while you were weeping

[sisyphusshrugged]

Maybe something to smile about

miscellaneous snarkery - election edition

slacktivist: Who made Steve?

In the third grade at Timothy Christian School, we learned a variation of the children's catechism. I don't remember most of it any longer, but I've always treasured the first three questions.

Recently, however, I've come to realize that these three questions do not accurately represent what it is that many American Christians believe. I have amended them to bring them into line with current practice and teaching:

Q: Who made you?
A: God made me.

Q: What else did God make?
A: God made me and all things -- except Steve.

Q: Why did God make all things except Steve?
A: God made all things except Steve for His own glory.

Concession Speech

I concede that I put too much faith in America's youth. With 8 out of 10 of you opposing the President, with your friends and classmates dying daily in a war you disapprove of, with your future being mortgaged to pay for rich old peoples' tax breaks, you somehow managed to sit on your asses and watch the Cartoon Network while aging homophobic hillbillies carried the day. You voted with the exact same anemic percentage that you did in 2000. You suck. Seriously, y'do. [Cheers, applause] Thank you. Thank you very much.

There are some who would say that I sound bitter, that now is the time for healing, to bring the nation together. Let me tell you a little story. Last night, I watched the returns come in with some friends here in Los Angeles. As the night progressed, people began to talk half-seriously about secession, a red state / blue state split. The reasoning was this: We in blue states produce the vast majority of the wealth in this country and pay the most taxes, and you in the red states receive the majority of the money from those taxes while complaining about 'em. We in the blue states are the only ones who've been attacked by foreign terrorists, yet you in the red states are gung ho to fight a war in our name. We in the blue states produce the entertainment that you consume so greedily each day, while you in the red states show open disdain for us and our values. Blue state civilians are the actual victims and targets of the war on terror, while red state civilians are the ones standing behind us and yelling "Oh, yeah!? Bring it on!"

"You have mail!....drool to follow as an attachment"

This is an example of what would have happened if Ann Coulter had written Flowers for Algernon.

Silly Brad DeLong!

This is a GREAT way to pick presidents! Presidents aren't sposed to be big smart compentent people who "know stuff" and can "solve problems"! The President is like America's Dad! He's there to comfort you on a stormy night when you've had a real bad dream, or be tough when your lunch money's been stolen by terrorists! When Osama bin Laden pushes you around during recess or a bully crashes a plane into the World Trade Center, you can always count on America's Dad to make you feel better by buyin you ice cream or by huggin a firefighter at Ground Zero!

Being a positive sort, I can come up with all sorts of silver linings:

Of course, we may have to throw up a few more sandbags twixt them and us when Fred Phelps ascends to the Supreme Court or the Anti-Witchcraft Amendment sails through the new Congress, but let's worry about that later. For now we'll just return to our vantage point and continue taking notes for our natural history of Boobus Americanus. Our predecessor at that task, Mencken, when asked why he remained in a country whose citizens he considered imbeciles, replied, "Why do men go to zoos?" For those of us with functioning frontal lobes, there is always some amusement to be gleaned from even the most desperate of situations, so long as the wild animals are kept in their cages and the home to which we return after a day's entertainment is sufficiently far upwind of the smell.

the voters have spoken

With this broad mandate, it is time to push aside the mealy-mouthed timid campaign rhetoric Giblets has toyed with before! Giblets will not be "conciliatory" after this historic moment! Tariffs on reading! A flat tax on gay sex! Mandatory prayer before monuments to the Ten Commandments in every class room! A war in every garage, a tortured Arab civilian in every pot! The streets will run with the blood of liberals!

But do not think Giblets will continue to divide the country. Oh no. The days of the bitterly partisan "pro-Giblets" and "anti-Giblets" Americas are over. Giblets is a uniter, not a divider. And he will unite America... UNDER THE CRUSHING FORCE OF HIS IRON HEEL!

National Museum Of The Middle Class Opens In Schaumburg, IL

"The splendid and intriguing middle class may be gone, but it will never be forgotten," said Harold Greeley, curator of the exhibit titled "Where The Streets Had Trees' Names." "From their weekend barbecues at homes with backyards to their outdated belief in social mobility, the middle class will forever be remembered as an important part of American history."

I Have Secret Inside Information That Will Blow The Roof Off Of Everything!

[UPDATE: It appears that this story is even bigger than I had first imagined. Developing ...]

[UPDATE 2: Oh, man! Oh man, oh man, oh man!]

[UPDATE 3: This is going to be huge!...

the election mess

international monitors really, really not impressed

The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system."To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Was anyone else wondering why CNN was so very deep in the tank?

