Thieves in the Temple.

What is to be done, part 226.

I haven't been all that impressed with the linkage of Sarah Palin to the Tucson shootings. There. I said it, and I'm glad. She sure hasn't helped her cause by stoking her persecution complex the way she always does, but I still think the connection between her and Mr. Loughner is rather tenuous (do we know for sure that he obsessed over SarahPAC maps?), and (more importantly) I think we've used her a bit too much to stand in for the real problem: the manipulative media culture which she represents. And, perhaps not surprisingly, said media culture has misdiagnosed the problem as a "lack of civility in public discourse." The problem isn't that our politicians and talking heads aren't "civil" enough, or use too much violent language -- it's that they're bought-and-paid-for liars, doing the bidding of their corporate paymasters.

The arrest of one Charles Habermann, for threatening to kill Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), instructs us more, I think, about the real problem with the media. Mr. Habermann thought Mr. McDermott a "Communist," which, not surprisingly, is a word many right-wing commentators have used to describe Mr. Obama and other Democrats, despite the fact that Communism fell over 20 years ago and most Democrats today stand to the right of Richard Nixon on domestic policy matters. Mr. Habermann is also apparently concerned about taxes, though federal income taxes were considerably higher when he was 8 years old and even higher than that when he was 2 -- and, not surprisingly, the Koch brothers-funded Tea Party movement received a lot of uncritical coverage on "liberal" media outlets over the last two years for protesting "high taxes." And, finally, Mr. Habermann was outraged about Mr. Obama's right-wing health care overhaul, which the "liberal" media covered almost exclusively as if it were the most left-wing option anyone could imagine -- even as clear majorities in poll after poll preferred single-payer. Now, if Mr. McDermott really was a Communist, really did believe in usurious taxation, or had really fought for single-payer health care, I wouldn't be concerned about Mr. Habermann's "lack of civility" (though, of course, I'd still be concerned about his alleged criminal behavior). But I submit that the media did enable (if not outright manufacture) Mr. Habermann's grievances.

Don't misunderstand me -- no "liberal" media knucklehead should go to jail over anything I've just described, and I assume there must be something unique to folks such as Mr. Habermann and Mr. Loughner that makes them break the law and foment tragedy while the vast majority of their ideological brethren get all the catharsis they need from watching Glenn Beck's clown act. But a sane, moral, and healthy media -- one that gives people the information they need to know, without all the drama and spectacle and emotional manipulation of today's sick, immoral, and decadent media -- is an end worth fighting for in and of itself, and would allow us to isolate sociopaths a lot better than we do now. And the first step toward a sane, moral, and healthy media is to loosen the bonds between the media and corporate control. After all, all the media behavior I described in the previous paragraph played into the corporate madness for mammon, did it not? The stock market continues to break records, and corporate profits were just at an all-time high this past quarter, all while official unemployment remained a hair under 10 percent.

Loosening the bonds between corporations and media is a big job, and despite large Democratic majorities over the last two years (including, you know, that crucial one-seat majority in the President's office), it has, if anything, become an even bigger job. Fighting corporate control of the media begins with all the things we've been doing here over the years -- demanding a la carte cable packaging and solid net neutrality protections and more low-power FM stations, while opposing consolidation and cross-ownership of media outlets. The fight continues with much more comprehensive policy prescriptions -- Constitutional amendments preventing corporations from enjoying the rights of personhood and from owning one another. Over the next few weeks, I plan to codify these ideas, and others, into a Newswatcher's Bill of Rights (suggestions for a better title greatly appreciated), which I hope will focus our thoughts more concisely on a matter that, quite frankly, has broad and deep support across the ideological spectrum. Look out for it.

Notes of an allegedly sanctimonious purist.

By now you probably know that, in a truly impressive display, Mr. Obama told the world that folks who criticize his grand "compromise" with Republicans on tax cuts are "sanctimonious" and "purist." Although I'd find it grotesquely easy to argue that Mr. Obama is a "sanctimonious" "purist" himself in his mania for "compromise" and "bipartisanship," or smack down the "concessions" he supposedly wrung from Republicans, or question what he means by "getting things done," I'll confine my remarks to some of the unstated implications of his words.

First, let me be clear: folks who criticize the Obama "compromise" aren't "sanctimonious" or "purist." Does Mr. Obama understand where the "sanctimonious" and "purist" folks really are in politics? Do cops who complain about big government at Tea Party rallies somehow fail to strike him as "sanctimonious" or "purist"? How about preachers who protest at Elizabeth Edwards's funeral? When Sen. Shelby complained about imposing a "nanny state" on the same banks who destroyed our economy, Mr. Obama didn't find that "sanctimonious" or "purist"? Plenty of right-wingers want all taxes, all regulation, all gays, all non-Christians, and all non-Republican Hispanics out of their way, and plenty of liberals want everyone to be able to get abortions and no one to be able to buy guns. But the next time I hear Mr. Obama complain about the "sanctimonious" "purism" of any of these folks will be the first.

It gets better. Letting tax cuts for the top two brackets expire isn't a particularly "purist" position -- liberals do not, as a bloc, demand the return of the 91% tax bracket (which that noted arch-liberal, Dwight Eisenhower, never lifted a finger to change). But when liberals merely petitioned Mr. Obama to do the same thing that polls consistently tell us a broad majority of Americans want him to do, Mr. Obama got to redefine a position held by as many as two out of three Americans as a "purist" position. Not incidentally, in the course of his remarks he also redefined the public option as a "purist" position, a position standing in the way of progress, when single-payer -- yet another position which registers majority support in poll after poll! -- seems far more like a "purist" position than the public option. Thus Mr. Obama has (at the very least!) acquiesced to the corporate strategy wherein all positions popular with the people but bad for CEO compensation somehow become extremist.

How has Mr. Obama reached his late forties without learning that, if politics is the art of the possible, then fighting for positions that reek of "purism" widens the pallet of the possible? Especially when those "purist" positions, like single-payer or higher taxes for the rich, are actually popular? Even Max Baucus says that if he'd put single-payer on the table, he could have gotten the public option (of which he was a nominal supporter) into the final health-care bill, since a public option would have seemed like the compromise position it actually is. But Mr. Obama seems to start every negotiation with what he'll settle for, guaranteeing that he'll get less. It's almost like that's the idea. But in real life you don't negotiate that way with anyone, let alone a negotiating "partner" who understands that fighting for more extreme positions always gets you more of what you want. And this is the main reason American politicians move rightward, as the bulk of America moves leftward -- the right-wing party fights to the death for what it wants (or, more precisely, what its corporate paymasters want), while the nominally left-wing party tries to make sure everyone's "happy."

