Some More on the Berkeley Study

I have been cruising the net in search of discussions about this study, and I realized that it's important to point out a few things:

1. This is pretty strong evidence for something being wrong with the electronic voting machines, about as strong as the evidence we have that smoking causes cancer. Those who argue that this is not proof should also then accept that we don't know if smoking causes cancer. The only alternative explanation would be if there is something else about the areas with electronic voting machines that correlates with their introduction, but I have not seen any good suggestions on that. The idea that this increase could be caused by a higher Jewish vote for Bush doesn't work, because there are not enough Jewish voters in those areas to cause the effect that was observed, though it's always possible that some fraction of the effect is due to increased Jewish support of the wingnuts. This is something that could be studied quite easily, to find out if that is the case.

2. A reporter supposedly said that this study doesn't matter because it will not change the Florida results. That is an inane comment for two reasons: First, election transparency matters whether the audits would change results or not. Second, this study cannot be seen as meaning that all other reasons for increases in Bush votes have been explained. Consider what the study does: it studies whether the counties with voting machines differ from those who used punch cards. It does NOT consider whether the vote in the punch card areas is valid or not. All the findings mean is that there is something about the voting machine areas which is odd. It doesn't say that the rest of Florida is perfectly ok, and neither does it say the reverse. That remains an open question.

3. The conclusions the authors of the study made is that there are good grounds for auditing the vote in at least some parts of Florida. They do not say anything about whether the difference they observe is due to fraud or not. Of course, the problem is that the election people in Florida are not exactly neutral auditors of their own problems. There is also the other problem that there may be no way of auditing machines without paper trails...

The Berkeley Study on Florida Voting in 2004

Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson and Rachel Best are the authors of a new study on the Florida presidential elections in 2004. The authors gave a press conference today, and their article is available online. I have read through it once, so my comments here will have to be regarded as preliminary. In particular, my brain has a delay button on critical thinking, so I probably come up with more questions later on. But I hope I have enough to explain what this study argues.

The authors use a statistical model that tries to explain why the support for Bush might change in the 2004 elections as compared to the 2000 elections. Possible factors affecting this change in support are historical voting patterns in an area (such as past support for Republicans, including Bush), voter turnout and changes in it, size of area, its income and the ethnic composition of its population.

In addition to these factors, the authors included variables that measure the use of electronic voting machines. Some areas don't have them, some do. If electronic voting has no impact, we'd expect the factors in the preceding paragraph to explain why some areas have more growth in Bush votes than others. If electronic voting turns out to have an impact, over and above the other factors, then an audit is indicated.

The results indicate that electronic voting did matter. Translated into real numbers, the authors argue that Bush might have gained 130,733 extra votes from this, possibly as many as twice this amount if the votes should have been assigned to Kerry instead.

My discussion:

Interesting. Note that this is not about those precincts where Dixiecrats voted overwhelmingly Republican. The voting machine effect was especially large in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade; all Democratic areas of the state. A similar study done in Ohio didn't show a voting machine effect at all, although the authors didn't have all the data they used in the Florida study on factors other than voting machines.

If I wanted to subject this study for criticism I'd ask what other factor might account for the voting machine effect. Is there something that was not included in the list of factors in this study but which should have been included? This variable would have to correlate with the presence or absence of electronic voting machines.

Sorry, I Overslept

As usual. I'm beginning to suspect that I have some vampire blood or something.

Anyway, a rumor has that the Bush administration plans to lower taxes on capital sources of income (interest income, for example). Workers don't get tax cuts, of course. To keep things revenue-neutral (meaning that they try to add as much extra to the tax revenues as this will take away) the administration is contemplating removing the tax-deductibility of employer-funded health insurance.

Naughty, naughty! Less taxes for those who don't work at all and less health insurance coverage for those who work. It's true that tying health insurance to working status was a very bad idea, but this is not the way to fix that problem.

Consider what happens if firms can no longer deduct their contributions to health insurance premia. The easiest way to think about this is to think what would happen if your mortgage interest payments on your house loan would no longer be tax-deductible: buying a house would be more expensive. The effect here is similar: providing health insurance becomes more expensive for firms, and fewer firms will bother to do it. This means more and more workers without health insurance at all! Bush's health care policy in action.

It's worth pointing out that earnings would probably have to rise if firms wish to have the same size of workforces as before the change, so things aren't quite as bad as they first look. But they are bad enough, for the extra earnings are not going to be enough to buy individual health insurance policies for the workers and their families. This is because group insurance (as offered by employers today) is much cheaper and more effective than individual policies. Many more consumers would end up uninsured.

