Mercury Rising

Ron Reagan, that is (not his "sainted" father):

Isn’t it past time we realized that whenever Bush or his allies seem to admit an uncomfortable truth, it’s only a tactical retreat. They’re really just trying to get through the day. Then, when we’ve stopped paying attention, they’ll go back to doing what they’re good at: subverting the truth.

And isn't it past time more people spoke out just like that.

When Pope Benedict comes out against abortion, women priests or gay marriage, the evening TV news never fails to mention this. But it wasn't until I visited Juan Cole's site today that I found out that the Pope has called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. I won't hold my breath waiting to see this on FOX News any time soon. (Or NBC, CBS or CNN, for that matter.)

Well, there's Bush's pet legislation to overturn the Sixth Amendment and turn all of America into Gitmo. (Read about it here or here.) Or there's the fact that the much-abused Labour MPs and cabinet members have had quite enough of Tony Blair's toadying to Bush and may actually act on their long-simmering disgust with him. Or the fact that Bush's lies about his "tax cuts paying for themselves" have been categorically refuted. (The original CBPP links are here and here.) Aw, what the heck: You pick 'em.

El Universal says: PRD workers from Ayutla surprised workers of the VIIIth district of the federal electoral institute burning election documents, inclluding dozens of ballots. Sebastián de la Rosa Peláez, leader of the PRD in the state of Guerrero, alleged burning of election documents at the city dump, orchestrated by José López López, secretary of Electoral Processes and the technical secretary of Council 8, Andrés Astudillo Camacho. Ballots came from the towns of Tecoanapa, Juchitán, Marquelia, Azoyú, Cuajinicuilapa, Cruz Grande, Ometepec, San Marcos and Ayutla... Rosa Peláez said that this district had burned 3,000 votes. but counting tally by tally, "We succeeded in saving more than 10,000 votes for our candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador". ... The partially burned ballots were forwarded to be shown at the meeting in the Zocalo "as a proof of fraud orchestrated from within the IFE.."

[Image from La Jornada No kidding, folks. This is big news. I almost choked when I read it. AMLO said (my paraphrase): Thank you [etc.] We are reunited here again, free citizens from evey class and social condition, men and women, Mexicans of all colors, ages, races, and languages that populate our great nation. Indians, workers, farmers, entrepreneurs, middle class people, employees, professionals, artists, intellectuals, businessmen, students, teachers, doctors, nurses, university teachers. I especially want to note the presence of many of the poor, who are the foundation of our country and our movement. Their presence here is my main source of pride as a human being and leader. [Charles: Imagine ANY American politician saying this.] There are whole families, old people, kids, joined to form a single common will to defend democracy. We are united, proving by our deeds that we seek a just nation, free, democratic, tolerant, and diverse. We are here because we want a new economy, a new way of doing politics, a new social compact, more humane and egalitarian. We are here because we want a new nation. [This is a historic moment.] Let us recall that at another historical moment of democratic transition, Francisco I. Madero told an American newspaperman: "When I rise to power, I will incarnate two principles: first, as ordered by the Constitution, not to seek re-election. The other is the right to vote. For the latter, electoral law reform, motivated by the public, is needed. I will be the primary guardian of that popular right and will consider my primary debt to be to facilitate the expression of the common will. I will be the main friend and defender of the people's liberties. I regard everything else is secondary." Vicente Fox never understood that lesson. Instead of serving as the guardian of a meaningful vote, he betrayed democracy. For this reason, democracy is again the central issue of out nation. We must see that democracy is not just the best system of human governance, it is the must effective means to guarantee social harmony. It creates equilibrium and counterbalances, favors dignity, and prevents any group from acting as a dictator. But more, in a country like Mexico, with its extremes of privilege and want, democracy acquires a fundamental social dimension. It makes it a matter of survival. Democracy is the only option for millions of the poor, for most people to improve the conditions of work and life. If the democratic gates are closed, there is nothing except repression or violence. Let us never forget that so many Mexicans have sacrificed so much for this cause, losing even their lives. We are here to reject electoral fraud which attempts to falsify the result of the expression of the citizens's will as expressed on the second of July at the ballot box. [Charles: Imagine Al Gore of John Kerry saying any of this]. [General description of the allegations of fraud] It is not much to ask, that they count each ballot, precinct by precinct. [Charles: except in corrupt electoral systems, where maintaining power depends on making sure the fraud is never exposed.] Mexico does not deserve to be governed by a fake president, without legitimacy, without moral or political authority [Charles: unlike the US, which deserves exactl that.] We hope that the electoral court may clean up and make transparent out election, ordering the votes to be counted. We know the members of the court are subjected to intense pressure from the powerful, who believe they are the lords of Mexico. It is not we who lack respect for our institutions. Our nation, sadly, lacks a tradition to assure that those who run the institutions act justly. Historically, the Constitution and the laws have been obeyed only in form, and have been violated in substance. So, while we can't discount the possibility that the court will behave like free men and women, we can't sit with arms folded hoping for that result. Let us remember that liberty, justice, and democracy have never been won except by organization and struggle. [Hidalgo and Morelos kicking out the Spaniards. Then Villa, Zapata, and many nameless heros.] Democracy is not handed down from above. One does not beseech it to come, one obtains it by conquest. Let's await the result of the court in a state of mobilation, attentive, and filled with pride. To our opponents, I apologize for the annoyance that our movement may cause you. I hope that some day, you will understand that this struggle is necessary, not just for us, but so that Mexico can be a respectable and respected nation, living democratically and in harmony. Let's wait until the court rules, in a permanent assembly, night and day, until they count the votes. [Charles: Holy smokes! They are occupying the city indefinitely!]

Translation by Google, with minor human embellishment. By way of El Machete Ignacio Ramone, The Mexican Crackup, Diplomatic World, August 2006 A massive fraud. And indisputable. Mr. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission admitted it. The twenty-five Foreign Ministers of the European Union expressed their “serious concern”. “It is important that we transmit in the clearest possible way the concern of the European Union and that of all the Member States on the result of the presidential election”, declared the Minister Dutch for the Affairs Foreign. Reporters without Borders recalls that “this election intervenes after four years of a continuous degradation and without precedent of the press in the country”. In Washington, personalities like Mssrs. Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski affirmed that the United States could not accept the official results. The National Democratic Institute (NDI), chaired by Mrs. Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State; Freedom House, directed by Mr. James Woolsey, former head of the CIA; American Enterprise Institute, impelled by the Gerald Ford former president; the Open Society Institute, controlled by Mr. George Soros--all denounced “massive manipulation” and called for “economic sanctions”. Senator Richard Lugar, president of the commission of the Foreign Affairs of the Senate and envoy of president George W. Bush, did not hesitate to speak openly, him also, of “frauds”: “It is clear that there was a program vast and concerted frauds the day of the election, either under the direction of the authorities, or with their complicity. ” You rub the eyes? You ask yourselves how such declarations in connection with the recent presidential election Mexico could escape to you? You cannot imagine how this could be so. None the personalities or institutions quoted above denounced what has just occurred to Mexico. All the reported comments - authentic -, relate to the presidential election of November 23, 2004… in Ukraine (1). The “international community” and the usual “organizations of defense of freedoms”, that one knew to be so active in Serbia, in Georgia, in Ukraine and still recently in Byelorussia remain, so to speak, stuck dumb in front of the “electoral coup d'etat” which is made under our eyes in Mexico (2). The planetary outcry is imagined if, on the other hand, this same election had proceeded, for example, in Venezuela and if the winner - by a difference thus from hardly 0,56% of the votes - had been… president Hugo Chávez. The Mexican poll of July 2 presented in opposition two principal candidates: Mr. Felipe Calderón, of the Party of National Action (PAN, the right-wing Catholic party, with the incumbency), declared victorious (provisional) of the poll by the electoral federal Institute (IFE), and Mr. Manuel Andrés López Obrador, of the Party of the democratic revolution (PRD, moderate left). Well before the beginning of the campaign, it was clear for president Vicente Fox (PAN) and the authorities of the incumbency that Mr. López Obrador with his campaign against poverty was the candidate to be defeated. By all the means. Since 2004, an operation, containing clandestine videotapes obligingly distributed by the chains Televisa and TV Azteca, tried to discredit Mr. López Obrador. Vainly. The following year, under the eccentric pretext of non-observance of the legal standards regarding construction of an access road to a hospital, Obrador was condemned, and deprived of the right to run for election. Massive demonstrations of support ended up forcing the authorities to restore Obrador's rights. Since then, the destructive enterprise continued, reaching delirium during the election campaign (3). More especially because a wind of panic blows on Latin-American oligarchies (and on the administration of the United States) since the left carries it everywhere (almost): in Venezuela, in Brazil, in Uruguay, in Argentina, in Chile, in Bolivia… these new alliances do not exclude Cuba any more (4). In such a context, the victory of Mr. López Obrador (the electoral court will decide on September 6) would have too important geopolitical consequences. Which neither employers nor the great Mexican media want. Nor Washington. At any price. Even if it means the sacrifice ofdemocracy. But Mr. López Obrador and the Mexican people will have the last word.

Could the march go as high as TWO million this time? The Solictor General, Bernardo Batiz thinks so. (Update: The police say 2.4 million) He also denied the (not particularly credible) suggestion from the press that governmental employees are being forced to pay kickbacks to support the march. As he said, make a formal charge before a court. If it's true, it would be incredibly easy to prove. The marchers are smiling, armed only with whistles, rattles, and drums. It is, , says José Gil Olmos, President Fox, ultra-right wing civil organizations (especially church-affiliated ones), private enterprise, and certain media organizations are the ones urging violence. Like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they are creating an atmosphere ripe for violence by repressing a genuine popular yearning for real and free elections. President Vicente Fox's involvement in the election will become a matter in front of the elections court. Personally, I think that there's no question he abused his office. If the allegations against his wife and sons are sustained, it will be Katy, bar the door.

Most people in the north may feel that there was something crooked, but what can one do? ask primary school teachers Braulio Luna and Rogelio Nájera. They drove 22 hours to get away from the lying media that saturates northern Mexico and hear it straight from AMLO. Calderon supporters, eat your hearts: The judge in charge of the electoral court has accepted the possibility of recounting all the votes. In other words, all this ..grr.. stuff about a full recount being "illegal" is now "inoperative." PAN may of course lodge specific objections which will be heard, but the judge limited the causes for not recounting to One of the many explosive charges being explored is the role of churches in corrupting the election. Illegal use of the voter registry is another charge to watch. As I understand it from other sources, PAN got the list of all the disabled people utterly dependent on the government for their daily bread and told them which way to vote. Even in Mexico, with its long history of manipulation, this would not go down well. Reminiscent of the former snake, er... Senator from Georgia, Esther "(z)Ell"-ba Gordillo denies that she was involved in fraud. Of course, she didn't provide any evidence to refute the charges: that in over 4,000 precincts there were statistically-impossible levels of voter registration or that in 485 precincts where there was not representative from the PRD to supervise the vote, FeCal got 64% of the vote while AMLO got 30%. Victor Toledo opines that no one could imagine the possibility of computer fraud were it not for the shocking example presented by Mexico's northern neighbor. And no, he's not talking about Canada. Seems they read Rolling Stone and Bradblog too. Julio Hernandez Lopez calls it, to paraphrase, the Calderon Crime Family (literally, the group of organized delinquents). Lady Fox's statement that that federal deputy Jesus Gonzalez Schmal's authority had limits, whose limits excluded investigation of corruption by the Fox family, did not go down well. He calls Ugalde "¡Uh: Fraude!" whose translation should be evident. Dagnabit: why do we Americans have to have the Mexicans show us how democracy is done? Calderon has the effrontery to compare himself to Madero. More as possible.

George W. Bush has said that he would "like to close" the detention camp at Guantanamo. Surprise, surprise: he lied.

The controversy over the US-run detention centre at Guantanamo Bay is to erupt anew with confirmation by the Pentagon that a new, permanent prison will open in the Cuban enclave in the next few weeks. Camp 6, a state-of-the-art maximum-security jail built by a Halliburton subsidiary, will be able to hold 200 prisoners. Commander Robert Durand, a spokesman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said the $30m, two-storey block was due to open at the end of September. He added: "Camp 6 is designed to improve the quality of life for the detainees and provide greater protection for the people working in the facility."

Since Bush is lying about wanting to close Guantanamo, should we believe that the permanent camp will hold only 200 prisoners? They may have plans for a much larger detainee population:

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill. [...] According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute." Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.

Consider how broadly the concept of "terrosist" has been applied for purposes of including people on the "no-fly" list, consider the groups that the FBI has been monitoring as "suspected terrorists", and you see how dangerous this legislation is. Is this permanent detention camp likelier to be populated by the likes of Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin than by members of al Qaeda? Or by you and me, if we say the wrong thing in the wrong place? It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get us. "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." George W. Bush, December 19, 2000

In which a conservative pastor chooses to actually live according to Christ's teachings instead of making his church yet another Republican Party precinct headquarters:

MAPLEWOOD, Minn. — Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes. The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary? After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns. “When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.” Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members. But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share. “Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

Of course, the people who left Boyd's church were probably also unhappy about this move of his, too, which happened a year before his famous sermons:

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos. This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

No, he didn't up and move the church itself to that neighborhood (which I'm guessing is near either Rice Street and/or University Avenue). But he obviously has been preaching a gospel of tolerance -- of skin tone, anyway -- that probably set the teeth of his white, middle-class suburbanite flock on edge. Thing is, the public schools in the Twin Cities are very good. The excuse usually given for living in the 'burbs -- The Schools -- really isn't operative here. People live in the 'burbs because they want to avoid seeing black people, who they see as criminals and Drains On The Taxpayer. (Of course, it would be far less of a drain on the average taxpayer if rich people were made to pay their fair share, but it's not politically correct among these folks to say that.) For this pastor to actually engage blacks and Hmong and Vietnamese persons, and to encourage them to join his church no matter their financial status, is every bit as shocking to his conservative white parishioners as his "The Cross and The Sword" sermon.

Spanish, French, German reactors have to be cut back or shut down The European heatwave has forced nuclear power plants to reduce or halt production. The weather, blamed for deaths and disruption across much of the continent, has caused dramatic rises in the temperature of rivers used to cool the reactors, raising fears of mass deaths for fish and other wildlife.

Narconews reports fighting in Oaxaca, including paramilitary activity. Probably not a good vacation destination. Sunday is the big demo. PAN managed to get a a grand total of 50 supporters to cleanse the statue of Maquío (Manuel J. Clouthier, a politician whose memorial serves as a pigeon commode and PAN shrine) PRDistas had defiled the shrine by demanding that the votes be counted. Of course, since Maquío died (PANistas murmur "murdered") after losing the 1988 election-- which was widely believed to have been stolen-- a more fitting memorial would seem to be... counting the votes. The electoral court agreed that the federal election commission did not need to open the ballot boxes. They weren't happy about the way it was done-- dead of night, no PRD representatives, etc. The PRD accused Gordillo of orchestrating the election fraud, acting as the go-between to governors of states controlled by PRI and PAN. (Image by Helguera from La Jornada. The snakes are labeled IFE, FOX, PAN, PANAL, SNTE) Lame duck President Fox's wife has been accused of "irregularities" by Jesús González Schmal, a national deputy. Trust El Universal to tell you about all the mouthy back and forth without explaining what the irregularities are. It appears her sons, the brothers Bribiesco Sahagun (Fox) are accused of being involved in a web of self-dealing business transactions and that Mrs. Fox is enmeshed in the scandal. I would bet this isn't going to go away. Espionage is the charge leveled by PRD representative Leonel Cota Montaño. The contractor was PANista and paid for by the Government Secretary. A document anonymously delivered to AMLO suggests that a spy apparatus was established, though no examples are known by which anyone was followed. And for silly season news: Sunday is the big demo. PAN managed to get a a grand total of 50 supporters to cleanse the statue of Maquío (Manuel J. Clouthier, a politician whose memorial serves as a pigeon commode and PAN shrine) PRDistas had defiled the shrine by demanding that the votes be counted. Of course, since Maquío died (PANistas murmur "murdered") after losing the 1988 election-- which was widely believed to have been stolen-- a more fitting memorial would seem to be... counting the votes. Image by José Carlo González and published at La Jornada. The PRD adorns the statue of PAN's Saint Maquío with a yellow flower, yellow being the PRD color. As Rayuela of La Jornada says, the PAN is lauding PRDista Cuahtemoc Cardenas, the PRD is lauding PANista Clouthier, and it's not even April Fool's Day!

I don't know what's funnier: The fact that the Lieberman campaign staff was passing out non-union-made campaign buttons, or that they tried to pretend they had nothing to do with the buttons once somebody pointed the absence of the union bug.

Ehud Olmert and the IDF are justifying the wholesale bombing of Lebanon, especially of Beirut (which in the course of two weeks has now been reduced to the same pitiful condition it was in during the horrendous civil war of the 1970s and 1980s), by saying that the Hezbollah soldiers who are their targets are hiding among the civilian population. Except that they're not, as Mitch Prothero points out:

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection. But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been. For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too. The almost nightly airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut could be seen as making some sense, as the Israelis appear convinced there are command and control bunkers underneath the continually smoldering rubble. There were some civilian casualties the first few nights in places like Haret Hreik, but people quickly left the area to the Hezbollah fighters with their radios and motorbikes. But other attacks seem gratuitous, fishing expeditions, or simply intended to punish anything and anyone even vaguely connected to Hezbollah. Lighthouses, grain elevators, milk factories, bridges in the north used by refugees, apartment buildings partially occupied by members of Hezbollah's political wing -- all have been reduced to rubble. In the south, where Shiites dominate, just about everyone supports Hezbollah. Does mere support for Hezbollah, or even participation in Hezbollah activities, mean your house and family are fair game? Do you need to fire rockets from your front yard? Or is it enough to be a political activist? The Israelis are consistent: They bomb everyone and everything remotely associated with Hezbollah, including noncombatants. In effect, that means punishing Lebanon. The nation is 40 percent Shiite, and of that 40 percent, tens of thousands are employed by Hezbollah's social services, political operations, schools, and other nonmilitary functions. The "terrorist" organization Hezbollah is Lebanon's second-biggest employer.

What's more, by deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians, the Israelis are blowing up any goodwill the Lebanese people, whatever their persuasion, may have held for either them or for America:

As we drive south toward Tyre, we soon pass a new series of scars on the highway: shrapnel, hubcaps and broken glass. A car that had been maybe five minutes ahead of us was hit by an Israeli shell. Three of its passengers were wounded, and it was heading north to the Hammound hospital at Sidon. We turned around because of the attack and followed the car to Sidon. Those unhurt staked out the parking lot of the hospital, looking for the Western journalists they were convinced had called in the strike. Luckily my Iraqi fixer smelled trouble and we got out of there. Probably nothing would have happened -- mostly they were just freaked-out country people who didn't like the coincidence of an Israeli attack and a car full of journalists driving past. So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah "hiding within the civilian population" clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don't know what they're talking about. Hezbollah doesn't trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why they fight so well -- with no one to spy on them, they have lots of chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion. And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire. Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now saying that they want to fight.

We don't talk much theology here, despite the fact that ideas on religion permeate politics worldwide. I've just done a long and detailed analysis of 1 Samuel 28, which involved looking at Judeo-Christian theology of the occult (remember the Witch of Endor?) and the afterlife (the catechism and The Apostles's Creed). In short, the scriptures do not have a blanket prohibition against methods of telling the future. They object to mechanical methods and to the use of creatures (as opposed to the Creator) for doing so. The foundational idea is of a Living Spirit flowing through all Creation, that nothing is fixed or determined until the end of time itself.

Both AMLO and FeCal insist that they are president. PRD supporters picketed the Bolsa, the Mexican stock exchange, but did not block entry or exit. Constitutional jurist Clemente Valdes has warned that a misstep by the electoral court could plunge Mexico into chaos. He did not rule out that the election could be annulled and sent to the Mexican Congress, but said that that would be a disaster. Former electoral counselor Jaime Cardenas has said that the electoral court must examine the ballots. He said that the media and private enterprise had assumed the powers of the state to block AMLO's bid for a recount. The elections institute (IFE) has been badly weakened and is in need of reform. He says they need to do a full recount. Elba Esther Gordillo of the PRI continues to dig herself deeper, calling Calderon the president elect. But her party, as represented by Senate leader Manio Fabio Beltrones, says the ballots should be counted. He also expresses strong opposition to privatization. In the rumor category, El Sendero Fecal has some interesting stuff. One is a claim that La Gordita...er, Miss Gordillo... got 900 million pesos from Fox as an economic stimulus to labor. They continue to try to run down Calderon's thesis, using a database accessed at Arizona State. They have narrowed the possibilities to four: 1) Mr. Calderon wrote his thesis prior to 1861, when the thesis database begins, 2) He obtained a thesis, but not by a recognized institution, 3) he received a thesis from the JFK School as claimed in his biography, but the pro-Obrador marches have crashed the ASU computer system, or 4) he didn't do a thesis or a master's at Harvard. Unfortunately, they missed one possibility: that he obtained a master's that didn't require writing a thesis. This seems to be the case. This is a good example of why blogs, like newspapers, can make some real boners... but haven't yet gotten the nation mired in a senseless war or tangled up the presidency in answering baseless charges. Something weird but true: Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the right-winger running the US drug farm in South America, is a Harvard grad, as is Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia. That's a lot of conservatives from such a supposedly liberal establishment.

