Supreme Court Rebukes Texas Again Over a Death Sentence

Note: For any reader who may have forgotten, President Bush was Governor of Texas prior to being President and was responsible for killing an extreme number of inmates, along with Mr. Gonzales, his nominee for Attorney General who said it was ok to ignore the Geneva Convention and torture the prisoners in Abu Graib. Bush thinks its OK to kill adults in prison and teenagers on a battlefied they should not be on.

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Supreme Court Rebukes Texas Again Over a Death Sentence
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - The Supreme Court overturned a Texas death sentence on Monday while delivering its latest rebuke to the way the death penalty is being handled by judges in the state, which has executed far more people than any other in the modern era of capital punishment.

The errors committed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in upholding the death sentence of LaRoyce L. Smith were so clear to a majority of the Supreme Court that the justices decided the case in the inmate's favor on the basis of the briefs, without hearing arguments.

Only Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented from the unsigned 12-page opinion. They did not write an opinion of their own.

Mr. Smith was convicted in 1991 of murdering a co-worker at a Taco Bell restaurant in Dallas where he had recently worked. He was 19. With an I.Q. of 78, he had reached the ninth grade in special education classes.

In the sentencing phase of his trial, the jury sentenced him to death under a procedure that the Texas Legislature was then in the process of amending to conform to Supreme Court rulings.

The justices said Monday that the Texas appeals court ignored problems the Supreme Court had already identified and that it should have known, when it affirmed the sentence last April, that the jury instructions made the death sentence unconstitutional.The state court "erroneously relied on a test we never countenanced and now have unequivocally rejected," the justices said.

In the last few years, the Supreme Court has overturned a number of death sentences in Texas while making evident its frustration with both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the federal court that hears habeas corpus petitions from Texas inmates.

With Texas having the second-biggest death row in the country, the Supreme Court's increasingly careful monitoring of death sentences in that state could have a significant effect on the overall death penalty picture.

Jordan Steiker, a law professor at the University of Texas who is Mr. Smith's lawyer, said although dozens of inmates might be freed from the Texas death row as a result of the ruling in Smith v. Texas, No. 04-5323, dozens of others in similar circumstances had been executed.

All were sentenced under a variant of jury instructions that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional in opinions that began in 1989 and ended on June 24 of this year, when the court overturned another death sentence in a case, Tennard v. Dretke.

Although the Tennard case had already been argued and a decision was imminent, the Texas appeals court rejected Mr. Smith's appeal without waiting for the Supreme Court's further clarification. The question the justices dealt with in all these cases was whether Texas juries had received instructions that permitted them to give adequate weight to any mitigating factors offered by the defendant to show why he should not be executed.

Under the Texas law that the Supreme Court approved when it permitted capital punishment to resume in 1976, a death sentence was mandatory if jurors answered yes to two questions: Was the killing deliberate, and would the defendant present a continuing danger to society?

There was no room for consideration of mitigating circumstances that the court found in subsequent decisions had to be considered by the jury if the defendant offered them.

After the court ruled in 1989 that Texas had to give jurors the chance to consider mitigating factors, the state added new instructions. Jurors who wanted to take mitigating factors into account should do so by answering no to one of the two questions, even if they believed that the correct answer was yes.

In a decision in 2001, the Supreme Court found this response constitutionally flawed. It then amplified that decision in the Tennard case in June.

Both in 2001 and in June, the justices said, telling jurors to answer the questions honestly and while at the same time instructing them to disregard their own answers placed the jurors in an untenable position, most likely preventing them from giving proper weight to the defendant's mitigating evidence.

The court said Monday that Mr. Smith's mitigating evidence of a low I.Q. and troubled family background - his father stole from the family to support a cocaine habit and was sent to prison - were substantial enough to require the jury's consideration.

Of the 943 executions in the country since 1976, Texas has carried out 335, more than the next six states combined. It has 457 people on death row, second to the 635 in California, which has conducted 10 executions.

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Former G.I.'s, Ordered to War, Fight Not to Go

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Former G.I.'s, Ordered to War, Fight Not to Go
By MONICA DAVEY

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops.

Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty.

They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000 other members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a corps of soldiers who are no longer on active duty but still are eligible for call-up.

In the last few months, the Army has sent notices to more than 4,000 former soldiers informing them that they must return to active duty, but more than 1,800 of them have already requested exemptions or delays, many of which are still being considered.

And, of about 2,500 who were due to arrive on military bases for refresher training by Nov. 7, 733 had not shown up.

Army officials say the call-up is proceeding at rates they anticipated, and they are trying to fill needed jobs with former soldiers as they did in the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

Still, the resistance puts further strain on a military that has summoned reserve troops in numbers not seen since World War II and forced thousands of soldiers in Iraq to postpone their departures when their enlistment obligations ended.

Tensions are flaring between the Army and some of its veterans, who say they are surprised and confused about their obligations and unsure where to turn.

"I consider myself a civilian," said Rick Howell, a major from Tuscaloosa, Ala., who said he thought he had left the Army behind in 1997 after more than a decade flying helicopters. "I've done my time. I've got a brand new baby and a wife, and I haven't touched the controls of an aircraft in seven years. I'm 47 years old. How could they be calling me? How could they even want me?"

Some former soldiers acknowledge that the Army has every right to call them back, but argue that their personal circumstances - illness, single parenthood, financial woes - make going overseas impossible now.

Others say they do not believe they are eligible to be returned to active duty because, they contend, they already finished the obligations they signed up for when they joined the military. A handful of such former soldiers, scattered across the country, have filed lawsuits making that claim in federal courts.

These former soldiers are not among the part-time soldiers - reservists and National Guard members - who receive paychecks and train on weekends, and who have been called up in large numbers over the last three years.

Instead, these are members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a pool of former soldiers seldom ordered back to work. Ordinarily, these former soldiers do not get military pay, nor do they train. They receive points toward a military retirement and an address form to update once a year.

When soldiers enlist, they typically agree to an eight-year commitment to the Army but often are allowed to end active duty sooner. Some of them join the Reserves or National Guard to complete their commitment; others finish their time in the Individual Ready Reserve.

For officers, the commitment does not expire unless they formally resign their commissions in writing, a detail some insist they did not know and were not told when they signed their contracts, although Army officials strongly dispute that.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, a spokeswoman for the Army, said people in the service are well aware of the provision. "We all know about it," Colonel Hart said.

She said problems with the call-ups of former soldiers have involved a relatively small number of people, are being worked out, and are hardly unique to this conflict. In the first gulf war, she said, more than 20,000 former soldiers were called up. With medical problems and no-shows, only about 14,400 were actually deployed, she said.

Most of the deployments in the first gulf war lasted 120 days, the Army said. The current call-ups are more likely to last a year.

Of those seeking exemptions now, the Army is studying each person's case individually, Colonel Hart said, and has no set rule on what allows a person to avoid deployment. Army officials are still weighing more than half of the requests. So far, only 3 percent of requests for exemptions have been turned down, while 45 percent have been approved.

As for the former soldiers who failed to appear at bases by their assigned dates, the Army is trying to reach them, one by one, to discuss their circumstances, Colonel Hart said. In late September, some Army officials suggested that they would pursue harsher punishments - declaring people AWOL and possibly pursuing military charges - but the Army has since taken a quieter, more conciliatory approach.

"These are challenging times in their lives," Colonel Hart said, adding that some former soldiers who failed to report might have moved and not received the Army's notice. "We're contacting them as best as possible."

For the rest, though, some questions linger over who really qualifies for the callback.

Colette Parrish said she burst into tears the evening that her husband, Todd, walked into their house in Cary, N.C., with a letter from the Army calling him back to service. "We had no idea this could happen," she said. "We hadn't been preparing for any of it because we thought it wasn't possible."

At first, Mr. Parrish, 31, said he was convinced that the letter was just an administrative error because he believed that his time in the Individual Ready Reserve had ended.

He had gone to college on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, then served four years as a field artillery officer. He said he resigned his commission after that, became an engineer, and still owed the Army four years in the Individual Ready Reserve to complete his total obligation.

To Mr. Parrish, who has filed a lawsuit against the Army in federal court in North Carolina, that obligation ended on Dec. 19, 2003. But the Army apparently does not agree, and says that it never accepted Mr. Parrish's resignation as an officer.

As the court fight has continued, Mr. Parrish's date to report to Fort Sill, Okla., has been pushed back, again and again, one month at a time. Instead of thinking about long-term plans, for his wife and their future family, he is living in 30-day increments.

He said he always looked back on his service years fondly, and with a deep sense of patriotism.

"I guess I feel disillusioned now," he said. "This isn't about being for or against the war. It's not about Democrats or Republicans. It's just a contract, and I don't think this is right. If they need more people, shouldn't they get them the right way? How many more like me are there?"

