexington G -- were let stand in the officially certified final vote count with voter turnouts of roughly 124% each.

In Miami County's Concord South West precinct, Blackwell certified a voter turnout of 98.55 percent, requiring that all but 10 voters in the precinct cast ballots. But a freepress.org canvas easily found 25 voters who said they did not vote. In the nearby Concord South precinct, Blackwell certified an apparently impossible voter turnout of 94.27 percent. Both Concord precincts went heavily for Bush.

By contrast, in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, amidst record turnouts, a predominantly African-American precinct, Cleveland 6C, was certified with just a 07.85 percent turnout.

The official count was 45 votes for Kerry versus one for Bush, in a precinct where the day's overall voter turnout would have indicated eight or nine times as many voters.

Independent statistical studies of Cuyahoga County indicate that if the prevailing statewide voter turnout was really 60 percent of the registered voters, as seems likely based on turnout in other major cities in Ohio, Kerry’s margin of victory in Cleveland alone was wrongly reduced in the certified returns by 20,000 or more votes.

New research has added confirmation to apparent widespread fraud -– most likely in the computer tabulation stage -- in at least three heavily Republican southern Ohio counties.

Mathematical researcher Richard Hayes Phillips, PhD., has shown that Clermont, Butler and Warren Counties, surrounding Cincinnati, netted Bush votes on par with his margin of victory in the state. But for Bush to have built up his margins in these three counties, 13,500 Democrats would have had to have split their tickets by voting for Supreme Court Chief Justice candidate Ellen Connally while simultaneously voting for Bush, by all accounts a virtually impossible event.

The numbers are startling. In Butler Country, Bush officially was given 109,866 votes. But conservative GOP Chief Justice Moyer was given only 68,407, a negative discrepancy of more than 40,000 votes. Meanwhile, Moyer's opponent, a pro-gay, pro-abortion African-American liberal from Cleveland, was officially credited with 61,559 votes to John Kerry's 56,234.

The Blackwell-approved tally would mean that more than 5,000 Butler County voters ignored Kerry's name near the top of the ballot, but jumped to the bottom of the ballot to vote for Connally. And this was to have happened in an area where some 40,000 Republicans did exactly the opposite, voting for the President while skipping the race for Chief Justice. Few who are familiar with Butler County politics believe such an outcome to be even remotely credible.

In Warren County, Bush was credited with 68,035 votes to Kerry’s 26,043 votes. But just as the county's votes were about to be counted after the polls closed on November 2, the Board of Elections claimed a Homeland Security alert authorized them to throw out all Democratic and independent observers, including the media. The vote count was thus conducted entirely by Republicans.

Here Blackwell's certified tally says the slightly funded Connally somehow outpolled Kerry by more than 2,400 votes, nearly 10 percent of his county wide total.

Phillips’ latest analysis was conducted at the precinct-by-precinct level. When looking at returns before they have been blended into countywide figures, Phillips says the suspect nature of the outcome in these three counties is heightened by the fact that precincts within them yield wildly inconsistent data. A few municipalities show Republicans and Democrats voting along party lines – as one would expect. But throughout most of these three counties are precincts with massive margins for Bush that are inconsistent with the rest of the counties and impossible to conceive except by some sort of manipulation.

This is an almost certain indicator of fraud, says Phillips.

The statistical analysis of these results show Blackwell’s certified vote is deeply flawed.

It does not, however, identify how the fraud was perpetrated. Based in part on these inconsistencies, the Election Protection legal team has filed suit with the state Supreme Court, asking it to overturn Ohio's presidential election.

But despite the fact that the contention rests in large part on Moyer's own re-election campaign, the Chief Justice refuses to recuse himself from this and related cases. He has helped write decisions denying a further public investigation into the count and recount processes, and has voted to protect Blackwell from providing public testimony under legal subpoena.

Well, for the moment, let me close with a Psalm. Of sorts.

TWENTY-FIRST [CENTURY] PSALM

A fool is my shepherd. I shall not think.
He maketh me to bog down in a quagmire.
He leadeth me beside dirty waters.
He destroyeth my ozone.
He leadeth me down paths to the extreme right, for his lobbyists' sake.

Yea, though I walk through relatively safe streets,
I do fear evil (the threat level is orange),
for thou hast scared me. My assault rifle comforteth me.
Thou anointest my car with oil. My deficit runneth over.
Thou preparest my table with fast food in the presence of my television.
Surely paranoia and resentment will follow me all the days of my life.
And I will dwell in this Empire of Fools till I die, uninsured.

--Lawrence Swan, Letters, The Nation