Christmas cheer from the Bush family.



Still no WMDs under the tree for Georgie. Click the photos for the stories.

{ 11:48 AM }

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Choose the Blue. What America does is shop and consume. Forget about moral values and culture wars and abortion nonsequiturs and thinly veiled biblical references. Commerce is the one language here everyone understands &mdash consumers, businesspeople, and even politicians. And now you can speak your political preferences with your wallet by shopping Blue.

Hallelujah! I have been on my knees praying to Jesus Christ for a site like this since Scalia 2000.

{ 5:18 PM }

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Who is Arnold Schwarzenegger's biggest contributor? A millionaire (natch), a reclusive tax cheat, a chimpanzee steward, and a "lifelong bachelor."

{ 11:29 AM }

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Sex-crazed Red State teenagers. What happens when you lie and tell kids they will get AIDS from sweat?

They start speaking their own language:

Gloria Thomas never thought much about the jelly bracelets her two teenage daughters in the Huntsville school district had been wearing for the past year until she stumbled upon a color code chart in one of their notebooks.

For some students the plastic bracelets, which come in a rainbow of colors, are more than a trendy fashion statement. They're also props for sex games, a trend gaining momentum in other districts nationwide.

"I called the school on Monday and they acted like they didn't know about it," Thomas said. "I can't believe they're actually letting these kids wear these bracelets."

Huntsville school officials acknowledge that some students wear the bracelets, but they have not witnessed any inappropriate behavior associated with them.

Thomas' 13-year-old daughter, Monica, said both boys and girls wear the bracelets. The game begins when a boy notices a girl wearing a bracelet. He then tries to break or snap it off her wrist. The game works the same when a boy wears the bracelet.

If successful, the person wearing the bracelet is supposed to perform a sexual act that's determined by the bracelet's color.

According to one Web site, black represents sex, green represents outdoor sex, orange represents a kiss, red represents a lap dance and clear is anything goes.

Brilliant! A five-color alert system. These kids actually did learn something from Tom Ridge!

{ 10:16 AM }

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What's the succession procedure when a vice president dies suddenly of congestive heart failure?

{ 10:12 AM }

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Fraud in Ohio? The Ohio supreme court will take another look (Guardian):

George Bush's victory in the US presidential election will be challenged in Ohio's supreme court today, when a group of Democratic voters will allege widespread fraud.

President Bush clinched re-election by winning the state of Ohio on November 2 by a margin of 136,000 votes over the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. Despite claims of fraud and technical glitches, Senator Kerry decided that they were not big enough to affect the result and conceded the election on November 3.

However, Cliff Arnebeck, a lawyer representing a group of voters challenging the Ohio result, claimed new analysis of various anomalies suggested it was rigged.

"We'll be calling for a reversal of the result based on evidence developed in the course of litigation," Mr Arnebeck told The Guardian yesterday. "Exit polling and substantial irregularities excluded votes that should have been counted. There is evidence that votes cast for one candidate were moved to the column of the other candidate."

Mr Arnebeck, a legal adviser to a liberal group, Alliance for Democracy, said the "contest of election" lawsuit will be presented to a judge from the Ohio supreme court today on behalf of at least 25 disgruntled voters. He said he expected other voters and organisations to join the case.

Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, has until Monday to certify the result. His office did not return calls seeking comment yesterday but his spokesman, Carlo LoParo, told the Associated Press news agency: "There are no signs of widespread irregularities."

Mr Arnebeck said that hearings held in Ohio cities have brought to light new evidence of malpractice. He said one voter of a pro-Republican group caught destroying Democratic registration documents in Nevada before the election, had also been operating in Ohio.

Critics of the Ohio count have also pointed to the case of an electronic voting machine found to have credited President Bush with 3,893 extra votes in a suburb of Columbus where only 638 people voted. State officials have said those votes will not be included in the final certified totals.

There have also been complaints focused on punch card ballots, of the type which caused chaos in Florida in 2000. Voting involves making a hole in the ballot against the chosen candidate by punching out a small piece of card, a chad, with a stylus.

In the 68 Ohio counties where the ballots were used this year, according to some groups protesting at this year's election, vote counters were unable to determine a vote for the president, but did register votes for other offices.

The veteran civil rights leader, Reverend Jesse Jackson, is spearheading the call for an Ohio recount. "We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live with fraud and stealing," he said earlier this week.

Kenneth Blackwell is the new Katherine Harris, another GOP functionary whose function is to cause voting malfunctions.