Mark Waple, Mr. Parrish's lawyer, said he had received calls from 30 other former soldiers in recent months, all of whom had heard of Mr. Parrish's case and had similar stories.

At least two other former soldiers have filed suit over the question.

In Hawaii, David Miyasato, a former enlisted soldier who served in the first gulf war, said he would never go AWOL; he would have gone to Iraq, he said, if need be.

But Mr. Miyasato also said that his eight-year commitment ended nearly a decade ago. After he received his letter calling him back to service, he said, he called the Army repeatedly to argue that he was not eligible. Finally, he said, with his date to report to a base in South Carolina just days away, he contacted a lawyer and filed suit on Nov. 5.

"This was actually my last resort," said Mr. Miyasato, a former truck driver and fuel hauler who said that, at 34, he led an entirely different life, with an 8-month-old daughter and a window-tinting company to run. "I had been calling around everywhere for help."

On Nov. 10, Mr. Miyasato said, he learned that the Army had rescinded his orders.

In New York, Jay Ferriola, a former captain in the Army, filed a suit saying he had resigned his officer's commission in June and no longer qualified for call-up in the Individual Ready Reserve. On Nov. 5, the Army rescinded his orders and honorably discharged him.

"This shows that the system works," Colonel Hart said. "If the soldiers bring their situations to our attention, we're going to do what's right."

Barry Slotnick, Mr. Ferriola's lawyer, said he wondered how many other soldiers might be in similar positions, but without the money, the contacts or the certainty to sue. Mr. Slotnick said he had received numerous calls from others since he filed Mr. Ferriola's case in late October.

"We might as well add another phone bank," Mr. Slotnick said. "What I can see is that there are many, many cases of people being called up that shouldn't have been. This is a backdoor draft. I also have to wonder how many are already in Iraq who shouldn't be there, who just didn't think to question it."

The Army's current plan is to fill 4,400 jobs through March from among 5,600 former soldiers ordered to duty. But an Army official said last month that more former soldiers, perhaps in similar numbers, might be called on later next year, as well.

For now, those being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan are being asked to handle a variety of support positions, including truck drivers and fuel and food suppliers.

Months ago, the Army said some of the former soldiers would be needed to play the French horn, the clarinet, the euphonium, the saxophone and the electric bass as part of the military's bands, but the notion drew criticism from members of Congress who questioned the need to order people to give up their civilian lives to play instruments. Colonel Hart said the Army has since filled the musician jobs with volunteers.

Before going to Iraq, former soldiers are receiving as many days of training as they need, an Army spokesman said. Some of the soldiers said they were worried, though, about the prospect and safety of trying to get up to speed in a few months.

"These guys like me are basically untrained civilians now," said Mr. Howell, the former helicopter test pilot. Mr. Howell said he left the Army years ago with an injured back, knee and elbow, leaving him wondering about his own physical condition.

"I don't even have a uniform anymore," he said. "But they don't have any more reserves left, so we're it. All they want is some bodies to go to Iraq, just someone to be there, to sit on the ground."

When he left the military in 1997 as part of a reduction in forces, Mr. Howell said, he saw a note in the "little print" in his annuity agreement about a future commitment. But he said he was told that his obligation to the Individual Ready Reserve would be brief and meant little anyway. "They said it was just a way of having me on the books," he said.

After that, Mr. Howell said, he jumped into the civilian world. He got married. He and his new wife began building a house. They struggled to have children.

In September, his first child, Clayton, was born. Just before that, his orders arrived.

"It does rip my heart out that these young men and women are over there, and there is part of me that wants to be with them," he said recently. "But I have responsibilities here now."

Mr. Howell said he had applied to the Army for an exemption but was recently turned down. If he loses his appeal, he will be given a new reporting date. His best hope, he said, is that his appeal is buried somewhere at the very bottom of a big stack of them.

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Microsoft Expands Operations in India

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Microsoft Expands Operations in India
By SARITHA RAI

BANGALORE, India, Nov. 15 - The Microsoft Corporation announced on Monday that it was significantly expanding its software development operations in India as it opened a new campus near Hyderabad, its second-largest campus after its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Microsoft's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, formally opened the 28-acre campus in the suburbs of Hyderabad, which is 250 miles north of Bangalore, a rival technology center. The campus thus far has only one building, with capacity for 1,600 workers.

Besides Mr. Ballmer, the chief executive of the Intel Corporation, Craig R. Barrett, is to arrive in India this week, highlighting the country's growing role as a source of skilled technical labor as well as a sizable market. Mr. Barrett is scheduled to visit Bangalore and Delhi this week.

The issue of outsourcing, the movement of work to cheaper labor markets like India, was an issue in this year's presidential elections in the United States. The Democratic contender, Senator John F. Kerry, had promised to get tough on companies that were moving jobs overseas.

Even with the re-election of President Bush, corporations like Microsoft are still wary of being tarred as the cause of job losses. Mr. Ballmer said that his company would expand in India, but that this would not reduce job opportunities at its operations in the United States.

"The nature of our business is such that there is enough growth potential which allows us to hire both at our Redmond headquarters and here in India," Mr. Ballmer said after the opening. Microsoft has nearly 450 programmers at its development center in Hyderabad. "Since we are looking for very high levels of skills, we are looking to hire in the hundreds," Mr. Ballmer said.

Last year, Microsoft said that it expected its development center to have 500 employees by 2005, but Mr. Ballmer said the company would exceed that target.

Microsoft is not alone. Global corporations like General Electric and American Express started by outsourcing low-end code-writing work to India, but taking advantage of India's pool of technical workers and lower labor costs, many multinational companies have recently stepped up outsourcing. Microsoft's own software development center in Hyderabad opened in 1998 with only 12 employees.

Increasingly, though, these corporations are outsourcing high-end technology work to India. Microsoft, for instance, outsources work, from call centers to advanced embedded software development, to India.

"Many corporations have super-, hyperaggressive outsourcing plans to India to meet their growing needs while keeping costs under check," said Chris Disher, the Chicago-based vice president and head of Booz Allen Hamilton's outsourcing advisory service.

While Microsoft's hiring plans are not huge, Mr. Disher said, its moves do send "an important signal about the competencies and innovation skills that are available in India."

Mr. Ballmer, who visited three Indian cities on Monday, signed major agreements with two of India's leading outsourcing companies, Infosys Technologies and Wipro in Bangalore. The deals will enable Infosys and Wipro to use Microsoft technologies to build software for their clients at more favorable terms. With Infosys, Mr. Ballmer announced an $8 million joint venture.

"These deals signify Indian outsourcing companies' growing clout in influencing technology decision in American boardrooms," said Sudip Nandy, chief strategy officer of Wipro.

Microsoft is one of Wipro's top five customers, and Wipro provides it with a range of services, from call centers to I.T. services to software development. The work for Microsoft employed 200 Wipro employees in March 2001; now it uses more than 5,000.

"I'm excited about what's going on here in India," Mr. Ballmer told reporters in Bangalore after signing the two deals.

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From Bad To Worse: Bush Chooses Rice To Replace Powell

As if things weren't bad enough, President Bush has nominated Condoleeza Rice, the know nothing do nothing lie to Congress so-called National Security Advisor. This is the same person who, like Bush, had no interest in and ignored all of the warnings and information leading up to 9/11/01. The USA is in deep trouble!

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Bush Orders CIA Purge

airamericaradio.com

Bush Orders CIA Purge

The CIA a hotbed of liberal dissidents? The White House thinks so and has ordered "the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden." New York Newsday quotes a former senior CIA official as saying that "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

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Before and After

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CIA

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Credibility

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And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins

The Free Press
freepress.org

Bob Fitrakis

And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins
November 10, 2004

Are the provisional ballots in Ohio being thrown out? A new rule for counting provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was implemented on Tuesday, November 9 at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon, according to election observer Victoria Lovegren.

The new ruling in Cuyahoga County mandates that provisional ballots in yellow packets must be “Rejected” if there is no “date of birth” on the packet. The Free Press obtained copies of the original “Provisional Verification Procedure” from Cuyahoga County which stated “Date of birth is not mandatory and should not reject a provisional ballot.” The original procedure required the voter’s name, address and a signature that matched the signature in the county’s database.

Lovegren described the clerks as “kind of disturbed” after the new ruling came down. She said that one of the clerks told her, “This is new. This just came down. They just changed it in the last thirty minutes.” According to Lovegren, 80 yellow-jacketed provisional ballots piled up in the hour and 45 minutes she observed. By Lovegren’s tally, three provisional ballots were rejected because the registered voters’ registration had been “cancelled.” The rest, she said, were being discarded because of no date of birth.