What is a citizen to do, then? Simply, keep fighting -- keep calling and writing your Congressfolk, keep talking to the members of your community, keep demonstrating in public for the causes you believe in and the country you love. I don't guarantee victory all the time, or even, frankly, very much of the time -- the powerful do not relinquish their power to the people very easily. But I do guarantee that fighting for what you believe in always gets you more of what you want and deserve than giving up and wallowing in cynicism does. And having consecrated my life to the notion that democracy works, I'm hardly ready to declare it dead, even if a nominally Democratic President thinks his most important job isn't doing the will of the American people, but compromising with Republicans who are out to destroy him. We just need to communicate our will until he gets it, and if it takes Sarah Palin kicking his ass in 2012 for him to get it, then let that be his fault.

manic Monday.

Larry Flynt tells the Fox Business (sic) Channel's Neil Cavuto that he's "hoping" to expose a sex scandal involving yet another Republican Senator within a week or two. But I'm not looking forward to it. I've heard that Trent Lott's sudden retirement might be a related matter, but I doubt it -- Mr. Lott's retirement makes sense in too many other ways. I've also heard two other potential candidates for the "sex scandal of huge proportions" -- current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. I suppose I hold one tiny soft spot in my heart for Mr. McConnell, who was one of the 34 deciding votes against that flag-burning monstrosity last year, but I'd also vastly prefer Mr. Graham, once an actual hero for condemning the antics at Abu Ghraib, to whichever right-wing panderer succeeds him. I mean, they always find someone worse.

another reason to impeach Bush and Cheney.

Some folks say impeachment isn't worth it, because if the House impeaches Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and then the Senate tries and convicts them and removes them from office, we might get stuck with someone even worse.

The trouble with that theory is that the Constitution has already limited the pool of successors. If Messrs. Bush and Cheney were removed from office today, we would be "stuck" with Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, is next in line for the Presidency. If the Democrats take control of the Senate in 2006, the President Pro Tempore would be Robert Byrd of West Virginia. I think this would be a good situation regardless of your affinity for either man, since each of them are approximately 388 years old and almost certainly wouldn't run for re-election in 2008. I can't imagine either Senator being much more than a caretaker for the remainder of the 2004-2008 term, either -- given the circumstances of a Bush/Cheney removal from office, you'd think they would approach their new assignment with some trepidation.

UPDATE. As I noted in a later post, this entire analysis is horsedoodle -- the Speaker of the House, not the President Pro Tempore, is next in line after the President and Vice-President. I regret the error, though not the wish for either Messrs. Byrd or Stevens as President. Please make a note of it.

on some of Mr. McCain's recent remarks concerning youth, wisdom, and debating your countryfolk.

Mr. McCain faced a hostile crowd at the New School's commencement ceremony on Friday, not long after giving essentially the same speech to a less overtly hostile crowd at Liberty University's commencement ceremony.  I presume that Mr. McCain's defenders, however many of them remain, praise his message to both sides in America that neither has a monopoly on wisdom and that everyone needs to calm down.  Sounds noble, doesn't it?

I wish it were.  This message would be noble if it addressed the reality of our surroundings.  But the problem with American discourse is not that both sides are shouting at each other.  The problem with American discourse is that when left-wingers try to argue reasonably with right-wingers, right-wingers accuse us of weakness and treason and siding with the terrorists.  It should not be surprising that we occasionally (and not often enough, in my view) respond angrily to that.  So I find it rather patronizing to have Mr. McCain suggest that, far from having legitimate and quite possibly insoluble grievances against the right wing he's rushing to embrace these days, I'm merely one of those people who thinks he knows everything and never listens to the other side.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that it's not conservatives I won't listen to, but the knuckle-draggers who have stolen the conservative mantle.  And I do not claim infinite knowledge.  I merely claim that I do not need to have infinite knowledge to condemn a war fought this incompetently on such fictitious pretexts.  I do not need to have infinite knowledge to point out that this right-wing "effort" to "save" Social Security is nothing more than a pension raid.  I do not need to have infinite knowledge to recognize that this government cares less for keeping America safe -- whether from terrorist attacks or Category 5 hurricanes -- than it does for spying on its political enemies in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  I do not need to have infinite knowledge to see that Republican economic policy perpetuates a shell-game economy that benefits large corporations and not American citizens.  And, much as I'd love to think these are merely differences among "countrymen," I think I have every right to suspect the good intentions of the people who pushed this war down the throat of half of America, who never considered the multitude of better alternatives to shoring up Social Security, who ignored warnings on PDbs and fiddled while New Orleans drowned, who passed numerous tax cuts that only benefit CEOs and portfolio managers.

I'd agree with Mr. McCain if current American discourse actually dealt with how we're going to achieve the promotion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, and not with the emperor being stark naked and the emperor's defenders bullying anyone with the temerity to point it out.  If one side commits innumerable acts of malice and incompetence and then "debates" mainly by accusing the other side of treason, the problem cannot be solved by both sides getting together over beer and hot dogs and volleyball and passing the talking stick around the campfire and musing that the greater part of wisdom is recognizing what you don't know.

As the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for war and a time for peace.  Now is not the time to break bread with the folks who claim moral superiority when they wage war in order to steal American treasure for Bush's crony corporations.  Now is not the time to break bread with the folks who want their perversion of God's voice to be the only voice in the public square.  Right now, these people are all dead to me.  Thankfully, they are not now, nor will they ever be, the majority of Americans, Americans who can think and feel.  I'm happy to reach out to them.

But not to John McCain's new friends.  They haven't earned it.

UPDATE. As I note in a later post, I regretted the quotation I used from the Book of Ecclesiastes. We're not "at war" with our fellow Americans. "There is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing" is obviously far more apt. Maybe sadder, too. Please make a note of it.

why pharmacists must fill all prescriptions they receive regardless of their "moral values."

Pharmacists serve the public.

A significant portion of the public uses birth control pills.

Therefore, pharmacists must fill prescriptions for birth control pills.

If you can't fill birth control prescriptions because you don't believe in birth control, then get another job.

What unconscionable selfishness -- Religious Righters want to be public servants, but only want to serve people who agree with them.

When did this stop being America?

the inevitable "Bob Casey, Jr., and the soul of the Democratic Party" post.

I'm pro-choice, but I respect folks who believe abortion is murder -- nobody on either side of the debate wants more abortions, and I can commune with anti-abortioners a lot more easily than with folks who think marriage needs to be "protected" from gays. And though I have no stake in the matter now, I've long thought that the Democratic Party ought to have more of a "big tent" approach on abortion (which Dr. Dean has tried to promote, though he's done it rather clumsily thus far). So I ought to be excited about the candidacy of Bob Casey the Younger for Rick Santorum's Senate seat, right?

Well, not necessarily. We know that Religious Right folks don't necessarily care about the "free market" or "wise use," that FDR never had to worry about his position on abortion, and that William Jennings Bryan was once the nation's foremost economic progressive at the same time he was the nation's most famous fundamentalist. We know, in short, that there's no symbiosis between the Republican economic agenda and the Republican social agenda -- in fact, as Thomas Frank suggests, the latter is a red herring for the former -- so it should be possible for a Democrat to move right on social issues as cover for moving left on economic ones. This strategy should have been Dennis Kucinich's strategy when he ran for President in 2004, but Kucinich suddenly became pro-choice the day he announced his candidacy. Kucinich's record on every other issue I care about is progressive enough that I would gladly have worked toward his election as President despite his opposition to abortion, but throwing his lifelong opposition to abortion into the water smacked to me of abject cowardice, and though I voted for him during my state's primary, I was never that enthusiastic about his candidacy again.

