So the President is pushing forward on Social Security. Republicans in Congress are keeping their mouths shut and don't anticipate voting on a bill during he 109th.
The President supports Delay. House Republicans reinstate the ethics committee rules.
The President says John Bolton is the best person for the United Nations. Republican Senators send him to the floor with an explicit lack of an endorsement.
The President wants an up-or-down vote on all of his judicial nominations. Republican Senators sign a compromise allowing the preservation of the filibuster.
I was trying to understand how my impressions of a Christian platform, one that would be in line with the religious left, could be so out-of-line with the impressions of the majority of folks who identify themselves as staunch Christians. So I set about re-reading the Gospels. After reading just one, the Book of Matthew, I understood how folks could come to different conclusions, but I could no longer understand what the Christian Right had against nuance. You really have to wonder
From the bankruptcy bill, to the UNICEF report on child poverty, to diaries about "rich liberals," I've been seeing more and more references to specific economic class labels again lately. The Republicans accuse us of trying to incite class warfare, which is silly, because Americans have some very weird ideas about class...
Both parties try to pander to "the middle class." It's commonly batted around that 90-95% of Americans identify themselves as middle class (although I have yet to find, after sifting through hundreds of Google hits, a single person who will give anything close to a specific source for this number), which means this pandering is an attempt to create class-warfare between a universal "us" and an illusory "them." It seems that people, unless they are faced with insurmountable evidence, really don't like to be labelled as "rich" or "poor," and if income were normally distributed, they'd have a point.
According to the NYT/International Herald Tribune, the new Human Rights report on Iraq describes a number of human rights violations by the U.S. installed Iraqi government (Abu Ghraib wasn't counted among them, as that one belongs to us).
The document cited without comment a report by Human Rights Watch, an independent advocacy group, that "torture and ill treatment of detainees by police was commonplace," allegedly including "beatings with cables and hosepipes, electric shocks to their earlobes and genitals, food and water deprivation."
In one case, the report said, enough evidence had been gathered "to prosecute police officers in Baghdad who were systematically raping and torturing female detainees." Two of them received prison sentences, while four were demoted and reassigned.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH)is distributing a memo about their new public access policy. In a nutshell, all peer-reviewed manuscripts supported in any way by NIH must be submitted to PubMed, a publicly accessible database. The full text of these papers will be available to the public 0-12 months after receipt.
I have mixed feelings about this. Scientific information should be disseminated as widely as possible, and the current journal system keeps a lot of scientific work in the almost exclusive hands of researchers at major universities. On the other hand, I'm a little nervous about the antecedents of this decision...
I am not a political scientist. Forgive my ignorance. It seems to me that the Right Wing has certain principles (Self-Sufficency, Small Government), certain policies (Pre-Emptive War, Corporate Welfare), and certain Politics (Family 'Values,' Homeland Security) that bear almost no relation to each other. This fact has in no way diminished their power, and may in fact have fueled the success of the Republican Party over the last 20 years.
A huge amount of intelligent discussion has taken place on this site regarding how best to translate progressive principles into successful politics, many times by proposing particular policies. Is it necessary, or even desirable, that we tie all three together into a coherent whole?
Every once in a while I go cruising through some of the bigger Right Wing Religious websites to see how they're spinning the news, and more importantly, what exactly it is they're up to at the moment.
I've decided to try to do a regular update of headlines from over there.
This is the no hat version of my earlier fun diary, with the important bit emphasized and the rest discarded.
Gallagher and McManus are both listed in a Lewin Group list of speakers and experts on the CHMI, Bush's Marriage initiative. If there are others who received money to push this initiative, my guess is that they're likely on the list of names below...
So now we have three pundits on the take, Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, and Michael Mcmanus. People have been asking why the administration would pay them to say things they would gladly say for free. So I thought to myself, wouldn't it be interesting if these folks all contributed to anti-gay marriage soft-money groups? Perhaps they were only laundering the administration's money...
Things get goofy on the flip...
I've seen a number of threads that have been concerned with the difference between a politian's positions, and a politician's party. For instance, Frost running away from the Dem label, Chafee running to the left of RI Dem opponents, Roemer being pro-life, etc. etc.
So, because I'm genuinely curious, I've got an (admittedly quite silly) hypothetical scenario complete with poll:
I keep hearing a version of the following from people on both sides of the aisle:
A) There were no weapons of mass destruction.
B) There was no link between Iraq and 9/11.
C) Invading Iraq was still the right thing to do.
A number of democrats, and even a number of pundits who are often administration apologists, do continue to throw the pre-war statements of people like Condi Rice, regarding WMDs and 9/11, back in their faces and asking how they could be construed as anything but misleading America into war. The typical defense is that A and B are irrelevant, given Saddam's status as a bad guy and the status of Middle East Democracy as a necessary long-term goal of the United States.
Actions speak louder than words. If this defense is accepted by anyone, the following actions need to be explained:
So, Target has taken a hit for not allowing Salvation Army Bell ringers to solicit donations. Wal-Mart allows the ringers, but only for 14 total days, and no more than 3 days in a row. Why? Because anything more might open the door for union organizing. The SA seems to have taken a page from Wal-Mart's book. When butchers voted for union representation, Wal-Mart eliminated meat departments. When Salvation Army thrift store employees in Heath, Ohio tried to organize, the Salvation Army shut down their store just weeks before Christmas.
I'm trying to figure out what's up with the Franklin County, OH absentee votes. The results listed are simply not credible, as they have the absentees split into two groups (Absentee 1 and Absentee 2) that voted (practically) identically, and both groups are counted in the total.<p> What's even weirder is that this error first appeared in the unofficial count, was "fixed" for the presidential and senatorial races for the official count, but NOT fixed for other statewide races. This makes it appear that the numbers were hand-jiggled for the top two races. Numbers below the fold:
Franklin Co. Ohio has now released its official tally of votes, including provisionals, along with a list of every provisional voter, grouped by whether or not their vote was accepted (sub-grouped by reason for rejection).
As has been the norm, there are some pretty screwy things in these documents, including bizarre absentee totals, bizarre provisional voters, etc. Links and details below the fold.
This weekend, the Columbus Dispatch did an analysis that they claim shows that the voting machine shortage disproportionately affected suburban Republican voters. It claims that, because more votes per machine were recorded in suburban wards, these machines were busier. Busier machines lead to longer lines. The analysis, also cited by the Election Law site at OSU, is flawed on a number of levels.
There has been a lot of heated discussion on Dkos about fraud theories. It's been a lot like listening to people who have read neither The Origin of Species nor Genesis debate creationism and evolution. Many reasonable people have pointed out that potential fraud is only one of many problems with our voting system, that errors are known to occur, and there is reason to believe that errors favor Republicans. WRT Ohio, people are debating whether an accurate vote total could swing the election. To me, that'd be nice, but not necessary. What I'm most concerned with are acts of voter suppression, particularly the discriminatory waiting times to vote. These issues, are in fact, related.
A lot of attention has been focused on precinct 6C in Cleveland, which had an extremely low reported turnout (7.1%), with an extremely high percentage of votes for Kerry (>95%). Further research showed that the three precincts that voted at the MLK branch library had a combined turnout of 13% (144 votes/1082 registered voters). After a lot of further digging, I'm now going to focus my attention elsewhere. See below the fold for my reasons.
