android photography

As one of the major issues facing the U.S. is our health care system, which is seriously FUBAR, it's wonderful to see this story highlighted at Daily Kos:



During his family practice residency at UNM Hospital, Dr. Andru Ziwasimon said he became aware of the profound barriers and inflated costs of medical care for low-income and uninsured people, and he decided the best way to do his part to fix the problem was start a health clinic that offers primary care to uninsured patients.



"In a lot of ways our system of medicine is so corrupt in its values around money instead of taking care of patients," said Ziwasimon. "So I decided I wanted to practice medicine in a way that was respectful to my community and met the needs of the most vulnerable people."



Follow the link to read the details of how Dr. Ziwasimon runs his clinic. One of my constant refrains is that there are two things that should never be done for profit: health care and education. The good doctor is living proof that quality health care is not dependent on the profit motive.



We need more doctors like this. I hope he gets a lot of publicity, and that others follow his lead.

Via the Eschaton blog:



Amount the U.S. has pledged for humanitarian relief in the aftermath of the earthquake/tsunami that has so far killed 50,000 people:



$15 million.



Amount the White House expects to spend on George W. Bush's second inauguration:



$30-$40 million--not counting security costs.



Imagining that if there were no hell, one would be created especially for this administration:



priceless.



Update: this story reports that another $20 million is being added to the U.S.'s aid package.



Update II: Professor Juan Cole points out that Bush could have done himself a huge favor in terms of U.S.-Muslim relations by providing more aid. The death toll continues to rise; some now estimate the number of dead in Indonesia alone will top 80,000.

Estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the invasion range as high as 100,000, most of them innocent civilians, many of them children. Though on an admittedly smaller scale, families here are also suffering for Bush's war: in addition to the parents, siblings, and spouses of the troops killed, 900 U.S. children so far have lost parents in Iraq.



Sad to the depths of his 4-year-old soul, Jack Shanaberger knew what he didn't want to be when he grows up: a father.



"I don't want to be a daddy because daddies die," the child solemnly told his mother after his father, Staff Sgt. Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger, a military policeman from Fort Pierce, Fla., was killed March 23 in an ambush in Iraq.







More than 40 U.S. troops have died without ever seeing their children, including Army 1st Lt. Doyle Hufstedler, whose daughter, Grace Ashley, was born six weeks after his death.







I wonder what these mothers will tell their children as they're growing up. I couldn't blame any mother who felt the need to heroize her husband and what he was doing, because she can't bear the thought of her child believing his father died in an unjust cause. But I pray they'll have the strength to someday tell their children the truth about why their fathers were in Iraq, and about the government that sent them there.

Oh, the sweet sweet music of Senate hearings:



New Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Monday his party will launch investigative hearings next year in response to what he said was the reluctance of Republicans to look into problems in the Bush administration.



There are too many unasked and unanswered questions and the American public deserves better,' the Nevada senator said at a news conference. [ . . . ]



Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who heads the Democratic Policy Committee, said the first hearing will be at the end of January and he suggested it might focus on contract abuse in Iraq. He said the policy committee, which has held occasional investigative hearings in the past, planned to convene at least one such hearing a month.

[ . . . ]



They said issues that "cry out" for closer investigation, in addition to contracting abuses in Iraq, include the administration's use of prewar intelligence and its reported effort to stifle information about the true cost of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. Reid also mentioned global warming and the "No Child Left Behind" education program as topics that needed a closer look.



The Democratic-organized hearings would not have subpoena powers, but Dorgan said there are plenty of whistleblowers "anxious to tell their story."



It's a start, oh yes it is. Everyone think good Watergatey thoughts.

The incomparable Daily Kos was one of the first blogs I ever read. It's now a community of 20,000+ registered members, with hundreds of thousands more stopping by regularly to read it.



Markos, the founder of the site, is a U.S. Armed Services veteran; he was also an early, and vocal, opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and dKos was one of the sites around which opposition to the war coalesced. The dKos bloggers (Markos, his designated guest bloggers, and the diaries that can be written by any registered user) have been tracking both the runup to the war, and its consequences, all along. And the consequences just keep getting worse.



The service men and women in Iraq have an amazingly high survival rate, thanks to improved medical techniques. But that means they are surviving with horrific, life-long injuries (warning: graphic photo). We need to see these images; we need to understand that the damage being done is not an abstraction. And the costs, financial as well as human, of this unjust, ill-conceived clusterfuck of a war will be with us for generations. The immediate costs of the war are bankrupting our economy, and the long-term costs can only be guessed at.



If this were a just world, most of the Bush administration would be under indictment now. But it isn't, and we will all have to pick up the pieces of what's left of the world when they're done with it.

You probably know that conservative/religious groups would like to ban RU-486, or at least have it labeled as dangerous and potentially fatal, since a woman died last year after taking it.



Well, okay, that seems reasonable; if something is dangerous we should certainly know about it. And really, maybe we should ban it. So let's look at some statistics to get an idea where we are.