His supposed friend Vladimir Putin has sold aircraft to Hugo Chavez, and is backing Venezuela for a seat on the UN Security Council. As if that news weren't bad enough, his definite nonfriend Cindy Sheehan has bought a ranch in Crawford. Doesn't that just make your day?

Help us Google Bomb Dick DeVos, won't you? Seems that when people find out that Dick DeVos is deeply involved in Amway, they don't like him very much. Gee, I wonder why?

Chicago to Wal-Mart: Start paying something resembling a living wage and benefits by 2010, or you can forget about expanding here. Of course, Wal-Mart is hinting that this will mean that they won't be gracing Chicagoland with any more Wal-Marts and may close the ones that they have. To which the Chicago city council says "Tough. Costco already meets our wage and benefit requirements. Why can't you?"

The father of our junior Senator seems to be a bit of an exhibitionist:

Police cited the father of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, Norm Coleman Sr., on Tuesday for lewd and disorderly conduct for allegedly engaging in a sex act in a car outside a pizzeria. According to a police report, the elder Coleman, 81, was having sex with 38-year-old Patrizia Marie Schrag, who was also cited for lewd and disorderly conduct. The St. Paul Pioneer Press first reported the citation. A police spokesman didn't immediately return a call from The Associated Press.

The pizzeria in question is the Savoy, in a part of town that is borderline slum -- well away from City Hall, and the sort of place where wealthy men go to find hookers and be reasonably confident that their wives don't find out. Speaking of wives, this might finally cause the timid StarTribune to stop sitting on the various stories about Norm "Family Values" Coleman and his wife (and their alleged "open marriage") that have for years been a prominent part of local political gossip.

If you've lived in the US for any length of time during the past three decades, you've heard somebody repeat, at least once, the idea that "Canadians have to wait much longer than Americans to get health care!" Um, no. In fact, they generally have less of a wait than Americans do.

Some Bush "boom", eh?

In a press briefing before her trip to the Middle East, Condoleezza Rice said (emphasis mine),

What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.

Birth pangs? Odd way to describe all those deaths. Or maybe not....

For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: All this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because wickedness is multiplied, most men's love will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved. (Matthew 24:7-13, Revised Standard Version)

We have to get those End Timers out of power before they get us all killed trying to make their fantasies a reality. [Hat-tip to Tinsel Wing, by way of Jo in Salon's Table Talk.]

NOAA, via Truthout: A team of scientists from the NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University is forecasting that the "Dead Zone" off the coast of Louisiana and Texas this summer will be larger than the average size since 1990. ... The "Dead Zone" is an area in the Gulf of Mexico where seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters. It is caused by a seasonal change where algal growth, stimulated by input of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, settles and decays in the bottom waters. The decaying algae consume oxygen faster than it can be replenished from the surface, leading to decreased levels of dissolved oxygen. ... Research indicates that nearly tripling the nitrogen load into the Gulf over the past 50 years has led to the heightened Gulf of Mexico hypoxia problem. The scientists say their research will improve assessments of hypoxic effects under various Gulf Coast oceanographic conditions. And where would those nitrates be coming from? Factory hog farms, fertilizer poured on crops in non-sustainable farming, untreated human waste. Things that any sane modern nation would deal with through the logical operations of government. And who would be responsible for making sure that our government fails to do sensible regulation? The people who say that government is the problem and prove it by their personal example.

From DiversityInc.com:

Threatening letters, at least two containing a white powdery substance, were sent to NAACP offices in three states, a spokesperson for the organization said Monday. The civil-rights group's offices in Baltimore and New York City received letters with the powder, said spokesperson Richard McIntire. The branch in Norfolk, Va., also received a letter, the FBI said, although it was not immediately determined whether the letter contained powder. Marvin Cheatham, who heads the Baltimore office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he opened the letter Friday and the substance later was identified as boric acid.

I saw that DiversityInc.com piece even as the news of Ann Coulter's boasting about her own fake-anthrax mailing was still recent enough to be reverberating in my brain. I think I'll check in with David Neiwert over at Orcinus. He keeps track of racist and eliminationist movements, and I seem to recall that anthrax, real or fake, is a favored weapon of white supremacists.

Some people (the most recent one being a commenter over at the Tapped blog) have noted with some surprise that Bob Somerby seems to be uncharacteristically eager to defend Joe Lieberman. But if you've been following Somerby's online career over the past decade, it's not that surprising. The irony is that Somerby's latest Lieberman defense winds up proving the very point he wants to discredit: Namely, that Lieberman's 1988 action was a monumental betrayal that really did cause great harm to Clinton and, by extension, to America -- by making it politically possible for the Republicans to proceed with impeachment. Somerby says that Lieberman wasn't the only Democrat to go after Clinton. But Somerby is honest enough to admit that they didn't start attacking Clinton until Lieberman started attacking him. And that, ladies and germs, is what created the "bipartisanness" the Republicans needed to impeach Bill Clinton. (But not, luckily, to remove him.) You gotta understand the dynamic at work with Bob Somerby. Here are the rules he operates by:

The Prime Directive (not numbered because it is above the numbers, that's how important it is) Al Gore is always right and never makes mistakes (except when he endorsed Howard Dean, who Somerby hates with a white-hot passion). Gore and Somerby were buddies from college onward and thus Somerby has always (with the sole exception being their divide over Dean) backed everything Gore does, up to and including picking Lieberman as his running mate in 2000. The rest of the rules are as follows: 1) Bob Somerby is always right. Goes without saying. He almost never even admits to being criticized, much less to actually being wrong on something important. When he does acknowledge criticism, he cherry-picks the critics and/or the criticisms he thinks are the most easily-debunked and mocks them, or tries to. 2) Bill Clinton is always right, except when stating this reflects badly on Al Gore. (Somerby will defend to the death Gore's apparent decision to distance himself from the most popular president of the past sixty years. This means that he will pretend that Lieberman really didn't hurt Clinton all that much with his 1998 backstabbing.) 3) Any information that violates any of these rules is to be ignored. Goes without saying. Granted, we all have our blind spots. The problem is that you could hide the Grand Canyon in some of Somerby's.

Today's Morning Edition featured back-to-back reports about Joe Lieberman and the DLC. Fair and balanced reporting? Neither, thanks. David Welna's report on Lieberman was all about "the unexpected rise of Ned Lamont and the sudden danger Lieberman found himself in of losing his job." Welna tells us "This has caused a sense of indignation among Lieberman's supporters." Indignation is the response to offensive behavior. If Welna has accurately characterized the supporters' feelings, they obviously feel that giving the voters a real choice about whether Lieberman remains their Senator is Just Not Right. Jim Amann, speaker of the Connecticut House, clearly is indignant, even downright outraged: "Shame on all of us if we allow a shrieking minority in our party to hijack this primary." Shrieking minority. Nice way to talk about the voters. I hope lots of Connecticut voters heard that description and tell their friends. Mara Liasson's report on the DLC was longer, and even more dismissive of the Democrats who dare to reject the DLC:

"In the blogosphere, the DLC is attacked as centrist sellouts and shills for big corporations, but the fight really boils down to one issue: the war in Iraq."

No, the fight boils down to the DLC being centrist sellouts to the Bush agenda and shills for big corporations. The DLC wants the fight to be about the war in Iraq so it doesn't have to answer for its collaboration with the protofascists who are destroying our democracy. To present what passes for the blogosphere's side of the story, Liasson interviews quotations from Elaine Kaymarck — a DLC operative who provides us with this insight:

"The blogosphere also has been really pushing the notion that Democrats have to have firm and decisive stands on issues, and that we cannot afford any more flip-flopping candidates a la John Kerry."

Why is a Democrat repeating the GOP smear against Kerry? How many times did the netroots debunk the canard that Kerry flip-flopped on the issues? I'm sure Liasson didn't realize it, but this quotation is a prime example of the real reason the "netroots" criticize the DLC so fiercely: It's often impossible to tell them apart from the GOP. The blogosphere repeatedly debunked the smear that Kerry flip-flopped on the issues, but Ms. Kaymarck calls him a flip-flopper without a qualm. The money quote, however, comes from Gov. Tom Vilsack:

"We're not a grassroots organization."

And he says it like it's a good thing. Vilsack goes on to say that the DLC can serve to "unify" the party, but somehow I don't see that happening, because, according to Liasson, what the Democrats have to do is

"...get the passion of the netroots and the policy ideas of the DLC working in harness so they elect Democrats rather than tearing them apart."

In other words, the DLC calls the shots and the netroots activists shut up and obey. This report supports the observation by Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, and others that the defining characteristic of Lieberman and his DLC allies is a sense of entitlement: that Senate seat belongs to Lieberman, the Democratic Party belongs to the DLC. Why is that so? Because they say so. They've got the power and that means they're entitled to keep it. The DLC is different from the GOP exactly how?

# posted by MEC @ 7/25/2006 07:19:00 AM 2 comments

And if so, is it being deliberately starved to death per the recommendations of Grover Norquist?

Avedon Carol's Sideshow (see also Allspinzone) brings to our attention one of the most important stories of this era: The Bush Administration is filling the government with partisan operatives specifically to undermine the laws they are sworn to enforce. The specific story she refers us to is one by Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe regarding changes in hiring practices in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department: The documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the change [i.e., under Republican rule but before the political loyalty oaths were required], 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds. In an acknowledgment of the department's special need to be politically neutral, hiring for career jobs in the Civil Rights Division under all recent administrations, Democratic and Republican, had been handled by civil servants -- not political appointees. But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the procedures. The Civil Rights Division disbanded the hiring committees made up of veteran career lawyers.... Meanwhile, conservative credentials have risen sharply. Since 2003 the three sections have hired 11 lawyers who said they were members of the conservative Federalist Society. Seven hires in the three sections are listed as members of the Republican National Lawyers Association, including two who volunteered for Bush-Cheney campaigns.... At the same time, the kinds of cases the Civil Rights Division is bringing have undergone a shift. The division is bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians. ... The academic credentials of the lawyers hired into the division also underwent a shift at this time, the documents show. Attorneys hired by the career hiring committees largely came from Eastern law schools with elite reputations, while a greater proportion of the political appointees' hires instead attended Southern and Midwestern law schools with conservative reputations.The average US News & World Report ranking for the law school attended by successful applicants hired in 2001 and 2002 was 34, while the average law school rank dropped to 44 for those hired after 2003. Political cronyism. A decline in standards. A failure to defend the less powerful. A failure to obey the law. They are all woven from the same cloth of moral corruption. This is being done all through government. The courts are being filled with reliable partisans who place loyalty to party over their oaths of office. Scientists are being muzzled, or even displaced by industry advocates. IRS auditors who know how to find fraud in the returns of the wealthy are being removed. The Pentagon is being filled with faux-evangelicals on a mission from Hell; they've already turned Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon into their understanding of democratic paradises. What this means in a practical sense is that reformers can win election after election and not a lot will change. The bureaucrats, judges, military officers and so on-- all in lifetime positions-- will refuse to enforce the law. Under normal procedures, it could take 30 or 40 years to flush this toilet. Indeed, this is a graver form of the situation that FDR faced. With a third of the nation unemployed, and a third of the businesses shuttered-- the entire nation turned into a giant East St. Louis-- the Republican courts refused to admit that the federal FDR at least faced bureaucracies that had been formed by considerations of merit. Nor were the Republicans as a whole under the cult-like thrall of perverted Christianity: they were just greedy, hard-hearted, small-minded little b------ds. This is why I predict that we will eventually decide to dissolve the American Republic and, through a Constitutional Convention, re-form ourselves as the Second Republic. The dangers we face from global warming, economic decline, not to mention a billion p--sed off Muslims are so serious that we may not have a lot of time to resolve our differences. It's not that anyone wants to admit that our traditional form of government has failed, nor endure the uncertainty and loss that such a major transition would involve. But it may be the only way to save our nation from permanent eclipse, after an eternity of being led by bad shepherds.

While Atrios was busy looking up one thing, he found another. And while that thing was indeed interesting, I found the epistle two posts down to be even more interesting:

David Brock wrote a letter to Creators Syndicate asking them about their decision to syndicate Samuel Francis's column. Here's their answer:

"Did I disagree with the column? Yes," responded Anthony Zurcher, a Creators editor who saw the Francis piece before it was syndicated. "Did I feel it was so reprehensible that it shouldn't have been sent out? No." In his Nov. 26 column, Francis decried the MNF spot not only for its implied nudity and implied sex, but for racial reasons. (Sheridan is white and Owens is black.) Francis wrote, among other things: "Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself." The column prompted yesterday's letter from David Brock, president and CEO of Media Matters for America, an organization dedicated to "monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Brock, a former conservative, wrote Creators President Rick Newcombe to say "Creators' willingness to distribute such abhorrent views calls into question the syndicate's ethical and editorial standards. ... [W]e are looking forward to hearing your explanation as to why your syndicate judges Sam Francis to be an appropriate columnist for your roster." Zurcher said Creators distributes columnists from across the political spectrum, and "we don't tell them what to say." He noted that other Creators columnists, including Roland Martin, have discussed the MNF spot from a different perspective than Francis took. The syndicate editor acknowledged that Francis addressed "a very sensitive topic." But, "he's entitled to his opinion and David Brock is entitled to his opinion," said Zurcher. "I have a lot of respect for David Brock and what he does, and for media watchdog groups on both sides. They have an important role to play."

Yes, Francis is entitled to his opinion that "Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction." Creators is entitled to syndicate it. Newspapers are entitled to publish. But, expressing concerns about breaking "down the sexual barriers between the races" is not a broaching a "senstive topic," it's f---ing racism.

And yes, when Francis died not long afterward (barely three months after penning this piece for the openly racist VDARE website), nearly the whole of the "respectable" side (and much of the blatantly non-respectable, openly racist side) of the right-wing noise machine did not merely ignore the death of an embarrassing man, but stepped forth to send him off with the tenderest eulogies , eulogies that outdid even those they gave arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Here's Joseph Sobran:

Along the way Sam wrote a few books, including a small study of his intellectual hero James Burnham. I don’t think Sam actually met Burnham, but I worked with Jim at National Review during his last years there and shared Sam’s admiration for him. The key to Sam’s thinking was Burnham’s book The Machiavellians, a study of power I also regard as seminal. Long before it became fashionable to mock the “politically correct,” Sam was attracted by Burnham’s pessimistic logic and total scorn for liberal optimism, especially in matters of race and ethnicity. Like Burnham, he had no desire to be accepted by liberals and stoically endured their ostracism. He was devoid of self-pity. It never crossed his mind to complain about the neglect he received, though it was a sort of organized neglect; his enemies were well aware of him, and they feared his pen. Sam was a familiar figure at conservative gatherings. He was an uncompromising Southern paleoconservative, with an abiding contempt for Lincoln and the liberal tradition. ...

"Southern conservative" = racist as hell, of course. Oh, and here's another good friend of Francis', just for grins. Just in case it hasn't been made utterly clear how bigoted the man was, do note that in 1995, he actually managed to get fired from the Washington Times -- not exactly a bastion of liberal or anti-bigoted thought -- for a column that attacked the Southern Baptist Convention for finally getting around to condemning slavery, 150 years after splitting from the main Baptist Convention rather than renounce slavery. Check this out:

Not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century did a bastardized version of Christian ethics condemn slavery. Today we know that version under the label of 'liberalism,' or its more extreme cousin communism.

Remember, this wasn't some obscure low-hit-count blogger or college professor. This was a darling of the movement.

Image is PANista Carlos Gelista from La Jornada, at link The photo is by Jose Carlo Gonzalez. OK, my stupid: Demo is not this Sunday. It's a good thing they didn't put me in charge of the Refreshment Committee. Meanwhile, the PRD (more precisely, the For the Good of All Coalition, which includes other minor parties) delivered the next round of documents, having to do with irregularities in the July 2nd count. Tomorrow they file the complaint on illegally opening ballot packets. They have already delivered a tape of ex-PRI union boss magisterial, Elba Esther Gordillo with the PRIist Governor of Tamaulipas, Eugenio Hernández, in which they discuss selling out to PAN. (The tape is online at the PRD site. I haven't listened to it). Another bit of evidence is the refusal of the electoral delinquency cops, the Fiscalía Especializada para la Atención de Delitos Electorales (Fepade), denying to the PRD coalition copies of previous verification checks which included issues of the Calderon's cousin and software impresario Hildebrando. There's more, but I got a "monthly bandwidth exceeded" message from the translation center of my brain. Another gripe is illegal coordination between organizations and companies and the PAN campaign to the tune of about $15-20M for electronic blitz ads. By the way, the link to which that goes is the Senderodelpeje blog, roughly translated as The Kingfish Way, a phrase with humorous resonances of Huey Long and the Sendero Luz guerrillas. I'd read it more often if they'd get an editor, but they do have great cartoons. La Jornada also had a wonderful glimpse of the "MiniFox Cabinet." This one, showing Esther Elba Gordillo reading from her ethics handbook as the head of Education is the teaser for the full nine yards here. An interesting sidelight from Flashpoints, Friday with Gustavo Iruegas, former Mexican Ambassador of Foreign Relations to Latin America and the Caribbean. He says there are so many Lebanese in Mexico, they could force Mexico to accept refugees.

Fewer buyers, more foreclosures. What was that again about the "Bush boom"? For whom?

A beautiful book review, by Business Week's Gail Edmondson: For millions of voters disgusted by rampant political sleaze, Berlusconi's carefully honed image as an earnest, hard-working, financially capable chief executive answered a deep national longing. The real Berlusconi is less the talented CEO than a savvy, unscrupulous salesman, argues investigative journalist Alexander Stille in his blistering account, The Sack of Rome. Despite his nose for the market, Berlusconi stumbles repeatedly in business, skirting financial crises by appealing to rich and powerful allies. ... The engrossing tale describes Berlusconi as someone who seduced secretaries to make high-level contacts, ruthlessly deployed cronyism for maximum financial gain, bought off critics and tax inspectors, changed laws to derail criminal lawsuits against himself, and kept men on his payroll who bribed judges and colluded with the Mafia. ...No question, Berlusconi's reign was disastrous for the economy: Italy's global competitiveness ranking slipped from 28th to 41st, lower than that of Namibia, according to the Institute for International Management in Lausanne. But the broader lesson of the mogul's political career is even more depressing: Western democracies remain dangerously vulnerable to media manipulation. Somewhere, imagining hundreds of thousands of FOX viewers's skulls simultaneously exploding, Phoenix Woman is smiling.

From the New York Times:

GEORGETOWN, Ky. (July 22) -- The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible. But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.’’ Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter.

Think about it: They turned down taking any more money from the SBC rather than turn themselves into fundie madrassas like Bob Jones University. Then again, the SBC was coughing up less and less dough even as it imposed more and more restrictions:

In 1987, college officials negotiated an agreement with state Baptist leaders that allowed either side to end the affiliation, with four years’ notice. Both sides said that they had wanted to continue the relationship, but that the strains had recently become acute. Georgetown asked the Kentucky Baptist Convention two years ago to allow 25 percent of the college’s trustees to be non-Baptist, but the proposal was rejected. Only about half of Georgetown’s students are Baptist, and less than half of the alumni are Baptist, Dr. Crouch, the college’s president, said. “I realized that our fund-raising depended on getting non-Baptists on our board,’’ Dr. Crouch said. Then, a year ago, the Kentucky convention turned down a nominee for Georgetown’s board for the first time. Around the same time, Dr. York asked the college to look for a religion professor who would teach theologically conservative positions. “You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they actually existed,’’ Dr. York said. Dr. Crouch and Georgetown’s trustees decided it was time to exercise their escape clause.

Freed from the sheltering, encircling, constricting arms of the SBC, Georgetown now is able to do things that will lead to its being taken seriously as an institute of higher learning:

Georgetown continues to pursue serious academic ambitions, like pursuing a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the college honor society. Only 270 colleges and universities have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, and there are rigorous standards for new ones. Among the most important requirements are freedom of inquiry and expression on campus, along with respect for religious, ethnic and racial diversity. A Georgetown requirement that tenured professors be Christian could pose problems with the honor society. The college must also improve on a number of specific standards, including increasing the number of books in its library and reducing professors’ course loads. Phi Beta Kappa considers applications over a three-year cycle, and Dr. Crouch hopes Georgetown will be ready to reapply in 2009. “Phi Beta Kappa is the gold standard,’’ said Rosemary Allen, the Georgetown provost.