(Here's the background on those mysteriously non-existent but solidly pro-Bush 3,893 votes.)

{ 3:40 PM }

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Without oil, all that's left is fear. A culture of hatred. The erosion of human rights, both global and domestic. Where do they originate?

From the comment thread at the ever-indispensable Orcinus:

I still believe that the core of hate is fear.

But what are these people afraid of?

Jon R. Koppenhoefer

- - -

Jon,

I think they are afraid because of the declining power of the United States. Its formerly strong economic foundations have been undermined in the last three decades, since the oil shocks began.

To be more specific, the United States' own oil production peaked and then began to decline in 1970. I think few people realize (it is a sort of super-secret, though out in plain view) that oil found in the lower 48 was one key, perhaps the most important key, to the economic mega-power of the United States. When we became a net importer of oil, all that changed... but nobody is supposed to understand or mention it.

This loss of economic power was not, in my opinion, the fault of either political party, but rather just a matter of circumstances. True, our country could have handled the transition much better, but we got stuck in a particular mindset. I am being charitable, but what's the point of bitterness and recrimination now?

Now the Neocons feel obliged to take a snarling, hyper-masculine, militarized approach to the world because they perceive that our weapons are all we have left. It's like the facade of a movie set - a false front - and they desperately want to do something to recreate that economic power (their "new American Century") before the world figures it all out, dumps the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and tries to move forward in the reality-based world, which, of course, the Neocons hate and in which they cannot possibly live.

Ralph

A concise and brilliant analysis of the last 34 years in the USA.

Ralph is evidently also connected to a blog called Newsfare. Check it out.

{ 1:22 PM }

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Infantile America. One of my wife's pet bugaboos is the wildly overzealous demand for child safety. "How we did we manage to get to adulthood without baby monitors and bike helmets and safety seats with extra-large cupholders?" What she sees is a healthy impulse for child well-being that has tipped over into a grotesque, market-driven coddling that encourages the passivity and obesity of youth.

My own variation on this theme is disdain for what people claim as intellectual safety for children. Here's a letter that appears in the November 29, 2004, edition of The New Yorker (not online):

The photograph of the naked ACT UP members in Richard Avedon's photoessay was one of the last works by a great master of photography (Portfolio, November 1). But that doesn't justify your decision to print it in a mass-circulation magazine that children can see in school libraries and medical offices and on their parents' coffee tables. Conservative readers look forward to your thoughtful editorial content, only to be offended by such "art." As the Election Night mandates clearly showed, conservative values are still alive and well in America. The inclusion of the photograph illustrates how out of touch you are with the values of many of your readers.

Frank Laird
San Diego, California

In response, let's skip the "mandate" rhetoric and get right to the issue of the naked people.

The New Yorker is, in the best senses of both words, an adult magazine. That means it covers the widest range of subjects of interest to the adult mind as unpredictably as the unfolding of current and cultural events. Unlike Hustler Magazine, or Cat Fancy for that matter, where you pretty much know what you're getting into when you pick it up, The New Yorker is the kind of thing you want to read when you don't know what you want to read. This requires a level of intellectual openness of which Frank Laird is evidently incapable, because he wants to make the world safe for hypothetical children in doctors' offices.

Here's a tip, Frank: try a different magazine. Why should the discourse of American adults stoop to your perception of what the lowest common denominator ought to be? Surely within the vast sea of periodicals in this country there must be at least a thousand magazines that meet your standards. Why must this one, a continent's distance away from you, adhere to your "values"?

I was in southern California recently, in Orange County near where you live, and as far as I could tell the emphasis was on real estate development, automotive culture, shopping, and a bland, narcissistic athleticism that may be more in line with your vision of what constitutes a worthy publication. Why not start your own magazine, Frank? Call it, I don't know, how about The San Diegan, and let it be as docile and imbecilic and you and your children. Leave The New Yorker and its nudity to us — we can handle it. After all, we're adults.

The problem with the Frank Lairds of the world is, like unwelcome guests, they don't know when to join the conversation and when to shut up. Frank's complaints about nudity reveal a complete lack of worldliness in the most political sense of the word.

We don't remember hearing any howls of outrage from your anti-nudity faction, Frank, when The New Yorker first showed the world the photographs of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. And that's why we're not listening to your threadbare sanctimony now.

UPDATE: Here's the controversial Avedon photo, courtesy of Fans of the New Yorker Livejournal.

{ 1:03 PM }

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