In 2000, an estimated 9% of Ohio’s provisional ballots were rejected and not counted, according to Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Many election observers are predicting the number will be much higher this year due to directives from Blackwell’s office.

An earlier analysis in the Free Press of the 155,428 unofficial provisional ballots recorded at the Secretary of State’s website found that a clear majority, 85,096, came from the 15 counties Kerry won. An additional 17,038 came from urban Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati, and Wood County, where Bush won with 53% and 53.5% respectively. Traditionally, Hamilton County’s provisional ballots are disproportionately cast in the African American majority wards of the central city and not in the affluent Republican-dominated suburbs. Thus, nearly two-thirds (65.7%), or 102,134, provisional ballots come from areas where the provisional ballots are likely to be pro-Kerry.

The official county-by-county board of elections’ final tally will begin on Saturday, November 13, the 11th day after the election and be completed by the 15th day. Following this canvassing period, 11-15 days after the election, an automatic recount would ensue if the gap between Kerry and Bush narrowed to less than one quarter of one percent, an estimated 16-19,000 votes, depending on how many are actually counted.

During the canvassing, Bush will no doubt lose 3,893 votes from the infamous ward 1B in Gahanna, Ohio where a “computer glitch” counted 4,258 votes for Bush from 638 voters. But it is unlikely that Kerry will draw within the needed automatic recount margin.

At the end of the canvass, candidates including Kerry have five days to apply for a paid recount, according to election attorney Donald McTigue. McTigue served as U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich’s campaign treasurer during the Democratic presidential primaries. The recount would be held within five days, and gives any candidate who applies, Kerry or others, the right to physically inspect the polling place materials including 92,672 ballots that failed to record a vote for President.

Under Ohio law, like Florida law in 2000, the recount can include these ballots, many of them punch cards with the notorious “hanging chads” and optically scanned ballots where marks may have gone slightly astray but a vote for president is clearly evident.

Overseas ballots postmarked by Election Day and late absentees just prior to the election also remain to be counted. During a recount, candidates may also inspect authorizations to vote, to make sure that the machine tallies are in line with the actual votes cast. They also may examine voter registration forms to argue for improperly rejected provisional ballots.

Local boards of elections may amend election results if obvious mistakes are pointed out. It will cost $10 per precinct in Ohio, or an estimated $120,000, to recount the whole state.

The official tallies are due at the Secretary of State’s Office by December 1. The Secretary of State must certify the election under Ohio law by December 3.

U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich complained in an article on CommonDreams.org that “Dirty tricks occurred across the state, including phony letters from Boards of Elections telling people that their registrations through some Democratic activist groups were invalid and that Kerry voters were to report on Wednesday because of massive voter turnout.”

The Free Press, in its November 7 article “None dare call it voter suppression or fraud,” pointed to possible voting anomalies in Miami County, Ohio where nearly 19,000 new ballots appear to have been added after 100% of the precincts had reported. The additional votes were at virtually the exact same ratio as earlier Bush votes, 65.8% for earlier votes and 65.77% for the latter. Kerry’s vote percentage was identical, despite the nearly 19,000 new votes at 33.92%.

Roger Kearney of Rhombus Technologies, Ltd. told the Free Press, “The report you saw the following morning at 9 a.m. was probably either the 60 or 80 percent report.” Kearney’s company is the reporting company for vote results for Miami County; he claims that the problem was not with his reporting and that the additional 19,000 votes came before 100% of the precincts were in.

As for the statistical anomaly that showed virtually identical ratios after the final 20-40% of the vote came in, Kearney offered no explanation and said he merely reports the results given to him.

Miami County reports its votes in 20 percent blocks instead of a continuous running tally. “I watch as Steve Quillen, the Board Director, put floppy disks that he had taken from the tabulating computer and put them into the reporting computer. He did this at about 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% of the count ... I looked at each of these reports. When the final one came out about midnight, we copied the report file onto my floppy disk. I came home and immediately posted it to the website. The page is still on our website exactly as it was shortly after midnight ... No one had access to this computer but me.”

Kearney told the Free Press that the software used at the Miami County Board of Elections for counting the votes is from Elections Systems & Software (ES&S). The strong Republican ties of ES&S are well established in the public record. (See for example, “Diebold’s political machine” at motherjones.com).

Such statistical anomalies may be examined if Kerry has the courage to demand a recount, or if other candidates who have legal standing to request a recount are curious. McTigue told a gathering of suburban Democrats that Kerry may recount eight counties of interest, and other candidates may recount the rest of Ohio.

Unless the opportunity is seized, more than 100,000 votes will likely go uncounted, and statistical anomalies and “computer glitches” will remain unexamined.

--
Bob Fitrakis is a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College. He has a Ph.D in Political Science and a J.D. from The Ohio State University Law School. He is the author of seven books, an investigative reporter, and Editor of the Columbus Free Press (freepress.org). He has won ten major investigative journalism awards including Best Coverage of Politics in Ohio from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. He served as an international election observer in the 1994 presidential elections in El Salvador and was the co-author and editor of the report to the United Nations. He served as legal advisor for eight polling locations on Columbus' Near East Side for the Election Protection Coalition.

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Green and Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount

From gp.org

News Release

GREEN & LIBERTARIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TO DEMAND OHIO RECOUNT

David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the 2004 presidential candidates for the Green and Libertarian parties, today [November 11, 2004] announced their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio.

“Due to widespread reports of irregularities in the Ohio voting process, we are compelled to demand a recount of the Ohio presidential vote. Voting is the heart of the democratic process in which we as a nation put our faith. When people stand in line for hours to exercise their right to vote, they need to know that all votes will be counted fairly and accurately. We must protect the rights of the people of Ohio, as well as all Americans, and stand up for the right to vote and the right for people’s votes to be counted. The integrity of the democratic process is at stake,” the two candidates said in a joint statement.

The candidates also demanded that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who chaired the Ohio Bush campaign, recuse himself from the recount process.

The Ohio presidential election was marred by numerous press and independent reports of voter intimidation, mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines and the targeted disenfranchisement of African American voters. A number of citizens’ groups and voting rights organizations are holding hearings this Saturday in Columbus, Ohio to investigate voting irregularities and voter suppression in the Ohio 2004 general election. The hearings will be held from 1-4 p.m. at the New Faith Baptist Church, 955 Oak Street. Voters, poll workers, journalists and voting experts are invited to testify. A second hearing will be held on Monday at a location TBA, from 6-9 p.m.

The Cobb and Badnarik campaigns are in the process of raising the required fee, estimated at $110,000, for filing for a complete recount. The campaigns are accepting contributions through their websites.

The Cobb-LaMarche website is http://www.votecobb.org.
The Badnarik-Campagna contribution page is https://badnarik.org.

The Cobb and Badnarik campaigns have displayed a level of cooperation and civility rarely found in electoral politics. The campaigns jointly participated in and/or sponsored a series of independent debates. Cobb and Badnarik were also simultaneously arrested in St. Louis protesting their exclusion from the restricted, two-party corporate-sponsored debates.

To see an investigative report by Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which asserts that the Ohio vote was improperly decided, see http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php.

For an article detailing a dozen ways in which the Ohio vote was potentially manipulated, see http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810.

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I swear: I'm on vacation (Keith Olbermann)

From http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
Countdown with Keith Olbermann

I swear: I'm on vacation (Keith Olbermann)

SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION— Golly, I’ve never been the subject of a conspiracy theory before.

Yet, there it is, flying around the Internet under the byline of a Peter Coyote: that when I attempted to break the “lock-down” of coverage of the voting irregularities story in the media during Friday night’s edition of Countdown, I was fired, and left the studio in the middle of the program.

Um, no, actually.

I’m on vacation— it’s been scheduled since August; I’ll be blogging in the interim; Countdown will continue to cover the story in my absence; I not only wasn’t fired for ‘mentioning’ the story - but we covered it five nights in a row; and, I’ll be back on television on the 22nd (earlier, if developments warrant).

But we can now trace how just a dollop of the truth can be subverted into an item available for purchase in the Tin Foil Hat District - and we have another reminder that what you read on the Web, no matter how much it might fit your beliefs, anxieties, or even other facts, might still resemble more a game of telephone than actual investigative reporting.

I’m reminded suddenly of the lyric from The Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime”: “Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?”

What happened was this. We end nearly every Friday show with a news quiz. Each week my colleague Monica Novotny asks me a series of questions sent in by viewers. If I get half or more correct, I win a “prize” - if not, I suffer a “punishment.” This edition’s prize was a week’s vacation. I feigned surprise, asked when it began, was told it began whenever I wanted, and promptly got up and literally ran off the set.