This passage sums it all up:

“The convention itself in its national and state organizations has moved so far to the right that previous diversity on the faculty and among the trustees is no longer possible,’’ said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest. “More theological control of the curriculum and the faculty has been the result.’’ David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,’’ Professor Key said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re searching for truths.’’

Even as well-funded agents of Satan like Howard Ahmanson are trying to drag the Episcopalian/Anglican churches back into the Dark Ages, the Baptist colleges are making a stand for education over indoctrination.

Thanks to El Machete, I learened the specific allegations of fraud are coming online here or here. These show the district by district results, and one can then look at individual precincts by selecting a district. They have uploaded some images of precinct tallies, and many more are to come. So, for example, look at Aguascalientes, district 1, precinct 339B by clicking on the Analisis detallado tab. They got 640 ballots and had 345 left over. There were no null votes. One expects 295 votes. But only 283 voters were recorded. So there are 12 phantom ballots. Of the ballots, PAN got 165. The remaining categories (APM PBT NA ASDC and unregistered candidated) aren't defined clearly, but they are the other parties Alianza por Mexico (APM in Spanish), Coalicion por el Bien de Todos (PBT in Spanish), Partido Alternativa Socialdemocrata y Campesina (PASC in Spanish), Nueva Alianza (NA in Spanish), Proceso Electoral Federal (PEF in Spanish) These votes add up to 118: Total votes - PAN's votes. Then there are precincts where, like the loaves and the fishes, there are more completed ballots plus unused ballots than there are registered voters. Aguascalientes 362 C01, with 628 registered voters, got 940 ballots, reported that 303 were cast and 637 were not used. Mexican law clearly provides for a recount of precincts where the numbers don't add up. And AMLO has already listed something like 70,000 such precincts. Would you believe the election was clean if there were that many arithmetic errors?

Mexico I've held off on posting, because until today, there wasn't much new that could be stated concisely. James K. Galbraith, doing his late father proud, says the election statistics don't add up (link thanks to El Machete) But today, the electoral process took a step toward breakdown. The most interesting story is actually one suggesting that Calderon faked a Harvard degree. Cris Villarreal Navarro of Austin found that Calderon took a 12 month course called "The Mid-Career Program," but did not write a masters thesis as claimed in his autobiography. ____________________________________________________________________________

Revised, 7/22. I didn't make it clear that the Kennedy School of government gives a Master's in Public Administration, an MPA, analogous to an MBA, and that their mid-career program is essentially an Executive MPA, analogous to the Executive MBA. Just as the Exec MBA is a for-real degree, I assume the Exec MPA is a for-real degree, requiring very intensive study. In general, accelerated degrees tend to give the technical basics, but leave out the field service/internships/study projects and especially the thesis that give most Master's degrees (though not the American MBA) their depth. This seems to the case here, since as Wikipedia says: The schools major degree programs are a two-year Master of Public Policy (MPP) program, which focuses on policy analysis and design, and a Master of Public Administration (MPA) program, similar to an MBA. The MPA is available in two forms: a one-year "mid-career program" intended for professionals between 7 and 15 years after college graduation and a two-year MPA program intended for recent graduates. So, the rub comes in what Calderon conveyed to his Mexican audience by saying he had a "maestria" from Harvard. And I do suspect that his audience was misled, at least to some degree, because Executive degrees are just not the same as the full-rate versions. Resume inflation is a dangerous game for would-be leaders to play, because leadership is about trust. Voters generally conclude that politicians who fake a resume-- like certain presidents claiming to continue to fly in the Texas Air National Guard after having been grounded--are, morally speaking, scum.

_______________________________________________________________________ AMLO did an interview in which he said that 30,000 precinct tallies couldn't match ballots cast plus blanks with ballots received. Let's let El Machete take it from there: Yesterday, López Obrador (along with his assistants Claudia Sheinbaum and Octavio Romero Oropeza and computer wiz Esteban) returned to Carlos Loret de Mola’s radio show in W Radio (Televisa’s XEW). They brought 21 well-labeled boxes with documents — copies of “actas”. In paper about 30,000, out of the 50,000 “actas” with “arithmetic errors” that López Obrador’s team has so far been able to review. (They left a DVD with evidence of the 50,000.) Claudia Sheinbaum said there are still more “actas” that their team hasn’t been able to review yet. They showed to the camera a few cases of discrepancy between the figures in the “actas” and the figures in the IFE report. I’ll list here only those I was able to capture. (The video is here: http://media.amlo.org.mx/Entrevista_Loret_20072006.wmv.) He gave examples of errors in favor of Calderon of 600 votes. According to El Universal, The Economist is waffling, worried that AMLO might be angling to have the elections canceled. Calderon, with tin ear cocked to the orders of the White House, declared that the election is over; never mind about the niceties of letting the proper authorities decide that. He wants to "paint Mexico white," declaring that white is the color of peace, harmony and brotherhood. The PRD is less than happy about having peace and harmony imposed in disregard to law. It has denounced the counselors of the federal election institute (IFE) for their partisan behavior and announced a loss of confidence in the IFE. The PRD also accused the PAN of creating an atmosphere of fear by accusing the PRD of being violent. One of the stories of yesterday that I frankly didn't understand was the claim by the IFE that 2,873 precincts had been recounted and that despite what would seem to be massive (a roughly 3% miscount) and systematic (benefiting Calderon and Obrador while injuring the others) arithmetic errors, PAN actually gained a bit. Well, the PRD says this recount is bogus and that the IFE counselor, Rodrigo Morales is lying. A network of organizations called Ecclesiastical Observatory is accusing the church of contributing to the climate of violence by playing footsie with Calderon, the charge of playing footsie that (given the nature of PAN and the takeover of the upper reaches of the Catholic Church by the radical right) is almost certainly true. At issue is a meeting between Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera and Calderon. Meanwhile, a breakfast meeting between the rector of the National University (UNAM) Juan Ramon de la Fuente and AMLO is said (by what sort of idiot I am not sure) of having damaged the university. It's not like the rector of UNAM has the sort of power that a cardinal does, so this is probably a smoke screen. The political situation looks like this to me: the investment community (Bushco) hates this uncertainty, wants Mexico's oil (PEMEX) privatized immediately, and is pushing Calderon to grab the reins. Calderon has the support of most of the church hierarchy and control of the electronic media (which is mostly playing BS; I keep glancing at it and getting pro-wrestling and Natalie Holloway knockoffs, with no real news). On the other hand, if Calderon pushes too hard, he could find himself -- perhaps not immediately, but when he tries to privatize PEMEX-- in a very hot climate. The next big demo is this Sunday[7/23: Correction: it is on 7/30]. I'll bet the numbers are even greater.

Lady Lightfoot enjoys Cat TV. Alex decides it's a rerun.

So much attention is focused on global warming that we miss the other, interconnected dangers that humankind faces as a consequence of our poor stewardship of Earth, problems like ozone thinning, decline in agricultural/marine productivity, and decline in species diversity. The greater the rate of global warming, the greater the rate of ozone thinning. The greater the rate of global warming and ozone thinning, the less productive our farms, forests, and fisheries become. Species diversity is a critical element of how bad it all gets. The great joys of life come from diversity. Diversity, both biological and cultural, is why we have choices in what we eat and places we vacation. Many of our medicines come from nature, so as we lose species, we lose potential medicines. One cannot be pro-life and be indifferent to the wonders of nature and human culture. In that regard, a BBC article on the decline in diversity among bees and flowers (or the original article in Science) is worth reading: Scientists from [Britain and the Netherlands] examined records kept by enthusiasts dating back more than a century. They write in the journal Science that habitat alterations, climate change and modern industrial farming are possible factors in the linked decline. There is a chance, they say, that the decline in pollinating bees could have detrimental effects on food production. "The economic value of pollination worldwide is thought to be between £20bn and £50bn ($37bn and $91bn) each year," said Simon Potts from the University of Reading, UK, one of the scientists involved.... "The ultimate drivers [of species decline] are changes in our landscapes; intensive agriculture, extensive use of pesticides, drainage, nitrogen deposition. Too bad bees aren't listed on the Dow. With a $50B annual after tax net, they're up there with Exxon Mobil ($36.7B in 2005). If the people destroying the earth had a clue that bees were valuable, they might treat them more respectfully.

Via talk show phenom Johnny Wendell: Sources: Negroponte Blocks CIA Analysis of Iraq “Civil War” (Ken Silverstein, Harper's, 7/21/06) I reported in May that despite the deteriorating situation in Iraq, no National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been produced on that country since the summer of 2004. The last NIE...was rejected by the Bush Administration ...as being too negative, though its grim assessment subsequently proved to be highly accurate. The situation has gotten even darker since my initial story ... and I've learned from two sources that some senior figures at the CIA, along with a number of Iraq analysts, have been pushing to produce a new NIE. They've been stonewalled, however, by John Negroponte, the administration's Director of National Intelligence, who knows that any honest take on the situation would produce an NIE even more pessimistic than the 2004 version. That could create problems on the Hill and, if it is leaked as the last one was, with the public as well.

In order to try and understand the Bush/PNAC mentality responsible for things such as this and this, religious mania is often invoked. But while Bush is always more than happy to throw red meat to the evangelicals, I suspect that his actual religiosity is a mile wide and an inch deep. You gotta understand, the PNAC mindset is aligned with the mindset of buccaneering COOs everywhere. This mindset states, in accordance with homeopathic principles, that the cure for stupidity is EVEN MORE stupidity. Company in debt and can't turn a profit? Leverage even MORE debt so you can take over another company -- that'll fix things! Country bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan while the economy goes in the toilet due to war debt and tax giveaways for the rich? Invade ANOTHER country -- that'll fix things! Until someone finds a better explanation, this is the one I'm running with.

...or we could have busted Bush for violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On further review, it looks like US citizens are bound by Title VII even when overseas, so Merkel could file a complaint against Bush if she liked.

David Broder will never be regarded as the stupidest man alive. At least as long as Donald Luskin walks the earth, anyway. Atrios has covered this issue in brief, but how many people clicked through to read the Barney Frank speech that Broder references in a recent article? Barney Frank, always the satirist, said that the US was not a dictatorship, it was a banana republic run by a strongman who had won one of his two elections. Broder, in his densely sententious way, figures that that's acceptable for America. Here are two key excerpts from Broder: Frank began by separating himself from the strident voices on the left -- frequent in the world of blogging -- that accuse Bush of subverting American democracy.... A Congress that challenges a president when it thinks he is wrong is not infringing on the rights of the "decider." It is reminding him that the Constitution and American history decree a division of power, with a set of checks and balances that make this a different form of democracy from that of parliamentary systems -- or disguised dictatorships such as those run by Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and Hosni Mubarak. That is why Frank's speech is important. (emphasis added). As a strident left blogger, let me say that Egypt's dictatorship isn't especially well-disguised, except perhaps from the American people. Our own State Department calls it "progress" when in 2005 token opponents to the Mubarak regime are allowed to conduct campaigns. Most observers think that Mubarak's 88% margin was decided in advance of the election. At the other extreme, Chavez has disguised his dictatorship exceptionally well by being elected and reconfirmed in free and fair elections, defeating opponents who controlled the media. But Broder was greatly cheered because liberal Barney Frank compared Bush to Hugo Chavez. Bashing Chavez fits the propaganda script of Pravda on the Potomac, as Lambert calls it and so the rhetorical hook slides right past Broder's jaw. Does Barney Frank really think Hugo Chavez is a threat to democracy in Venezuela? Probably not. He supported him against the Bush coup, criticized him for imperfections in the voting process... and, according to Frank's website, hasn't mentioned him in the last three years. So the Chavez mention is a rhetorical tactic analogous to "hugging the beltbuckle," as Viet vets experienced the Viet Cong military tactic of getting in so close that it's impossible to deliver suppressing fire. Frank is pretending to adopt the worldview of Republicans to insult them by comparing their leader to one of their hate objects. A classic Barney Frank rhetorical prank. And David Broder, slackjawed and snoring, swallowed it. Here is some of what Barney Frank had to say: What we have is a President who won the election in 2004, was declared the winner of the election in 2000, much more dubiously. ... If you assume that Florida was counted 100 percent accurately, a very hard assumption to make, George Bush still fell half a million votes behind Al Gore... But from then on, he took the position that as President, he was, as he later articulated it, the ``decider.'' That is not a word that you find often in American history. ... So we have had a very different kind of American Government. We have had an American Government in which the President gets elected and exercises an extraordinary amount of power. It is democracy, but it is closer to plebiscitary democracy than it is to the traditional democracy of America. Plebiscitary democracy, political scientists use to describe those systems wherein a leader is elected, but once elected has almost all of the power.... We had a debate here a month ago on the floor of this House on the right of the President to ignore legislation passed 30 years ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act... What Congress had decided with Presidential approval became irrelevant. ... You know, it is one thing if the President says, well, there is no law here, I have got to do what I need to do. That is dubious and we can get to it. But where the law has been set out in a prescribed constitutional manner as to how you do something, and the President says I am not going to do it that way, I will do it my way, then you are into plebiscitary democracy. Then you are into the democracy that says no checks and balances. No, Congress, I will do what I think necessary. ... . Now some have argued, well, the President can do anything unless he is explicitly told he cannot. Not in this administration. They believe the President can do anything he wants, even if he is told he can't. ... Shutting out the Congress means that you think you are perfect, that you think you can do these things, that you can exercise these extraordinary powers and you don't need anybody to say, wait a minute, maybe you should do it this way or that way. ... One of the things this administration has used more than every other administration in history is the right, when signing a bill, a right that they claim to sign a bill, the Constitution says Congress passes a bill, the President can either veto it or sign it. And they say, okay, here is the deal, we will sign it, but when we sign it, we will say that we are really signing these parts and not the other parts, because we consider some of it unconstitutional, so we will ignore it. That is a wholly unconstitutional approach. The President has a right to say, this is unconstitutional, I don't like it. His job then is to veto the bill. But what he does is he picks and chooses; he thinks the legislation is a supermarket. He walks in, he takes some from here, some from there, he discards what he doesn't like. That is not appropriate. ... What we have again is the assertion that a President gets elected and essentially is the decider in ways that really go contrary to the notion of participation by other segments. Yes, it is true you win an election and you gain some power. This is a very big, very complex country. It really is not a good idea for one individual, even one who was legitimately elected in an election in which there was no contest, and we certainly didn't have that in 2000, to be the decider, to diminish input from others. Now, again, I have to reiterate that this could not have happened without the collaboration of a supine Congress. Never in American history has Congress been so willing to give away its constitutional function. I know people have said, well, what do you expect, it is a Republican President and a Republican Congress. That is what happens. No, the history of the United States is that even when the same party controlled the Presidency and the Congress, Congress did oversight.... So we have seen no oversight. That has played into the hands of the plebiscitary Presidency, into the hands of a President who is allowed more power than is healthy for a society. And I reiterate, I am not charging authoritarianism. It still is a free country, and I encourage people to use that freedom and to be critical and to organize. But we are still talking about a very, very different mode of governance, the mode of governance in which, instead of the checks and balances and the collaboration and the input of a lot of people, you get one man making the decisions.... Now, I understand that democracy can be messy and it is not always neat, but we have not before this had an executive branch that considered it to be more of a nuisance than anything else. ... I acknowledge now that when I told friends over these past couple of years that we should just go policy issue by policy issue and not talk about the overall framework of governance, I was wrong. It is now clear to me there is a pattern to this administration's actions, and it is one that rejects not democracy, but the democracy of checks and balances and participation and cooperation and collaboration that we have long known; and it substitutes the democracy of the plebiscite, the democracy of the strong man who gets elected and is then allowed to go forward without interference. Does anyone have any doubt that Frank was using the term "plebiscitary democracy" as a sarcastic synonym for "banana republic"? Does anyone have any doubt that "plebiscitary democracy" is one man's whim away from dictatorship? Does doubt remain that no trace of conscience or intellect remains in David Broder, that he is merely a mass of grudges and prejudices animated by the habits of a lifetime of being a servant of power?

Bonddad discusses the Bush Economy -- and, among other things, the worst job-creation rate in forty years and the fact that working people haven't had a raise in five years.

After all the hard work the American conservatives and the Bush Junta did to get Angela Merkel elected, Bush apparently decided to remind her that he owns her lock, stock and barrel and can do whatever he wants with her. Tony, too.

...is almost as bad as the one over at the Wall Street Journal. While the WaPo's editorial page and A-list pundit consiglieres such as Kurtz continue to verbally fellate Bush and Company in particular and Republicans in general, actual WP reporters like Walter Pincus and Dan Froomkin keep doing their best to inject a little reality into the proceedings (emphases mine):

Amid all the other news yesterday, the attorney general's startling revelation that President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation into the administration's controversial secret domestic spying programs hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.

Bush's move -- denying the requisite security clearances to attorneys from the department's ethics office -- is unprecedented in that office's history. It also comes in stark contrast to the enthusiastic way in which security clearances were dished out to a different group of attorneys: Those charged with finding out who leaked information about the program to the press. It is not common for a president to personally intervene to stop an investigation of his own administration. The most notorious case, of course, was the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal. Among the many major differences, however: In that case, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resigned rather than follow Nixon's order.

Bush's action is also another example of what I have previously noted is a consistent White House modus operandi: That time and time again, Bush and his aides have selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them.

That's ingratitude for you.

In 2004, the White House political operation recruited Thune to challenge Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. He dealt the Democratic Party a major blow, edging Daschle in South Dakota as Bush captured a second term. Thune, a conservative who rarely breaks with the GOP or Bush, said Wednesday that if he were up for re-election this year, he'd adopt a different strategy. "If I were running in the state this year, you obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda," Thune told reporters at the National Press Club. He said the Iraq war is Bush's biggest problem. [...] "Clearly we are facing a headwind if you look at the national political environment," Thune said. "The president's numbers in most places aren't good ... these are going to be tough races to win."

So Thune thinks he needs to distance himself from Bush to win re-election. Will someone please ask him if he's also going to distance himself from Rovian campaign tactics, such as making secret payments to bloggers to distort the media coverage of the election ?

More and more American workers are starting to ask the question "If the economy's been in such wonderful shape for the past few years, then where the hell's my pay raise?"

First, Ben Domenech. Next, Ann Coulter. Now, Ralph "Damien Thorn" Reed -- who just lost his bid to be the GOP candidate for Georgia's lieutenant governor -- has been revealed to be a less-than-original thinker:

On April 14, 1983, Reed wrote a column for The Red & Black student newspaper attacking the late Mohandas K. Gandhi. Entitled "Gandhi: Ninny of the 20th Century," it denounced the motion picture Gandhi for its favorable treatment of the life of the pacifist leader of the Indian independence movement. A graduate student complained to the editor of The Red & Black that Reed had plagiarized a Commentary article by film reviewer Richard Grenier. After an investigation, Reed was fired from the paper. Reed wrote a final column acknowledging his failure to cite sources but accusing the graduate student who complained of "the most shocking, profane form of personal attack I can imagine." (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade, page 130-31)

Over in one of the Eschaton comments threads, we find this bit of personal testimony:

By the way the graduate student mentioned in Ralph's plagiariam incident was me. The "investigation" into the incident consisted of a phone call from the editor of The Red and Black to Ralph who admitted the plagiarism and was fired on the spot. I hand delivered a letter outlining the plagiarism and including a copy of the Commentary article to the Red and Black offices. Less than 2 hours later I received a call from the R&B telling me they had discussed the matter with Ralph, he had admitted the plagiarism, and was fired on the spot.

My letter to the R&B only discussed the plagiarism issue and was incredibly judicious. Ralph's politics (and mine) were not mentioned or implied in any way. I remember Ralph attacked me personally in his response. This pretty much sums up the entire right wing approach. Attack people who reasonably point out your shortcomings in the most vicious terms possible with no regard for the truth.

Ralph has been a disgrace for a long time. It didn't just happen overnight.
rwr | 07.19.06 - 8:17 am | #

Charming, eh? That's Our Ralph.