See where I'm going? Bob Casey, Jr., would not have to meet the Kucinich standard to earn my support, but he would need to get a whole lot closer to that than he's done, and I doubt it's in him to do that. Casey wants to do the job right in Iraq, but doesn't support an exit strategy or a timetable for withdrawal. Casey would have voted for Sam Alito's confirmation, which was plenty worth opposing on grounds that have little to do with abortion. Casey has only recently supported a federal minimum wage increase, while Santorum has actually sponsored legislation toward that end in the Senate. Casey doesn't support single-payer health care (as Messrs. Pennachio and Sandals, his Democratic primary opponents, do) or expanding stem-call research. Casey would allow employers to extend benefits to gay couples in long-term relationships, but doesn't think government should mandate such benefits, nor does he support gay marriage or adoption by gay couples.

Even the good news isn't that good. Casey supports increased federal investment in alternative energy sources, and good for him, but it's easy to do that given that federal investment in alternative energy sources is so small. What amount of investment would he call for, especially vis a vis the vast federal investment in coal and oil? Casey opposes private Social Security accounts, and good for him, but would he raise the $90,000 ceiling on the payroll tax in order to shore up the trust fund? Would he change the flat payroll tax into a progressive tax? Casey also thinks the Bush tax cuts should be rolled back, and good for him, but would he support a more progressive tax code, or targeted tax increases on the rich linked to saving necessary programs?

And while Casey's thinking on abortion isn't the standard right-wing slab of hate, there's not as much for me to support as I'd hoped. Casey has, in the past, expressed support for state and federal funding of contraceptive services, and, more importantly, supports forcing employers and HMOs to cover contraception in their health plans. That second item is near litmus-test for me. Yet Casey opposes forcing pharmacists to fill prescriptions when they claim "moral reasons" for failing to do so -- which he must know, since he's not a dummy, cripples his support for covering contraception in health plans in the first place. I worry, of course, that for Rick Santorum, Casey's positions will probably seem a little too "nuanced" -- maybe Santorum will even call Casey "a flip-flopper," though Casey could describe Santorum's entire 2006 legislative record using that same formulation.

The trouble with Democrats isn't that they're "not connecting" with the right-wing knuckle-dragger wedge enough; it's that they don't neutralize the knuckle-draggers by pushing the economic justice issues that brought them to power in the first place. Rick Santorum's own approval ratings are much lower than healthy for an incumbent, and he has lashed himself so strongly to his party's extreme wing that despite his political acumen I still think he'll lose. But the more pertinent question is: if Bob Casey, Jr. wins, are we going to win? Or is the national Democratic Party going to take a Casey victory as a cue to move far right on social issues without moving left on economic ones?

Katherine Harris, come on down! You're the next contestant on "American Theocracy!"

I'd really hoped to wait a few more years before saying, "wow!  That idiot makes Rick Santorum look positively erudite!"  But, alas, I don't get this wish, not after House Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL), during a fluff piece on ABC's Nightline, started testifying about her pledge to use all of her assets to win a Senate seat:  "I am willing to take this widow's mite, this pearl of great price, and put everything on the line...No matter how much you have, are you willing to take what you have and sell it all for a great price?"  What unearned self-regard -- why should folks care that she's willing to "put everything on the line" when she's never articulated a reason for her to put everything on the line besides "I want to be a U.S. Senator"?  And as for her "widow's mite," and her "pearl of great price," no Christian should tolerate such a hysterical desecration of holy text.

Let's take the wayback machine to the time of the Gospels, shall we?

In Mark 12.41-43, Jesus observes a slew of rich folks donating "much" to the church's treasury, and then observes a widow giving "two mites."  Jesus instructs his apostles that the poor widow "hath cast more in" because she gave "all that she had."  Harris misses at least half of the wisdom of Jesus's parable:  the widow is more devout, not just because she's given everything, but because she has less to give to begin with -- and whereas Ms. Harris won't have any problems making another pile of unearned money even after she exhausts her ten million-dollar "widow's mite," the widow in Mark 12.41-43 who gives her all has also given away her very life.  What else does Jesus mean by "all her living"?  He means the widow is going to die after giving her two mites.  Katherine Harris, on the other hand, is going to remain quite comfortable after Bill Nelson vanquishes her at the polls in November.

As if to add insult to Katherine Harris's injury, I must note also that Mark 12.38-40, directly preceeding the tale of the "widow's mite," says the following (I use the King James Bible unless otherwise noted):

"And he said unto them in his doctrine, Beware of the scribes, which love to go in long clothing, and love salutations in the marketplaces,
"And the chief seats in the synagogues, and the uppermost rooms at feasts:
"Which devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation."

In other words:  the "scribes" and those in "the chief seats" and "the uppermost rooms," who will be making the largest donations in 41-43, are suspect not merely because they give only a portion of their riches, but also because they're vain and pretentious and because they, can you believe it, "devour widows' houses," not unlike that of the widow in line 42 who shows the rich people up by giving her all.  Would it be piling on to add that no destitute "widow" was ever married to a living real estate magnate and that buying yourself a Senate seat is rather little like donating your treasure to the commonwealth for the good of all?

Of course, it gets worse -- Ms. Harris not only contorts the parable in Mark so that it excuses her wealth rather than condemns it, she also follows "this widow's mite" with "this pearl of great price."  The parallel structure leads you to believe that "this widow's mite" and "this pearl of great price" are the same thing, that when she gives up her fortune, she will be giving up "a pearl of great price."  However, a perusal of the relevant text, from from Matthew 13:45-46, reveals that she's completely butchered the meaning of the epithet:

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls:
"Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it."

Since "the kingdom of heaven" is like "a merchant man" giving up everything to buy a "pearl of great price," the "pearl of great price" is in no way like a "widow's mite" -- it isn't what you give up to get heaven, it is heaven, it's what you get when you give up all you have.  In other words, in the analogy relevant to Ms. Harris's life, the "pearl of great price" isn't the ten million bucks she's planning to spend, it's the Senate seat she's hoping to win.  Seems a bit shallow put like that, doesn't it?  I mean, I'd never think to compare winning a seat in the U.S. Senate to winning a place in kingdom of heaven.