Two insider facts:

a) We planned that gag to tamp down any surprise or speculation if people tuned in Monday and didn’t see me (I assumed reactions would divide into three groups: ones from the left which assumed I’d been “silenced,” ones from the right which assumed I’d been “suspended,” and, the largest group by far, ones who couldn’t care less).

b) The rest of the show is live, but, for reasons of technical complexity, we always pre-tape the quiz in advance. The whole running-off-the-set gag was recorded at 7:45. Temporally speaking, my “mid-show firing” occurred before the newscast itself.

Thanks, though, to all who e-mailed fearing a reply “Olbermann? No Olbermann ever worked here.” The e-mail volume since the first blog last week, incidentally, is up to 27,000 as of 2 PM ET Sunday, and it continues to run at about 22:1 in favor, with the “ones” boiling down to messages like “get over it” and the cordial greeting from a woman in late middle age: “Shut the F up.” We do learn from this correspondence that not a lot of people like Ann Coulter, and that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is so infrequently read that the oxygen over there is being utterly wasted.

There is another fallacy in the Olbermann’s Been Disappeared story, and it’s the very idea that there is a “media lock-down” of coverage. Nobody can argue that the MSM has been vigorous here - nor, in television’s case, anything but largely dismissive - but you can ring that up much more to hauteur than to censorship.

On Friday, David Shuster, who has already done some excellent research at Hardblogger, did a piece on the mess for Hardball, and Chris followed up with a discussion with Joe Trippi and Susan Molinari. There was a cogent, reasoned, unexcited piece about the mechanics of possible tampering and/or machine failure on CNN’s “Next” yesterday, and Saturday alone there were serious news pieces in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake Tribune, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. NPR did a segment of its “On The Media” on the topic (with said blogger as the guest).

And today the New York Times continues its series of “Making Vote Counts” editorials with a pretty solid stance on the necessity of journalistic and governmental proof that the elections weren’t tampered with, nor the victims of Speak & Spell toys retro-fitted as electronic voting units. By way of contrast, though, the Houston Chronicle has an editorial so puerile that it may be the most naïve thing I’ve ever read that was actually written by a grown-up.

I suspect the coverage is going to go through the roof as the news spreads that Nader has gotten his recount in New Hampshire, and that the Greens and Libertarians are actually going to get their Ohio recount. When reporters discover what Jonathan Turley pointed out to us on Tuesday’s show, namely that 70% of Ohio’s votes were done with punch cards and as Florida proved in 2000, in court, a lot of those punch cards— as Jon put it— “turn over,” I suspect there will be long-form television on the process. As an aside: as of earlier today, the Green/Libs— should we just go ahead and call them the Glibs?— were at $118,000 towards their Ohio war-chest goal of $150,000. I’ve gotten a peck of e-mails about why neither party’s Website has details, and it turns out the site you want on this is VoteCobb.Org.

All that having been said, the most remarkable read of the day is probably the item buried on page A5 of The Washington Post. (Registration required but free). There, Charles Babington and Brian Faler take the wind out of the primary post-election grist for the yak-fests of radio and television: the overwhelming relevance of “Moral Values” to 2004’s presidential voters.

You will recall that the Exit Polling on November 2nd ranked the most important issues as follows:

1. Moral Values, 22%
2. Economy and Jobs, 20%
3. Terrorism, 19%
4. Iraq, 15%

The authors point out that those results came when pollsters offered voters a list of which issues factored most into their decision to vote. They note that last week, Pew Research went back and surveyed voters again, and took their temperatures in two ways— with a list (as was offered on election day), and without one (in other words, voters had to remember their issues; it ceased to be multiple choice). Those working off the checklist responded similarly to the election day exit pollees:

1. Moral Values, 27%
2. Iraq, 22%
3. Economy and Jobs, 21%
4. Terrorism, 14%

But the free-form Pew survey produced entirely different data. Given nothing to work with, simply asked to name the deciding factor in their vote, “moral values” shrunk back to human size:

1. Other, 31%
2. Iraq, 25%
3. Moral Values, 14%
4. Economy and Jobs, 12%
5. Terrorism, 9%

Babington and Faler point out that “other” included such gems as not liking Bush, not liking Kerry, honesty, and presumably “I was following instructions from Jon Stewart.”

Oh and by the way: how come the “Kerry’s winning” part of the election night exit polling is presumed to have been wrong, or tampered with, but the “Moral Values” part of the same polling is graded flawless, and marks the dawn of a new American century?

On Vaco but still reading your e-mails. Write to me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

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Comment: Write to Keith and encourage him to continue covering the post election examination of the ballots.

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'Apology for Bush win' website is a big hit

'Apology for Bush win' website is a big hit

Thousands of remorseful Americans say sorry to the world for president's victory

South China Morning Post
Monday, November 15, 2005

It started the day after the US presidential election with one student posting a picture of himself on the internet holding up a sign reading: "Sorry world (we tried) - half of America".

Within just a few days, the website www.sorryeverybody.com, set up by James Zetlen, had 27 million hits, he said.

The site features more than 2,200 pictures of contrite Americans holding up placards expressing their sorrow at the victory of George W. Bush. There are 1,000 more pictures waiting to be posted.

"It was mind-boggling the amount of emotion the website has triggered," said the 20-year-old neuroscience student at the University of Southern California.

Not all the emotional responses have been positive, however. Mr Zetlen's site for rueful Americans has spawned at least eight websites for people who say they are not at all sorry that Mr Bush beat Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Mr Zetlen said the reaction from outside the US has been overwhelmingly positive. "The international community is absolutely mortified at what has happened," he said.

About half of the more than 3,000 e-mails he received came from abroad. The worldwide reaction included responses from Germany, France, Italy, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Chile, Brazil, China and South Korea.

The German daily newspaper Der Spiegel wrote about the website and the French daily newspaper Liberation called the number of penitent people "impressive".

All the pictures share a common theme, asking forgiveness for the re-election of Mr Bush.

"Sorry everybody, the inmates are running the asylum. AGAIN! Please don't hate half of us."

"Dear World. We are so sorry! It makes no sense to us either."

One man's sign reads: "This one of the 55,902,001 Americans that voted against Mr Bush would like to apologise for the 59,422,689 idiots who did."

Several talk of leaving the United States. "We are so sorry that we are moving to your country." One man is holding up an SOS distress call, spelled out in Morse code. Another pictures a toddler wearing a T-shirt saying: "If I could vote, I'd vote against Bush." One picture shows the American eagle with the words: "Sorry everybody."

Some non-Americans have posted supportive photos and messages on the site. Stefan from Germany said: "On behalf of my country I accept your apology. I know you tried hard."

Mr Zetlen said he was surprised at the number of submissions and traffic the site attracted. The University of Southern California had to ask Mr Zetlen to take the site off their server because it was taking up 82 per cent of the traffic.

He now hosts the website privately, which he estimates will cost US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month. He has received almost as much in donations.

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Bush Wants Line-Item Veto to Be Revived

Bush Wants Line-Item Veto to Be Revived

(AP) - Six years after the Supreme Court took away the president's ability to veto specific parts of legislation, President Bush is asking Congress to bring back the line-item veto to let him make precision strikes against projects and tax provisions he doesn't like. At a news conference after his re-election, Bush said he wanted a line-item veto that "passed constitutional muster," explaining it would help him work with lawmakers "to make sure that we're able to maintain budget discipline."

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Commentary:
This statement, "to make sure that we're able to maintain budget discipline," coming from the President who has created the largest deficit in US history and who clearly has no clue about "budget discipline" is a very sad joke.

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Bush Moves to Privatize Social Security

Bush Moves to Privatize Social Security

(AP) - Fresh from re-election, President Bush is dusting off an ambitious proposal to overhaul Social Security, a controversial idea that had been shelved because of politics and the administration's focus on tax cuts and terrorism. Bush envisions a framework that would partially privatize Social Security with personal investment accounts, similar to 401(k) plans, that would be voluntary for younger workers.

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Commentary:
A big problem with this proposal is that the money that will be diverted from funding the Social Security fund will cause there to not be enough money to support those currently on or eventually to be dependent upon Social Security. An additional problem is that the government will dictate where these so-called personal investment accounts can be invested, both dictating what companies will control the funds (thus increasing the coffers of those companies) and what funds one can invest in. In other words, this is a very bad idea.

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Powell and Three Others Leaving Cabinet

Powell and Three Others Leaving Cabinet

(AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell and three other Cabinet members have resigned, it was disclosed Monday, escalating the shake-up of President Bush's second-term team. Senior administration officials said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was most likely to succeed Powell. "I believe that now that the election is over, the time has come for me to step down," Powell wrote. The White House released the letter Powell sent to the president on Friday as well as those written by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, confirming their departures.