That's my hope for the Lebanon(Hezbollah)/Gaza(Hamas)-Israeli conflict: that all the major powers let the belligerents duke it out until they get tired. I refuse to watch the news coverage or to care about what is just one more episode in a war that has raged openly for sixty years. I will try to send aid for the civilians, mostly Palestinian or Lebanese but also Israeli who are suffering terribly. This is one of the most absurd, incomprehensible military campaigns in history. As has been pointed out, Ariel Sharon would have dealt with it-- indeed, dealt with similar situations-- with a much more measured and focused response. How strange that Sharon would seem like a sage next to the chickenhawks running this campaign. Saddest of all is the lack of comprehension in this country. Most Americans couldn't find Lebanon on a map. Now munitions paid for by American taxpayers are raining down on it... and killing dozens of civilians for every Hezbollah fighter. With what I understand are 900,000 refugees in Lebanon, and Israel demanding that Lebanese abandon their homes to create a demilitarized zone up to the Litani River-- with a million residents of Gaza lacking food and water-- it amounts to ethnic cleansing. There is no defense for the humanitarian crisis that has been created: one cannot endanger a couple of million innocent civilians on behalf of a half dozen soldiers or in pursuit of a few thousand militiamen. Juan Cole has a terrific piece in Salon, good enough to get me to click through the ad. Lebanon... is a multicultural society, sometimes called a country of minorities. In East Beirut, Jounieh and points north, into Mount Lebanon, Maronite Catholics are the majority. Sunnis are important in the port cities -- Tripoli, West Beirut and Sidon -- as well as in the Bekaa Valley and in the far north. In the Shouf mountains live the Druze, hardy adherents of an esoteric offshoot of Ismaili Islam. The deep south down near the Israeli border is orthodox (or a "Twelver") Shiite territory, though they are also a majority in the Bekaa Valley to the east, with Baalbak a major center, and decades of immigration to the capital have created a southern ring of Shiite slums around Beirut. Poor Shiites are the constituency for the fundamentalist Hezbollah Party, though in opinion polls most of them do not report their main political commitment as Muslim fundamentalism. ... Hezbollah emerged as the militarily most important group in Lebanon when 14,000 Syrian troops withdrew from the country in spring 2005. The Syrians had played the role of peacekeeper, or at least referee [Charles: I think the correct term is "warlord." Syria was not neutral, serving to reinforce the Muslim regions], during the Lebanese Civil War. ... The Cedar Revolution was hailed by the Bush administration as a great achievement of democratization, but in fact it pushed the fragile Lebanese political system into a state of dangerous instability, in which the Lebanese ethnic factions no longer had a referee. ... Israel has bombed, blockaded, isolated and crippled the entire country. Why? In preparation for what? ... Israel has a range of options. It has already made one raid into the south. ...The next stage could be a calibrated Israeli incursion into the south, reminiscent of its Operation Litani in 1978. ... How good is the maximalist plan enunciated by Israeli military and government spokesmen? Ethically, it is monstrous, involving war crimes on a vast scale insofar as it targets a civilian population for forcible relocation. And practically, any such plan is doomed to abject failure. This confrontation of Hezbollah and Hamas is a road to nowhere. I guess that's why the GOP is so anxious to travel it.

"Big Dig" collapse a blow to urban dream

With 7.5 miles of underground highway and a 183-foot (56 meter) wide cable-stayed bridge, the Big Dig replaced an ailing elevated expressway to fix chronic congestion and reunite downtown Boston with its historic waterfront neighborhoods. But cost overruns, leaks, delays, falling debris, criminal probes and charges of corruption plague the nearly completed 15-year project, giving ammunition to opponents of similar plans in other cities considering tearing down aging elevated highways built in a construction boom in the 1950s and 1960s. [...] "When things leak and certainly when things fall down that aren't suppose to, clearly that undermines people's confidence in government's ability to deliver," said David Luberoff, a Harvard researcher and co-author of "Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment."

It wasn't "the government" that did such a lousy job on the Big Dig. It was Bechtel, a private contractor. The problems aren't a failure of government, they're a failure of the rightwing notion that privatizing public works is a good thing. When the priority is profit, then quality and safety are lower priorities than they should be because, y'know, they cost money and therefore reduce profits. "Government" isn't to blame for the debacle of the Big Dig. The fault lies with the people who have been shrinking the government until they can drown it in the bathtub.

General William Odom calls it a "Reverse Domino" theory. I call it a "Black Hole" theory. Whatever it's called, it describes the same thing: How our invading and occupying Iraq has sucked up America's and much of the rest of the world's energy and attention, and destabilized the Middle East. From General Odom's recent Nieman Watchdog article:

We should have learned a number of things from the Vietnam War, but most of all that unintended consequences are often the most significant outcomes. Our well-intended policies in Vietnam soon rendered the United States incapable of accomplishing anything positive in the region. Massive use of American combat power justified all of the extremism that North Vietnam used in pursuing its course, and most important, it removed all doubt about who could claim the banner of "national liberation" in Vietnam. The Saigon government was soon seen as no more than America's lackey. Thus withdrawal from Vietnam actually improved America's strategic position for turning the tide against the Soviet Union, beginning during the Carter administration and accelerating during the Reagan administration.

[...]

Is the domino theory valid for the Middle East? No, not any more than it was in Vietnam. But a reverse domino theory is. The longer the U.S. stays in Iraq, the more likely the collapse of the secular regimes in those Muslim nations, and the more likely a full-scale war between Israel and its neighbors. It’s American departure from Iraq that could prevent it.

[...]

The U.S. forces in Iraq opened the country to al Qaeda cadres, and democratic elections have cleared the way for radical rulers. The longer U.S. forces stay, the more likely it is that their radicalizing impact will reach beyond Iraq to Egypt and Saudi Arabia – and perhaps to Pakistan. Not the other way around! Tied down and strategically immobilized by its entanglement in Iraq, the administration has no credibility with most of its major allies. Only after it withdraws from Iraq and admits its own complicity in this spreading crisis will it be able to help stem the tide it has set in motion. Why? Upon our withdrawal, our allies will be far more likely to respond constructively to a U.S. bid to design a joint strategy for restoring regional stability in the Middle East. Decreasing the likelihood of more radical (and possibly undemocratic) regimes emerging in the Middle East requires a coalition of the major states of Europe and East Asia. It is beyond U.S. power alone. The longer the United States keeps troops in Iraq, the greater that challenge will be.

The local and national right-wing noise machines keep stroking themselves into ecstasies of transcendently irrational anger every time a new Minnesota Poll comes out (see here and here for examples), and this one -- which features Democrat Amy Klobuchar with a 19-point lead over Republican Mark Kennedy in the race for the US Senate seat of the retiring Mark Dayton -- will be no exception. (It doesn't matter that Klobuchar's led Kennedy in every single poll since she first entered the race; the cons and the Republicans will see this as yet another Dolchstoß from the all-powerful evil liberals that run the Strib.) Let's see which one of the conservative nutjobs -- be it radio, TV, print or online -- first calls for the killing of StarTribune staff over this poll. Place your bets: Who, when and where?

...if you teleported all the people in it to Mexico City's central square. (Image from La Jornada. DemocracyNow! has a segment; transcript not up at this moment. John Ross says that there may have been 1.5 million people, but the police said 1.1 million. The largest demonstration in Mexico heretofore was 1.2 million, when they tried to keep Lopez Obrador off the ballot.Complaints detailing 53,000 precincts with anomalies (out of 130,000) have been submitted already. There is a second track, to invalidate the election. The TEPFJ court, called the Trife has the power to do whatever is needed. If ballots aren't recounted, the PRD may withdraw from the government in December, creating a constitutional crisis. The Washington Post is up to its usual stupidity, with Manuel Roig Franzia claiming that Lopez Obrador is suddenly asserting a new causus belli, "errors" in half the precincts. As readers of Mercury Rising know, this was always the reason for the anger: a 1% recount after the election showed an unacceptable error rate. But in Kremlinological terms, there's a sufficient tone change to the article to suggest that the Washington Post realizes that the "Lopez Obrador=Hugo Chavez=Fidel Castro" story isn't selling. So Pravda on the Potomac finds itself scrambling to get close enough to the rear of the rest of humanity to lead the reactionary charge.

Republicans have always claimed that cutting taxes, especially on the rich and corporations, leads to higher wages and more jobs. Bonddad makes the case that, with the 2003 tax cuts, the opposite is what really happened.

Check it out, here. Some excerpts:

Mark Perry is co-director of the Conflicts Forum, a Beirut-based nongovernmental organization that has, over the past three years, put former senior American and British policy-makers and intelligence officials in talks with Hezbollah and other militant political Islamic groups in Lebanon. He formerly worked as an adviser to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and as a reporter for Newsday. Perry has recently returned from Beirut and is now in Arlington, Virginia. Laura Rozen interviewed him by telephone Friday about the unfolding crisis in Lebanon and Israel. So explain what your group, Conflicts Forum, is about and under what auspices you have been having a dialogue with Hezbollah We have been talking to Hezbollah for three years. [Conflicts Forum] has put together a group of former senior policy-makers to talk to Hezbollah. We did two official, open sessions, in March and July of 2005, and then we did a lot more informal, private sessions. And [my co-director, former MI6 agent] Alistair [Crooke] and I talk to them every time we go to Beirut -- about once a month -- and talk to them on the phone on a weekly basis.

[...]

We’ve been hearing the theory that the timing of Hezbollah’s Tuesday kidnapping of the two Israeli Defense Force soldiers was planned well in advance and with coordination from Tehran or Damascus. Can you speak to that? Oy vey. There are a lot of people in Washington trying to walk that story back right now, because it’s not true. Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it -- so he went and got them. The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield. Now if you’re sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking "Oh my God," you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say "Oops, sorry, wrong time" or you can say, "Hey, this is war." It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that the Hezbollah commander on the ground said Tuesday morning, "Go get two Israeli soldiers, would you please?”

[...]

Some are proposing that the Lebanese government send its army into southern Lebanon. What do you think of that idea? [said sarcastically] It’s a really great idea. The Lebanese army can’t collect the garbage in Beirut. Neither can the Syrian army. Southern Lebanon is Hezbollah land. … Hezbollah is the second or third most competent military force in the region, after Israel and Iran. It could probably defeat a good sized Egyptian battalion.

[...]

How do you see this playing out? Some interesting things are going on in Israel, and we ought to take note of it. The first thing, the current prime minister in Israel [Ehud Olmert] is a very capable guy. And he is a realist. … But he isn’t Ariel Sharon. He’s not a warrior. He has a genetic mistrust of the uses of bombs and airplanes to conduct foreign policy. But when you are attacked you respond, and he did. And he has been very clearly signaling that there are limits here. While Condi Rice and George Bush talk about Syria and Iran, Olmert has taken Syria and Iran off the table, put them back on, and then taken them back off. When Hezbollah attacked Haifa Thursday, first Hezbollah said, “We didn’t do it.” Then they said, “We didn’t target Haifa.” No one picked up on it. Here’s what they meant to say: “We understand hitting Haifia is a major escalation, and we didn’t mean to do that.”… Olmert responded, “You get Haifa, we’ll take down Beirut,” and he went after Beirut. So far as I can tell, since then, Haifa has been off limits. Now so far as I can tell, there are rules here. And the rules are, you take down our major cities and we’ll make life very uncomfortable for you. And Olmert put Damascus back on the table as a clear warning. And I think [Syrian president Bashar al-] Assaad probably called Hezbollah -- over which he doesn’t have too much influence -- and said, “Did you hear that signal or not?” And they got it. So now we’re in a game. … I expect we’ll see an escalation here over the next two days, but what I would expect to find after that is that both sides climb down off the ladder.

He'll tell you, right here.

AMLO chatting with a few friends in the Zocalo (from The PRD site; Jornada removed its photo, so this was revised 7/17.) See any blue or white purses? The secretary of the Governor of Mexico (DF), Ricardo Ruiz Suárez said a million people showed up for the demo. Which was peaceful. The text of AMLO's speech was, in my own paraphrase: From my heart, I thank you, who have come from every part of Mexico, paying your way, knowing that this effort is not in vain. Rather, we're defending a cause of historical importance for Mexico. You are not here merely to support one person, but to defend the inalienable right of a free people to choice those who represent it. Yes, we want to defend our electoral victory. But more important, we seek a higher cause, of making democracy have substance and meaning in our country. We cannot go back. A high price was paid to get us this far, a price that included the lives of thousands of Mexicans murdered in in the cause of free and clean elections. It is an intolerable abuse that criminality, money, and dirty tricks can permit the privileged few to impose an illegitimate president. In addition to the divisive attitude of the IFE during the campaign, computer manipulation, and many other wrongs--in addition to those, they falsified the precinct tallies and the calculations of the vote. In the recount completed so far, in 60 percent of the 130,788 precinct tallies, there were "arithmetic errors." There are 1.5 million votes not supported by ballots. I call on Calderon to behave responsibly and accept a full ballot review. If that supports his election, he has nothing to fear. But I urge him to consider that not all the water in the oceans can erase the blot of a fraudulent election. I repeat: it is not acceptable for our opponents to take refuge in legaloid arguments, through lack of time or technical nature prevent the opening of ballot boxes, not when what is at issue is democracy and the nation's political stability. For many good an sufficient reasons--for political and economic stability, for rejecting the culture of cynicism, for strengthening civic society, for reconciliation-- count the ballots: vote by vote, precinct by precinct. Friends: 1. Reinforce those sitting in at the district councils, to prevent ballots from being added or subtracted. 2. Peaceful civic action begins at the end of this week 3. The third march will be July 30th. I will not betray the Mexican people. I am not alone, because we are in this battle together. ___________________ If Mexico doesn't want him as a president, the US sure could use him. I'd be willing to run Schwarzenegger against him.

As Avedon Carol would say, "You in the back, try to keep up, please!" The New York Times gets it, a lot too late: It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration's response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power. Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. ... To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans' deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans' civil liberties have been trampled. The nation's image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents "disappear" people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time. Five years less two months ago, I wrote the following. Anger and fear in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are being used to herd the nation into hasty, unwise decisions. This is not to say that retribution must be abandoned: far from it. It is to say that the American people are being cynically manipulated. Were they aware of the full facts surrounding the attacks, they would demand major changes in government. ... There is a great push to have us surrender our freedoms as the price of stopping terrorism. We are told that we must become like the Taliban in order to defend ourselves from them. ... To reprise Raymond Close's penetrating words: "[T]he most effective defenses we will have against the terrorist threat [are] a commitment to the rule of law, dedication to fairness and evenhandedness in settling international disputes and a reputation as the most humanitarian nation in the world.... and this: no time since Nixon- and probably not since McCarthy-- have the foundations of Constitutional law been at greater risk....the power of their president has been greatly enhanced by the terror attack. Circumspection and skepticism are in order, particularly as they relate to the erosion of Constitutional liberties. Maybe I could offer to write The New York Times's editorials five years ahead of time. Considering how they've managed to alienate their readers, though, I'd like an advance.

PRD protestors in wizard costumes and dressed as pregnant ballot urns before the electoral court (from La Jornada Horses on the march! From La Jornada The protest march from the Anthropology Museum to the Zocalo. The PRD has alleged that the IFE illegally opened 40% of the ballots. Antonio Gershenson points out that because packets were opened in secret, this has sown seeds of suspicion that will be hard to extirpate. He says that Esther Alba Gordillo suborned governors of northern PRIista states to "pass" PRI votes to PAN. David Quintana S. writes that this is a watershed moment for small farmers. He feels they must take to the streets or face complete devastation of the traditional farm. The electoral advisors of Mexico (DF) Districts 25, 22, 24, 3, 9, 18, 15, 14, 1, 20, 26, 12, 2) have asked permission to recount the ballots. La Jornada editorializes in favor of a complete recount and lacerates the electoral institute (IFE) for opening ballot boxes without representatives of the political parties present. 2200 police will join AMLO, though not as protestors, but as a security force that had to be doubled because of the size of the protest. In the grand journalistic tradition of blaming everyone equally, Jorge Jepeda Patterson opines that the evidence presented by the PRD in the immediate wake of the election was disorganized and occasionally wrong, with the films being partially or fully debunked [Ed: this is an overstatement. The films show what they show, which--whether it's criminal or not-- ain't pretty.] He criticizes FOX for abusing the power of the state, PAN (and the PRD, for reasons that are completely unclear) for the dirty election, and Calderon for retreating into legalism, and for being so dense as to not see that if he pulls a George Bush, he'll end up with an angry and divided Mexico. Francisco Valdes Ugalde says that Mexico will export the vast wisdom of the electoral institute (IFE) [Ed: considering what a mess the country is in, this could be construed as a terroristic threat.] Filth 2006, is how Proceso delicately puts it. Proceso is a lot less generous to PAN than El Universal. They say that this was a fraud of an "advanced school" which makes the election theft of 1988 look pale. Proceso blames organized power for blocking change in Mexico.

Sometimes you wonder about journalists, even non-American ones. The following paragraph is about events in a Haitian slum: The killings began before dawn. Men armed with automatic rifles walked through the hillside slum of Grand Ravine, warning of a fire and yelling for residents to come out of their cinder-block and sheet-metal shacks. Those who obeyed were gunned down. ... The body count totalled 21, including three women and four children. Most of the victims were killed with a bullet to the head.Yves Jean-Philippe, a 56-year-old street vendor, was found in a dirt courtyard, his eye socket ripped apart by a bullet. Alnosia Desir, wife of a Christian pastor, was shot in the mouth and throat in her bedroom. The body of Jean Willerme Sanon, 12, lay face down on a twisting pathway, his head split in half.'What is shocking is that all victims appear to have been innocents. "We're talking about women and little children - these were no bandits," said Jean Gabriel Ambrose, the Port-au-Prince JP...the massacre that took place last Friday was so arbitrary - family members, neighbours, human rights observers and police all agree the victims were not gang members - that UN and Haitian officials believe it may have been in part an attempt to destabilise the newly elected government of President Rene Preval. So, who committed the crime? The reporter spends a lot of time talking about two "gangs," an anti-Aristide "gang" called the Little Machete army and another gang called Ti Bwa, as well as "renegade police officers," Renan Etienne and Carlo Lochard. Let's re-write the article: An anti-Aristide militia associated with the police, the Little Machete Army, is suspected of serving as a death squad to terrorize the population of a Haitian slum called Grand Ravine. Twenty people were executed by men armed with automatic weapons. Unknown is any role of a rival militia, called Ti Bwa. The effect of the shootings has been to cause many people to flee. Notice how it suddenly makes sense? It's exactly what the Ton Ton Macoutes did pre-Aristide. Except the Ton Ton Macoutes didn't have nice automatic weapons, shipped from the US through Santo Domingo.

The PRD page is down, perhaps yet one more hack attack, perhaps a weather or Net-related outage. Tomorrow is the big demo in Mexico City. Thousands have already arrived, and are preparing for the march at 11AM Central from the Museum of Anthropology to the central plaza, the Zocalo. You know it's for real: Bolillos, aluminum casseroles and portapotties have been deployed. It's kind of a slow news day, so if you want, skip to the bikinis of Sao Paolo. Is #6 pregnant? Trinidad Morales of the PRD confesses to naivete in failing to have PRD reps at 20% of the precincts dominated by PAN. But he says it's not an error. It's a bit hard to read, but it seems as if there were some gaps between the PRD and the "citizen network." To follow up on the ballot box stuffing film below, Fromow Rangel of the electoral fraud division says he hasn't received a formal complaint. which may mean that the PRD has decided against charging the fellow with fraud. As I pointed out, it doesn't change the fact that the film shows extremely poor controls on ballots. And it doesn't rule out filing fraud charges later. AMLO says that even if the vote by vote recount shows a Calderon win, the election was dirty and he will continue to criticize it. But the demos will cease. Sunday, he will discuss thousands of precinct tally sheets that do not match the result. PRI's Esther Elba Gordita... er, Gordillo will not officially join PAN. (Esther Elba Gordillo, from El Diario) Doña Pompis from Supermachos See someone with a white or blue purse? They're supporting PAN (blue and white are PAN's colors). Or they don't support PAN but like white or blue. This is Calderon's latest brainstorm, a campaign to declare that Mexico wishes to live in peace. He was inspired by Gerald Ford's Whip Inflation Now campaign, another exciting moment in political history. (Um, the WIN reference is made in jest).

One thing Japan has is old, sometimes hot and rainy, densely populated cities and one thing old, sometimes hot and rainy densely populated cities have is roaches. So, while looking for investment data on Japan, I stumbled across an article translated by Wendy Imura from Yuki Wada's original. It has the following tips (in addition to the obvious point of not leaving out boxes of pizza or beer bottles, keeping doors and windows closed, and sealing any cracks): 1. Keep potted plants or flowers outside. 2. Keep furniture 1" from the wall and use plastic instead of cardboard boxes to deny them nesting grounds 3. Adhesive traps are safe and cheap, but move them around (http://tinyurl.com/pglqu) are recommended. 4. Boric acid traps can be made out of boric acid, flour, oil, and onions. I've always heard cocoa and boric acid. 5. Spraying roaches and then smashing them works pretty well. But why use roach spray when "kitchen cleaners, toilet cleaners, mold removers, and antibacterial sprays are all more handy, cheaper, and more effective," 6. Roaches can be ambushed from the front, not from the rear, since they have wind sensors in the back. 7. Do not vacuum up cockroaches in the vacuumcleaner, since "sometimes female roaches can actually breed when they die, turning your vacuum cleaner into a mobile roach nest."

Short Version: Bad. (As in "Not good".)

...it's that somebody in the media actually called them on it, both in the newspaper itself and on an online blog on the paper's website.