I can already hear (in that part of my head that still listens to right-wingers who'll say anything to keep an argument going) that Ms. Harris means simply to invoke the difficulty of her task.  But I don't care what people mean so much as what they say and do.  It doesn't matter that getting into heaven is a difficult task and so is running against a well-funded opponent; it matters that winning a U.S. Senate seat is not a guarantee of wisdom or intelligence or utility.  It doesn't matter that a "widow's mite" and "a pearl of great price" are both phrases from the Bible -- it matters that these phrases function as part of a story that leads us to a greater wisdom about the world.  But you won't see that wisdom if you never think of anyone but yourself, if you believe that Jesus blesses the rich and powerful more than the smart and happy, and if you think "morality" is whatever gets the most knuckle-draggers to the polls.  I still worry that plenty of benighted souls are impressed with Ms. Harris's "courage" because they think the Bible is made up of magic spells that help you get rich or avoid pain.  So I'm going to match Katherine Harris's pledge with my own pledge:  I'll campaign for the ejection of Florida from the union if its citizens are stupid enough to elect her to the Senate.  Wealth without wisdom, religion without compassion, ambition without utility -- how did everything wrong with Republicans become incarnate in one human being?

a welfare state for bad ideas.

Where does a man begin flogging the Christine Flowers column in Monday's Philadelphia Daily News?

In sum, she invokes Oliver Wendell Holmes's "marketplace of ideas," where ideas "flourish or perish under their own power," to suggest that liberals "muzzle dissent" more than right-wingers do.  Her evidence?  Well, for one thing, "an unscientific poll involving a tally of (her) recent e-mails leads (her) to believe that liberals are less 'liberal-minded' than their conservative counterparts."  It couldn't be that people of the same stripe disagree more agreeably than people of a different stripe do, though one can observe this very phenomenon in this blog's comments.  She also claims that liberals have "sought to muzzle dissent" no less than five times since 1992, which list might invite the retort "five incidents of chicken pox do not constitute an epidemic."  But it's also possible she gets angry emails from liberals because her ideas aren't good enough to "flourish" but still do, thanks to her column helpfully provided by the local media, and I'm inclined toward this explanation, because only one of her five listed events (liberal opposition to military recruitment on college campuses) represents a possible incident of liberal "muzzling."  The other four events range from outright lies to, what do you know, incidents where liberals exercised their First Amendment rights by criticizing people they didn't like.

First, the outright lies.  Bob Casey was ostracized at the 1992 Convention because he wouldn't endorse the Democratic Presidential candidate.  This is, I would expect, a fairly common phenomenon though it doesn't reflect well on the party.  If it were a mere matter of his pro-life views, six other pro-life speakers wouldn't have been able to speak at the Convention, either.  And Rick Santorum didn't express "traditional views on family" so much as he compared homosexuality only slightly favorably to bestiality and suggested that the reason so many Boston priests fondled kids is that Boston is a liberal city.  It's a lie to suggest liberals were angry about "traditional views on family" rather than his reactionary views on society.

And criticizing isn't the same as "muzzling."  Who exactly has put duct tape over Rick Santorum's mouth for spewing his spew?  No one has prevented Santorum from standing for the Senate, or for the Presidency in 2008 if that is his will.  And Bill Cosby was, in Ms. Flowers's own words, "criticized," not muzzled, not prevented to speak (as he would speak about similar topics later and those comments were duly reported).  And, finally, the Dover decision does not "muzzle" -- do liberals require the teaching of quantum mechanics in Buddhism class just because some people find the experience of Einstein's mind a religious experience?  And even if the decision were "muzzling," the man who did the muzzling is a conservative Republican justice appointed to the bench by Mr. Bush.  Surely such a man would have stood up to liberal tyranny, if it existed.

Conflating "dissent" and "criticism" and "muzzling" and "censorship" is a right-wing trick I'm getting damn tired of, but I suspect with Ms. Flowers it's also intuitive:  she really feels oppressed when people disagree with her, or with her heroes.  Well, I'm not opposed to making people feel ashamed of themselves when they say things they ought to be ashamed of, as Rick Santorum and so many others have certainly done.  "For shame!" is also free speech; you may find it unpleasant or uncivil, but not oppressive.  And the First Amendment does not only apply to one person at a time; it applies to all of us, all of the time, and that includes those moments when we criticize others, no matter how that makes their sympathizers feel.

I mean, really.  This column should have "perished," but it's no better or worse than most right-wing sputum circa 2006.  And I've a damn garden to tend to.

Abramoff and I.

Dick Polman reminds me that Jack Abramoff was not President of his college's Republican club, but president of the College Republicans in the early '80s, where he was friends with ultra-rightists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. And while he was there, he summoned a demon with this utterance:

"It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently."

Still wondering why we liberals seem so angry these days? It's because folks like Abramoff aren't just crooks; they're crooks who want us permanently silenced. Last I looked, there was still only one way to permanently silence me.

Funny thing is, I do not seek to remove conservatives from power permanently. A society without conservatives would be disastrous. In fact, I seek harmony, not mere "peaceful coexistence," with conservatives. But I will not lie about myself in order to achieve harmony. And I certainly will not seek "peaceful coexistence" with right-wing demagogues like Santorum, Bozell, O'Reilly, Hannity, DeLay, etc. Any "harmony" I achieve with such folks would be a false harmony, like the harmony between President Clinton and the Gingrich House. That "harmony" gave us George W. Bush.

bad news for Tom DeLay.

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to at least three charges, and will apparently cooperate with federal investigators to nail some twenty-odd Congressfolk, at least a few of whom are presumed to be Democrats.

But that's not what I mean by "bad news for Tom DeLay"!  Ha ha ha ha!  I am such a trickster!  No, the bad news for Tom DeLay is that he's in such big trouble to begin with.  This is late-breaking news, obviously -- I could have undertaken the brief analysis I'm about to describe over thirteen months ago -- but it's nonetheless instructive.  You may recall that DeLay got 55% of the vote in his 2004 re-election bid, an unusually low number for a ten-term incumbent.  You may also recall that DeLay explained this low figure by pointing to the Texas state legislature's redistricting in 2004, undertaken expressly for the purpose of generating more Republican seats in the House of Representatives.  He suggested that when you create more Republican districts, you necessarily dilute the Republican districts that had been delivering supermajorities to Republican candidates, so that although more Republicans win, they'll all have lower tallies.

That sounds like a reasonable explanation for Tom DeLay's 55%, right?  Sure it does.  But the facts often obliterate even Tha Bush Mobb's most reasonable assertions, and so it goes with this one as well.  Looking up Texas's Congressional delegation, I found that out of 20 Texas Republicans not named Tom DeLay, only one -- one! -- finished with a smaller percentage of the popular vote in their districts than DeLay did in his.  And that fellow, Rep. Pete Sessions, garnered 54% of the popular vote in Texas's 32nd district against a twelve-term Democratic incumbent whose district disappeared beneath him, whereas Tom DeLay ran against a complete unknown.  All four first-term Republicans did better than DeLay (although Ted Poe -- who ran against Nick Lampson, another Democratic incumbent whose district disappeared beneath him -- came close to DeLay, getting 56% of the vote in Texas's 2nd distict).

So, while Jack Abramoff might be able to sink Tom DeLay, I think that boat's already taking a lot of water.

"no way am I making the same mistake Bill Paxon made in 1994!"

