Republicans want to apply their mania for secrecy to the origins of what you eat.

{ 2:28 PM }

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Images of the anti-Bush protest in Santiago.

{ 1:46 PM }

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The me-first president.

{ 10:41 AM }

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Malarial madness. In the post-Vioxx age of pharmaceutical industry and FDA mistrust, perhaps we should take a harder look at Chinese herbal medicines that are actually effective against malaria, in contrast with the officially sanctioned drug Lariam, which is notable for its role in a string of murder-suicides among military personnel and their families.

All drugs have a risk-benefit profile, but if the risk is murder-suicide, it more than defeats the therapeutic purpose of the drug, wouldn't you say?

Unless of course the therapeutic purpose of Lariam is just an illusion overshadowed by the profit motive of those who enforce its use by the troops. Pushing a profitable drug over an effective drug makes loads of sense to those making the profit.

And it's timely too: profitability over reality is the same hidden motivation that appears behind lots of catastrophic decisions nowadays.

{ 9:32 AM }

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From UC Berkeley: "The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in [Florida] counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance -- the probability is less than 0.1 percent."

Via American Samizdat.

{ 11:09 AM }

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"Who killed Margaret Hassan?" asks Robert Fisk. After all, her death means more to those who feel they must prove they are fighting "evil" than to those who are the supposedly evil ones.

{ 10:54 AM }

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Is Jesus anti-environment? You can expect a certain amount of handwringing over abortion or gay rights from politicized Christians. But environmentalism? How does that fit in? Forget procreation for the moment — isn't Creation a great enough thing to want to protect?

From Theocracy Watch:

Do you know these people?

United States Senate Republican Leadership

Bill Frist, TN
Mitch McConnell, KY
Rick Santorum, PA
Bob Bennet, UT
Kay Bailey Hutchinson, TX
Jon Kyl, AZ
George Allen, VA
 
They are the seven highest ranking Republican Senators in the U.S. Senate.

Every one of them received a scorecard of 100% from Christian Coalition. That means they voted with Christian Coalition 100% of the time.

They all received scores of 0 to 8% from the League of Conservation Voters -- a consortium of environmental groups.

This is the part I don't understand — why does Christianity presume anti-environmentalism?

{ 10:10 AM }

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Drinking liberally. Now you can wash your democratic sorrows down in more cities.

The Chicago location for Drinking Liberally is the Red Lion Pub, but did you know it's haunted?

{ 1:56 PM }

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A gay Republican is like a Jewish Nazi... pathologically conflicted at best. Take a look at this article on GOP's Ken Mehlman and the terrific commenting going on at Blue Lemur.

{ 10:20 AM }

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How to steal $50,000 from a widow. I wrote about Wells Real Estate, a crypto-Christian real estate investment trust company before: "Leo Wells, a huckster who characterizes America's faith-based elite, oversees one of the largest real estate portfolios in America, yet has never fully repaid investors in any of his funds over the last 20 years."

For most of us, white-collar crime in the name of Jesus Christ is just an abstraction, a few lines unceremoniously noted in the Wall Street Journal or Forbes, until you receive (as I did) the following email from a woman named Sandy Tucker who gave me permission to share it with you:

This is my story…

I was widowed in 1984 and my accountant/financial planner invested $50,000 into Wells Real Estate Fund I as a B Investor. According to Wells Real Estate personnel, today my $50,000 is not worth a cent.

For many years, I communicated with Mr. Wells, both verbally and in writing, to determine what the outcome of my investment might be, but the lies always overshadowed any honesty, and therefore I never knew the real truth of my Fund I investment as a “B” investor.

During these past 20 years, I never received one cent of return on my money. I truly believe that he thought his investors would die before he had to answer to them, and I am sure that many have.

I will be 61 years old in November and still hanging in there, working two jobs to make a living, and fighting to the end to bring resolve to this situation before I die.

Fifty thousand dollars may not mean much to Leo Wells, or Ken Lay, or Neil Bush, or any of those who have profited handsomely from the Christianization of American politics, but it means an enormous sum of money to one 61-year-old Christian widow.

In her lengthy email, Ms. Tucker also included detailed descriptions of Wells's funny business with prospectuses as well as the class action lawsuit that resulted. All to no effect. Her money is all gone, and the "Christian" businessman who has yet to be publicly disgraced (let alone prosecuted) for his actions has not answered for it.

But the heart of the matter is this, in her words: "Any man, whether an individual or a business owner, who professes to be a Christian and puts God in control would never do to anyone, including widows, what he has done to me and hundreds of other investors."

For twenty years she has borne this burden alone.

Investing and religion are a difficult mix at best, partially because the timeframes are at odds. Ms. Tucker brought up the Wellsian concept of an investment afterlife, which of course does not exist: "I truly believe that [Leo Wells] thought his investors would die before he had to answer to them, and I am sure that many have." Bad investments like those held by Leo Wells's investors are the real "death tax."

The ultimate problem with government and business leaders invoking the name of Jesus Christ, as Leo Wells and George W. Bush do with great regularity, is that unsuspecting Christian voters and investors assume that their beliefs are shared. This assumption is a fatal mistake.

Although I am not a Christian, I do know of at least one Commandment that bears repeating: "Thou shalt not steal." But American faith-based elites are more concerned with publicly displaying the Ten Commandments than with actually following them.

Unfortunately, for all Americans who are also Christians as well as for the rest of us, expecting justice from self-anointed dispensers of "morality" is too much to ask.

If there is indeed an afterlife, Leo Wells will burn in it.

If you want to go after white-collar crime carried out by hypocrites, you need to find someone who has already been successful in such investigations. Some like John Kerry.

{ 10:54 AM }

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Farewell, morality. When there is more public outrage over a soldier photographed smoking a cigarette than there is over a Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in the head (in a mosque, no less), you know that morality has left American soil, flying away on the Orwellian wings of corporate media and their master manipulators.

{ 10:42 AM }

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Thank you, Red States. Fallujah in Pictures.

{ 10:02 PM }

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Darleen Druyun, enemy of taxpayers. For those of you seeking more information about Boeing's double-dealing ex-Air Force procurement officer, start with today's Washington Post, which contains a photo of Dragon Lady that I had not seen before, as well as invaluable Skimble coverage from the past year (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 — this last one is the hilarious story of Michael Sears, Boeing's disgraced CFO, having written a business self-help book called Soaring through Turbulence).

Darleen Druyun never showed the taxpayers who employed her anything like appreciation, let alone love. Maybe we can get Druyun's priest brother Edward Lofton to help pray for return of the billions of tax dollars squandered by his sister and her daughter Heather. After all, he gives radio lectures on what "love" is.

{ 1:27 PM }

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Let Visa and MasterCard handle the vote. Somehow, no matter where I am in the country (or the world, for that matter), Visa and MasterCard know that I and not someone else "voted" for a sweatshirt at Target, or gasoline on I-80, or a chair at Ikea.

Barring outright identity theft, for which there is more recourse, why do we not worry about the authenticity of these trivial financial transactions but are collectively unsure about our civic transactions?

Shouldn't the 38 soldiers who have died in the curiously-timed offensive in Falluja since Election Day say something about the importance of our civic transactions as voters?

{ 9:03 AM }

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