Time Warner Inc. reported a 7.8% decline in third-quarter earnings as it set up a $500 million legal reserve related to continuing investigations into its America Online unit. In addition, the media giant said it would restate its results for AOL Europe prior to 2002.

...

Time Warner said it will restate its results for 2000 and 2001 because of the way it accounted for its acquisition of its interest in AOL Europe. The Securities and Exchange Commission has insisted that the company should have consolidated the financial results for that business prior to January 2002. In addition, Time Warner said, the Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Department of Justice are continuing their probes of transactions entered into after July 1999 at AOL.

Regret The Error: Election error round-up

From incorrect information on how to vote, to wrong voting times and incorrect polling and voter stats, the election inevitably brought out the errors in many newspapers. We humbly offer this selection of pre-election corrections

Kerry Won. . .

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completelyÑleaving a 'hanging chad,'Ñor was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical lossÑthat's 110,000 votesÑoverwhelmingly Democratic.

what now?

Bush Voices Pride, Humility and Optimism

"America has spoken, and I'm humbled by the trust and the confidence of my fellow citizens," he said. "With that trust comes a duty to serve all Americans, and I will do my best to fulfill that duty every day as your president."

Majority Win Could Make Second Term More Partisan

So although the president reached out to defeated Democrats in his brief victory remarks Wednesday afternoon, his aides and supporters were quick to suggest that his bipartisanship might not go far Ñ and that they expected Bush's second term to pursue even more ambitious conservative goals than the first.

"President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate," Vice President Dick Cheney said as he introduced Bush at the victory celebration.

"This is going to be a more creative and more controversial term than the first term," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

only a very small percentage of my high court nominees will have actually bent the law on behalf of the Klan in open court

First of all, there's no vacancy for the Supreme Court, and I will deal with a vacancy when there is one. I told the people on the campaign trail that I'll pick somebody who knows the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law. You might have heard that several times. I meant what I said.

And if people are interested in knowing the kind of judges I'll pick, look at the record. I've sent up a lot of judges: well-qualified people who know the law, who represent a judicial temperament that I agree with and who are qualified to hold the bench.

Cabinet changes happen

US President George W. Bush said Thursday that there would be some changes to the cabinet for his second term.

"There will be some changes" to the cabinet, but "I don't know who they will be," he said at the first post-election news conference at the White House, during which he outlined his agendafor his second term.

Cabinet changes happen in every administration, and he was "about to head into the period of intense speculation as to who is going to stay and who's not going to stay," he said.

After the first cabinet meeting earlier in three months Thursday morning and the press conference, Bush would fly to Camp David, where he said he would "begin the process of thinking aboutthe cabinet and the White House staff."

"We'll let you know at the appropriate time when decisions havebeen made," he promised.

Bush to 'spend political capital'

Re-elected US president George Bush today said he intended to spend the "political capital" he earned campaigning for the White House.

In his first press conference since the election he acknowledged he had to "explain the decisions I make" but said he had every intention of following through with a second term agenda stretching from an overhaul of the tax system to "spreading freedom" in the Middle East.

"The people made it clear what they wanted," he said. "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it."

In contrast to the 2000 presidential election where he won in the electoral college but lost the popular vote, Mr Bush achieved decisive margins in margins in both and is now free to govern until January 2009 without the pressures carried by a first-term president seeking re-election.

The president said his administration would "achieve our objectives" in Iraq and talked of his "solemn duty" to protect the US despite criticisms from his Democrat challenger, John Kerry, of his leadership of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"There is a certain attitude in the world by some that says that it's a waste of time to try to promote free societies in parts of the world. I've heard that criticism," he said. "Remember I went to London to talk about our vision of spreading freedom throughout the greater Middle East and I fully understand that that might rankle some and be viewed by some as folly."

But he insisted he would not change course. "I believe that when the American president speaks he better mean what he says," he said.

Mr Bush said he agreed with Tony Blair that a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians was an "important part of a peaceful world" but without a belief that all people could participate in democracy, a two-state solution in the Middle East became "moot".

For the second straight day, he pledged to reach out to those who opposed his re-election.

"The campaign over, Americans are expecting a bipartisan effort and results. I will reach out to every one who shares our goals"

Humility and the civilized world

ThisisLondon

A triumphant George Bush has attempted to reach out to the world, insisting that "every civilised country" has a stake in the US-led war on terror.

But he defended his vision of spreading freedom throughout the Middle East, saying it was not "folly" as some global critics have argued.

In his first news conference since winning a second term in office, Mr Bush pledged to "reach out to our friends and allies" around the world.

During his first term he was criticised for sidelining some traditional European allies and alienating the Arab world.

He said: "We are continuing the war on terror and every American has a stake in the outcome of this war.

"Together we will protect the American people. We will persevere until the enemy is defeated."