The associated (not causal, as the causality isn't clear) mortality rate for RU-486 is 0.8/100,000. For comparison, the associated mortality rate for a pencillin shot is 2/100,000. So RU-486 doesn't seem all that dangerous, really.



But, of course, a penicillin shot serves an altogether different purpose than RU-486; to be fair, we should really look at another sex-related drug, like, say, Viagra, since it's been on the market for years now.



So what's the death risk for men taking Viagra?



Well. Um. Turns out it's 6/100,000. That would make it more than six times as dangerous as RU-486.



So I guess we'll be banning Viagra any day now. Or at least putting dire warning labels on it.



(Via one of my favorite blogs: Bitch. Ph.D. [best enjoyed by academics, though others can play too]).

"Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it."

-Baltasar Gracian, philosopher and writer (1601-1658)

It's that time of the quarter when insanity is the only reasonable state of mind. I have papers to write, and papers and finals to grade; posting will have to be sporadic over the next ten days or so.

The news that Harry Reid, a Mormon from Utah, had been elected the new Democratic minority leader in Congress did not inspire a great deal of confidence. With all due respect to the state and the people, Utah is not exactly a hotbed of progressive politics, and "Democratic Mormon" feels like an oxymoron. But Reid went on Meet the Press on Sunday, and darned if he didn't offer up some genuine criticisms of the Bush administration.



For example, here he is on Social Security:



Tim, I can remember as a little boy my widowed grandmother with eight children. She lived alone, but she felt independent because she got every month her old age pension check. That's what this is all about. The most successful social program in the history of the world is being hijacked by Wall Street. Yes, Social Security is a good program. And if the president has some ideas about trying to improve it, I'll talk to him, and we as Democrats will, but we are not going to let Wall Street hijack Social Security. It won't happen. They are trying to destroy Social Security . . . when Social Security came before the Congress, who opposed it? The Republicans. And they have a long memory. They've been trying to destroy Social Security for a long time and now they think they have an opening to do it.



Reid also had some harsh words for the administration's notion of tax "reform." And he defended the Democratic Party's status as the big-tent, inclusive party, by insisting that the Democrats are not going to follow the new Republican policy of using ideological litmus tests, rather than seniority, to decide committee chairmanships. (He also said that Barbara Boxer, whose views on abortion are quite different from his own, is the closest thing to a sister he's ever had.)



And to top it all off, he took on Clarence Thomas:



I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I don't--I just don't think that he's done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.



Of course, the accusations of racism have already started, but Reid had to know that was coming, and he took a stand against the--yes--embarrassingly incompetent Thomas anyway.



It's almost enough to give a person hope.

The eight soldiers come from places scattered across the country, from this small town an hour northwest of Little Rock to cities in Arizona, New Jersey and New York. In Iraq and Kuwait, where they all work now, most of them hold different jobs in different units, miles apart. Most have never met.



But the eight share a bond of anger: each says he has been prevented from coming home for good by an Army policy that has barred thousands of soldiers from leaving Iraq this year even though the terms of enlistment they signed up for have run out. And each of these eight soldiers has separately taken the extraordinary step of seeking legal help, through late-night Internet searches and e-mail inquiries from their camps in the conflict zone, or through rounds of phone calls by an equally frustrated wife or mother back home.



With legal support from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal-leaning public interest group, lawyers for the eight men say they will file a lawsuit on Monday in federal court in Washington challenging the Army policy known as stop-loss.



Good for them. The DoD, and the Bush White House, need to be forced to acknowledge what they're doing to our troops.



(Story in the New York Times; registration required. To bypass annoying and invasive compulsory online registrations, use Bugmenot.com.)

U.S. border guards at busy northern crossings will start fingerprinting foreign visitors entering from Canada by the end of the year, a top official in the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday.



[ . . . ]



Homeland Security is in the process of expanding the collection of fingerprints and other digital data to the nation's 50 busiest land crossings. Fingerprinting has already started at Mexican border crossings in Arizona, Texas and California . . . The fingerprinting technology, used already at airports and seaports, is to be extended to all land border crossings by the end of 2005.



(via Talk Left)

Many of us have been concerned for some time about the security vulnerabilities of touchscreen voting machines that have no paper trail, especially their susceptibility to hacking that can invisibly change vote totals. And given the track record of this administration, it seemed a little too naive to trust that it would not make use of such a vulnerability, and a little too tidy that Bush edged out a win in heavily Democratic areas of Florida, among other areas, on November 2. Well, now a programmer has admitted that Florida Republican Tom Feeney hired him to write software for Florida's touchscreen machines that would accomplish just such vote-rigging:



According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.



Feeney talks about using police patrols to suppress the minority vote, and tells Clint Curtis, the programmer, that he wants the software to "flip" enough votes to produce a 51% to 49% win for Bush.