To my shame, I've held my nose and supported the Democrat -- I walked around nearby swing counties for John Kerry on Election Day just like a lot of other people -- but I try to scrap bad plans as soon as I see they don't work.  Not so with U.S. Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and therefore decides which candidates will benefit from Democratic Party largesse.  A few websites, including Counterpunch and Ecrasez L'infame!, have been closely following the Illinois 6th District race.  In 2004, actual progressive Christine Cegelis, who still calls for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, won a surprising 44% of the vote against 15-term incumbent Henry Hyde.  An impressive showing given the circumstances, but apparently Emmanuel doesn't want to take any chances -- this time around, with Hyde retiring, Emmanuel favors Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth over Cegelis, though Duckworth isn't from the 6th District, is another bet-hedger on Iraq though the war robbed her of both legs, and says she cares about progressive issues without supporting any progressive solutions in particular.

Don't believe me?  Then check out the DCCC "Races to Watch" website, where you can see which Democrats plan to run against Republican incumbents.  Click on the state of Illinois, and check out the 6th District list.  Click on Cegelis's name, and you'll get pointed to her website without any further notation; click on Duckworth's, and you'll get a two-paragraph biography in addition to being pointed to her website.  It doesn't take a professional semiotician to figure out who they want you to vote for.  (The other two listed candidates for the 6th District, Peter O'Malley and Lind Scott, get the Cegelis treatment.)  Likewise with John Pavich, the lone challenger to incumbent Jerry Weller in the 11th District; Emmanuel has favored the former CIA operative with a one paragraph biography.  Though Pavich supports alternative energy research (though not development, I notice, and we are, frankly, more in the "development" stage with solar and wind at this point), most of his other positions are the sort of economic band-aids we've come to expect from Democrats.

Then check out District 15, currently held by Tim Johnson (no, the other one!), and click on a challenger named David Gill.  Gill doesn't get the Cegelis treatment from the DCCC website, but his candidacy still only merits a short note:  "Dr. David M. Gill is challenging GOP incumbent Timothy Johnson."  After looking at Dr. Gill's website, I think I know why:  he supports universal single-payer health care (which is far more popular than Democrats seem to think), wants to fight terror cells and not nation-states, supports the Employee Free Choice Act, and wants to withdraw from NAFTA.  Likewise District 18, where Steve Waterworth also gets one sentence of support as the lone challenger to Rep. Ray LaHood.  Waterworth, a 24-year vet of the Air Force, calls the Middle East situation a "quagmire," supports Universal Health Care, opposes faith-based initiatives, and suggests that the real solution to the abortion question is to "work harder to take the glory out of sex."  Hallelujah!  It's true that Waterworth also ran in 2004 and picked up only 30% of the vote.  But that hardly means that 70% of the 18th District loves Ray LaHood.  A lot of voters, there as anywhere else, stay home on Election Day, and could it be that they stay home because the Democratic Party is too scared to stand for what people want?

All in all, the DCCC website is a wonderful tool for figuring out whom to support in the 2006 House races:  if the DCCC pushes a candidate, then you want to support someone else.

the findings of the "Thieves in the Temple" tax commission.

Deciphering the early November recommendations of the President's Tax Commission ain't tough:  you will pay more taxes under either of the President's Tax Commission's two offered plans, and the rich will pay less.  The 10% bracket will disappear into the 15% bracket again, and the top bracket, the 33% bracket (it was 39% in 2001) will have yet another three points lopped off, down to 30%.  At the low end of the top bracket, which starts at $200,000 per year, that's a savings of $6,000; you only save $300 a year with the 10% bracket, but, Christ, what an insult.  If Congress pushes either of these plans, then Tha Bush Mobb will have rolled back one of the few progressive achievements of the Clinton Presidency -- the tax hike for the top 1 percent of income earners.  Plus it will sanction the abominable tax cuts that help the rich more anyway:  the dividend tax cut and the capital gains tax cut.  Reagan's 1986 tax cut slashed the top rate from 50% to 26%, but at least (in response to popular outcry) it closed most of the corporate loopholes.  They've all come back over the years.

All in all, this is an unconscionable record of cruelty and arrogance.  It's no good citing the handful of good ideas the Commission had, or wiping our brows because at least they didn't go for a flat tax or a national sales tax.  The Commission has done a horrible job, a job reflecting accurately upon a cruel, immoral and decadent American culture, as well as the lying, smirking "President" who brought the Commission into existence in the first place.  And, needless to say, if you hurt like I do at this moment, you certainly have no business trading your acquiescence to this monstrosity for the continued "security" Tha Bush Mobb offers.  Tha Bush Mobb is like La Cosa Nostra, only without honor, let alone a sense of history.

So, y'all know what I'd do, right?  I'd create a new bracket at the top, maybe representing the top one-fifth of one percent, and I'd tax that at 90%; I'd raise the personal exemption up to the level of the living wage and index that to inflation; I'd slash the lower brackets up to $60,000 to 10%; I'd restore the brackets between $60,000 and $200,000 to their pre-2001 levels; I'd raise the floor of the Alternative Minimum Tax to the level of the top one percent, raise the rate to slightly under the level of that bracket, and I'd index the damn thing to inflation like any child would have known to do and like any child would know to do now; I'd restore the dividend tax, the estate tax, and the capital gains tax to their pre-2001 levels and, here's a neat trick, make them progressive so smaller home-sellers don't get hammered as much as speculators and mansion-sellers.  And don't even get me started on all the sin taxes I'd create -- for example, I'd tax blockbuster Hollywood pictures, because spending all those hundreds of millions on things blowing up makes me think we're going to fall harder than Rome before I die.

I wouldn't even have to ask if all this is "revenue-neutral."  Once you start taxing the rich like you should, you move past "revenue-neutral" and into "funding low-income housing properly."  When President Kennedy cut the top tax bracket in 1961, and thus signaled the government's abandonment of projects like low-income housing, that was the beginning of the end for this country.  Can we turn it around?  We can, if "moral values" really mean anything to anybody.

victories, or not.

Y'all know that line from Pulp Fiction, the one that Harvey Keitel says to Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta after they've cleaned all the dead brains out of their car? The one that begins with "let's not go..."? Pretend I've just repeated it in the context of all the "victories" we've supposedly won in the last two days. Particularly Mr. Bush's "reversal" on the McCain/Warner anti-torture amendment.

The "liberal media" widely reported Mr. Bush as having caved to House and Senate pressure over the McCain/Warner amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill, but, as I suggest here, the "liberal media" have it wrong. As we know, the McCain/Warner amendment didn't specifically outlaw torture; rather, but required that the Army's own anti-torture standard in its interrogation field manual become federal law. So if the Army updates said field manual with ten classified pages that, in the words of one Pentagon officer, teach interrogators how to walk "right up to the edge," then we've got problems. And, dig this, this is apparently the first update to the Army's field manual for interrogation in thirteen years. What timing! Like I said: no benefit of the doubt for Tha Bush Mobb.