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Beyond red and blue (again)

The Boston Globe
Beyond red and blue (again)

By Robert David Sullivan | November 14, 2004

GEORGE W. BUSH can now claim a clear victory in the popular vote for president, thanks in part to people in and around the city of New York. But the president got no reelection mandate from the citizens of Savannah, Ga.

Wait a minute! Doesn't the familiar red-and-blue map prove that the Northeast is indefatigably Democratic and the South irrevocably Republican? Well, when you go beyond red and blue, things in the electorate get more complicated.

Last year, under the auspices of CommonWealth magazine, I devised a map that divided the United States into 10 distinct political regions, based on returns from national and state elections, demographic data from the US Census, and certain geographical features. These regions -- which each cast about 10.5 million votes in 2000 -- cut across state lines and even leapfrog them entirely (as with Upper Coasts, which includes most of New England as well as the coastal West from San Francisco up to the Canadian border). In many cases, they divide battleground states into two or three different regions, which explains why those states "swing."Last year, I predicted that if Bush or the Democratic nominee carried a sixth region, while holding on to the five that he or his party's nominee won in 2000, he would have a clear (i.e., litigation-free) win. Bush accomplished this feat, but not by much, winning the Big River region with a margin of 50.1 percent to 49.0 percent. Big River, which follows the Mississippi from northern Minnesota to Memphis, includes most of three states (Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) that were showered with television ads and candidate appearances this fall. Bush and John Kerry were separated by less than one percentage point in only about 65 of the 3,140 counties nationwide, and the greatest number were in Big River.

When Bush spoke after the election of having "the will of the people at my back," he was more likely referring to the 3.5 million-vote advantage he won in the popular tally than to his narrow victory in the Electoral College. Across the country, voter turnout was so high that Bush and Kerry each increased his party's raw vote in every region. The higher turnout benefited Bush in eight of them, including Northeast Corridor -- the most Democratic region in the country four years ago. The Democratic margin in this region, which includes such major cities as New York and Philadelphia, shrank from 2.9 million in the last presidential election to 2.2 million votes this time.

Kerry won the battle for new votes in only two regions, Upper Coasts (his home base, where he won 60.3 percent) and Great Lakes (which includes Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, and which he won with 56.7 percent). But it's worth repeating that Kerry still beat Bush in two other regions -- and that he didn't actually lose votes in any region. Compared with 2000, Bush's win was decisive, but this map shows that the Republican Party can hardly rest easy in 2008.

The red-and-blue map didn't change much from 2000 to 2004, but our 10 regions reveal some significant shifts. With 61.4 percent of its vote cast for Bush, Appalachia -- which has the poorest and most rural population in the United States, and was a bedrock region for Democratic nominees from Andrew Jackson to Harry Truman -- became the most Republican region in the country for the first time since at least 1976 (as far back as our county-level data go), and probably for the first time in American history. In almost all of the states in this region, Bush carried rural counties that haven't voted Republican since the Nixon landslide of 1972, and even stuck with Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984. Meanwhile, the most Republican region of 2000, the Gulf Coast-oriented Southern Comfort, was a close second this time (61.3 percent for Bush), and it was a key factor in keeping Florida in Bush's column.

But the growing Republican strength in Appalachia and Southern Comfort obscures the fact that Southern Lowlands, which lies in between, remains closely divided between the two parties. While Bush once again won Southern Lowlands (with 51.5 percent of the vote), Kerry increased Democratic margins in many parts of the region: northern Virginia; most of the major cities of North Carolina; and not only Atlanta but two adjoining suburban counties. He also pulled the county that includes Savannah, Ga., into the Democratic column.

This year Upper Coasts was the most Democratic region in the country -- again, probably for the first time in US history. If its representation in Congress is any indication, Upper Coasts is the most liberal region in the country on social and environmental issues; many Democratic Party strategists now deem it essential not to nominate someone from this region in 2008. Kerry's strength in his home region did help him capture New Hampshire, and four years ago that state's electoral votes would have been enough to put Gore in the White House. But the redistribution of electoral votes to fast-growing Southern and Western states meant that New Hampshire wouldn't have been enough of a boost this time even if Kerry had held onto the Gore states of Iowa and New Mexico.

The next most Democratic region was Northeast Corridor, but it was hardly something for Kerry to brag about. It was here that Bush enjoyed his biggest surge in the popular vote percentages, turning a 62-35 loss into a less lopsided 59-40. Nationally, four of the five counties with the biggest GOP gains, in raw votes, were those that make up Long Island. Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties all went for Kerry, but his margin there was more than 250,000 votes short of Gore's in 2000. At the same time, Staten Island flipped from 57 percent for Gore to a 50 percent win for Bush, while New Jersey's Ocean County (which has a high retiree population) went from a 49 percent plurality for Bush to a 60 percent landslide.

Despite these shifts, the "must-win" regions for each party will probably be the same in 2008 as they were in 2004 -- and 2000. For example, it's hard to imagine the Democrats winning without taking back the Big River region -- that is, holding on to enough rural and small-town votes to keep Minnesota and Wisconsin, win back Iowa, and at least make the Republicans fight for Arkansas and Missouri.As for the Republicans, the question may be whether they can go any farther by revving up their conservative, mostly rural base in Appalachia and the Farm Belt (which Bush won with 59 percent). It's possible that they'll need to look toward more populous counties with culturally conservative Catholic and blue-collar workers -- those old "Reagan Democrats."

This year in Pennsylvania, Bush did flip two counties in the corridor between Pittsburgh and Erie; if the GOP is maxed out in Appalachia, those are the kinds of places that could switch the state's electoral votes. And in Michigan, Bush did well in the most rural parts of the Farm Belt, but he would have had to bulk up his showings in the region's urban counties to carry the state.The Republicans must also keep an eye on the Southwest. In winning the Sagebrush region by a bigger margin (60.6 percent) than the Democrats won the more heavily Hispanic and urban El Norte (54.9 percent), the GOP helped to snatch New Mexico and hold onto Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. But the population is growing so rapidly in those states that the Republicans can't be sure of that equation holding for four more years.

The 10 Regions approach also puts the perplexing question of what the Democratic Party needs to do about the South in a different light. Right now, common wisdom is that the party must reduce the Republican margin in Appalachia by somehow neutralizing the "guns, God, and gays" issues that have doomed Democrats in rural areas. But it could be just as important to build on the party's foundation in Southern Lowlands, which is more urban, better-educated, and more heavily minority than the other Southern regions (indeed, Southern Lowlands has the highest percentage of blacks in the population, nearly 28 percent, of any of our 10 regions).

This choice isn't obvious on the red-and-blue map, which simply screams "Look South" or "Go West" to the Democratic party. But it would be foolish to assume there's only one way to court the South -- just as it would be short-sighted for the Republicans to believe that voters on the West Coast and in the Maine-to-Minnesota corner of America move in lockstep. If the parties want to understand the American electorate in 2008, they're going to have to go beyond red and blue.

Robert David Sullivan is an associate editor of CommonWealth, a quarterly journal published by MassINC, a Boston-based nonpartisan think tank. More on the 10 Regions of US Politics can be found at www.massinc.org.

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GOP to press for gay-marriage ban

The Boston Globe
GOP to press for gay-marriage ban
Democrats facing reelection pressure

By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff | November 14, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Emboldened by the 11-state sweep of bans on same-sex marriage Nov. 2, conservative leaders intend to fuel the debate further when they return with an expanded majority to the next Congress, and press vulnerable Democrats into an awkward corner over the divisive issue.

There is little chance a federal constitutional amendment will pass the House or Senate with the necessary two-thirds' majority, but advocates expect it to be reintroduced in both chambers, prompting a vote that would placate conservatives and could then be used against Democrats up for reelection in 2006.

With as many as 15 states poised to introduce their own same-sex marriage bans in the next two years, following a campaign that proved the political potency of the issue, Republicans see it as one of their most powerful issues heading into the 109th Congress.

Asked whether politicians should vote against same-sex marriage bans at their peril, senior White House adviser Karl Rove told reporters last week, "I think people would be well-advised to pay attention to what the American people are saying. This is an issue on which there is a broad consensus."

Gay-rights advocates strongly disagree and cite polling data that show many voters support civil unions and oppose a step as drastic as a constitutional amendment, preferring to leave decisions about marriage to the states.

But those who have been promoting same-sex marriage said they cannot help being chastened by the Nov. 2 votes, wary they may have pushed too far too fast. Many are concerned about the political reverberations for Democrats and moderate Republicans who have typically been on their side.

"We have to win in the legislatures and the voting booths; otherwise, this will be seen as a movement that is forcing itself on the American people," said Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. On that score, and on winning popular support for its cause, he said, "I don't think we have done a great job."