Read the whole thing. There are several independent investigations going on right now that are trying to connect the dots between a number of bad actors, several of them current or former members of the U.S. government, that form a very dark web including the CIA, certain key banks, drug running, the Saudi royal family, Islamist terrorism, and the Bush family. I haven't been posting much on them, because hard proof is still hard to come by, and talking about the allegations (which include the suspicious "suicides" of two men who got too close to the seamy underside of the Bush family) without the proof risks sounding like tinfoil-hat territory. But I will bring you information like the above as it becomes available.

James Wolcott, whose writing I perpetually envy, has a post up just for men. Read 'em and heed 'em, oh andro-Americans.



Update: That is to say, I admire his writing generally, not for this post in particular; and snarky comments about pen envy are entirely unnecessary.

There have been a number of posts around the blogosphere lately with the "And So it Begins" title, as various folk see various warning signs of the dangerous path our country is on. Here's another hint that Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale may prove to be all too prophetic: Employers are now screening potential employees for conformity to certain religious and political beliefs.



Yesterday, my wife went looking for work at various retailers around town, hoping to make some extra green for the holiday season. She's been off the market for the last 4+ years raising our son, and I've been with my current employer for that same period of time, so neither of us has any recent experience on the job-seeking scene. Thus we were surprised to discover a new trend in the kind of questions being asked on applications. It seems that certain employers are attempting to determine the political and religious preferences of applicants.



The applications in question all had to be completed on computers in the HR office, so I've got no hardcopy proof to offer, only the anecdotal accounts from my wife (no coincidence I suspect). At a certain "big box" store, which go will unnamed, she was asked "Would you say that God is an important factor in your life?" and "Do you believe that our current political leaders are doing a good job?". At a couple other places there were questions like "Would you say that you have 'traditional' values or 'progressive' values?" or something similar.



These are paraphrases unfortunately, but regardless of the specific text, the intent is clear - some employers are attempting to screen applicants based on their political and religious views. Oh, I'm sure that these questions are phrased in such a way to skirt equal-opportunity regulations and appear "neutral" in regards to a given viewpoint and that, if taken to task, the employer can claim that they are not considered in the final hiring decisions, but then why ask the questions at all? What possible relevance could a person's religious/political beliefs have to punching numbers on a cash register?



The implications are truly frightening. The least disturbing justification would be that of maintaining a "harmonious work environment" by insuring that all the employees have compatible world views. But one can imagine much more sinister motivations, such as the assumption that those who give a negative answer to the "God" question are more likely to be immoral (and thus rip-off the company), or those that express a lack of faith in political leaders are more likely to question the authority of the management, or even that their views may be "anti-American" and/or sympathetic to the "enemy". Another motivation might be the advancement of a larger social agenda through a privately-controlled system of economic reward and punishment ("right-minded" folks will be the only ones gainfully employed, thus having their opinions materially validated, as well as more time and money to contribute to the cause; while "wrong-minded" people will be too busy just trying to survive to make any political trouble).



And even if it is entirely true that such questions are ignored in evaluating suitability for employment, the message is clear. My spouse answered the questions based on what she thought the employer wanted to hear, rather than her actual beliefs - she responded "yes" to the God question, "yes" to the political leaders question, and said her values were more "traditional". And though these were all lies, she likely just increased her chances of getting a job. After all, when was the last time you heard of a company hiring applicants specifically because they didn't believe in God, didn't support our political leaders, and were avidly Progressive?



I have nothing to add.

Also from the fraternal unit in the Windy City:



"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing."



Dwight David Eisenhower - 34th president of the United States

From my bruddah in Chicagah, things to do before the next inauguration in January:



1. Get that abortion you've always wanted.



2. Drink a nice clean glass of water.



3. Cash your social security check.



4. See a doctor of your own choosing.



5. Spend quality time with your draft age child/grandchild.



6. Visit Syria, or any foreign country for that matter.



7. Get that gas mask you've been putting off buying.



8. Hoard gasoline.



10. Borrow books from library before they're banned - Constitutional law books, Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, Tropic of Cancer, etc.



11. If you have an idea for an art piece involving a crucifix - do it now.



12. Come out - then go back in - HURRY!



13. Jam in all the Alzheimer's stem cell research you can.



14. Stay out late before the curfews start.



16. Go see Bruce Springsteen before he has his "accident."



17. Go see Mount Rushmore before the Reagan addition.



18. Use the phrase, "You can't do that - this is America."



19. If you're white - marry a black person, if you're black - marry a white person.



21. Take a walk in Yosemite, without being hit by a snowmobile or a base-jumper.



22. Enroll your kid in an accelerated art or music class.



23. Start your school day without a prayer.



24. Pass on the secrets of evolution to future generations.



26. Learn French.



28. Attend a commitment ceremony with your gay friends.



29. Take a factory tour anywhere in the US.



30. Try to take photographs of animals on the endangered species list.



31. Visit Florida before the polar ice caps melt.



32. Visit Nevada before it becomes radioactive.



33. Visit Alaska before "The Big Spill."



34. Visit Massachusetts while it is still a State.



What else should be on the list? Add your suggestions in the comments.