But he went on: "Every civilised country also has a stake in the outcome of the war.

"I will continue to reach out to our friends and allies, our partners in the EU and Nato."

He said he continued to believe that freedom and democracy were alternatives to "tyranny and terror" around the world.

He said spreading freedom throughout the Middle East was a "central part" of his foreign policy.

Yeah, right, says Britain

Britain will not back military action against Iran if President George W Bush decides to confront Tehran in his second White House term, Jack Straw has said.

The Foreign Secretary rejected claims that hardliners in Mr Bush's administration could press for an attack on Iran as "inconceivable".

Mr Bush has labelled Iran as part of his "axis of evil" and has led calls for the United Nations to crack down on Tehran's alleged attempts to make nuclear weapons.

However, Mr Straw said the prospects of another conflict on top of the war on Iraq were "pretty remote" and that the international community would resolve the dispute "constructively".

"I don't see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Mr Straw, who is in Germany for the Queen's state visit, also described Mr Bush's re-election yesterday as an "opportunity" for Europe to heal its divisions with Washington.

and in fairness, we waited a whole day before cocking a snook at one of our NATO allies

In its first foreign policy move since President George W. Bush won reelection this week, the United States enraged NATO ally Greece by siding with neighboring Macedonia in a bitter row over the use of the country's name.

The United States formally recognized the "Republic of Macedonia" as the name of the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (FYROM) over the strong objections of Greece which has waged a lengthy international campaign against Skopje's use of the moniker.

"We have now decided to refer to Macedonia officially as the 'Republic of Macedonia'," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, stressing that the move was intended as a show of support for Skopje and not aimed at upsetting Greece which immediately protested the change.

"By recognizing Macedonia's chosen constitutional name, we wish to underscore the US commitment to a permanent multi-ethnic, democratic Macedonian state within its existing borders," he told reporters.

He added that Skopje is a "steadfast partner" in the global war on terrorism and has contributed troops to the US-led coalition in Iraq.

The move is largely symbolic but it infuriated Greece which has long opposed using the name "Macedonia," the same name as the northern Greek province where Alexander the Great was born, to refer to its northern neighbor.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told Foreign Minister Petros Molyviatis that the United States understood Greece's position but said the move was not aimed at upsetting Greece and had nothing to do with the results of the Tuesday's US election.

so, how's the war going?

We didn't just let them get their hands on the explosives - we let them get their hands on the guys who build them

We were too cheap (or stupid) to hire Iraqi chemical-weapons experts, so now they may be working for the insurgents:

More evidence of a major failure by the Bush administration to adequately prepare for the possibility of insurgency in post-war Iraq has surfaced amid claims by some rebels that they have acquired chemical weapons and are preparing to use them against U.S. forces in the besieged Sunni stronghold of Falluja.

The claims ... suggested that chemical-weapons specialists are lending their expertise to the guerrillas, a development that is causing growing anxiety in Washington.

Such a possibility was noted in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Duelfer Report last month which detailed in an annex that a group of insurgents, called the “Al-Abud Network,” had worked with a civilian Iraqi chemist to build chemical weapons for use against Coalition forces.

The report, which was noted by Michael Roston at Columbia University in a paper published by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) last week said U.S.-led troops had nipped the plot in the bud but that al-Abud “was not the only group planning or attempting to produce CBW (chemical or biological weapons) agents...”

“(A)vailability of chemicals and materials dispersed throughout the country, and intellectual capital from the former WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs increases (sic) the future threat to Coalition forces,” according to the Annex.

Why is this happening? It's the Pentagon having its usual manhood contest with the State Department...

but the hospitals they're abandoning were once painted

Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said on Thursday that it has decided with "a great degree of regret and sadness" to shut down its three aid centres in Baghdad and to cancel plans to open a fourth in Fallujah.

"It has become impossible for MSF as an organization to guarantee an acceptable level of security for our staff, be they foreign or Iraqi ," said Gorik Ooms, the general director of the Belgium-based group.

The three medical aid centres in Baghdad, being run by about 90 Iraqi nationals in the mainly Shia Muslim neighbourhood of Sadr City, had seen more than 100,000 patients since January.

Coming assault on Fallujah

The coming assault on Fallujah (delayed until after the election, nice), will be big news if it goes well, and should be big news if it goes poorly. Tom Lasseter, of Knight-Ridder newspapers writes it may seen as a watershed event for the nascent second Bush term and for Iraq's embattled Prime Minister. And here are several relevent discussions posted by Juan Cole.

UPDATE: The assault has begun.