"Condi, check that diaper, hon" Bush handling of the PANista government. Image from Reuters on La Jornada Judges Leonel Castillo González y Eloy Fuentes Cerda will be handling the initial review of the electoral challenges for the Election Court. The PRD gets district 1 of Tamaulipas; el segundo, PAN gets district 9 de Chiapas. With 355 challenges, and a deadline of September 6th, that makes for atight calendar. Watch for PAN to run the clock. Watch for the strategy to then backfire as the Electoral Court throws up its hands and concludes that, since the complaints can't be reviewed, the election will have to be declared invalid. Bishop Lona of Tehuantepec said it would be very healthy for Mexico if they counted the ballots publicly. The Bishop Emeritus of San Cristobal de las Casas warned of the polarization that has been occurring. . In Oaxaca, which is in a state of near-anarchy, we can see why they're concerned. The Popular Revolutionary Army, which is not associated with AMLO, is talking "civil disobedience," "armed self defense," and "stopping" PAN, which they call the "fascist ultraright." You know, if Delaware or Colorado were not really under the control of Washington and the local militias that were in control were talking "armed self-defense," I'd be concerned, too. Meanwhile, Calderon has been denying that the elections court can legally require a recount, which I believe is baloney. Recounts can be ordered when there's specific evidence of tampering or fraud. In the 1% recount, there were a huge number of ...um...errors in Calderon's favor, so many that a reasonable person would conclude there had been fraud. Now, that fraud could have been local and not ordered by the national PAN. So, now Mexico will recount more precincts. Suppose many of those show evidence of ... um errors in Calderon's favor. A reasonable person would conclude that there might have been a national plan to commit fraud, at which moment, the law would be consistent with recounting all the ballots. This is almost identical to the situation in recent American elections, where evidence to do the recount emerges from more limited recounts. So, my reading is that Calderon is being dishonest and by issuing his own personal ruling on what the election court can legally do, he's engaging in exerting pressure on the streets as much as the marches of the PRD. As we see at MR, PANistas range far and wide on the marching orders of PAN-central. José Luis Barraza of the CCE (Business Council Coordinator) accused AMLO of stirring violence. Cesar Nava of PAN was revving up their supporters by pre-emptively blaming Lopez Obrador for any violence that might occur. You know, if PAN goes into a polling place in the dead of night to review the ballots and the neighbors object, it's AMLO's fault. This strategy has been backfiring, so today Manuel Espino did the Emily Litella moment: “A party that assumes the burden of governing is obligated to offer bridges, to dialogue regarding all political opponents, and not create political anarchy, not engagie in sterile debate, and not denigrate its opponents." Guess he's been reading MercRising. And if only he'd said that on July 3rd, PAN might be regarded as a party worthy of assuming the burden of government. PRI kicked out Professor Elba Esther Gordilloof the National Educational Workers for supporting Calderon. While I don't understand the complex politics of this, I suspect it presages a breakup between the often-conservative and sometimes corrupt union leadership and the rank and file, which has been radicalized by PAN's neoliberal policies. More from La Jornada, which tells a much more nuanced story than Proceso. In this country, Al Franken is giving Ruben Navarette an open forum to tell us that everything is juuuuust fiiiine; also that Al Gore lost because he was a rotten candidate, and that Busby lost because she was a rotten candidate, and ideas of election fraud in the US are all the hallucinatory product of the fever swamps of the Internet. What a dip; or, rather, a double dip. Fortunately, the audience is booing Navarette, and to his credit Franken has begged Navarette to put down the shovel. __________________________________ The future of news is here and it strongly resembles hell with a coutierier: Noticias por Adela (Televisa). Adela reminds one of a giant lizard, with enormous, thin, hyperflexible lips that make one wonder whether they will suddenly bloat like lily pads to consume her victim. (Image of Adela Micha, from her biography on Televisa In a recent interview with Lopez Obrador, she stroked him like a cat, trying to get him to say something damning on air. Even in Mexico, where physical contact is definitely not necessarily a sign of sexual interest, it was a bit much. __________________________________ I second Avedon Carol for naming Noah Scheiber as Boss Wanker for this story. Given the choice of the crook or the populist, The New Republic will choose the crook every time. They are ^%$ing hopeless. Scheiber's criticism of Ron Klain for urging Lopez Obrador to fight for the election he may well have won? That Lopez Obrador would have to push the way Bush did. Of course, in the Mexican election, it's Calderon's family members that control election machinery, so any pushing like Bush would actually have to be legal. Someone, please change Scheiber's diapers, too.

Paul Krugman, working to clear away the fog and "gaslight", had this to say today about the US economy (and why most Americans know it's crappy even as the well-paid TV talking heads keep saying it isn't):

I'd like to say that there's a real dialogue taking place about the state of the U.S. economy, but the discussion leaves a lot to be desired. In general, the conversation sounds like this: Bush supporter: ''Why doesn't President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.'' Informed economist: ''But it's not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well.'' Bush supporter: ''Why doesn't President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”

That's a pretty accurate summation, to judge from the performance of the various Bush supporters who've posted in our comments threads. Now, the Bushies like to tout the economy's 2004 growth as evidence that things are just peachy in America. But there's one small problem with that, as Krugman notes:

Here's what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income—the purchasing power of the typical family—actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go? The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004.

So what did Piketty and Saez find upon analyzing the newly-available data from 2004? They found that for most Americans, the economic news wasn’t all that good. Only the people at the very tip-top of the economic pyramid got the bennies. Oh, and a college education isn't a ticket out of poverty any more, either:

There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better...that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

This reminds me: Bush and his fellow Republicans are banging the let's-privatize-and-destroy-Social-Security drum yet again -- just as it's becoming apparent that most Americans are going to need Social Security more than ever. Now, if you recall from the last time they tried this in late 2004/early 2005, they tried to claim that Social Security would be bankrupt in a few decades. However, as Kevin Drum and others have pointed out, the figures they used for their estimates assumed an average annual economic growth rate of around 1.8% (which is abysmally low) for the next three decades. That would be the equivalent of a thirty-year-long Great Depression. Granted, I find it all too feasible that Bush could throw America into a thirty-year-long Great Depression, but even he might find that a difficult task. And if the economy grows for the next thirty years at even slightly subpar rates -- say, 2.6% or so per year -- that's enough to keep Social Security fully funded forever.

I learned last night, when I looked up the roll call vote for the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, that the full title of the bill is the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act. That's appropriate. Although I'm very familiar with Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, I didn't know as much as I should of Fannie Lou Hamer's career. Wikipedia enlightened me.

Fannie Lou Hamer ... was instrumental in organizing Mississippi's "Freedom Summer" for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a reputation as an electrifying speaker and constant champion of the civil rights. [...] On August 23, 1962, Rev. James Bevel, an organizer for SNCC and an associate of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon in Ruleville and followed it with an appeal to those assembled to register to vote. Black people who registered to vote in the South faced serious hardships at that time due to institutionalized racism, including harassment, the loss of their jobs, and physical beatings and lynchings; nonetheless, Hamer was the first volunteer. [...] In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or "Freedom Democrats" for short, was organized with the purpose of challenging Mississippi's all-white and anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention of that year as not representative of all Mississippians. Hamer was elected Vice-Chair. [...] Hamer was invited, along with the rest of the MFDP officers, to address the Convention's Credentials Committee. She recounted the problems she had encountered in registration, and the ordeal of the jail in Winona, and, near tears, concluded:

"All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?"

In Washington, D.C., Johnson panicked, calling an emergency press conference in an effort to divert press coverage away from Hamer's testimony; but many television networks ran the stunning speech unedited on their late news programs that night. The Credentials Committee received thousand of calls and letters in support of the Freedom Democrats. Johnson then dispatched several trusted Democratic Party operatives to attempt to negotiate with the Freedom Democrats, including Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (who was campaigning for the Vice-Presidential nomination), Walter Mondale, Walter Reuther, and J. Edgar Hoover. They suggested a compromise which would give the MFDP two seats in exchange for other concessions, and secured the endorsement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for the plan. But when Humphrey outlined the compromise, saying that his position on the ticket was at stake, Hamer, invoking her Christian beliefs, sharply rebuked him:

"Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important than four hundred thousand black people's lives? Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Now if you lose this job of Vice-President because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take [the nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk about. Senator Humphrey, I'm going to pray to Jesus for you."

Future negotiations were conducted without Hamer, and the compromise was modified such that the Convention would select the two delegates to be seated, for fear the MFDP would appoint Hamer. In the end, the MFDP rejected the compromise, but had changed the debate to the point that the Democratic Party adopted a clause which demanded equality of representation from their states' delegations in 1968. Hamer continued to work in Mississippi for the Freedom Democrats and for local civil rights causes. She ran for Congress in 1964 and 1965, and was eventually seated as a member of Mississippi's legitimate delegation to the Democratic National Convention of 1968, where she was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. She continued to work on other projects, including grassroots-level Head Start programs, the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign.

The Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization passed in the House 390-33, after four attempts to weaken it were defeated. (You get one guess as to the Party of all 33 members who voted no.)

Which means they might do it. Or not.

The story of the day definitely goes to Mike Malloy, Mike Papantonio, RFK Jr., and Bradblog for the story that qui tam civil (fraud) cases have been filed against two voting machine companies. In 60 days, the legal boys will be free to discuss details. But apparently they have the internal whistleblowers to back up what may be the biggest lawsuit since Pap brought down Big Tobacco. No one in the lapdog press has picked up the qui tam story, but AP has noticed other lawsuits that have been filed: Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers and prone to temperamental fits of technology that have assigned votes to the wrong candidate. Manufacturers say their machines are more reliable than punch cards and other traditional voting technologies. But they face a determined opponent in Voter Action, which has filed lawsuits in Colorado, California, Arizona and New Mexico. Similar bans have been sought by voters in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. On Thursday, a coalition of groups filed a lawsuit in Georgia. Listen here, courtesy Brad Friedman

The Mexican election has gradually become one of those watershed events, events like Election 2000, like the war on Iraq, like the massive and illegal wiretapping of Americans that pose us with a clear choice, a choice that we must make as to which side we are on. At least for me, it didn't start out that way. As those who know me are aware, I was more or less neutral in the Mexican election. Like most people, I saw Fox's election as a turning point in Mexico's history, in which the historical--and very corrupt-- monopoly of the PRI was at last broken. We all hoped the Mexican people would be able to freely choose between the major parties. The PRD, as is sadly too typical of the Mexican left, seemed naive about how to go about meeting the development needs of Mexico. Those needs, thanks to right-wing Catholics who made birth control a matter for excommunication, are huge. And the failure of the left to defend against the repression unleashed against them in 1988 seemed to symbolize how unprepared they were to govern. That a guy as strange as Subcomandante Marcos could rise to a position of unofficial national leadership spoke of a system broken almost beyond repair. Unfortunately, PAN turned out to be the new name of the party of Mexico's superwealthy: it is PRI's money with a Catholic extremist gloss. Violence against the poor and dispossed has been rising and incomes have been stagnating. And the PRD produced a candidate with solid political experience and high approval ratings from the people of Mexico City. He also picks up support from those who understand that wealth inequality is disastrous for Mexico (See, for example, this piece from a former OC Weekly editor. The Economist quasi-endorsement of Lopez Obrador represented the same sort of visionary stance, of seeing that by keeping the poor in a ditch, Mexico as a whole has to stay there. And then there were a series of events. 1. The attempt of the right to paint Lopez Obrador as identical to Hugo Chavez and (whisper, whisper) Fidel Castro. This is getting old, especially the US-sponsored coup against Chavez. We've seen the campaign by a relentlessly right-wing electronic media in the US and in Venezuela. In Mexico, this lame old approach just looks pathetic. 2. The violence at Atenco, which our resident troll wants to blame on the PRD (in fact, the EZLN, which is in opposition to the PRD, is probably the primary mover in indigenous resistance movements). I challenge all our readers to look at that Wikipedia article. 3. The incredible dishonesty of the Mexican electronic media, as for example reported in the article above, in which they showed footage only of protestors attacking police, not of the initial attack of the police on the flower vendors, the "systematic police violence against reporters," or the police riot that followed, killing several people and disappearing many, many more. People with long memories will immediately make the mental connection to the massacre of Tlatelolco and subsequent hunting down and murders of dissidents by police. 4. The attempt by PAN to bulldoze the opposition into silence on election day. 5. The long count, characteristic of electoral wrongdoing, and the sudden, inadequately explained change of lead. 6. The large number of blank ballots. 7. The response of PAN leadership to cases in which fraud was pretty obviously happening. When honest people see things that look dishonest, they denounce them. But what really fixed it is the systematically dishonest, thuggish behavior of PANistas that I personally witnessed when one of them (Pandaluz) spammed this site, demanding that I view video that "proved" that Lopez Obrador was a liar. Well, I did look at it, and I thought it was baloney. Basically, it showed Lopez Obrador saying that he would respect the electoral process and not launch a street war if he didn't win. Standard political boilerplate. But since no one can promise that they won't protest obvious fraud-- indeed, in one of the great ironies of this election, Fox became the leader of reform when he led marches against PRI fraud-- it was mostly proof of how gullible and shallow these PANistas were. The response was, by Mexican standards, pretty venomous. Mexican standards, traditionally, require a certain level of restraint, circumlocution, and decorum as one informs an opponent that he's a son of a b---h. Failure to do so marks a person as having been raised in a questionable household. I encourage people to look at that thread and decide for themselves what it is about counting votes that has these PANistas in such a panic. Then, as our readers know, one of the PANistas, a guy posting as Manexpat, came over to the blog to post (on a thread devoted to responding to misinformation put out by a different self-inflated personality) to inform me that I was in violation of article 33 of the Mexican Constitution forbidding foreign interference in Mexican affairs, and to order to cease and desist. He lists himself as a Briton. He says that he's glad he's not a Christian because we "sicken him." But he says that's not anti-Christian. As Bob Dole would say, "Yeah, whatever." No Mexican I know would list himself as anything except a Mexican, unless he actually changed citizenship. Lots of Americans still call themselves. No simple agnostic goes around saying that people of a certain religion sicken him unless he's a bigot. If this is starting to sound like a bad soap opera, well, that's Calderon's supporters for you. Having failed to make any substantive point-- and unless this is T. L. Brink-- any germane one, Manexpat has managed to dig himself into a deep hole and forgotten to bring a ladder. Now, Internet flame wars are even cheaper than a dime a dozen and anonymous posters claiming to have certain degrees and affiliations that substantiate their views are like Giffen goods. I am posting his post to me in comments below (yes, normally I would keep such individual posts private, but this is one of those exceptions. There is no real attempt to communicate, there is a definite attempt to avoid exposure of dishonest dealing, and there's some question in my mind as to how far over the line this obsessive behavior is going). Let me be clear: this is only relevant in that the recklessly aggressive, obsessive behavior of Manexpat seems typical of the PANistas I have been dealing with-- and it's very similar to the recklessly aggressive behavior of the leadership that I have been reporting on the pages of this blog. Showing our readers this is the best way I know to get across what's going on in Mexico. It is this kind of behavior that signals to me that this crisis in Mexico has a good chance of morphing into a real breakdown in civil order. Sure, there's political theater in every election, and Mexico has some of the best. But there's something different about the character of what's going on in Mexico that reminds me of 1988 and 1968, when the ruling party talked itself into hysteria and, ultimately, into mass murder. What I have seen makes it suddenly very clear to me which side I am on. It's time for all of us to choose.

Joshua Micah Marshall has written a Web Exclusive column for Time magazine, detailing how terror alerts and arrests of alleged terrorists correlate with Bush's and the GOP's political fortunes.

In these perilous days, we must be ready to think the unthinkable. No, I don't mean the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack. After 9/11, that's all too easy to imagine. No, I'm talking about a thought that even now seldom forces its way into respectable conversation: the quite reasonable suspicion that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP's poll numbers.

It's not unthinkable at all. Julius Civitatus of JuliusBlog pointed it out two years ago, complete with a graph showing how news about terrorism coincides with changes in Bush's approval rating. If it's finally time for the MSM to call attention to that correlation, then it's time for Julius to get credit for pointing it out first.

FeCal is willing to do a partial recount. Although he has a mouthpiece, Juan Molinar, trying to push the toothpaste back in the tube, the PANistas are being forced to climb down from yet another ridiculous and extreme position, the first being that the election was over. I'm sure there are districts where no one cares if the votes are recounted. I'm sure that AMLO will waive his right to recount those in the name of [select from a menu of high sounding principles], just as FeCal is agreeing to recount as few as he can get away with in the name of [select from a menu of high sounding principles]. Of course, if the 10% of the precincts that I imagine will be covered by the partial recount are as screwed up as the 1% that have been already re-examined, then a 100% recount will be clearly indicated. So, there's a slight chance that this will not break down into civil disorder. But I suspect that behind the scenes, desperate PANistas or their accomplices in the IFE will continue to try to revise the ballots, that trolls like the one we were recently treated to on a preceding thread will continue to make it clear that PAN represents the paranoid, thuggish, ugly side of Mexico, and so on. In just two precincts, Guanajuato 6 and Tlaxcala 2, 200 bogus PAN votes were discovered. That's a huge miscount, almost certainly criminal. It would be nice if the guy who has been pretending to be president would say so.

From DiversityInc:

Conservative backlash to the massive street demonstrations over immigration is aggravating Republican leaders' carefully orchestrated plans to renew the landmark Voting Rights Act before the fall elections. After Latinos came out in greater force than they have in decades to protest a House-passed immigration bill, conservatives persuaded Republican leaders not to force a vote last month to extend the law that requires bilingual ballots in precincts with large non-English-speaking populations. They joined with a group of southern Republicans who object to extending the law's requirement that nine states have federal oversight decades after they quit hindering blacks' access to voting booths through Jim Crow laws.

Oh, come now. The GOP threw blacks over the side decades ago. It was George W. Bush's own father who helped road-test the "Southern Strategy" back in 1964, well before Nixon used it in 1972. That's why all the talk of "Republicans making inroads among Hispanics" has been a joke all along: Everybody knew that the moment the GOP feels threatened, they immediately move to placate their base, and their base doesn't like blacks, Hispanics, or anyone else who tans better than they do and/or doesn't attend the same churches that they do.

Election results are out.. My quick look at one district in one town in one state shows very little awry. There are two new films of irregularities: One 23 minute film shows how in District 3 of Tabasco, centered in Comalcalco, they removed the seals on the building and opened the booth in which the ballot packages were stored. The information requested (by the district president?) was not in the ballot packages. The second video was from Zacapoaxtla, Puebla, where the initial report was 103 were PRD, 82 were PAN, 12 were PRI, and 92 were blank. In fact, only 10 of the ballots reported a blank were blank and 64 were for the PRD. After the recount, the result was PRD: 167, 95 PAN, 17 PRI. The elections court has received 355 challenges, 225 from the PRD, 109 from PAN, and 1 from PRI. Ninety-two additional challenges were received relative to the congressional elections.

As always, Bonddad has the goods.

The University of Wisconsin gets it:

An instructor at the University of Wisconsin who has said he believes US officials orchestrated the September 11, 2001 attacks, will be allowed to teach a course on Islam. Some state politicians had called for the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire Kevin Barrett, a part-time instructor, after he spoke about his theories on a radio talk show last month. The university provost, Patrick Farrell, said in a statement late on Monday: "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas."

And politician Steve Nass gets it wrong:

Politicians who had called for Barrett's dismissal criticised the decision.... Steve Nass, a state representative, said he would push next year for cuts to the university's budget.

If you guessed Mr. Nass is a Republican, you got it right.