Ah yes, it's that wonderful time again: when giving becomes confused with money and materialism, deeper meanings are overshadowed by the frantic ringing of cash registers, and families go into debt for the coming year.



Want to opt out of the crass commercialism? Homemade gifts are great, of course, but also time-consuming. If you'd like to purchase gifts, but want them to be more meaningful and less materialistic, the Natural Resources Defense Council has some great gift suggestions emphasizing green/sustainable living, including national parks passes, solar chargers, night scopes for catching glimpses of nocturnal creatures, and lots of other creative ideas.



One of my favorites on their list is Heifer International, an organization that helps communities all over the world escape crushing poverty by giving them animals: cows, goats, chickens, lambs, and more. Recipients pledge to pass on their gift by sharing their animals' offpsring with others. The HI program promotes sustainable living, strong communities, and peaceful cooperation. You can donate in honor of those on your gift list in amounts from $10 on up, so there's something for every budget.



The ELCA (the American Lutheran Church) also has an alternative gift-giving catalog; donations can be given to a wide variety of projects from disaster relief, to community development, to feeding the hungry, to hiring teachers for refugee camps. Donations can be as little as $1, so this is a great option for kids. Also in the family vein, this article from Penn State has some good suggestions for intergenerational gift-giving.



Want more choices? Charity Navigator is a non-profit organization that has evaluated over thirty-four hundred charities nationwide; here's a list of all their four-star charities, including Jewish, Catholic, and nonreligious organizations.



Whatever you do, I hope you'll find a way to look beyond the glitzy surface of this holiday season and celebrate the values of love and generosity instead.

Melanie, over at Just a Bump in the Beltway, has a roundup of articles about the folk now being forced back into uniform to go to Iraq:



* A 43-year-old single mom who completed her service twelve years ago has been called up. She's training with a man in his 70s. He's an officer who somehow didn't fill out his discharge paperwork when he retired, so he's fair game.



* Other middle-aged members of the IRR (Individual Ready Reserve) are facing physical challenges, from failing eyesight to bad knees and backs, but the Army is determined: “We don’t give up on them. We haven’t failed to qualify a single person,” said Staff Sgt. Kenneth Calloway, a 29-year-old Army Reserve instructor. “We just give each individual a lot of time — and lots of ammunition.”



* A man who served honorably in both the Army and Marines, and has no remaining service obligation, was told he would be treated as a deserter if he didn't report for duty. A letter from his chiropractor detailing his back injury was ignored; other back-door draftees with similar physical ailments are receiving the same treatment. A retired colonel, Andrew Bacevich, isn't surprised. "The Individual Ready Reserve -- that title is a misnomer. They're not ready," Bacevich said. "It's the equivalent of me walking out here on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and taking the first 5,000 people I meet and saying 'you're now in the military.' "



Follow the link for all three stories. The draft will be here sooner rather than later. If you are between the ages of 18 and 35, start thinking very seriously about your options. If you have kids, grandkids, nephews or nieces aged 18 to 35, sit them down and talk to them about this--and if you have friends or family in Canada, keep in touch. You may need them.

Why, in the year 2014, has the New York Times stopped publishing online? Click here to find out (8-minute film, probably Flash).

"I think the greatest source of danger in this world is indifference. I have always believed that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference ... The opposite of peace is not war, but indifference to peace and indifference to war ... Indifference is the enemy."



-- Elie Wiesel



(If you'd like a steady supply of inspirational or thought-provoking remarks, you can subscribe to a quote-of-the-day service here.)

Not depressed enough with the election and the looming economic crisis? Well, there's a flu pandemic on the horizon, too:

A global pandemic of avian influenza is "very, very likely" and could kill tens of millions of people worldwide, a top World Health Organization official said Monday.

Governments should be prepared to close schools, office buildings and factories in case of a pandemic, and should work out emergency staffing to prevent a breakdown in basic public services like electricity and transport, said Dr. Shigeru Omi, the organization's regional director for Asia and the Pacific.

Such arrangements may be needed if the disease infects 25 to 30 percent of the world's population, Omi said. That is the World Health Organization's estimate for what could happen if the disease - found mainly in chickens, ducks and other birds - develops the ability to spread easily from person to person.

Deaths associated with the rapid spread of a new form of influenza would be high, he said. "We are talking at least 2 to 7 million, maybe more - 20 million or 50 million, or in the worst case, 100" million, he said.

While many influenza experts have discussed similar figures privately, Omi's remarks represented the first time a top public health official had given such an estimate in public. < . . . >

A few analysts have suggested that the death toll could be considerably higher. Dr. Henry Niman, a medical researcher in Pittsburgh who criticizes the World Health Organization as being too conservative, said that with more than 70 percent of the human victims of the disease dying so far, the death toll could exceed one billion if the disease were to spread rapidly among people.