At the state level, ban opponents are considering introducing their own ballot initiatives, stopping short of same-sex marriage but ensuring domestic-partner provisions, such as healthcare benefits and visitation rights.

At the federal level, where a constitutional ban failed in both houses of Congress last year, both sides are floating a number of proposals in the hope of working toward a national consensus on same-sex marriage. One proposal, backed by groups opposing same-sex marriage, would bar the federal courts from hearing cases that would extend gay marriage beyond states that allow it.

But the constitutional amendment, as unlikely as it is to pass, remains the ground on which conservatives hope to build political pressure on Democrats -- and to openly reward the conservative activists who believe they helped deliver the election to Bush by turning out their supporters.

In the Senate, at least five Democrats are expected to face close races in the next election, putting them in the crosshairs of Republican strategy every time there is a vote on same-sex marriage. One of them, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, represents a state that voted to ban same-sex marriage Nov. 2.

Stabenow voted with the majority last summer, when the Senate rejected the federal constitutional ban; 50 senators voted against it, 48 senators voted for it, and two did not vote.

Three of the other vulnerable Democrats facing reelection -- Senators Maria Cantwell of Washington, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, and Bill Nelson of Florida -- won within a two-percentage-point margin in their last races and are in presidential battlegrounds. They, too, voted against the ban on same-sex marriage ban last July, making them appealing GOP targets. Another endangered Democratic incumbent, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voted yes on the ban.

"Legislators in those states are . . . going to be hard-pressed not to be supportive," said Paul Weyrich, CEO of the conservative Free Congress Foundation. "If under those conditions legislators continue to vote against the amendment, I think there will be some political translation."

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, the leading opponent of same-sex marriage, warned that opponents can either switch their votes or continue to see same-sex marriage wielded against them in elections to come.

Sprigg said he expects to use same-sex marriage as a political wedge until it is blocked at the federal level. "An easy way for Democrats in Congress to take this issue off the table is simply to vote in favor of it," he said, referring to the constitutional ban.

Chances of a mass reversal in the Democratic ranks are slim to none, Democratic strategist David Axelrod said. "I don't think if we opposed a constitutional amendment before, we should support it now," Axelrod said. "That would be craven and stupid." But, he conceded, the 11-state sweep did signal a greater truth about the dilemma facing his party. "There is a more meaningful question about values that needs to be addressed."

But certain moderate Republicans who voted against the ban could be in trouble as well, especially Senators Lincoln D. Chafee of Rhode Island and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, both facing reelection in the next cycle. Both, according to advocates on both sides, are in danger of primary challenges from conservative Republicans.

The risk for conservatives is that Chafee and Snowe represent states that often lean to the Democrats. If either were defeated in the Republican primary, the winner would risk losing the seat to a candidate more liberal than Chafee or Snowe.

Opponents of the ban, as well as gay-rights advocates, said Republicans appear increasingly in danger of overreaching on the issue, putting their own majority in jeopardy if they appear too zealous to pass a measure that lacks even a 51-vote margin in the Senate, let alone the 67 votes required for a constitutional amendment.

Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, a leading voice on conservative cultural issues who is planning his next steps about same-sex marriage on Capitol Hill, is "wildly out of step with where his state is," said Christopher R. Barron, political director of the Log Cabin Republicans.

Pennsylvania backed Democrat John F. Kerry over President Bush.

If the Nov. 2 vote unsettled Democrats anywhere, it was in Michigan and Oregon, which supported Kerry and voted to ban same-sex marriage at the same time. Rove and other Bush strategists have cited those votes as evidence the ballot measures reflect a wider national sentiment against same-sex marriage, backed even by people who oppose Bush.

"In states like Arkansas and Ohio, where it was on the ballot, Bush won, and in states like Oregon and Michigan, where it was on the ballot, it won by significant margins, and we lost," Rove said. "I do think it was part and parcel of a broader fabric where this year moral values ranked higher than they have traditionally."

Many supporters believe that, as a civil rights issue, same-sex marriage is not like taxes or healthcare.

"It's like any other civil rights progress we've had in this country," said Representative James P. McGovern, a Worcester Democrat. "Maybe it's unrealistic to expect things to change overnight, but . . . I think the president and Karl Rove and all those others who are demagoguing this issue are on the wrong side of history."

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The Arafat Voids

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

The Arafat Voids
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The day after Yasir Arafat died, USA Today carried a big, bold headline that caught my eye. It said: "Arafat Dies, Leaves Void."

All I could think of when reading that headline was its double meaning. Yasir Arafat left a void of leadership, with no formal successor. But he also left a void of achievement. And it is that second void that really matters, considering that he led the Palestinian movement for some 40 years.

You will pardon me if I don't join in the insipid chorus about how Arafat's great achievement was the way he represented the "aspirations" for statehood of the Palestinian people and, through terrorism and resistance, put the Palestinian cause on the world map.

Excuse me, but Yasir Arafat put the Palestinian cause on the world map in 1974, when he was invited to address the U.N. General Assembly. What did he do with all that attention after that? Very little. There is a message in his life and his legacy for every world leader: If all you do is express the aspirations, but never produce the reality, then history will judge you very harshly. And any honest history of Yasir Arafat will judge him on his voids, not his visions.

Will we now see the emergence of a Palestinian leadership - a broad coalition from Hamas to Fatah - ready to take the collective decision to really reconcile with the Jews that Arafat was not ready to make on his own?

Will Arab leaders, like Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who put forth a peace plan, be ready to really help the Palestinians make the tough decisions by giving them Arab cover? Or will we simply have another generation of expressive politics by Arab leaders, who love the Palestinian cause but not the Palestinian people?

Ariel Sharon seems to have already started to learn some of the lessons of Arafat's life. Mr. Sharon was asked recently what made him change his mind, and risk his own life and political career, to undertake a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza after so many years opposing such a move. His answer: There were things he could see "from here" that he couldn't see "from there."

In other words, sitting in the chair of the prime minister, he could suddenly see the long-term interests of the Israeli people in a different way.

"Sharon has started to give up his popularity among his own constituency, because he realizes that the welfare of the Israeli people, as a whole, requires decisions that are unpopular but unavoidable," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. But Sharon cannot stop just with Gaza. He's got a lot more popularity to give up with his old constituency if we're going to see a deal on the West Bank.

Finally, what about President Bush? When it comes to the Arab-Israel question, he's had a little bit of Arafat disease himself. He's given some of the best speeches of any president on the Arab-Israel issue and delivered the most pathetic diplomacy I have ever seen.

This divide reflects the paralyzing split in his administration between those who understand that America will never win the war of ideas in the Middle East without working seriously on the most emotional issue in Arab political life - the Palestine question - and those, like the vice president and secretary of defense, who think the whole issue is overrated. The first group are right, the second are wrong. The president needs to choose.

If only President Bush called in Colin Powell and said: "Colin, neither of us have much to show by way of diplomacy for the last four years. I want you to get on an airplane and go out to the Middle East. I want you to sit down with Israelis and Palestinians and forge a framework for a secure Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and progress toward a secure peace in the West Bank, and I don't want you to come back home until you've got that. Only this time I will stand with you.

"As long as you're out there, I will not let Rummy or Cheney fire any more arrows into your back. So get going. It's time for you to stop sulking over at Foggy Bottom and time for me to make a psychological breakthrough with the Arab world that can also help us succeed in Iraq - by making it easier for Arabs and Muslims to stand with us. I don't want to see you back here until you've put our words into deeds."

Yasir Arafat preferred to die, beloved by all his people, in a Paris military hospital - rather than sacrifice his popularity and maybe his life so that the majority of his people could live and die at home. Will Ariel Sharon, George Bush and the Arab and Palestinian leaders now follow his model and play to the crowds, or play to history?

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Slapping the Other Cheek

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

Slapping the Other Cheek
By MAUREEN DOWD

You'd think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek," "good will toward men," "blessed be the peacemakers" and "judge not lest you be judged."

Yet somehow I'm not getting a peace, charity, tolerance and forgiveness vibe from the conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office.

I'm getting more the feel of a vengeful mob - revved up by rectitude - running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels.

One fiery Southern senator actually accused a nice Catholic columnist of having horns coming up out of her head!

Bob Jones III, president of the fundamentalist college of the same name, has written a letter to the president telling him that "Christ has allowed you to be his servant" so he could "leave an imprint for righteousness," by appointing conservative judges and approving legislation "defined by biblical norm."

"In your re-election, God has graciously granted America - though she doesn't deserve it - a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," Mr. Jones wrote. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ." Way harsh.