Meanwhile, right-wing spinmeisters will no doubt be pillorying the New York Times for breaking its NSA-spying story on Friday, after cravenly sitting on it for "a year" "to do additional research" and even then withholding "some information the Administration has argued could be useful to terrorists." Perhaps the breaking story gave 41 Democrats, 4 Republicans, and Jim Jeffords the steel they needed to block a cloture vote on the PATRIOT Act conference report that day. But right-wing spinmeisters ought to learn to join the debate, instead of shouting everyone else down. They can't whine about how the terrorists now know something they didn't know before, as if America is so weak that it can't withstand self-scrutiny. They can't harp on how one of the Times's authors has a book out coming soon, as if that fact automatically negates any of their charges. They can't merely parrot Mr. Bush's line that he followed the law and the Constitution, as if Moses handed this information down from Mount Sinai. They need to deal with specific charges contained in the New York Times article that the NSA taps violated the NSA charter, federal eavesdropping law, and even the PATRIOT Act. They also need to deal with charges the Times omitted, which Dan Eggen's Washington Post article from the same day runs down. And, yes, they also need to consider what could happen to them under a President Hillary Clinton, with the powers that Mr. Bush would be giving her.

(As always, registration required for New York Times and Washington Post articles. Cockburn and St. Clair review some of Eggen's reporting in this article, which earns them a hat tip.)

victory over torture! or not.

Eric Schmitt filed two reports for the New York Times this week in re the McCain/Warner torture amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill, which Mr. Bush has threatened to veto if said amendment is included.  In the most recent report, dated 12.15, the House voted overwhelmingly on Rep. Murtha's resolution to instruct the Defense Appropriations Bill conferees to accept the Senate's anti-torture provisions.  But the earlier report, dated 12.14, states that the Army has revised its field manual to, well, be a little more specific about what interrogators can do and what they can't do.  The article claims that the list of proscribed and allowed techniques is 10 pages long.  It looks an awful lot like a way of undercutting the McCain/Warner amendment, which, as you may remember, does not specifically outlaw torture, but calls for standard Army interrogation techniques (which presumably do, or rather did, outlaw torture) to become federal law, which the President would then be bound to enforce.

Now, having read the latter article, you may well be saying (as the New York Times probably wants you to say), "well, according to the article, the Army has a long and specific list of interrogation techniques, so it likely does prohibit torture, given all the controversy there's been over it lately."  I sure do hope that's the case, but there are at least four additional factors to consider.  One, Tha Bush Mobb, being made up of "big thinkers" and "reality creators," doesn't care about "controversy."  Two, the list is classified, so we don't know that it prohibits torture for sure.  Three, because the list is classified, we also don't know that there are in fact 9 pages of allowed techniques and one page of prohibited techniques.  Four, the timing is, as it always is with Tha Bush Mobb, awfully suspicious.  And Tha Bush Mobb doesn't deserve any benefit of the doubt.  I can't help but feel that this isn't just "a stick in McCain's eye," but a stick in ours as well -- you already know Tha Bush Mobb wants to investigate you, and you already know they'd prefer not to fuss over distinctions like "citizen" and "non-citizen."  So, yeah, I'm rubbing my own eye at this moment.

I don't think it would be too much to ask -- and when I say "I don't think it would be too much to ask" what I mean of course is "I demand" -- that our elected representatives look at this "classified" document and report back to their constituents about it, and not accept the whining excuse that "then our enemies will know what we're up to," as if foreign terrorists ever decide to just cancel their little outings based on what precise interrogation techniques the United States uses to ferret out their comrades.  "Electrodes to the scrotum?  Well, now I feel a little squeamish about bombing this club" is not a statement I suspect I will ever hear a terrorist utter.

(Registration required for both of the above articles.)

this is how we do.

Movie critic Neal Gabler annihilates the "war on Christmas" argument advanced by Fox News Watch hack Eric Burns, who is clearly not prepared for argument with sentient life. Burns walks into the ambush with "if I can just give three examples right now in different parts of the country" and Gabler whacks him over the head with "three incidents of chicken pox doesn't make an epidemic." Shame you almost couldn't hear it over Burns "hanging back," by which he must mean "shouting."

But now I'm going to bring some more thunder.

If you're really that threatened by someone saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," or whatever else, I got three words for you, and I'll say them slow:

Suck.

It.

In.

You live in a country with other people in it. You live in a country with people who think and worship differently than you do. Even your personal Lord and Savior, George W. Bush, agrees with me that this is a good thing. You do remember from history class that many of the folks who settled in America were running from religious persecution elsewhere? Actual religious persecution, the kind that got you imprisoned or maimed or killed, and not the "persecution" where you don't hear only the things you want to hear all the time?

The beauty of America is that so many disparate people have come here to dream, and have stayed to forge bonds across differences. If that's too tough for your obviously slender belief in God, then move to some dictatorship which would lend steel to your soul. America is not your damn enabler.

deep thoughts.

As if I didn't need more reminding that it was a whole lot easier for the populace to influence Congress before the holiday shopping season, the House passed their nefarious dividend and capital gains tax cut extensions yesterday. Now their tax cut bill differs markedly from the Senate's, meaning we could have a hairy reconciliation process. I mean, we can only hope! The more the House and Senate argue, the less damage they can do to the rest of us. But between that House tax cut bill and those cruel budget cuts and that PATRIOT Act reauthorization (not all Mr. Bush was hoping for, but enough to keep Senator Feingold angry), 2005 ain't finishing up well. Of course it could have been a lot worse -- after 1l.2.04 I thought we were going to have estate tax repeal and a flat-rate income tax and Social Security privatization by now -- but the disproportionate presence of far right-wingers in Congress is insufferable.

And here's how Tha Bush Mobb wants that to get worse: as gay marriage was the wedge issue in 2004 ("wedge" as in "the slice of the pie that gives us more than half the pie," as well as its more common meaning), illegal immigration may be the wedge issue in 2006. Remember, people who get uptight about illegal aliens don't automatically vote Republican, but now they might. Mr. Bush himself has been a waffler on immigration issues -- I'll admit that his statement about Americans not having to choose between safety and openness, though it propped up bad economic policy, was quite impressive -- but "showing independence" from Mr. Bush's waffling might be an asset to would-be far-right-wingers in 2006. More on this later.

In any case: remember those Republican campaign slogans? Start repeating them to your friends. I think I'm going to make bumper stickers.

describing another dispatch from outside the reality-based community.

Former Bob Dole press secretary Douglas McKinnon should know better than to slam the media for demoralizing the troops.  Actually, I think he does know better, for he can't seem to decide whether the villain is "liberals" or "Democrats" or members of "the media" or some combination of the three, and he can't even pin down whether "many" in the media or "some" in the media are responsible.  But this only compounds his sin.  And saying that these ethereal villains "gleefully" demoralize American soldiers compounds it further.  Being both a liberal and, I guess, a medium for information to get from one place to another, I would challenge anyone who reads this blog to find the "glee" in it.  The word "glee," according to my Random House Unabridged, comes from an Old Norse word meaning "glow," and means "open delight or pleasure; exultant joy; exultation."  It should be obvious to any reasonable person that, no matter how witty I try to be at any given moment, the current state of the world leads me not to "exultation" but to misery.