But Omi [ . . . ] pointed out that the high death rate recorded so far might be overstated, because people with less severe cases of the disease might not be diagnosed as having it. < . . . >

The World Health Organization, a Geneva-based UN agency, has reported 44 confirmed human cases of A(H5N1), 32 of whom have died, a 72.7 percent rate. The organization has identified only one case of probable human-to-human transmission - a mother who cradled her dying daughter all night - while the rest of the cases appeared to have been acquired directly from animals.

Researchers have been struggling to determine how and whether the disease might develop the ability to spread easily from person to person through the air the same way human influenza viruses do. Omi said that it was becoming more and more likely that the virus would develop the ability to spread among people for several reasons.

The virus has proved highly versatile in mixing genetic material with other viruses, he said. The disease has recently developed the ability to survive in domesticated ducks and be excreted in large quantities without making the ducks sick, making it hard for farmers to know which birds to cull.

Omi declined to predict when the virus might spread to people, but noted that winter was the most dangerous time for influenza viruses and that human cases had already started appearing this autumn, whereas last winter they did not start to appear until January.

The good news? Yes, there is a bit of it. Saline nasal inhalations appear to be effective in reducing the spread of germs, including viruses:

Inhaling a salt-water aerosol, a treatment often used for asthma, may also reduce the spread of germs that can spread disease, according to a new report.

People suffering from a variety of illnesses exhale bacteria and viruses which can spread disease to others.

Some people, apparently, exhale a lot more infectious particles than do others:

Those producing 500 or more particles per liter of air were considered high-producers.

The patients were given a six-minute inhalation of aerosol salt-water solution, a treatment often used for asthma patients.

Tests during the following six hours showed a sharp reduction in the number of particles exhaled by the high-producing individuals.

Since there's no way for you to know whether you're a high-producer, err on the side of caution. Don't have access to asthma treatments, or they're too expensive? Buy some saline nasal spray, over the counter. I use it to keep me from getting sinus infections--just a couple of squirts per day does the trick, and the asthma treatments seem to work on the same principle.

Wouldn't it be marvelous if such a simple thing helped prevent a worldwide flu epidemic, or at least kept you and yours safer? If you're at high risk for flu, talk to your doctor about what equipment is needed for the asthma treatment, and where you'd get it and the saline solution--probably a medical supply store would sell what you need.

If you're not normally at risk, buy some spray anyway, and use it religiously. At the very least, it'll keep away colds and sinus infections. And it just might save your life.

are such a mixed blessing; great to see the people, hard to travel, hard to get any work done--which, sadly, is a necessity when you're a grad student on the quarter system. I got back today, and now I have to hunker down and get a lot done. But I'm glad I went.

Cartoonist

Mark Fiore gives us the essential about Bush's nominee to replace John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez. He sure is impressive, that Gonzalez.

Oh, how quickly it strikes.



My brother, via email:



Hey! You haven't blogged anything for a while. What do you want me to do here, start working or something?



Me:



Geez, sorry! I've been busy attending to the minor details of my grad student life, like grading papers so I can get them handed back by next Tuesday. Bloggy goodness will resume soon . . .



Him:



MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

MUST BLOG NOW.

M.U.S.T B.L.O.G N.O.W.





I tell ya, the public is so demanding!



Apologies to any and all who have checked for posts and thought, "What, flaking out already?" Many things have asked, nay begged, to be posted, but reality has kept rudely intruding. So I cry you patience as I strive for balance.

"I'll stop calling these people 'Orwellian' when they stop using 1984 as an operating manual."



I heart Paul Krugman.

You may have seen this in your inbox already, but if not, one of the best sites on the Internet right now is SorryEverybody.com. Most of it is messages from Americans to the rest of the world, apologizing for the election; but there are also numerous messages from people in dozens of countries, offering their forgiveness and encouragement.



As one Canadian says (paraphrasing), "This site is doing more for your international relations than anything else could." Of course, some bemoan the "liberal impulse" to apologize, as if our regret were a bad thing. If it became a self-indulgent pity party, unaccompanied by concrete action, it would be bad; but for myself, I don't think the numerous posts from citizens of other countries, saying that the site has prevented them from hating all Americans indiscriminately, should be dismissed that lightly.

Just how much will the Bush administration do to satisfy its religious-right base? Michael Crowley over at Slate has an article about James Dobson, the uber-evangelical who heads up Focus on the Family, a ministry that "gets so much mail it has its own zip code."



After being less than enthused about W in 2000, Dobson campaigned hard for Bush this time. What drove Dobson, who supposedly finds the compromises of politics disgusting, to enter the nasty fray, and what does he want in return? Hint: you get three guesses, and the first two don't count.