I expect my comment on the following post to be deleted from the site where I posted it, the weblog of a T. L. Brink. I am posting it here not to prove how clever I am-- if I were clever, I am sure I would let stuff like this lay-- but because many of our readers don't believe that any mainstream Christians attempt to defend our faith from being perverted into a disgusting political cult. Well, I do, and I think many other Christians also do and I want people who have left the church because they're disgusted with the ongoing politicization to know. At any rate, this all started from a post by Brink on a blog called El Machete 2006, where El Machete comment that the election is not over. T.L. Brink Says: July 7th, 2006 at 5:04 pm This is an interesting conspiracy theory, with much more speculative theory than hard evidence of conspiracy. At the micro level, I observed the voting and counting of the votes in three precincts, and detected no fraud. At the macro level, I notice a great consistency between the exit polls of many different organizations, the PREP, and the current counts: all show a slight lead for Calderon. As a social scientist specializing in questionnaires http://heuristicbooks.com I think that attributing all of these consistencies between these separate polls and the IFE totals is more than a reasonable stretch. Let´s admit that Calderon got more votes on Sunday. If you want to say that the balloting was not valid because slick media duped the average voter into being afraid to vote for his own best interests (e.g., AMLO), that is another story, but don´t try to invent vote totals that don´t exist. For a different view of the election, consult my blog http://mexicopolitics.blogspot.com by TL Brink Sunday, July 09, 2006 more weight for vote legitimacy Over the last few days, the international press has weighed in on the Mexican election. From the U.S., Spain, England, and France, the election and its tabulation are seen as legitimate. World leaders from Bush (U.S.) to Martin (Canada) to Zapatero (Spain) have officially congratulated Calderon on his victory. In today´s Rumbo de Mexico, the foremost of Mexico´s liberal intellectuals, Carlos Fuentes said ¨The presidential election was transparent¨and he urged his fellow citizens to accept the rule of constitutional law. posted by T.L. Brink at 11:33 AM 1 comments ________________________________________________ (Today,) Charles said... This is one of the most incandescently dishonest posts I have seen on the election. 1. Bush and the president of Spain basically uncongratulated Calderon in recognition of the fact that the electoral process is not over. That Mexico, less PAN loyalists, regard the election as still in process became widely known some time ago, when one of the judges on the electoral court delivered a stinging rebuke to Ugalde, reminding people that the court-- not Ugalde-- decides when the election is over. At the very least, a prompt revision to your post would have been in order. Even better would have been an acknowledgement of the fundamental failure to understand the process and an apology to your readers, if any. 2. The Financial Times and The New York Times-- which some would include in "the international press"-- have urged Mexico to fully resolve the electoral disputes by doing a full and transparent count of the vote. There is a fairly obvious reason for this. Mexico has had a lot of violence lately, not directly related to the election but very much related to the people in power imposing their will on the less powerful. So if the people who voted for Lopez Obrador feel they are being trampled, Mexico could have some very rough times ahead. It is just good sense to have a nice, leisurely review of the ballots. 3. Carlos Fuentes may have said he thought the election was fair. His statement was hardly a ringing endorsement. He said that people should cool their jets and put making sure that the election was fair be placed ahead of other considerations. 4. I provided a precis of your resume to the Machete blog for their amusement. It was on that blog where I read your slap that people who doubt the fairness of the election are engaging in "conspiracy theories." Let's just say that I'm a lot less impressed with your accomplishments than you seem to be. I am especially unimpressed that you did a hit and run on a topic you evidently don't understand on someone else's blog, and demeaned them in the process. Finally, I infer from your book on interpreting dreams that you consider yourself a Christian. As a Christian, I consider you an embarrassment. 12:48 AM

Richard Cranium of AllSpinZone offered a very good link to a Daily Kos diary. Patrice Olsen, Ron Gifford, and five graduate students from Illinois State University went down as monitors. Olsen was presumably not with the official monitors. She saw only one bad precinct, the Special Polling place for non-residents, which opened late, didn't have enough ballots, made people stand in line, and had no controls over closing time. I don't see her report as especially critical of the conduct of polling. As a special human interest angle, she is very cute. _________ Also thanks to Richard, Al Giordano has a slightly overheated piece which, however, has a good, detailed description of the allegations of what happened in Comalcalco, Tabasco, in which a near-war erupted when representatives of the election institute came down without authorization in the dead of night. to "review" the ballots in this Lopez Obrador stronghold. ________________________ From Flashpoints, Monday John Ross: in the 48,000 square meters of the Zocalo, there were 5-6 people per square meters, plus enough people in the side areas to add up to well over 500,000 people. PRD is requestion that 53,000/130,000 precincts be recounted. PRD may refuse to take office, precipitating a constitutional crisis. Haven't counted half a million votes. Ted Lewis of Global Exchange, who monitored the election: He called for a proper count. Structural problems: Josefina Vasquez Mota, secretary of social programs became FeCal's election chief. GE was unable to detect a national plan of fraud, but at the local level, there was a systematic effort at manipulation in Oaxaca, the state of Mexico, and San Luis Potosi. The parties could agree to a runoff. _____ One of the TV stations ran a sympathetic profile of the guy in blue. He's very polite, soft-spoken, denies he was stuffing the ballot box. I tend to believe him. However, as I posted when I first saw this film, the rest of the footage shows such outrageously poor controls over ballots that almost anyone could have taken extra ballots or otherwise falsified the results. So, the fact that I believe him doesn't mean that the elections court or the Mexican public should. One piece of evidence used to support the position there was no fraud is that the PRD poll rep. in Salamanca, Queretaro said that there was no illegality at the poll. However, as we know from Ohio, some county workers who call themselves Democrats aren't, and there's no reason to think all PRDistas aren't actually PANistas. And Lopez Obrador says that so much money was floating around that it's not impossible that the Salamanca poll rep might have been bought off. This blogger complains that she was rejected as a PRD rep. through various machinations of the federal elections institute. Again, it doesn't matter what one side or the other thinks. If there's a question, it undercuts the legitimacy of leaders who claim to have been fairly elected. ________ About a week too late to keep Mexico away from the brink, the federal elections institute is going to publish the precinct data. If they had done this the day after the election, a lot of speculation could have been quelled. _______________________ A personal comment. The Mexican debacle shows the wisdom of the Electoral College. In Mexico, you have an election decided by half a percentage point, and the candidates scrambling to find problems among 41 million ballots. And they will find problems, on all sides. In 2000, a similar debacle happened in Florida. There were only 6 million ballots to look at. Obviously, if California had been so closely divided, it would have been almost as bad as Mexico. But think of the nightmare of trying to check 100 million ballots, as would happen if we didn't have an Electoral College. Deming principles demand that complex systems be equipped with troubleshooting tools of the kind that the Electoral College is. The entire problem with the Electoral College, in which small states receive inordinate representation, could be solved by changing the formula by which votes are allocated to states, so that they receive the same number of electors as Representatives. Then all we'd need is real presidential candidates.

Steve Bloomfield, London Independent The last Somali warlord left fighting Islamists in Mogadishu surrendered yesterday after two days of battles that killed more than 140 people. Abdi Awale Qaybdiid is believed to have fled after scores of his troops handed over their weapons. ...He was the last of an alliance of warlords backed by the United States which claimed to have formed an anti-terrorism coalition. The group had been fighting the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a group of Islamists which wants to bring sharia law to the whole of Somalia - a country that has been lawless and leaderless since 1991. And they trashed Clinton over losing two helicopters, the lives of 18 American troops, and assorted body parts of 73 others. Bush has lost a whole d--n country.

A former top aide alleges that: Augusto Pinochet's $26m (£14m) fortune was amassed through cocaine sales to Europe and the US, the general's former top aide for intelligence has alleged. In testimony sent to Chilean Judge Claudio Pavez, Manuel Contreras alleges that Pinochet and his son Marco Antonio organised a massive production and distribution network, selling cocaine to Europe and the US in the mid-1980s. According to Contreras, once Pinochet's ally and now a bitter enemy, Pinochet ordered the army to build a clandestine cocaine laboratory in Talagante, a rural town 24 miles from Santiago. There he had chemists mix cocaine with other chemicals to produce what Contreras described as a "black cocaine" capable of being smuggled past drug agents in the US and Europe. Pinochet denied the charges I bet he does. The mastermind behind the cocaine operation, alleges Contreras, was Eugenio Berríos, a renegade chemist who was used repeatedly by Pinochet's secret police force, DINA, to run clandestine laboratory experiments. Earlier testimony and documents show that Berríos and the lab tested anthrax and botulism and were able to produce the deadly gas sarin. The biological weapons were slated to be used against Pinochet's personal enemies and in a massive form against enemy troops in the event of an invasion by Argentina. The drug operation, says Contreras, was designed to raise cash for the dictator. Isn't Pinochet's Chile a wonderful success story?

Jose Blanco had an opinion piece in La Jornada titled, "What are AMLO's objectives?. I don't see it as a very insightful piece, perhaps because my Spanish is so imperfect. Still, it seems petty at this stage to, for example, quibble over whether there were 35,000 or 55,000 compromised precincts. The answer to that, I am pretty sure, is that the greater number show possible evidence of tampering, while the lesser show probable evidence of tampering. And an even smaller number show inarguable evidence of tampering, like precinct 2227. But the questions that the title suggests are ones worthy of consideration. Politics is, and always has been, a messy combination of striving toward principled goals and opportunistic exploitation of events to gain the power to be able to achieve goals (not to mention personal enrichment and other arts exemplified by the modern Republican Party). The only problem is when there is an open contradiction between the stated goals and the actions. Like, when the Democrats say they are the party of the people and then intervene in the Lieberman, Hackett, Cegelis, and Lentz races to make sure that the will of the citizens of those states is not done. So why, wonders Blanco, would AMLO follow a two-track strategy of, on the one hand, challenging the legality of the election process and of the process of vote counting through the courts while simultaneously deploying a strategy of social pressure on those courts? It's a reasonable question to ask, but unlike Blanco, I see the answer as fairly obvious. The Mexican political process, like the American, is structurally awful in that the electronic media are controlled by the wealthier segment of the population. Lopez Obrador was smeared as a crazy leftist and had no means to reply, just as John Kerry, the war hero, was smeared by the Swiftboaters, and Al Gore was smeared as "Ozone Man" (and far worse). In both countries, there is an additional structural flaw that has taken a long time to seep through dense psychological mechanisms of denial: the bodies supposed to regulate the electoral process are infested with cronyism. In the US, it's voting machine companies with a political attitude and corrupt Secretaries of State. In Mexico, it's the control of social programs by partisans, cronyism in the software industry, and local power brokers. Mexico is headed quickly toward a breakdown of civil order, perhaps even civil war. How can this be avoided? One wise suggestion is that the parties could agree to have a two-way runoff between Lopez Obrador and Calderon, one likely to produce a clear result. But this would be intolerable if it happened in an atmosphere of smears, voter intimidation, and ballot box stuffing. Both sides would have to take a step away from confrontation and wage instead a campaign based on a higher vision. This can only happen if the smears, voter intimidation, and ballot box stuffing are denounced publicly and universally. That's where one track of Lopez Obrador's strategy is heading: to the Election Court to document the abuses and to the Supreme Court to deliver a rebuff so profound that no party will be tempted to steal an election again. But where's the upside to Calderon to have a full examination of the election? Isn't every incentive for him to avoid a searching examination? So, the only way to get to the morally just outcome is to provide Calderon an incentive to deal through social pressure. Furthermore, if done in the nonviolent style of Martin Luther King, it could be an opportunity to elevate the understanding of the dispossessed of Mexico. The terrible fact of Mexico is that the dispossessed do not feel in any way part of the political system. They are foreigners in their own land, coping with economic forces they can neither influence nor even fully comprehend. A nonviolent campaign could bring together Mexicans of different social classes and ethnic roots into a classroom, a classroom to discuss Mexico's future. For so long, Mexico has lived as a subordinate, in the shadow of the United States. It is long past time for it to enter the community of nations as a full partner. But it can only do so if it leaves behind the master and servant relationships inherited from colonial Mexican society. I do not say that Lopez Obrador is Lazaro Cardenas. But with a little help, he could be.

Not surprisingly, PAN is fighting back against Lopez Obrador's video proofs of fraud. In the best defense is a good offense category, they've launched their own challenges of Lopez Obrador strongholds, to which I say "Great!" But this is just for entertainment. It doesn't look good that the National University has just formally disassociated itself from the vote count.. We put together the plan, UNAM says, but we didn't have aaaanything to do with how the election institute implemented it. And, OH NO! Update: The Financial Times thinks they ought to count the votes: "It would be foolhardy for Mexican elites to underestimate the dangers this situation represents...." Translation: "You idiots! You're turning Mexico into the financial equivalent of toxic waste." I would say that was obvious almost a week ago. And, whoops! This update: The White House and Spain just finished uncongratulating FeCal. That can't be good. The basic defense on the very serious charges illustrated by the film is that Obrador representatives signed off on the precinct tallies of precinct 2227 adjacent to Cerro Gordo in the Salamanca district. So, the guy in blue is just relocating ballots to elect representatives that had been placed in the wrong ballot box. Um. That's a few seconds of the video. We also see ballots left on a chair outside the polling place, blank ballots left lying around in the open for anyone to take them, completed ballots left lying around and someone browsing through them, and then this guy in blue. In other words, there are no controls. So, let's lay it out. You're holding the camera showing at the least massive indifference to basic security procedures and much more likely fraud so open no one bothers to hide it. The thugs who are running the precinct ask you to sign off. You (a) make a scene, risking losing the film, or (b) put on your best s#1t-eating grin, sign everything in sight, and run for the exits? Next, there's precinct 740 in the third district of Queretaro. There, the tallies didn't match the number of ballots. So, PAN says, they opened the urn and found that they had counted a mere 200 extra votes for PAN. Of course, the tallies were still off by 20 in a precinct of 200 voters. No harm, no foul, and don't worry about those 3,000 other cases where the tallies didn't match, says PAN. PAN opened those up and found a thousand more votes for itself. Now, I haven't been able to download enough of the film from Queretaro to figure it out, and the audio sounds more like dolphin mating sounds. But I understand that the precinct rep had to be all but waterboarded to get the recount, and that he looks guilty as sin. To be continued.... ________________________________________ * Editor, Department of Obscure Humor: Mexican polling places are called "casillas" or "little houses." "Little House on the Prairie" was an ancient television show from the First American Republic from which many Republican myths of personal virtue and self-sufficiency derive. "Faerie" is also known as "The Bermuda Triangle" and "The Mofo Zone." Lambert is working on a headline that doesn't require footnotes. I hope. ____________________________ Hairy update: Oh-- and the shredders are starting to roll. Apparently-- my translation skills are challenged-- aides to the electoral institute (IFE) are removing documents in Comalcalco, Tabasco, and parts of Puebla, under the claim that the Electoral Court needs them to analyze the claims of wrong tallies. This according to PRD representative Horario Duarte, who is apparently a legislator. They, um, didn't notify the proper authorities they were doing this. In Villahermosa, Tabasco, the PRD was tipped that people had broken the official seals with the intent of altering documents, and were allowed in the IFE offices by the obliging military guards; a PAN truck was parked out in front. It turned out these were local IFE personnel, who argued that the district president Tomás Alfonso Castellanos (note to self: check if TAC is a local cacique) had ordered them to do this. 500 PRDists converged on the offices, made a citizen's arrest (I think) and are presently holding the IFE personnel. The local IFE rep in Villahermosa said he was "surprised" by this report. In Puebla, IFE advisors decided to review the ballot packets without notifying the political parties. The fuse is lit.

I'm trying to get other stuff done, but some things are just too funny not to share. Apparently Lopez Obrador has film of a man dressed in blue stuffing a ballot urn in Guanajuato. I am downloading the film from http://www.amlo.org.mx/. 31.7 MB. Forty five minutes on dialup. No wonder they're hacking his site. Another video shows the council president of District III (Queretaro) expressing extreme reluctance to examine the ballots in a precinct which had 200 votes for Representative and Senator-- but 423 for president. I hope one of our readers has a line to John Stewart... this definitely looks like material for high comedy. ______________________ But, wait! There's more! Some of the formal elements of the complaint: 1. Partiality of the election institute (IFE) in not stopping the "Swiftboating" ads 2. Manipulation of the preliminary count by IFE 3. IFE failing to mention 2.5 million votes in the preliminary count. 3. Use of patronage, including some heavy-handed pressure on elderly/ill/disabled recipients of social programs including Vivienda Rural and Adultos Mayores. If I understand aright, 152 complaints have been filed outside of District 15. 151 are directed toward inconsistencies in calculation and precinct "irregularities" like the pregnant urn, which have already brought 52,000 votes into question. For Mexico City, there were "generic irregularities," presumably polling stations closed by flooding, voters told ballots were waterlogged, and so on. District 15's results were a litany of irregularities. The complaint also alleges that the software and computer system were compromised in a manner that would allow tampering. The 904, 604 blank ballots are 116,447 greater than in 2000 and are 2.16% of the total. In certain unmonitored districts, there are suspicious statistics for the Nueva Alianza candidate. And Fox dumped 80 billion extra pesos into the economy versus 2005 in just the first three moneths of the year. _______________________

Fortunately, Lambert is on the job

You know, the seat he was forced to resign because he's in dire danger of getting sent to prison? Oh, please, Tom, pleeeeeaaaase run again. I want to see if the voting public of TX-22 is going to vote for a guy who'd have to resign his seat a second time, should he actually win.

For authentic journalists, Mexico’s post-electoral conflict is one of those gigantic news stories that happens few times in the course of a lifetime: Not merely a story about how a state-of-the-art electoral fraud was perpetrated in a major country of 100 million people, but, more historically, the story of how that fraud will be laid to waste. -- Al Giordano, one of the few remaining authentic journalists (Image from Giordano. This image shows that only the percentages for FeCal and Lopez Obrador changed, puncturing the myth that the changeover occurred because Calderon strongholds were counted last. If that were so, the PRI candidate's percentages should also have changed) Mexico matters. The United States imports more oil from Mexico than Saudi Arabia. --Man from Middleton Could the dam be breaking? At last, the redoubtable McJoan frontpaged a story on Daily Kos about the Mexico City demo for Lopez Obrador (AMLO). Thanks to Richard from AllSpinZone for the heads up on that and on the Giordano article. Man from Middleton (see above) did a Kos diary on Pemex privatization and how it will lead to $5 per gallon gas. So, good for McJoan, and MfM and the many commenters! Let's even give the WaPo (linked by McJoan) all due credit: 1. They actually reported a newsworthy story, a demo of up to half a million people out of 41 million voters. 2. They correctly reported that the demo was regarding allegations of election rigging. 3. They provided a plausible estimate of the crowd size, apparently from the Secretary of the Federal District Security. La Jornada says fewer, John Ross said on Laura Flanders that it was half a million That's about all the credit they are due. So, how is the WaPo full of manure? Let me count the ways! Let's start from a little meta analysis, introducing the cast of character puppets the WaPo parades forth for its Punch and Judy show: There is The Mob. They are poor, filled with "frustration and rage." They wave signs, They pump their fists. They suffer "decades of perceived indignities and a sense of persecution," (emphasis added) rather than, say, decades of real indignities and persecution like being forced off their ancestral lands, shot, beaten, and raped, and having elections stolen. They are clearly insane and dangerous. There is Lopez Obrador: He is a "failed populist candidate," i.e., the WaPo is telling us that his allegations of electoral fraud are bogus. He "ignited the smoldering emotions of his followers," making him a dangerous incendiary. There is FeCal: A "champion of free trade," i.e. the White Knight. There is Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute, FeCal's charger, "which has a stellar international reputation," assuming you only ask right-wingers. If you're getting the sense that you've seen children's cartoons with more convincingly constructed characters, you're right. Let's now enumerate the outright lies and pickaninny-grade caricatures. 1. "On Saturday, he gave a mega-display of street power...." The point of the demo was not to show "street power." That comes next week. The point was to speak directly to his supporters, many of whom may not get their news from newspapers or from the Murdochized TV. As he "communication is difficult" since the Mexican electronic media is as bad as the US. The streets are their blogs. 2. "The crowd chanted, 'Strong, strong!' when López Obrador stepped to the microphone." This is probably a mistranslation of "Fuerte! Fuerte!" or "Loud! Loud!," a not unreasonable request from a large crowd. Or perhaps the WaPo misheard the cried of "Fraude! Fraude!" (Fraud! Fraud!) that the McClatchy man heard. 3. "He got a moment of mass catharsis, an outrageously loud, communal venting." As Atrios would say, "Oy." Half a million people think they are living under a dictatorship and it's "venting." 4. One of the more amusing gaffes in this article involves residual editor's marks: "x 'They stole this from us,' said Concepción Myen, 68, a lifelong Mexico City resident who is unemployed. 'This is the worst thing that can happen to Mexico.'x" In conventional editing, xes are used for typeface blemishes. Since this is the WaPo, I would imagine those xes are probably editor's thoughtcrime marks. 5. But it gets funnier, in a sick sort of way. Why is Concepcion Myen unemployed? Well, if you noticed, she is 68. Even in Mexico, people are expected to be able to retire at some point. But in Punch and Judy world, they have to be slugabeds to be members of the angry Mob. 6. "Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, lost a presidential race that many international observers have said was stolen" If the election was stolen, it wasn't lost. The WaPo is trying to imply that those international observers are wrong. They weren't 7. Lopez Obrador stated that there is no president-elect, since the election is disputed. But the WaPo calls Calderon's claiming to be president elect and receiving phone calls from Bush and Stephen "Bush North" Harper "formalities." They shoulda listened to the Elections Court. Judge Eloy Fuentes said that no disputed election in non-annulable. "We rule on the validity [of the election]" he said, in a clear slap at the the head of the election institute, Ugalde. Indeed, contrary to the notion that this was an angry rally demonstrating "mega street power,: Lopez Obrador made it clear that this was a peaceful movement. We aren't going to fall for provocations and hand the game to the opponents, he said. We aren't going to bother the citizens, he said. We aren't going to block the highways. And he added some words which would burn the conscience of PAN if its leaders had any: "We are certain that despite all these anti-democratic practices, we won on the 2nd of July, and we did it with a free vote, the choice of the citizenry. We didn't pass out construction materials or other favors, we didn't buy votes, we didn't make shameless deals with the same old political bosses. For this reason, we are going to defend out victory. By the way, just to add to PAN's joy, it has a minority in the House of Representatives So, what does a real journalist make of it? Here are Giordano's major points: 0. Most important, as shown by the image above, the sudden surge by FeCal could not have been due to counting northern Mexico last. If that had been the case, Madrazo's percentage should have risen as well, since he ran ahead in northern Mexico. 1. There hasn't been a re-count. The electoral commission simply entered the precinct tallies. 2. In the preliminary count, the electoral commission held back 2.5 million votes. When those votes were added in, FeCal's margin dropped from 377,000 votes to 257,000. 3. A recount of 1% of precincts reduced FeCal's margin by 13,000 votes. Giordano extrapolates that to slightly over 1 million votes. 4. Lopez Obrador suspects fraud in 43,000 precincts. 5. The primary suspect for major fraud is Guanajuato. This state produced a 700,000 vote margin for FeCal despite having 5% of Mexico's population: "640 of those 6,122 precincts show discrepancies and irregularities which include more votes cast than are voters in the precinct, more votes cast for Calderón than votes cast in the precinct, electoral officials that refused to count the votes in public, discrepancies between the actual result and the reported result, missing or suspect vote tally reports, each of them sufficient to trigger, under law, a vote-by-vote recount" 6. FeCal allowed recounts in only eight precincts in Guanajuato, from which Obrador's vote increased by 253 votes. If thus were extrapolated over the 6,122 precincts, Lopez Obrador would receive 200,000 more votes from Guanajuato alone. 7. Jalisco, Queretaro, and northern Mexico are also suspect. 8. When Vicente Fox confronted PRI corruption, he used civil resistance. 9. The "computer systems [used in vote counting] were partly designed by companies and partners of Calderón’s brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala"