The Christian avengers and inquisitors, hearts hard as marble, are chasing poor 74-year-old Arlen Specter through the Capitol's marble halls, determined to flagellate him and deny him his cherished goal of taking over the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Not only are they irate at his fairly innocuous comment after the election that anti-Roe v. Wade judges would have a hard time getting through the Senate. They are also full of bloodthirsty feelings of revenge against the senator for championing stem cell research and for voting against Robert Bork - who denounces Mr. Specter as "a bit shifty" - 17 years ago.

"He is a problem, and he must be derailed," Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, told George Stephanopoulos.

Sounding more like the head of a mob family than a ministry, Dr. Dobson told Mr. Stephanopoulos about a warning he issued a White House staffer after the election that the president and Republicans had better deliver on issues like abortion, gay marriage and conservative judges or "I believe they'll pay a price in the next election."

Certainly Mr. Specter has done his part for the conservative cause. He accused Anita Hill of "flat-out perjury" for a minor inconsistency in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, that good Christian jurist who once had a taste for porn films.

Some in the White House thought of giving Mr. Specter the post and then keeping him on a short leash. But the power puritans have no mercy. They say he's a mealy-mouthed impediment to the crusade of evangelicals and conservative Catholic bishops - who delivered their vote with ruthless efficacy - to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Dr. Dobson about his comment to The Daily Oklahoman that "Patrick Leahy is a 'God's people-hater.' I don't know if he hates God, but he hates God's people," noting that it was not a particularly Christian thing to say about the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. (Especially after that vulgar un-Christian thing Dick Cheney spat at Mr. Leahy last summer.)

"George," Dr. Dobson haughtily snapped back, "do you think you ought to lecture me on what a Christian is all about?" Why not? The TV host is the son of a Greek Orthodox priest.

Acting as though Mr. Bush's decisions should be taken on faith, John Ashcroft lashed into judges for not giving Mr. Bush unbridled power in his war against terror.

Speaking Friday before an adulatory Federalist Society, a group of conservative lawyers, Mr. Ashcroft echoed remarks he made to the Senate soon after 9/11 arguing that objecting to the president's antiterror proposals could give "ammunition to America's enemies."

He asserted that judges who interfere in or second guess the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war can jeopardize the "very security of our nation in a time of war."

And since the president has no end in sight to his war on terror, that makes him infallible ad infini- tum?

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Saving 'Saving Private Ryan'

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

Saving 'Saving Private Ryan'

No one ever accused broadcast executives of being profiles in courage. But the pre-emptive timidity of a score of them was a sorry spectacle last Thursday when they decided not to show "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day because they were afraid of the Federal Communications Commission. Station executives were openly fearful that the movie's realism in depicting the carnage and vulgarity of war might offend that newly righteous bureaucracy, whose blue nose was bent out of shape by the flash of Janet Jackson's breast during the last Super Bowl and, later, by Bono's casual airing of an obscenity assuredly in use among soldiers in Iraq.

The incident might seem minor - the vast majority of ABC network stations chose to run the film - except that the executives' timorousness is a sign of the effects of the government's growing willingness to intrude excessively into American culture. Before the Janet Jackson and Bono episodes, the F.C.C. took the position that context mattered - unscripted profanity at a public event like a music awards program or accidental glimpses of flesh would be excused, while deliberate and regular abuse of the public airwaves would not.

"Saving Private Ryan" was shown without the F.C.C.'s objection on network television the past two years. But the agency's shifting and arbitrary standards left executives at stations in Dallas, Atlanta and dozens of other cities wondering what the rules are and fearing for their licenses.

Pressure groups and organized campaigns complaining in the name of public morality have been a constant in the nation's political culture since the witch trials of Salem. Government officials should resist the temptation of joining the fray on either side. Some stations asked the F.C.C. to formally approve the airing of "Saving Private Ryan," and the agency properly resisted becoming an overt censor. Now the F.C.C. should move the standard back to where it was - a position of common sense.

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About Those Election Results

The NY Times is finally mentioning the issue, but is still clearly in denial about the widespread problems.

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

About Those Election Results

There have been a flood of reports, rumors and theories over the last 12 days about problems with the presidential election. The blogosphere, in particular, has been full of questions: Why did electronic voting machines in Ohio add nearly 4,000 phantom votes for President Bush, and why did machines in Florida mysteriously start to count backward? Why did the official vote totals for Ohio's largest county seem to suggest that there were more votes cast than registered voters? Why did election officials in yet another part of Ohio lock down the building where votes were being counted, turning away the press and public?

Defenders of the system have been quick to dismiss questions like these as the work of "conspiracy theorists," but that misses the point. Until our election system is improved - with better mechanics and greater transparency - we cannot expect voters to have full confidence in the announced results.

Electronic voting proved to be, as critics warned, a problem. There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale. But this country should have elections in which the public has no reason to worry whether every vote was counted properly, and we're still not there. In Franklin County, Ohio, one precinct reported nearly 4,000 votes for President Bush, although the precinct had fewer than 800 voters. In Broward County, Florida election officials noticed that when the absentee ballots were being tabulated, the vote totals began to go down instead of up. Voters in several states reported that when they selected John Kerry, it turned into a vote for President Bush.

These problems were all detected and fixed, but there is no way of knowing how many other machine malfunctions did not come to light, since most machines do not have a reliable way of double-checking for errors. When a precinct mistakenly adds nearly 4,000 votes to a candidate's total, it is likely to be noticed, but smaller inaccuracies may not be. There is also no way to be sure that the nightmare scenario of electronic voting critics did not occur: votes surreptitiously shifted from one candidate to another inside the machines, by secret software.

It's important to make it clear that there is no evidence such a thing happened, but there will be concern and conspiracy theories until all software used in elections is made public. Voters who use electronic machines are entitled to a voter-verified paper trail, which Nevadans got this year, so they can be sure their votes were accurately recorded.

The outrageous decision by Warren County, Ohio, to lock down the building where votes were being counted is an extreme example of another serious problem with the elections: a lack of transparency. In some states, reporters are barred from polling places. The wild rumors about Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where the official results appeared to include an extra 90,000 votes, were a result of its bizarrely complicated method of posting election results, which is different in even- and odd-numbered years. The nation needs to develop an election culture in which officials in every part of the country automatically keep things as open - and as simple - as humanly possible.

Besides election equipment that is easy to check for error, the strongest defense against conspiracy theorists is election officials who act with openness and integrity. Here, too, the current system is at fault. Ohio and Florida, two of the key states in the election, have highly partisan secretaries of state who favored the Republicans all year in their rulings. If we want the voters to trust the umpires, we need umpires who don't take sides.

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The Political Conversion of New York's Evangelicals

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

The Political Conversion of New York's Evangelicals
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

The signs are all around. Storefront churches dot the commercial landscapes of the Bronx and Queens. Twice as many churchgoers - about 15,000 - pray weekly at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, compared with five years ago. Some 200,000 New Yorkers tune in daily to Radio Vision Cristiana, an AM radio station. And last March, thousands of evangelicals gathered on the steps of the State Supreme Court in the Bronx to protest the idea of same-sex marriage.

Evangelism is flourishing not just in the red states of the nation's heartland, but in the urban, liberal stronghold of New York City, where thousands of evangelical churches are anchored in working-class neighborhoods. Whether it will evolve into a local political force, as it has nationally, remains an open question. But a range of interviews with pastors, congregants and religious experts suggests that a new debate - and perhaps a political conversion - is taking place in parts of the city's minority neighborhoods, swaths that Democrats have long claimed as their own.

It is a conversion that prompted Jeanmarie Salazar, a Puerto Rican mother of four in the Bronx, to vote for President Bush even though his economic policies troubled her. And a conversion that caused Harold Thompson, an African-American from Flatbush who lived through the civil rights movement, to part with a lifetime of voting Democratic, citing the "immorality that is destroying our country."

Both Ms. Salazar and Mr. Thompson belong to evangelical churches whose leaders have spread a single but potent message: Faith trumps everything else, even traditional party alignments.

"They're beginning to think about the social transformation of New York City," said Tony Carnes, a sociologist of religion at Columbia University.

Precisely determining the number of people who consider themselves members of evangelical churches or movements is difficult. Mr. Carnes said that he conducted a census of the city's evangelical churches and estimated that 1.5 million New Yorkers attend them. A separate study, conducted in 2000 by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, put the number of evangelical New Yorkers closer to 1 million, said Vivian Klaff, a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware who analyzed the study's data.

If a fully accurate count of evangelicals in the city is difficult to achieve, it is even harder, at the moment, to define the voting patterns of evangelicals. But the number of Protestant New Yorkers who cast ballots for a Republican president more than doubled in the last four years, to nearly a quarter of those surveyed at polling sites by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. And a recent study by Mr. Carnes suggested that a majority of evangelical church leaders in the city were breaking with tradition and voting Republican: of 1,006 ordained ministers surveyed last year, Mr. Carnes found, 55 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Bush.