Right the first time! Yes indeed, Dobson's special wrath is reserved for gays. Crowley describes Dobson's preoccupation with the issue of homosexuality:



It was the gay-marriage debate that finally hurled Dobson into politics wholeheartedly. The subject of homosexuality seems to exert a special power over him, and he has devoted much idiosyncratic thought to it. When discussing gays he spares no detail, no matter how prurient. In Bringing Up Boys, he gleefully reprints a letter he received from a 13-year-old boy who describes wiggling his naked body in front of the mirror to 'make my genitals bounce up and down' and admits to having 'tried more than once to suck my own penis (to be frank).' Dobson believes that such adolescents suffer from what he calls 'pre-homosexuality,' a formative stage which results from having a weak father figure. Dobson further contends that homosexuality, especially in such an early stage, can be 'cured.' His ministry runs a program called Love Won Out that seeks to convert 'ex-gays' to heterosexuality. (Alas, the program's director, a self-proclaimed 'ex-gay' himself, was spotted at a gay bar in 2000, an episode Dobson downplayed as 'a momentary setback.')



What Dobson wants from Bush is nothing less than an all-out, fire-and-brimstone assault on gay rights. But he'd better not be holding his breath; the GOP has used the religious right far more than it has served it. Dobson, for all his support this year, seems to know it:



Dobson himself predicted future disappointment during an appearance on ABC's This Week last Sunday. Asked whether Bush would fail evangelicals, Dobson replied, "I'm sure he will fail us. He doesn't dance to our tune."



The America Dobson wants, if he gets it, will drive away independent and moderate voters, as Crowley points out. If he doesn't get it, he may well withdraw his support for the Republican candidate in 2008, a move that in 2000 is thought to have cost W a good many votes.



Damned if they do, or damned if they don't? Either way, the GOP could wind up viewing its dealings with the radical right in a more Mephistophelian light.

The good people over at The Blogging of the President are maintaining a list of links to stories/articles/etc. on whether, and how, and to what extent, election fraud took place on November 2.



It's a good resource to bookmark, and they're updating it continually as new information comes in.

from Atrios:



I just heard a report on NPR about a group of Chinese Muslims who have been in Guantanmo [sic]. We've decided that they're no longer a threat. The Chinese government wants us to hand them over so they can try them on terrorism charges.



We don't want to hand them over because... yes, you know it's coming...



The Chinese government may torture them.

Well, the generally incompetent Terry McAuliffe has reached the end of his term as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and a battle is raging within the party to see who will replace him. The Clintonian branch of the party is agitating for a "centrist" chair (read: business as usual, compete for voters by sounding more like the Republicans--in other words, the same tactics that have been losing elections for the last 30 years). The progressives in the party would like to see a co-chairmanship of Howard Dean and Simon Rosenberg, the visionary behind the New Democratic Network.



There are also several other names being tossed around, most of them in the centrist/business as usual camp. One of them, though, would be far worse for the party than merely a complete lack of new ideas:



If you care about solving the electronic voting problem, and stopping it, you must not allow Roy Barnes to take over control of the DNC. Because the moment he does, Diebold and electronic voting become the owners of our party.



Barnes, the former governor of Georgia, was instrumental in getting Diebold machines, even then known to be hackable and unreliable, installed in Georgia prior to the 2002 mid-term elections, in which 146 of 159 counties in Georgia had unexplainable voting "anomalies" in favor of Republican candidates.



Unfortunately, Democrats at large do not get to vote for the DNC chair (something that needs to be remedied in the future). For now, the new chair will be elected by the 440 members of the DNC itself; background on the Committee, and a list of the members, is here.



Mr. Barnes cannot be trusted with the future of the Democratic party. It would be good to let the members of the DNC know that.

The always excellent James Wolcott documents some of the signs of declining American empire.

I am . . .




Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. You are a
mystery novel dealing with theology, especially
with catholic vs liberal issues. You search
wisdom and knowledge endlessly, feeling that
learning is essential in life.



Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway has Amy Goodman interviewing UPI reporter Mark Benjamin about the injured troops from Iraq and Afghanistan:



AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the numbers, as you understand them today, of, not the dead, but the wounded?



MARK BENJAMIN: Well, with respect to the wounded, the Pentagon does report a number that it says is the number of soldiers that are wounded in the war. I think we're running around 7,000 or 8,000 in Iraq. But what that number does not include is the number of soldiers who are wounded or ill, or injured in operations that are not directly due to the bullets and bombs of the insurgents. So, for example, as of mid-September, if you take actually Afghanistan and Iraq together, there were 17,000 soldiers who were injured or ill enough to be put on airplanes and flown out of theater, and none of those casualties, and I call them casualties because they fit the Pentagon's definition of casualties, none of those casualties appear on any public casualty lists.



AMY GOODMAN: How do you get these figures, and why aren’t they being more reported?



MARK BENJAMIN: You have to ask the right questions. If you go to the Pentagon, and you take their own definitions of casualties and ask you them the right questions, they will give you some answers. So, for example, the reason why I started asking questions is that I visited eight major military facilities around the country -- well, in the United States and Europe, and frankly, I just saw more soldiers that were hurt than seemed to be reflected in the Pentagon reports. They -- the Pentagon says, when I asked them what was on and not on their casualty lists, they said they weren't keeping track of the number of soldiers. The Pentagon told me we are not keeping track of the number of soldiers who are wounded or ill or injured that are not hit by the enemy's bullets and bombs. If you go to the Pentagon's transportation command, however -- these are the people that put wounded soldiers on airplanes and fly them out -- they will give you some data. What the Pentagon says is, well, not every single person who is put on an airplane and flown out of Iraq is a casualty; some of them may have appendicitis, and so on and so forth. But they won't tell you how many of each category there are. So in other words, we know that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of potential casualties that are not being reported.