Through Avedon's Sideshow, I came across an inspired essay on the story of a group of American servicemen, including Steven Green, who stand accused of rape and cold-blooded murder in al-Mahmoudiya. The basic question the essayist asks is whether the attack on al-Mahmoudiya was part of a terroristic action by the US. I am at liberty to share the following letter, a copy of which I received, sent to the authors of "Tiger Force", a book on a campaign of terror committed by US troops in Vietnam: I very much appreciated this series. In your presentation of 6/1 shown on C-Span today, however, I felt you missed a major point, namely that Tiger Force was almost certainly a deliberate element of American policy. That doesn't mean that the men knew they were being used as terrorists. It would be very surprising if one were to find explicit orders to create a terroristic force. But the pattern, which runs through the unconventional wars the US has been engaged in is unmistakable. We know through Douglas Valentine's work on the Phoenix Program that the intelligence services had a large scale operation in Vietnam designed to kidnap, torture, and murder people. It largely misfired, ending up serving the aims of the Saigon government in suppressing political opponents. The US had similar operations in the Dirty Wars in Mexico (1968-75), Guatemala (1954-date), and El Salvador (ca. 1981-6), with very similar outcomes: traumatized soldiers and civilians, increasingly corrupt central governments, and rising anti-Americanism. The "El Salvador Option" put in place in Iraq by John Negroponte, generally believed to be behind the assassination program in Honduras, follows the same model. Although these operations seem to have used primarily intelligence operatives, Special Forces and regular forces seem to have been involved to a lesser degree. In the El Salvador case, from what I can make of it, the uniformed soldiers were told that they were executing a conventional war, meanwhile calling down massive firepower on groups that included many women and children. The same is happening in Iraq, in towns like Ramadi and Fallujah. Now, granted, most of this may happen because the military is incapable of fighting genuine counterinsurgency. They can't be bothered with learning local culture, language, and customs, and they don't understand tactics more sophisticated than force and bribery, so they end up making a muddle. But there's reason to think it's less random than one might imagine. Robert Fisk encapsulated it in the phrase: "Chaos is the plan." That is, the goal seems to be the destruction of a society, reducing living standards to the point that everyone is consumed with getting by day by day. The fabric of society dissolves and it becomes easier to force assimilation on it. One finds that that is just what the US practiced on the Native American population in this country. Professor Alfred McCoy has drawn a straight line between methods of torture developed in the 1950s and 1960s and Abu Ghraib. I think there is a straight line between the Phoenix Program, Tiger Force, and Fallujah. If there is, you should draw it, and if not, you should explain why not. No answer to this letter has been received.

NYT Editorial July 7th: When Mexican voters went to the polls to select a new president, many people believed that the worst possible outcome of the race between the conservative Felipe Calderón and the leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador would be a near-tie that would leave the winner without the aura of authority necessary to govern effectively. If that is so, the results were as bad as conceivably possible.... But there are enough problems to warrant a complete recount. Some polling stations that have recounted their ballots have found that the votes were misrecorded on tally sheets. The earlier discrepancies appeared to largely favor Mr. Calderón, in at least one case mistakenly awarding him hundreds of extra votes....Mr. Calderón, for his part, should not oppose a recount. If the result favors him, he should be able to govern more effectively. Marginal note: compare that last paragraph with the wildly dishonest LA Times version: In a news conference with foreign correspondents, Calderon ... pointed out that many ballot boxes were reopened and recounted Wednesday during the preparation of the final vote tally. Those recounts, he said, found only "minor variations" from the election night tally. You can't "point out" something that is a lie. But the New York Times doubled it's near zero credibility with me today, when it published the following by a NYU historian, Greg Grandin: ...Mexico's current electoral crisis likewise is propelled by rural unrest — this time largely brought about by the anger of agricultural workers displaced by the North American Free Trade Agreement. ...Mexican farmers simply can't compete with capital-intensive United States agribusiness, which continues to enjoy generous government subsidies. Moreover, Mexican commodity importers receive low-interest loans to buy crops from the United States. Every year, nearly three million tons of harvested Mexican corn is left to rot because it is too expensive to sell. ... For the last decade and a half, Washington and its allies in Mexican politics, including Mr. Calderón, have promoted a free-trade economic model that has failed to deliver the prosperity its advocates promised. Although the Mexican economy grew by 3 percent last year, the country's poverty and inequality indicators remain typical to bad by Latin American standards, with the richest 10 percent of citizens controlling 43 percent of the country's wealth, while some 40 percent of Mexicans live below the poverty line. These problems, combined with Mexican anger over the immigration debate in the United States, run the risk of souring relations between our two countries for the foreseeable future. ... The disputed votes include the 904,000 annulled ballots that come primarily from regions that went heavily for Mr. López Obrador, as well as discrepancies between the numbers handed in by polling stations and the actual ballots cast. The best thing the United States can do now is to support the push for a recount and to refrain... If the Bush administration does otherwise, it might help begin yet another season of Mexican upheaval ....

Garrison Keillor tells it best: If a preacher secretly accepts a bucket of money from a saloonkeeper to organize a temperance rally at a rival saloon and maybe send in a gang of church ladies to chop up the bar with their little hatchets, this would strike you and me as sleazy, but others are willing to make allowances, and so Ralph Reed's political career is still alive and breathing in Georgia. He has bathed himself in tomato juice and hopes to smile his way through the storm. The facts are fairly simple. Mr. Reed left the Christian Coalition in 1997 as it was sinking, and he was paid by Jack Abramoff to organize opposition to a gambling bill in the Texas legislature, which would have opened the door to competition for Mr. Abramoff's client casinos in Louisiana. So Mr. Reed got the good Christians of Texas to bombard the legislature with phone calls and letters denouncing gambling, for which Mr. Reed was paid millions of dollars in gambling money, by way of Mr. Abramoff's bagman, Grover Norquist. There are many other examples, but this simple story says it best: Ralph Reed pretends to be a Christian, but he's pretty obviously a conman and an extortion artist. What does that make all the people who have seen him up close and continue to think he's a Christian, doing God's work? The question especially appertains to those many good friends he has in the Republican Party.

Charles' post about how even the lefty blogs seem to be ignoring the crisis in Mexico got me to thinking a bit about the things we think we know. We are shaped, whether we like it or not, by "consensus reality" -- and the consensus-setters are the mass media and whoever tells them what messages to present. The very frames we think in are a product of this. (Why, to cite an example often used by Mike Malloy, do newspapers and news programs have "business" sections and no "labor" sections? Or, why does a large portion of the public believe that no human endeavor is worth doing unless the person or persons doing it can make money off of it?) The consensus reality most Americans -- that is, those who aren't Hispanic or who don't live within five hundred miles of the Mexican border -- have grown up with is that Mexico is this funny little country with the irredeemably corrupt government that keeps sending us cheap labor but is otherwise not all that important (the subtext being that they aren't important because they are brown people). The nuts and bolts of Mexican life and politics simply aren't covered by the news outlets that most Americans see. Which is why I'm glad that Charles is here, and that he knows Spanish, and that he knows statistics.

More foreign troops = more Taliban Des Browne, the defence secretary, conceded yesterday that the deployment of 3,300 British forces into the Taliban heartland of southern Helmand has "energised" the Taliban. Fewer intelligence agents = more al Qaide The man who led America's hunt for Osama bin Laden has said the CIA was wrong to disband the only unit devoted entirely to the terrorist leader's pursuit - just at a time when al-Qaida is reasserting its influence over global jihad. Shutting down the Bin Laden unit squandered 10 years of expertise in the war on terror, said Michael Scheuer, who founded the unit in 1995 and arguably knows more about Bin Laden than any other western intelligence official. Stupider Catholic leadership = fewer Catholics British scientists reacted angrily last night to the views of a senior Vatican official, who said Catholic researchers working on embryonic stem cells should be excommunicated. More electoral fraud = less democracy [M]y investigations team on the ground in Mexico City this week found voters in poor neighbourhoods, the left's turf, complaining that their names were "disappeared" from the voter rolls. ChoicePoint can't know what use the Bush crew makes of its lists. But erased registrations require us to ask, before this vote is certified, was there a purge as there was in Florida?... The Calderón "victory" is based on a gross addition of tabulation sheets. His party, the Pan, and its election officials are refusing López Obrador's call for a hand recount of each ballot which would be sure to fill in those blanks....Blank ballots are rarely random. ... In Mexico, the supposed [827,000] empty or unreadable ballots come from the poorer districts where the challenger's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR) is strongest....There's an echo of the US non-count in the south-of-the-border tally. It's called "negative drop-off". In a surprising number of districts in Mexico, the federal electoral commission logged lots of negative drop-off: more votes for lower offices than for president. Did López Obrador supporters, en masse, forget to punch in their choice?There are signs of Washington's meddling in its neighbour's election. The International Republican Institute, an arm of Bush's party apparatus funded by the US government, admits to providing tactical training for Pan. Did Pan also make use of the purloined citizen files?

Only a handful of blogs such as Sideshow and Allspinzone are even carrying the story of the meltdown of Mexico's political system. Kos should be interested, right? He knows just how scary it is when the government loses credibility. I don't think there's been a thread since election night. Atrios? No interest. A post on DeLong's board pleading for a thread was met with a shrug. What people do not seem to understand is that Mexico entered this election in a state of civil disorder, with parts of the country resembling Baghdad. A stolen election is very likely a prelude to violence. In 1988, there was a wave of murders by the right of supporters of Cuahtemoc Cardenas to suppress resistance to a stolen election. This time, it could drift into civil war. Despite Americans's dismissive attitudes, Mexico is an essential part of our economy. It is the fourteenth largest exporter, supplying over $200B in goods, including agricultural products, assembled appliances, vehicles, and electronics, and natural gas and other petroleum products. And they are one of our best customers. I urge our readers to reflect on the following and how it will almost certainly impact their lives. We cannot sleep while ourneighbor's home burns. John Ross., July 2nd 2006: Despite outgoing president Vicente Fox's avowal that Mexico is "at` peace", it doesn't really look that way. As the tightest presidential election in its 196-year history comes down to the wire, the nation is wracked by a spasm of violent social confrontation. Item--On April 21st, a thousand elite state and federal police descended upon a striking steel plant in Lazaro Cardenas Michoacan, firing tear gas and live ammunition wildly. But 600 strikers fought back with slingshots and iron ore pellets and drove the police off with heavy machinery. Two young workers were killed in the melee.... Item--On June 15th, thousands of striking school teachers in the southern state of Oaxaca encamped in the central plaza of the state capitol were dislodged by a coordinated police attack that left 100 teachers injured, two of them wounded by gun fire--there are unconfirmed reports of two deaths.... Item--It is now seven weeks since the brutal assault by state and federal police on machete-wielding farmers in San Salvador Atenco just outside Mexico City in which two young men were killed, hundreds beaten and jailed, and at least 23 women either raped or sexually abused by the invading security forces. Although protests of the atrocities have now spread to 34 countries and Atenco has become a world-wide symbol of Mexico's flagrant disregard for human rights, impunity reigns.... Blas Atempa on the Oaxaca isthmus is a potential Atenco as state authorities threaten to crush a local autonomous council that has the support of the Zapatistas' Other Campaign. On the fringes of Mexico City, gangs of "ruteros" or freelance bus drivers battle savagely for hours over turf and police are powerless to intervene. The narco wars rage in Mexican cities with five beheadings in Tijuana last week rivaling Baghdad on a bad day... But the biggest trouble could come not on Election Day but the day after if a closely fought vote is not resolved quickly and cleanly to the satisfaction of the participants. With Lopez Obrador and Felipe Calderon still nose to nose and the PAN's attack ads flying, emotions on both sides are peaking. The consensus of the pundits is that although Lopez Obrador has pulled ahead by three points in late polling... John Ross, July 2, 2006 Poll results are brazenly for sale in the run up to Mexican elections and all are equally untrustworthy. For almost 30 months, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the former Mexico City mayor and candidate of the leftish Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led the preferences, sometimes by as much as 18 points. But by April, under an unanswered barrage of attack commercials labeling him a danger to the nation in big block letters across the television screen, AMLO's lead had frittered away into a virtual tie with rightwing National Action Party candidate Felipe Calderon.... AMLO's diminished numbers were further complicated by Marcos's arrival in the capitol. [Marcos] has blasted the PRD and its candidate unceasingly in stump speech after stump speech across much of Mexico for the past five months...Marcos always reserves special invective for Lopez Obrador and the PRD -- the Other Campaign is, after all, a battle for the hearts and minds of the Mexican left. But perhaps the cruelest blow that [Marcos] has yet struck against his rival on the left came when he declared under the heat of national TV cameras that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would be the winner of the July 2nd election. Marcos's "endorsement" is seen in some quarters as being akin to Osama Bin Laden's 2004 U.S. election eve TV appearance that frightened millions of voters into re-electing George Bush. John Ross, July 5 2006 Under the PRI's seven-decade reign, the period between election day and the official declaration of a winner--always a member of the PRI--was utilized to cook the final results. Now under the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and with outgoing president Vicente Fox calling the shots, the abuse of state power is once again evident. ... Lopez Obrador went into Election Day with a small lead in reputable polls; exit polling seems to have confirmed a slender victory, although the Federal Electoral Institute has been reluctant to discuss the numbers. ...On election eve 2006, two PRD poll watchers were shot and killed in conflict-ridden Guerrero state in what public officials called an "attempted robbery." That is exactly the way the killing began in 1988. DemocracyNow, July 7, 2006 JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of the official count that did occur in the last -- in the midweek, there were instances where some ballot boxes were opened, and generally speaking, the counts, the actual counts, there improved the numbers for Lopez Obrador, didn't they, for the most part? LAURA CARLSEN: Yes, that's exactly right. The ones that were opened, according to these very strict rules that the Federal Elections Institute has for which ones you open or not, they did have mistakes in them. And those mistakes generally did favor Felipe Calderon. This will be one of the -- certainly one of the arguments that the group of lawyers of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will put forward when they ask the court to review the matter, because they're saying that not only there are mistakes, but these mistakes tend to have a tendency to favor the rightwing candidate. ...The Federal Electoral Institute was slow in applying many of its own rules during [the pre-election] period, particularly there's a rule against smear campaigns. Basically the rule says that you have to say something positive about your own platform and not just attack the opponent, which was characteristic of the campaign of fear that was orchestrated by Felipe Calderon against Lopez Obrador. In fact, the slogan was “Lopez Obrador is a danger to Mexico.” And it took months for the Elections Institute to rule that illegal. The same with the intervention of President Fox in the elections. ...The coverage that I’ve been seeing through the New York Times today, for example, and others, I think, is very unfair. What [Obrador has] called for is not a show of strength in the Zocalo, although in many ways it will indicate the kind of support he has, but, as I say, an informative assembly. And he's been very, very careful to make it clear that the idea is not to take the resolution of this problem to the streets, but to begin to talk to supporters about what comes next and to keep it within the legal channels. When PAN displaced PRI as Mexico's dominant party, there was hope that the system would change. It has not. PAN has become PRI, displacing local bosses and strongmen with servants of foreign investors. The "dinosaurios" are still running the shop, but this time as employees.

The Good Doctor didn't wait very long to blast the New York Supreme Court's decision to forbid gays from getting married in that state:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called the rationale used in a decision by the New York appeals court reaffirming a ban on gay marriage "bigoted and outdated," RAW STORY has learned. In a release issued today, Dean characterized the decision as inconsistent with Democratic values. "As Democrats, we believe that every American has a right to equal protection under the law and to live in dignity. And we must respect the right of every family to live in dignity with equal rights, responsibilities and protections under the law," the former Vermont governor wrote. "Today's decision by the New York Court of Appeals, which relies on outdated and bigoted notions about families, is deeply disappointing, but it does not end the effort to achieve this goal." Dean went on to call for the New York State legislature to change the laws to "protect the equal rights of every New Yorker," and "to proceed without the rancor and divisiveness that too often surrounds this issue."

Go get 'em, Doc!

Keith Olbermann beats Bill O'Reilly in the most desirable viewer demographic. AND: Tom DeLay's gambit to get off the Texas ballot by pretending to be a Virginia resident has been shot down. He's appealing the ruling, of course -- but even if everything breaks his way, it's going to be Labor Day before the Texas GOP can get someone to replace him on the ballot. And that's if everything goes his way. He could lose the appeal, too.

Liberty in Mexico, for example. The first graph shows the slow count. The counting went quickly up until about 7 or 8 (Central) in the evening. Then it slowed down. Way, way down. From 10:PM to 4AM, only 8% of the vote was counted. What were they doing? Minting ballots, I guess. Obrabor held a 2-2.5% advantage through a count of 70% of the vote. And then, suddenly-- a stroke? heart attack? the bite of an asp? Democracy died, at 4 AM.

Renee over at DKos discusses.

Image from El Universal.

Nathan Newman makes the case. Apparently, the spiritual ancestors of the same folk that Swift Boated Kerry and impeached Clinton, led the mother of all smear jobs against Grant because of his passage of the first Civil Rights laws and his relentless attacks on the Klan. If he'd been allowed to enforce the laws upholding Reconstruction, the racist Confederates would never have retaken the South and America might well have advanced to the point that a black president could be elected.