About 30 percent of the ministers were black and 30 percent Hispanic, reflecting the demographic breakdown of the religious group, Mr. Carnes said.

"It's a significant development," said Randall Barnes, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College. But, he added, the Republican Party in New York City is "still a decade or two away from making significant inroads into that community."

Any measuring of the political clout of evangelicals in the city, now or in the future, is complicated by the fact that a sizable portion of them are from other countries, and some are not eligible to vote, said Mr. Carnes, who conducted his study with a team of pollsters at the International Research Institute on Values Changes, an independent research group in New York City. The study was financed by the Christian Cultural Center, a charismatic evangelical church.

But the results indicated a shift to the right among voting evangelicals. In a separate study he did in 1997, Mr. Carnes said, only 22 percent of the city's evangelical church leaders surveyed identified themselves as "politically conservative."

In the aftermath of the election, an increasingly complex image has emerged of the Christian electorate - one that is not entirely captured under the religious right rubric. In New York City, there are the evangelicals who consider themselves liberal and voted for Kerry but find that they are missing from the mainstream image of their faith.

But then there are those, like Mr. Thompson, who broke with tradition for the first time to vote Republican.

And while many New Yorkers have loudly voiced their sense of alienation from the faith-based vote of the red states, the city's evangelicals, in numerous interviews, said they felt a similar invisibility in the Democratic stronghold they call home.

"You feel like you're alone," said Abraham Lopez, 19, as he stood on a recent Saturday outside the Assemblies of United Christian Churches on Third Avenue in the South Bronx.

Perhaps no single event better captures the group's presence than a same-sex marriage protest on March 14 in the South Bronx.

Led by State Senator Rubén Diaz, 150 Bronx churches closed for the day. They sent their congregants to the steps of the State Supreme Court on the Grand Concourse where thousands of people - estimated at 8,000 by Mr. Carnes, who used two methods to count the crowd - filled the streets. A large banner hung between two pillars, reading, "No to Homosexual Marriage."

"We said, 'Sunday nobody goes to church; we'll go to the street,' " said Mr. Diaz, one of the most noted of the city's Hispanic evangelicals. Mr. Diaz, whose South Bronx district includes about 250,000 people, is both an evangelical pastor and a registered Democrat.

"I am a conservative Democrat," Mr. Diaz, 61, said in a telephone interview from Puerto Rico. "When it comes to education, when it comes to health, when it comes to jobs, I'm a Democrat. When it comes to moral issues - marriage, abortion - I'm not a Democrat."

Mr. Diaz has a history of stirring controversy with his conservative stands on same-sex marriage and abortion. In 1994, after he organized a voter drive for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani , Mr. Diaz, then a city councilman, vocally criticized the Gay and Lesbian Olympic Games. Mr. Giuliani then issued a statement distancing himself from Mr. Diaz's views. In 2003, Mr. Diaz filed a lawsuit, which is still pending, against the city over the opening of a small public school for gay students. He defends his positions unflinchingly, saying things like he "cannot wait" for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and eagerly admitting that gay rights activists have picketed his church.

Several political strategists who have worked with Republicans and Democrats said that no one with Mr. Diaz's conservative views would be able to win a citywide or statewide office. But in local city politics, like races for the State Assembly and the City Council, the faith-driven agenda might have greater impact.

"In a Democratic primary where you take the party affiliation question out of play, then I think it could become a more powerful influence," said Kieran Mahoney, a Republican political strategist whose clients have included Gov. George E. Pataki.

Pedro Espada Jr., who lost to Mr. Diaz in the primary this year, said he had no doubt that the evangelical movement could sway local politics. Mr. Espada, who was ousted from his Senate seat by Mr. Diaz in 2002, tried to reach out to evangelical voters by visiting Bronx churches.

"They would say, 'Espada, we would vote for you but you are not a Christian,' " Mr. Espada said. But other politicians were more skeptical that the group's members would be driven by religion when they entered the voting booth.

Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president who is running for mayor, said, "Issues of faith and family matter, but so do issues of how we support our families, equal access and opportunity, housing, education, health care, jobs."

While Hispanics and African Americans in New York City have traditionally voted Democratic, those who attend evangelical churches may feel a different pull.

José Casanova, a professor of sociology who specializes in religion and politics at New School University and has studied evangelicals around the world, said that even if they are poor, they tend to vote for conservative candidates.

"They do not so much identify with their economic position right now, but with the one they ought to have with the help of God," he said. "They are very conservative and pro-market and do not expect the government to help them."

It is not clear how pervasive this view has been in New York City's evangelical community. But the Rev. A. R. Bernard has made a point of preaching economic independence and social conservatism at the Christian Cultural Center, where more than 90 percent of congregants are African Americans or black immigrants.

"We are teaching them self-reliance," Mr. Bernard said. "We have a whole new generation of people of color who have grown up without legal and racial barriers. They have experienced unprecedented wealth, unprecedented education, a position in the marketplace. So once you have something to conserve, you become more conservative."

Mr. Bernard, who said he voted for President Bush, does not publicly endorse candidates. However, he did tell his congregants that they should question the tendency to vote along traditional party lines.

Two of his church's members, Raina and Robert Bundy, said they decided to vote for Mr. Bush by following the news, watching the debates and, ultimately, praying over their choice. Like many African Americans, they said they were brought up to vote Democratic, but now compared the tradition to their mothers' old recipes for collard greens.

"We don't use fatback, it's all about olive oil now," Mrs. Bundy said. "You don't keep cooking something even though you know it's not good for you."

Marjorie Connelly and Jennifer Medina contributed reporting for this article.

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On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

FRANK RICH
On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide

FAREWELL to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it's the culture, stupid.

"It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. To Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states' revenge on "Will & Grace." William Safire, speaking on "Meet the Press," called the Janet Jackson fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of the same mind: "I think it's people who are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies ..."

And let's not even get started on the two most dreaded words in American comedy, regardless of your party affiliation: Whoopi Goldberg.

There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.

Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").

None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.

The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry. And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a former employee's accusation that the two had had a homosexual encounter - though not before paying the employee a $425,000 settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox News as prime movers in "Redeem the Vote," the Christian-rock alternative to MTV's "Rock the Vote."

But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in 1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network's prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.

Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.

But it's not only the G.O.P.'s fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the math and you'll find that the poll also shows that for all the G.O.P.'s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than the number of gay Republican voters.

When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 "moral values" movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed California ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell research, the governor and voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The measure carried by 59 percent, which is consistent with national polling on the issue.

If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red? Received Washington wisdom has it that the only Democrat who will ever be able to win a national election must be a cross between Gomer Pyle and Billy Sunday - a Scripture-quoting Sun Belt exurbanite whose loyalty to Nascar does not extend to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was fined last month for saying a four-letter word on television.

According to this argument, the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical "Bush votes come to life" apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by "moral absolutes," support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young children into the ranks of what he calls the "working poor." Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn't even met.

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In New Mexico, Bush vs. Kerry Is Still an Issue as Votes Trickle In

The New York Times
November 14, 2004

In New Mexico, Bush vs. Kerry Is Still an Issue as Votes Trickle In
By REUTERS

SANTA FE, N.M., Nov. 13 (Reuters) - Senator John Kerry has conceded, President Bush has laid out his plans for a second term and New Mexicans still do not know who won the election in their state.

New Mexico is the only state that does not have a clear-cut winner in the presidential vote, and state officials have been red-faced over the slow count. The state pledged to speed up counting ballots after it took about a month to tally the vote in the 2000 presidential race, where Al Gore beat Mr. Bush by 366 votes.

With most of the ballots counted, Mr. Bush has about 373,000 votes to 365,000 for Mr. Kerry, and several news outlets have projected Mr. Bush as the winner of New Mexico's five electoral votes.

On Friday, all of New Mexico's counties were required to have completed a count in their regions, but one rural county still had problems and did not meet the deadline. The secretary of state's office said Mr. Bush's lead over Mr. Kerry had narrowed to about 6,800 votes, according to initial tallies of the provisional ballots submitted to the office on Friday.

The main problems this time are the narrow margin between Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, troubles sorting through provisional ballots and not learning from the 2000 count, critics said.

It is expected to take more than a week to reach a definitive answer.

"I will not be declaring a winner until Nov. 23," said the secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron.

About 750,000 people voted in New Mexico, and Republicans said money that should have gone toward counting votes was spent on a marketing campaign intended to increase turnout.

"The counties were unprepared for the volume of voters because the money wasn't there," said Greg Graves, the executive director of the state's Republican Party.

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