AMY GOODMAN: And how are these troops being treated? You could refresh people on your groundbreaking story on Ft. Stewart, Georgia, and what was happening there. But what has happened since, as well?



MARK BENJAMIN: What has happened since is that essentially the treatment of the soldier, I think, depends to a certain extent on how badly they're injured, how they're injured and what stage of the treatment they're in. So for example, the military is very, very good at getting to wounded soldiers in the field and putting them on airplanes, flying them out of Iraq, taking them to Lahnstuhl, Germany, taking care of them and bringing them to Walter Reed. These are people hit by, for example, improvised explosive devices and missing arms and legs. As you go down the spectrum of casualties in terms of people that have their backs broken in car accidents, or frankly, people that have mental problems which is a growing and very serious toll from this war, which I think is also underreported, the treatment, at least according to soldiers, is not as good. I would add one other thing. The new, I think the latest, phenomenon that seems to be occurring is we now see an increasing number of soldiers reaching the end of their medical care with the military, and being put out of the military, now in the hands of the VA. And while I believe there’s some very, very capable people and caring people at the Veteran's Administration, they appear to be overloaded, and we’re reaching a situation now where sick, wounded and otherwise hurt soldiers are being essentially put out of the military and not getting the kind of care that I think they would like at the VA. And I think there are some soldiers that are starting to fall through the cracks.



AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin, as when you see once again, President Bush going to Walter Reed Hospital, your final thoughts?



MARK BENJAMIN: I'm certainly glad that the president is visiting the troops. I think he's probably seeing part of the picture. For example, I suspect they probably took him to the -- one of the wards there where they have more of the traditional war injuries as opposed to, for example, Ward 54, which is where I visited, which is the in-patient psychiatric ward where we have soldiers who frankly have been driven deeply insane by combat. I wish that the American people knew more about what is happening with respect to the toll of this war, because I think it's a lot bigger and a lot more troubling than most people know.



At Walter Reed Medical Center, the main request that the troops have is for long-distance phone cards. The government does not pay for LD costs for either the injured troops, or the troops actively serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. An official at Walter Reed estimates that last month, the patients there used about 55,000 minutes of long-distance time calling their families.



If you'd like to help out, phone cards of any amount can be sent to:



Medical Family Assistance Center

Walter Reed Medical Center

6900 Georgia Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20307-5001



The troops still on active duty overseas have the same need, as do injured troops at other medical centers. If I get contact information for them, I'll pass it on to you.

Guess what? After the most dismal spending record in presidential history, and ever-increasing deficits, Bush is suddenly a believer in budget discipline:



Six years after the Supreme Court took away the president's ability to veto specific parts of legislation, President Bush is asking Congress to bring back the line-item veto to let him make precision strikes against projects and tax provisions he doesn't like.



At a news conference after his re-election, Bush said he wanted a line-item veto that "passed constitutional muster," explaining it would help him work with lawmakers "to make sure that we're able to maintain budget discipline."



What a riot. Who knew Bush was such a natural comedian? This is almost as hilarious as that video clip where he went looking under couch cushions for the missing weapons of mass destruction.



Since Bush has a pet Congress, they're likely to give him what he wants--which is another weapon to reward and punish his lackeys and enemies. Pork barrels for your right-wing constituencies? No problem. Funding for, say, an afterschool program? Watch the mighty sword of budget discipline do its work!



The Supreme Court struck down Clinton's line-item veto power in 1997, saying it "gave the president unconstitutional unilateral power to change laws enacted by Congress." It'll be interesting to see if anyone manages to get a legal challenge all the way to the SC this time, and if they do, whether the Supremes will find some way to justify a different ruling.

Pericles, over at Daily Kos, has written an insightful and thought-provoking diary about, not the whys, but the hows of extremism, and the dynamic it needs in order to thrive. While I have some quibbles with it, overall it's excellent, and deserves a wider audience. Check it out.

Like so many other things that come out of his mouth, Bush's insistence that there "won't be a draft" is, well, less than fully honest:



David M. Miyasato enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1987, served three years of active duty during the first Gulf War and received an honorable discharge in 1991. He remained on inactive status for five more years, until 1996. Since then, the Kaua'i resident has married, started an auto window tinting business and this year, he and his wife had their first child.



But in September, Miyasato received a letter from the Army recalling him to active duty and directing him to report to a military facility in South Carolina on Tuesday.



This is not a case of a reservist, even an inactive reservist, being called up. This guy was done. Completely. Finished. And now he's being told that the Army can call him back whenever it likes, presumably for the rest of his life.