Soldiers Saw Looting at Al Qaqaa

The LA Times reports today that soldiers saw looting of the Al Qaqaa explosives storage facility after the fall of Baghdad. "The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers from one unit Ñ the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany Ñ said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply."

a few things to say
This is how culture works: progress never happens overnight. Progress doesn’t come without setbacks. And progress isn’t achieved without pain.

You want to talk about feeling as if you don’t belong in a culture? My children, let me take you back to 1984, when there wasn’t a nice, even 51%/49% split. I’m talking about the height of the Reagan years, when the Republicans had 59% of the popular vote, and the Democrats a mere 40%. Maybe it’s because no one wishes to speak ill of the recently dead, but the Reagan years weren’t as rosy as revisionists would have you believe. They were scary. They were evil. I’d been forced to enroll for the draft. Thousands upon thousands were dying of a disease the government didn’t even want to mention. The future looked grim. The Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight. And having liberal values was very suddenly a cultural badge of shame.

But you know what? A lot of us survived those years. And a lot of us will survive the next four. Progress will be made, exactly as it was even during the last four years. Some of it will be eroded, and then it will be built back up again into a firmer foundation. It’s like Beth Nielsen Chapman says: Solid stone is just sand and waterÑsand and water, and a million years gone by.

kinda spooky, really: Lincoln's second inaugural

And then they started telling people Kerry would ban the bible.

Quick tally here, Karl. My first grade math is rusty, but 51% does not make a mandate.

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part

Gay Marriage==Slavery

The first question that Democrats need to ask after yesterday's loss is whether or not we really are the reality-based community. If we are reality-based, we can learn from the election and more forward to future victories. If we are not reality-based, then we will find excuses and reasons for the loss that are external to ourselves. That will lead to more defeats.

Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.

Pinning this election defeat on an alleged lack of "moral values" is short sighted and it plays right into Republican hands. The Republicans consistently use that club to beat us over the head again and again while they fervently watch the Falafel Factor and listen to Rush as he pops little blue babies between attacks on the Democratic party's hedonism. They only believe in strict moral values when it's somebody they don't like. This is political posturing and we are fools to let them use it to marginalize our 50% of the population.

Your three years of cheerleading for a president who doesn't deign to read newspapers delivered this victory and this mandate. The savages you helped elect will destroy our relationships abroad, our rights at home and your credibility forever. I hope you can live with yourself. Because I can't live with you any more. I've cancelled my subscription. I'd rather read a cereal box at breakfast than watch you bend over backwards to serve a right-wing master who screams "LIBERAL" like it's a dirty word every time you waver slightly from Karl Rove's talking points. (first comment:

The Editors have a Cafe Press store

Comments

[sol-se.livejournal.com]

With 8 out of 10 of you opposing the President, with your friends and classmates dying daily in a war you disapprove of, with your future being mortgaged to pay for rich old peoples' tax breaks, you somehow managed to sit on your asses and watch the Cartoon Network while aging homophobic hillbillies carried the day. You voted with the exact same anemic percentage that you did in 2000.

Sorry, but I have to defend my fellow "youth" (does early 20s still count?). Actually, young voters had a huge number increase in voter turn-out when compared to 2000, but the problem is that every age group this election had a huge increase, so the percentages all stayed the same.

As the night progressed, people began to talk half-seriously about secession, a red state / blue state split. The reasoning was this: We in blue states produce the vast majority of the wealth in this country and pay the most taxes, and you in the red states receive the majority of the money from those taxes while complaining about 'em. We in the blue states are the only ones who've been attacked by foreign terrorists, yet you in the red states are gung ho to fight a war in our name. We in the blue states produce the entertainment that you consume so greedily each day, while you in the red states show open disdain for us and our values. Blue state civilians are the actual victims and targets of the war on terror, while red state civilians are the ones standing behind us and yelling "Oh, yeah!? Bring it on!"

I had the same gut reaction. Intellectually, I believe that every vote should be equal when determining the President, but I couldn't help but feel that "red" states were electing someone whose foreign policy/agenda affects those of us in the "blue" states so much more. If there are ever any more terrorist attacks, they'll most likely be on the coasts (New York, DC, California), not the mid-west or deep south. And those places in more danger all voted Kerry. New York City was, what? 85% Kerry? I live right outside DC, so a large majority of people in my area work for the federal government & commute, and it was overwhelmingly Kerry/Democrat here (Democratic candidates won all local elections). It should say something that so many *government employees* did not vote for Bush. I loved the blue state secession image (of the states pushed together). However, now I'm imagining DC trying to secede...and I think my head's in danger of exploding.

(By the way, thank you for posting the information you do. I think the internet is so important for us to be able to know what's really going on outside (and inside, I suppose) our country. We certainly won't get that information from any network media.)

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

it makes me feel a little better to know that there are people out there reading the same news I am.