Ballots in the trashcan, just like in Haiti. Photo from La Jornada (added 1:17 AM Eastern) Hall and Root report that 1. 3.5 million additional votes were discovered not to have been counted" tally sheets representing the millions of uncounted votes were set aside on election night because of various "inconsistencies," such as indecipherable markings on the voting booth records. 2. At least one outside election observer was less than impressed with procedures: A McClatchy photographer working in the troubled southern state of Oaxaca witnessed discrepancies between the vote tallies posted outside voting stations in the town of Tlalcolula and the data appearing on the IFE's Web site. The photographer also found examples of the presidential vote not counted. 3. PRD officials are also hinting that Calderon may have a conflict of interest in the election agency itself, saying that could explain why computerized returns showed both candidates actually shedding votes in the wee hours of election night. Like, for example, top election official overseeing election-reporting software, Rodrigo Morales, is an old friend of Calderon and Calderon's brother in law may have had a hand in creating the software (he says he lost the bid, but in the world of software, that doesn't mean he didn't get the subcontract). Update: Via Avedon, I discover the Mexican version of BBV and that The Econonist endorsed Mexico's left-winger. Also that the right winger's nickname is FeCal. Obrador's lead continues to dwindle, down from 2% with 80% of the votes counted to about 1.3% with 88.8% counted. That sounds like not such a big shift, but in fact, it means that the votes after 80% were coming in heavily for Calderon. Meaning that no one will believe a Calderon win. (Image from Reforma Update, 11PM Central time: Just like in Florida 2000, it looks to me as if they waited until people are going to bed to pull the switch. At 91.56%, Obrador's margin is down to 1.08 and dropping fast. At 93.10% counted, Obrador's margin is 0.88. By the way, at 7PM, the vote screen went blank, showing zero for all candidates. Except as noted, from La Jornada, look how the slow count began at 8PM. From 12-7 PM, ballots were counted at the rate of 7.8% per hour. The next hours showed very roughly 4%, 2.5%, 4%, 2%, and 1.5%. 23:51 93.2 % AMLO +0.81 23:09 91.86% AMLO +1.04% 23:04 91.56% AMLO +1.08% 22:57 91.21% AMLO +1.13% 22:45 90.74% AMLO +1.18% 22:36 90.07% AMLO +1.24% 22:13 89.36% AMLO +1.28% 21:47 88.40% AMLO +1.37% . 21:28 87.05% AMLO +1.59% 20:56 85.34% AMLO +1.72% 20:32 84.13%, AMLO +1.78% 20:00 82.72% AMLO +1.86% 19:41 80.12% AMLO +2.02% 19:06 78.57 % AMLO +1.98% 18:49 77.57% AMLO +2.0% 18:27 75.08 % AMLO +2.16% 18:32 73.58 % AMLO +2.28% 18:33 72.12% AMLO +2.32% 18:34 68.17% AMLO +2.21% 15:06 54.92 % AMLO +2.55 % 13:45 35.95 % AMLO +2.71% 12:05 25.38% AMLO +2.59

The Mexican election shows clear signs of tampering. It is likely that Mexico is headed into political crisis, because the right has whipped up a campaign of hate against the left wing candidate. And, via Daily Kos, it looks like that candidate is winning, up by 2% with 80% of the vote counted. Worse: our lapdog media is part of attempting to steal freedom from the Mexican people. From DemocracyNow The party of populist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is demanding a full, vote-by-vote recount in Mexico's closest-ever presidential race. A preliminary count of the votes cast in Sunday's election gave a slim lead to conservative candidate Felipe Calderon. But federal election officials acknowledged Tuesday that more than three million ballots - or eight percent of the total - remain uncounted. In the latest tally, Calderon leads Lopez Obrador by just over 0.6 of a percentage point, meaning the race is still too close to call. David Brooks, U.S. Bureau Chief for Mexican Daily newspaper La Jornada. Gilberto López Rivas, anthropologist... John Ross, a regular contributor to the Nation,... George Grayson, professor of Government at the College of William and Mary.... GEORGE GRAYSON: ... I was out on election day as an observer visiting various precincts, and I found it to be a relatively calm, orderly process, except their so-called special precincts, casillas especiales... JOHN ROSS: ... you can't tell anything from what happens in the pol[l]s on election day, elections here are stolen before, during and after the election, and so now we’re in the aftermath, and we saw the disappearance of 3 million votes from the PREP, from the preliminary totals. Only 2.5 million have been put back in there. There's still 600,000 votes out there. I personally believe that those votes were not counted on Sunday night to give the impression that Felipe Calderon had won the election. ... Way before the campaigns began in January, when Luis Carlos Ugalde was appointed president of the IFE, we began to see a pronounced bias against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and in favor of Felipe Calderon in the decisions that the IFE and Ugalde were making. This latest event where three million votes disappeared and then were placed back in after Ugalde was called on it, and he only on a television interview yesterday morning admitted that these votes had been taken out. The other thing, Amy, that we really have to look at is that there's an enormous disparity between the numbers of votes that have been cast for senators and deputies and those for the president. And interestingly enough, in those states in which the PRD, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's party, has won the elections, there are much many fewer votes for the president than there are for the senators and deputies, whereas in the states that the PAN now controls, there are many more votes for the president than there are for the senators and the deputies. And the state that’s most, I think, blaring here is the state of Tabasco. There were 13% more votes for the president than there are for senators and congressmen. And I say that Tabasco is an interesting case, because both the candidate from the PRI, Roberto Madrazo, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are natives of Tabasco, and of course there would be a much higher vote for president than there would be for senators or deputies. So, that’s where we are. Today, they begin to tally up the districts. There's going to be a huge fight about whether or not you get to open up the ballot box, open up the bags in which the ballots are counted, and recount those things. What we're seeing here is a replay of the 1988 election, which was stolen from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by an electoral authority that was then part of the government. The IFE is supposed to be autonomous. But we're seeing a replay right down to the fact that on Saturday night two poll-watchers [inaudible] were shot, were killed. After the 1988 election was stolen from Cardenas, hundreds and hundreds of his supporters were killed in political violence here. ... GILBERTO LOPEZ RIVAS: Well, I think that we have the phantom of the fraud election and state election appearing now in the public opinion and letters. Hundreds of letters in electronic means of communication are counting the irregularities and the forms in which this fraud is carried on by the Institute of Federal Elections. And I think that the counting of the votes could clear this fraud or could confirm that there is complicity between Ugalde, who is the head of the Institute of Federal Elections, and the President Fox. ... ...So what is happening now is that I receive hundreds of mails that are calling to demonstrations. As a matter of fact, today we have several demonstrations in front of the electoral body counting. So, I think that the society, Mexican society, cannot afford another fraud ... AMY GOODMAN: The Los Angeles Times is reporting today suspicion among Lopez Obrador's supporters was heightened Monday when the investigative magazine Proceso, citing police intelligence sources, reported that senior Interior Ministry officials had attempted to shape media coverage on election night. Ministry officials called the news directors at Mexico’s two leading television networks and requested that they not broadcast the results of their exit polls, Proceso reported, those exit polls, of course, showing that Lopez Obrador was in the lead.... AMY GOODMAN: David Brooks, can you talk about the role of U.S. consultants in Mexico, specifically Dick Morris? DAVID BROOKS: I mean, the campaign of Felipe Calderon became much more successful once it went negative and it started borrowing U.S.-style fear campaign tactics and negative campaigning. Dick Morris was one of the informal consultants. He claims that he was never hired and wasn't full-time, but that he has said and admitted that he did have informal consultations with the Calderon campaign. DAVID BROOKS: ..That media campaign has now crossed the border. And just yesterday, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, all published editorials basically repeating some of the claims of Lopez Obrador as a danger, basically proclaiming that, in their view, Calderon has won the election, and saying that that's a good thing for Mexico and for the United States....And the other factor there is, of course, that the U.S. has been very careful, the U.S. government has been very careful not to openly participate in this election, which is a wise thing to do. But it's no secret that the Bush administration, that Wall Street and, of course, the major media in this country favor Felipe Calderon, and that is also creating an issue of be careful what you read in the editorials, although the reports in most of these papers contradict the editorial. JOHN ROSS: ... I wanted to take up another thing, because I think it's important, and also to respond to Professor Grayson, who wrote a hit piece, a book that was a hit piece on Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador: this question of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as being a violator of the law. We see statements in the New York Times by Ginger Thompson that he led violent demonstrations in Tabasco in 1996. I was with Lopez Obrador at those demonstrations in front of the PEMEX platforms. They were, in fact, nonviolent demonstrations. Just another example of how the U.S. press has turned this thing around. And, you know, here in Mexico City was accused of breaking the law because he tried to build an access road to a hospital out in Cuajimalpa in violation of a court order. They tried to bar him from the ballot. Major parties and Vicente Fox tried to bar him from the ballot. He put 1.2 million people in the streets. I was happy to march in that demonstration, the largest political demonstration in Mexico’s history, last April. And they dropped the charges right away. The other thing is that, you know, when we say that the media has been very bad in this campaign, we have to understand that they're operating with the permission of the IFE. These hit pieces spots that ran for months and months that compared Lopez Obrador, inter-cut his face Hugo Chavez, Subcomandante Marcos, riots, lynchings, whatever you want, all these inter-cut his face, ran for months and months and months despite the objections of the PRD and of Lopez Obrador. It was only when there was a court order to have them removed that the IFE moved to remove those from the air just at the beginning of June. Time and time again -- I think the most -- one of the most egregious errors, maybe a deliberate error, that the IFE committed during this campaign was to disenfranchise millions and millions of Mexicans north of the border by setting up a procedure where it was impossible for people, undocumented workers, in the United States to cast a ballot, although there is a law now that says they're allowed to cast that ballot. ... When someone thinks they can decide who should be the leader of a nation despite the will of the populace, that, my friends, is totalitarianism. And totalitarianism is what Lady Hawhaw, The Washington Post, and a number of newspapers are abetting.

You know, the right-wing eliminationists out there are usually a little more subtle than this nowadays:

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit.

The retaliation was already happening. As Jesus' General notes, some jerkface put the names of the husband and wife, their address and phone number on a website dedicated to harrassing anyone like them who would work with the ACLU to seek redress for grievances. Here's what happened when the Jewish family in question, the Dobriches, tried to meet and reason with the eliminationist yahoos bent on running them out of town -- or worse:

On the evening in August 2004 when the board was to announce its new policy, hundreds of people turned out for the meeting. The Dobrich family and Jane Doe felt intimidated and asked a state trooper to escort them. The complaint recounts a raucous crowd that applauded the board's opening prayer and then, when sixth-grader Alexander Dobrich stood up to read a statement, yelled at him "take your yarmulke off!" His statement, read by Samantha, confided "I feel bad when kids in my class call me Jew boy." ...A former board member suggested that Mona Dobrich might "disappear" like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the atheist whose Supreme Court case resulted in ending organized school prayer. She disappeared in 1995 and her dismembered body was found six years later. The crowd booed an ACLU speaker and told her to "go back up north." In the days after the meeting the community poured venom on the Dobriches. Callers to the local radio station said the family they should convert or leave the area. Someone called them and said the Ku Klux Klan was nearby.

Because of its defense of Jews and other non-Christian Americans against enforced Christianity, the American Civil Liberties Union has been thought of as a "Jewish" group by many right-wing organizations and cranks, such as this guy, these guys, and this outfit. In fact, as was pointed out a few months ago by Dave Johnson at Seeing The Forest, Jew-baiting and liberal-baiting are one and the same thing as far as the conservative Republican O'Reilly-watching base is concerned:

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about "mainstreaming extremism" lately. That is Republicans injecting hard KKK stuff, disguised to sound more moderate, into mainstream outlets. The Republican charge that there is a "war on Christmas" is a prime example of this. Now we find out who they have been implying is behind this war - because they're dropping the code words and saying it out loud...The Christian Right has learned to use code words to disguise the anti-semitism at the core of their movement, but here they just come out and say it. You think I've been kidding when I say that "liberal media" comes straight out of the old far-right "Jew media" and "Jew York Times" stuff? "Liberal" and "Jew" used to be [PW butts in: And among the less cautious right-wingers, still are] interchangable words for the Right. They have always been able to talk about the ACLU to get votes in the South, but here you see what they have meant.

Indeed. [07/06/06 UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald documents the various links between the anti-Semites at StopTheACLU.com (and .org) and the cream of the "mainstream" right wing, such as Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin.]

Amazing what happens when a corrupt neoconservative plutocrat is replaced by an honest and competent man. Things that had been swept under the rug start seeing the light of day. No wonder the Bushies did everything they could to try to keep Berlusconi in power.

Lost in all the Fourth of July fireworks and the news of the (successful, so far) Shuttle launch, the CIA disbanded its ten-year-old Osama bin Laden unit late last year, probably at Bush's orders. Osama who?

As Charles has reminded us, symbols aren't to be taken for the things they represent. With that in mind, on this Fourth of July, here is my pledge of allegiance: I pledge allegiance To the Constitution Of the United States Of America And to the Republic That it created One Nation Out of many peoples, With liberty And justice For all. While you're at it, check out Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms, his brilliant visual interpretations of FDR's famous speech.

That's what Lady HawHaw says in her latest HeeHaw on the Mexican election. That, and atrocities too numerous to document, though translating "sin embargo" as "without a doubt" certainly needs to be filed as one of the stupidest comments ever made by someone pretending to be a reporter.

Trust Avedon to come up with the best stuff. She links to the following article onthe fish as Christian symbol. Suffice it to say that the article claims that a lot of people are driving around with a stylized vulva on their Volvo. It would be less pagan than a W sticker, I suppose. How much of the article is a fish story itself? Beats me. Ancient peoples had a limited number of symbols to work with. Sun, moon, man, woman... a few hundred words span mankind's basic kit of nouns. So, it's very unsurprising to find a symbol for one religion overlapping with that of others. Fish were almost certainly the major source of animal protein in ancient Palestine. For food insecure people, it was indeed life itself. But the gospels advise us to share fish with one another, not plaster symbols of them on our cars or wear jewelry made as an icon. And so, as a Christian, I can only chuckle when we get tweaked over what is, after all, only a symbol. If that symbol doesn't reflect a deeper spiritual reality-- and fish bumper stickers usually don't-- then it should be laughed at.

Destroying Iraq and rattling sabers in Iran's direction obviously aren't keeping Those People busy enough. They still have time to spend on an old favorite: plotting to hand Cuba U.S.-style democracy on a silver platter. I'm going to make a wild guess that the U.S. media aren't exactly all over this*; I read about it in England's Independent.

A new high-level report due for publication later this week urges the United States government to begin preparations to intervene in Cuba in the event President Fidel Castro's death. The goal is to help spawn a speedy transition on the island towards "democracy and political freedom". The recommendations, which include the creation of an $80m (£43m) fund to promote democracy in Cuba, are contained in the latest report compiled by the Commission for Assitance to a Free Cuba, created by President George Bush three years ago. The group is co-chaired by the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and by the US Commerce Secretary, Carlos Gutierrez, a Cuban-American.

We can stop right there. A commission created by George W. Bush, chaired by Condoleezza Rice and a "Cuban-American" political appointee. Millions of dollars to spend. We know what that means: windfall profits for Bush's corporate cronies, shameless interference in the target country's internal affairs, and abject misery for the recipients of Bush-style "democratization". (* A Google News search turns up a Miami Herald report from last week, but that's it from the U.S. media. The Bush regime plotting the takeover of another foreign country isn't news.)

Historian Robert S. McElvaine delivers a smackdown to those who claim the name of "Christian" while ignoring Jesus' teachings.

In Godless, her latest and most ill-tempered book-length rant, Ann Coulter asserts that liberalism is a "godless" religion. In fact, however, the most fundamental problem in Christianity in America and the world today is that the "fundamentalist" religion that most loudly proclaims itself to be "Christian" is Jesusless. [...] "Christians" of the sort who buy Coulter's books call themselves "fundamentalists," but their emphasis is entirely upon the word's first syllable; they're all about having fun. But when it comes to the fundamental teachings of Jesus, they take a pass. Turn the other cheek? Self-sacrifice? Help the poor? Nonviolence? That stuff's too hard. They replace the Gospel accounts of what Jesus said with the Gospel according to John and Paul (Lennon and McCartney, that is): "Give me money / That's what I want." [...] In my opinion, those who complain about a "War on Christianity" are right. The generals conducting that war include, in addition to Kill-a-Muslim-for-Christ Coulter, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, James Dobson, and the whole Unheavenly Host of televangelists and megachurch moneychangers and wolves in sheep's clothing who have expropriated the moral assets of Jesus and turned them to their own purposes. They never met a dollar they didn't like. They prefer profits to prophecy and pretend that Jesus did, too. They favor the rich over the poor and invert Jesus to contend that he did, too. They favor war over peace and lie by saying that Jesus did, too. Coulter and millions of her fellow adherents to ChristianityLite -- a "religion" that is the equivalent of a "Lose weight without diet or exercise" scam ("Easy Jesus! Be saved without sacrifice or good works!") -- have aborted Jesus and rewritten his teachings to suit their own selfish desires. Their revision of the Beatitudes -- what we might call the Be-Ann-itudes -- goes something like this:

Blessed are the haughty in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who exult over others, for they shall be further rewarded. Blessed are the arrogant, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for domination, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who show no mercy, for they shall obtain the wealth of others. Blessed are the hard in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who persecute for their own sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when you revile others and persecute others and utter all sorts of evil against them falsely on my account.

Onward Jesusless "Christian" soldiers, marching others into war.

The method: Swapping out your regular incandescent light bulbs for low-energy CFL models that last longer and save money and resources in the long run. You don't even need to do it to all of your light fixtures. The UK's Independent reports that if every American household just changed the bulbs of their five most-heavily-used light fixtures from incandescent to low-energy bulbs, they would save $6 billion (£3.2 billion) and reduce greenhouse gases by nearly half a million tons. The deal is that 90% of the energy in an incandescent bulb goes towards making heat, not light. That's why electric lights have historically been such energy hogs, typically accounting for 15 percent of the electrical usage of a household. CFL lights put out the same amount of light and with far less heat, thus reducing summer cooling bills. So it's a win-win situation.

Officially, newswires say it's too close to call at this moment. If so, Bush can claim to have destroyed conservative control over yet another country. If not, and if there are any questions about the election, Mexico is headed into crisis. Lopez Obrador is no John Kerry. He specificially thanked the poor, "la gente humilde," and made it clear that he understands that for them, politics is no game. Update: Calderon is also claiming victory. But there are indicators that the win will not be regarded as clean. According to Traci Carl of the AP: "many voters complained polls opened late or ran out of ballots....In Guerrero state, two poll workers were shot to death before the polls opened...Many polling stations opened late, forcing voters to wait more than an hour to cast their ballots....In Nezahualcoyotl, a slum of 1.2 million people east of Mexico City ... voting was delayed by flooding from a powerful hail storm the night before." Sound familiar? Prediction: Impending crisis maybe a 30% probability. Update: As of 11:50 Mexico City Time, La Jornada is reporting 41% of the vote counted, and PAN (Calderon) with 38% and PRD (Obrador) with 36%. Update: Preliminary results are available at El Universal or at the media outlet of your choice via the Federal Election Institute. Half the vote has been counted, and Calderon is up by 433,000 votes. Oh... and almost 2% of ballots are spoiled. Another interesting statistic that may have much to do with whether Mexico melts down tomorrow. Update, 7/3: Calderon's official margin on the preliminary count appears to be 1% of the vote, roughly 350K votes. Lopez Obrador's rhetoric is a little cooler, but he continues to signal that he believes he won the election. Whatever the outcome, I doubt that anyone is going to believe that Calderon won this cleanly. Especially not with 2% spoilage.

In light of the news that the Bush Junta is planning to bring up secret-spilling charges against the New York Times (but not, of course, against the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times, even though they ran the same story), I thought it was time to remind everyone that if this program was such a secret, then how come a Bush Administration official testified in an open-to-the-public session of Congress about it in 2004?

Yesterday, C-Span said it would have Ron Suskind on at 7AM & 4PM Eastern. Today it turns out it's at 9AM Sunday and 6:47AM Monday. But as a consolation prize, you can listen to Daniel Okrent. Suskind is a best-selling author, talking about issues of national significance. Okrent is a dope, rationalizing how he managed to miss so many key stories while ombudsman at The NYT. Almost equivalent, wouldn't one say? If Democrats ever take control of government, making C-Span's governance politically-neutral is an item to be considered. _________________________________ Update: In the Too Stupid to Be Organic, C-Span's BookTV point person responds that s/he never uses the main C-Span schedule because it's not reliable. Talk about left hand and right hand being unacquainted with one another.

On the page the image comes from, there are oral histories in Spanish. With the knowledge and complicity of the United States, Mexico murdered peaceful political dissidents: The leaked report - which covers 1964 to 1982 and is based partly on declassified Mexican military documents - alleged that the Mexican government and military committed "crimes against humanity". Hundreds of activists disappeared during the "dirty war" It said units detained or summarily executed men and boys in villages suspected of links to rebel leader Lucio Cabanas. Detainees were forced to drink gasoline and tortured with beatings and electric shocks. Bodies of dozens of leftists were dumped in the Pacific Ocean during helicopter "death flights" from military bases in Acapulco and elsewhere, the leaked report added. The worst single incident was at the Plaza of Tlatelolco: [Former president] Echeverria, 84, allegedly ordered the killing of student protesters in 1968, days before the Olympic Games opened in Mexico City. Prosecutors say up to 300 people may have died when government agents hidden among regular soldiers opened fire. Mr Echeverria was interior minister in 1968 at the time of the killings in Tlatelolco Square. This was cold-blooded murder, a terrorist attack by a government against its own people. Their blood, spilled so wantonly, cries out for justice from the pavement of Tlatelolco. And justice never comes.

Peter Nicholas in the LA Times via TO Sacramento - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in charge of protecting California against terrorism has tracked demonstrations staged by political and antiwar groups, a practice that senior law enforcement officials say is an abuse of civil liberties...California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office learned of the homeland security activity more than two months ago. On Friday, a spokesman condemned the actions, saying they violated the groups' constitutional right of free speech. In other words, after two months of trying to work it out privately, Lockyer blew the whistle publicly. Schwarzenegger has deployed the Sergeant Schultz defense: Schwarzenegger had "no information and no knowledge that this was happening," said Adam Mendelsohn, the governor's communications director. If Californians don't fire him for totalitarian tendencies, they should fire him for stupidity. According to assorted analysts, he has failed to get together a proper disaster relief operation as would be required for a genuine homeland security operation.

Dear Reader: Are you one of the seven to ten percent of Americans who is gay or lesbian? Then read this post. (Even if you're not, read it anyway.) You'd think from all the media coverage of anti-gay-marriage amendments in the news, that everything for gays has gone pretty pear-shaped of late. But at least one good thing just happened: The Arkansas Supreme Court unanimously (aside from one recusal) ruled that same-sex couples can be foster parents, overturning the decision of the Arkansas state child-welfare agency to ban them -- the only such ban in the country. Of course, the knuckledraggingly evil Mike Huckabee is making noises about getting the state legislature to pass a law that would overturn this ruling, but the wording of the ruling will make this somewhat difficult to do. Remember, this is Arkansas. The state whose unofficial motto is "Thank Goodness For Mississippi", because otherwise it'd be at the bottom of pretty much every legitimate ranking of a state's worthiness. If Arkansas can stagger into the light, at least on one portion of one issue, the rest of the nation (even Mississippi) can do so as well.