And Mr. McKinnon's analysis is also mercifully free from the bonds of verifiable evidence.  How many "negative" stories from the war front does he prove false?  How many "negative" stories does he prove are poorly-contextualized by the media, even?  How many unreported or underreported boons coming out of the Iraq war does he cite?  How many journalists or Senators or other liberals has he caught in a state of rapturous "glee" about the demoralization of American troops?  How many examples does he provide of the "ingrained contempt" for the military supposedly shared by "many liberals" in the "Democratic Party" and/or "the media"?  And how many soldiers serving in Iraq does he quote expressing their demoralization because of what this ever-shifting nexus of "liberals" and "Democrats" and "the media" has allegedly done?  If you answered "not a damn one" to each of the above questions, you win the right to consider yourself a reasonable human being.

The right wing's whining about "hurting the troops by opposing the war" is beyond insulting.  The Republicans control the Presidency.  The Republicans control the Senate.  The Republicans control the House.  The Republicans answer to their corporate paymasters, who control the media.  And the Democrats also currently reside outside the reality-based community; how else to explain why it took their leadership two weeks to support John Murtha's call for withdrawal?  Very soon there'll be no one left for the Republicans to blame but us -- the uppity citizenry, with the temerity to question Our Great Leader and His Golden Gut.

Inaccuracy in Media, part 227.

Cliff Kincaid is a big fat idiot. There is no way to be civil about this matter, now that one of the ringleaders of Accuracy in Media has written that "Anti-War Protests Kill Americans."

It's even better than you think. Despite that provocative headline, Kincaid doesn't have the guts to reaffirm the title in the article's text. Instead, he answers his hypothetical question with distorted evidence and craven qualifications like "it's worth considering" and "one thing's for certain." And then he does what they all do when they don't have a leg to stand on: he piles on further inflammatory, unsupported, and irrelevant allegations (irrelevant to the question of whether anti-war protests actually kill Americans). Thus, before the rage-inhibited can seriously consider the evidence of the first four paragraphs, Kincaid moves quickly to al-Zawahiri's supposed comparison of Iraq to Vietnam and then to al-Jazeera's "emergence" as "another powerful weapon at (the enemy's) disposal," neither of which directly relates to "whether anti-war protests kill Americans."

Anyway, let's get back to the pertinent question, of whether anti-war protests kill Americans. I've already said that my right to give honest counsel to my Representatives in Congress and to the President is inviolate, and the right to protest is implicit in that right. I've also already said that there are plenty of more compelling reasons Americans are dying in Iraq -- the foolishness of the mission and the incompetence and greed of our war leaders chief among them. So what motherlode of evidence does Cliff Kincaid to suggest I'm wrong? Here's all of it: a) "October was reported to be the deadliest month for U.S. troops since January," and the media gave "heavy publicity" to the September 24 anti-war march; and b) "one of the organizations behind the event posted an article urging 'solidarity' with the 'Iraqi fighters' and 'resistance' killing American troops and innocent civilians in Iraq."

What a formidable feat of rhetorical invention. As for point a): the "since January" is an arbitrary deadline imposed by the author. The months of January 2005, November 2004, April 2004, and November 2003 were far deadlier than October 2005, and only one of these four months followed a significant (and, more to the point, not well-covered) anti-war protest. As for point b): an article circulated by "one organization," even one "behind the event," obviously doesn't prove that everyone in the anti-war movement feels "solidarity" with the "Iraqi resistance." Anti-war protestors are a diverse lot; they even include many war veterans and political conservatives. I guess it's just easier for Kincaid to stereotype us.

Remember, kids, there's no need to find out what's going on in George W. Bush's America. All you have to do is seize upon the first factoid that confirms your prejudices. It works for Cliff Kincaid (or "insert name of other right-wing blowhard") and it can work for you, too.

a la carte nation!

Congress is off this week, so I can complain about the media all I want!

Ralph Nader, America's greatest citizen, reminds us that serious voices have almost entirely disappeared from the public airwaves. To think that you or I could once have been on the Merv Griffin Show because we actually had ideas worth hearing, and not just because we bought a sonogram machine in order to watch our starlet-wife's unborn fetus kick around in the womb. When Nader criticizes the fact that "audiences have become so hyped with the weird and the sexual," he sounds the clarion call for moral values exactly as it should be sounded (and not, for example, the way rageaholics like Brent Bozell do it). Read the entire thing, but get your reading glasses out; the font in this article is diabolically small for some reason.

Is the FCC about to do something right for a change? Word on the street is the FCC may reverse course and embrace the idea of a la carte cable programming. But the FCC also seems enamored of the "themed tier" idea, which smacks of being a compromise with the cable companies, and I'm not in a compromising mood. I explain why I hold the same position on a la carte programming as many far-right-wingers here, and I should add that the reason cable companies almost uniformly oppose a la carte cable is advertising: advertisers can buy time on any cable channel with the hope that a lot of channel-surfers will see their ad sooner or later. Given that I believe advertising revenue is one of the great evils of our modern corporate megamedia, I am of course not impressed.

And quelle surprise -- while the Parents Television Council and Focus on the Family remain unlikely allies in my war on cable monopolies, the big televangelists remain my enemies, opposing a la carte because they want to "reach the unconverted." No doubt the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells will soon be crowing that giving citizens the right to pay for cable channels one at a time is tantamount to "religious discrimination." As if we needed another reason to become a la carte nation!

(I'm compelled to use Mediachannel links for the above two articles, because the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times are both registration-required sites.)

how the media puts the Christ in Christmas.

I know the Friday after Thanksgiving is a slow news day, but did the local CBS affiliate have to spend the first nine minutes of its Friday noonday news broadcast on Black Friday shopping? That's nine minutes out of thirty, gang. They had three reporters "on the scene" at three different shopping centers. They had anchorfolk, reporters, and shoppers harping on the "stress" of Christmas shopping the whole time. It makes me damn sick. And the media wonders why it gets no respect?

Now, I'm not saying it shouldn't have been covered at all -- I'm as much an observer of the odd social habits of my fellows as anyone. I'm saying two minutes at the end of the broadcast, where the lightweight "human interest" stories typically go, would have been far more appropriate. Dedicating a third (or more, I stopped watching) of your broadcast to "Black Friday" is just a way of avoiding more important matters. Likely it's a way of avoiding more important local matters, as well.

what the world expects of conservatives.

Albert Camus, who was an atheist, asked many years ago "what the world requires of Christians."  Noting that, among other things, the Catholic Church turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the Holocaust despite Christ's command that his followers should help those in need, Camus answered simply that "what the world requires of Christians is that they should continue to be Christians."

And so it goes with our current troubles.  As a liberal, all I expect of conservatives in America is the same:  that they be conservative.  I expect that they be fiscally responsible; I expect that they demand a society where hard work finds reward; I expect that they mistrust federal intrusion into private life; I expect that they defend traditional cultural values; I expect that they defend the right of the smallest possible community to make the decisions that impact that community; I expect that they denounce hifalutin social-engineering solutions that make social problems worse; and I expect that they apply consistent and rigorous standards in ethics, commerce, and education.