This is going to be a rude awakening for the rah-rah patriots who vehemently supported Bush's war--so long as it was someone else fighting it.



(via Daily Kos)

Conservative Paul Craig Roberts says November 2 was An Election That Will Live In Infamy:



On November 2 Americans blew their only chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world.



Roberts has impeccable conservative credentials: Reagan's former Asst. Secy. of the Treasury, a former Cato Distinguished Fellow and former Wall Street Journal editor. Currently, he's a senior fellow in Stanford's Hoover Institution, the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, and research fellow at the Independent Institute.



And he says what so many of us feel:



The world was waiting hopefully for the sensible American people to rectify the ill-advised actions of a rogue neoconservative administration. Instead, Americans placed the stamp of approval on the least justifiable military action since Hitler invaded Poland.



If only he'd spoken out before the election; if only more of his fellow conservatives had done the same; if only people had listened. If only . . .

Nothing like starting my blog with a nice, light-hearted post, eh?



"Fascist" is not a word to be used lightly, and I assure you this is not a joke. The short answer to the question: not yet, but we could be.



DyspepTex over at the Daily Kos has a diary about it, including a suggested summary of the 14 characteristics of fascist states, such as: nationalism; militarism; persecuted scapegoats; political leaders who identify with the dominant religion, even as their actions violate its precepts; obsession with national security; restricted rights for individuals even as corporations are given free reign; and corruption of the electoral process.



Sound familiar? Read it all; I've only listed a few, but all fourteen seem more or less relevant to our current situation.



David Neiwert, whose excellent blog Orcinus tracks domestic terrorism and hate crimes, says that what we have in the U.S. now is "pseudo-fascism," but trending toward fascism. His seven-part series examining the rise of pseudo-fascism is here (the link is to Part 7, which has at the beginning links to the other six parts).



Neiwert has documented a rise in incidents of right-wing violence against perceived opponents. When that violence, he says, becomes "condoned and organizational," we will have crossed the line into full-fledged fascism.



Of course, this raises the question: if we are on the verge of becoming a fascist state, what can we do about it? The level of polarization we've already reached makes it seem unlikely that a productive dialogue is even possible. But the alternative is to sit back and watch our country be taken over, so we have to try.



Neiwert says he'll be offering suggestions in the near future on how to approach the red states. One thing he points out, that I've noticed in my ramblings about the Internets (sic), is the extent to which lefties are contemptuous of those on the right. It is ironic, to say the least, for those on the left to castigate the right for their "ignorance," when they themselves are largely, and willfully, ignorant of what life is like for those in areas that heavily supported Bush. If we consider ourselves to be the "reality-based community," then we have a responsibility to try to understand their reality, not just dismiss them out of hand.



I read a profile in Fortune magazine of the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune (did you know they have more money than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined?). The article mentioned that Sam Walton's children, especially his daughter, have worked to build a better infrastructure in northern Arkansas. This includes things like a four-lane road and an airport, issues of basic accessibility. While I refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, I also recognize that they have benefitted their corner of the world in some very tangible ways, even as they have exploited economic conditions the world over. And people in northern Arkansas know whom to thank for the airport and the four-lane road, and the growth of their job market. The insularity of the South is geographical as well as cultural, and we in the blue states have given many of its residents no particular reason to believe that we have their best interests in mind.



Another blind spot--or sticking point--for many lefties is religion. While we can rightfully decry the ways that religion has been exploited by this administration, we do ourselves no favors by sneering at the genuineness of the faith that many people hold. Even as we hear reports that we are becoming a more secular nation, 80% of Americans claim some kind of belief in God. The fact that church attendance has steadily dropped is not necessarily a sign that people are abandoning religion, but rather that it is being explored in less structured, less traditional ways. The (often accurate) sense that red-state residents have that liberals hold their faith in contempt is, again, less than worthy of the open-mindedness and tolerance that the left espouses. If we want to reach religious conservatives, we need to speak their language. For many on the left, this is simply impossible; but if we cannot sympathize with conservatives' religious views, we should at least try to understand them; and if we cannot understand, we need to reach for the respect every person deserves.



Issues of fairness and equity, and of compassion for those in need, are values that we can and do share, and we need to learn to speak to those issues in an authentic way. Economic populism, a la John Edwards, is still a potent force, and one that is consistent with the deepest roots and values of the Democratic party.



I'll have more to say about these issues in future posts; but for now, think about how we can make inroads into the insularity of the red states, and inoculate ourselves, at least in part, against the creeping tide of fascism.

I've been writing a de facto blog for some time via email, bombarding my hapless recipient list with frequent links to blog entries, articles, etc. So I finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and post all that stuff here instead, and free up their long-suffering inboxes.



My posts here will probably, topic-wise, be much like my emails: lots of politics and social issues, and unknown quantities of whatever else happens to strike me on a given day.



Welcome, and please do feel free to leave your comments.