I expect nothing of conservatives that they don't supposedly already expect of themselves.  But how do today's "conservatives" measure up?

They are not fiscally responsible, for when they're not mystifying the growing budget deficit and the national debt, they're making excuses for it.  And now they seek "fiscal responsibility" only by cutting the mostly small programs that actually help Americans, not by cutting the real fat in the budget or by demanding that the rich and powerful pay taxes according to their need and ability.

They do not care about "hard work," or they would not worship the casino the American economy has become, an economy whose manufacturing base has been destroyed over the last 25 years, an economy which only rewards CEOs who slash their payrolls, an economy with a stock market that operates almost entirely on hearsay, an economy which does not create skilled jobs for its educated college graduates but rather outsources those jobs to foreign workers whom American corporations are free to treat worse.

They do not hold that privacy must be protected, for they either tolerate or openly cheerlead for expanded federal surveillance of the citizenry, and many of them deny that a right to privacy even exists in the Constitution.

They do not stand for traditional values like "tell the truth" and "do unto others"; they stand for reactionary values like "hate all gays" and "let no woman have access to birth control."  And do they refuse to support the megacorporations that actually make our culture more coarse and decadent?  No, they blame people who drink lattes and wear Birkenstocks, because the blame game is easier than controlling your own urge to consume.

Today's conservatives care little for the right of small communities to make decisions -- indeed, historically the conservative "commitment" to states' rights mostly begins and ends with oppressing black folk.  Today's conservatives are happy to let large corporations become even larger, so they can wipe out the small businesses that are actually responsive to a community's needs.

Today's conservatives don't warn us that some solutions are worse than the problem; they are themselves the progenitors of hifalutin social engineering solutions like "opportunity zones," whereby large corporations get tax breaks so they can help "rebuild" communities by hiring more janitors and waiters and keeping most of the profits for themselves.

And how do today's conservatives apply "consistent and rigorous standards"?  By howling about the corruption of Bill Clinton and Jim Wright while excusing that of Lewis Libby and Tom DeLay; by cheerleading for Chris Cox as new SEC Chair because he'll let corrupt CEOs police themselves; by calling me a bigot for opposing the teaching of intelligent design in science classes and by supporting the huge unfunded mandates in No Child Left Behind.

I don't need to add, of course, that today's "conservatives" do all of the above not by reasonably advancing well-constructed arguments, but by yelling and screaming and questioning my patriotism and suggesting that my "weakness" will probably be the direct cause of more Arabs causing more planes to hit more American buildings.

Real conservatives would make societies stronger -- if they'd actually be conservative, not just corrupt and opportunistic bigots.

UPDATE.  Thanks to stc, three corrections have been made to the above:  "intrusion" is now correctly-spelled in paragraph two; "whom" has replaced "what" near the end of paragraph five; and "commitment" is shorn one "t" in paragraph eight.  I'm not nearly as sharp an editor as I used to be, so feel free to pass along any corrections that need to be made.

why "voters don't know" about clean elections.

One of our so-called local papers ("so-called" because it's really a Knight-Ridder paper) reports that most New Jersey voters were unaware of New Jersey's "clean elections" campaign.

Now I've already suggested why the effort failed in Camden and Monmouth Counties: the requirements for candidates to qualify for matching funds are too high (the New Jersey program requires about 1,500 contributions where the Arizona program requires 200). Read the full analysis here. Done reading? Good. Now let's add another reason clean elections campaigns fail: the media hardly covers them -- it's not sexy enough, I guess -- except to report that "voters don't know anything about them," as if they, the media, have absolutely no power to tell the voters about them. How offensive, that our sick and decadent culture continues to reward such abject hypocrisy.

Assemblyman Joe Roberts (no, I voted against him) planned to testify this week that the state should fund an education program to tell people about the Clean Elections campaign. How many times must I tell these pimps! The state doesn't need to fund an education program to tell people about the Clean Elections campaign. The state needs to study the successful Maine and Arizona programs and imitate them. That's all the state needs to do. The state certainly doesn't need to furnish Republicans with more ammunition against Democratic "fiscal irresponsibility," so they can lie their way into power and be even more fiscally irresponsible.

And if the media feels like covering it, well, good for them. If they don't, I don't want to hear them whining about their dropping profit margins.

(Registration required for Philadelphia Inquirer article referenced above -- I think! I was able to access it this morning wihtout registering, which is unusual.)

viva Virginia and Pennsylvania! and to hell with Ohio.

Jon Corzine survives both his ex-wife's apparent endorsement of Doug Forrester and Bill O'Reilly's "reluctant" endorsement of same to become New Jersey's next governor.  In Virginia, Tim Kaine "survives" both Jerry Kilgore's claim that Kaine wouldn't have executed Hitler and Mr. Bush's last-minute appearance on Kilgore's behalf.  Kaine (who opposes both abortion and the death penalty) repeatedly stated that, despite his opposition to the death penalty, he would enforce death penalty regulations in Virginia because -- dig this -- it's his job to enforce the law.  This means that, between Mr. Kaine and Mr. Bush, we now have a total of one executive who understands the meaning of the word "executive."

In other terrific news, voters in Dover, PA turned out eight school board members up for re-election in favor of a "pro-evolution" slate, and the main proponent of intelligent design recorded the fewest votes of any board member.  Unfortunately, aspiring Darwin-Award nominee Heather Geesey was not up for re-election this year, but I sincerely hope that she, too, will ultimately count the cost.

But every silver lining has a dark cloud, and this cloud comes from Ohio, where voters rejected four measures that would have reformed voting procedures there.  The measures would have lowered campaign contribution limits, permitted voting by mail, and appointed bipartisan boards to redistrict the state and oversee elections.  I've overestimated Ohio's politicians in the past; I'd hate to think I've overestimated their voters as well.

UPDATE. That's eight school board members in Dover, PA. I neglected to specify that the first time, but I've rectified the error above.

Roveprints!

U.S. Senator Jon Corzine, who's running for Governor in New Jersey, had just opened up a lead on his opponent, former West Windsor Mayor Doug Forrester, when Corzine's ex-wife (they divorced in 2003) suddenly lashed out at him. "He did let us down, and he'll probably let New Jersey down, too," she said. Strangely, Forrester's wife, Andrea, said something similar in an ad that worked fairly well for Forrester last month: "He's never let his family down, and he won't let New Jersey down."

Anyone else see the Hand of Rove in this? I shudder to think what they'll inflict on Tim Kaine in Virginia.

Of course, this could backfire: 2005 ain't 2004, New Jersey ain't Illinois (right, Jack Ryan?), and Philadelphia Mayor John Street promptly opened up a double-digit lead on Sam Katz after police found an FBI bug in his office in October of 2003.

I hope it does backfire. Republicans ought to try winning races with better arguments, not soap-opera tactics.