Of course, that's what the conservatives ultimately want anyway. Then they can offer the desperate consumers their health care savings accounts as the only alternative.

The Bitter Irony

Although this is pretty funny, really, even for those of you who don't have my morbid sense of humor. Consider the party of God, the party of moral values: the Republicans. Then consider what the first act is they have undertaken after the election which defined them as the guardians of our morals:

Spurred by an investigation connected to the majority leader, House Republicans voted Wednesday to abandon an 11-year-old party rule that required a member of their leadership to step aside temporarily if indicted.
Meeting behind closed doors, the lawmakers agreed that a party steering committee would review any indictments handed up against the majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, or any other members of the leadership team or committee chairmen, to determine if giving up a post were warranted. The revision does not change the requirement that leaders step down if convicted.
The new rule was adopted by voice vote. Its chief author, Representative Henry Bonilla of Texas, said later that only a handful of members had opposed it.
The Republicans' old rule was adopted in August 1993 to put a spotlight on the legal troubles of prominent Democrats. Mr. Bonilla said revising it had been necessary to prevent politically inspired criminal investigations by "crackpot" prosecutors from determining the fate of top Republicans.

This is very satisfying on some level. I hope the fundamentalists appreciate the ethics of this decision. I hope in vain, of course, the fundamentalists don't follow this stuff we call reality.

Goodbye, Checks and Balances!

Checks and balances are supposed to be built-in moderators in the American system of government. Right now they have practically no impact: the three branches of government are in Republican paws and so is the Fourth Estate, the media. Now it seems that even the last remaining shreds of power to slow down our rapid slide down the theocracy slope will be removed, and the remover is Senate Majority Leader Frist (of the cat-torturing fame):

Senate Majority Leader Frist today is expected to give his blessing to a GOP plan to dramatically change the Senate's voting rules -- effectively eliminating Democrats' ability to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees, aides said Tuesday.
Democratic leadership sources warned that a move to reduce from 60 to 51 the number of votes needed to end a filibuster of judicial nominees would be considered a declaration of war by most Democrats, could further weaken the position of the chamber's shrinking population of moderates and almost certainly would create new obstacles for the GOP's agenda.
During a closed-door meeting of the GOP Conference today, Frist will inform his colleagues that while the so-called "nuclear option" of changing Senate rules will be reserved as a last resort, Republicans will no longer tolerate Democratic efforts to block Bush's nominees to the federal bench, an aide to Frist confirmed.

This plan is to be kept on the back-burner and to be brought out only if the Democrats won't cave in otherwise. That's how politics is done now. Meanwhile, in the NiceGuyLand, the establishment lint Democrats (who stick to the conservative polyester in the wash) tell us that we should make advances at the fundamentalists and to stop fretting over the last election as this is so very bad for the country. Could they please tell me how exactly what they are doing is good for the country (unless ones idea of a "country" is something along the lines of the Soviet Union, a one-party state of some renown)? And could they tell me what it is that Republicans are doing that is based on considerations of the country rather than their own pocketbooks, bibles and their party?

Ok. I am a little angry. Probably the healthiest feeling to have right now.

http://sorryeverybody.com

This is a wonderful website. Click on the gallery and scroll down. Yes, it is a bit amateurish, but you'll be glad you went there, especially in these barren and biting times.

Added: If you liked this site, check out the responses at http://apologiesaccepted.com/index.html.

Separating the State from the Church

While the fundamentalist Protestants are working like beavers to break down the wall between the state and the church, to let the church flood the state, some Roman Catholics appear to be doing the reverse. Interestingly, this example took place in Massachusetts, a blue state if there ever was one:

ANDOVER -- State Rep. Barbara L'Italien was asked by the pastor of her church, St. Augustine's, to step down as cantor and head of the youth choir because of her pro-choice stance on abortion.
L'Italien, a life member of the church, says she refused the requests made by the church's new pastor, the Rev. William M. Cleary.
"I was told that because I am a legislator and a Democrat I was being asked to step down," she said. "This has upset my whole home. I am a pretty unlikely and undeserving target of this."
Cleary said this morning his decision to ask her to step down has nothing to do with her party affiliation. Rather, he says, he cannot have someone in a leadership position who is in favor of abortion.
"In this particular case we're dealing with a person who is against the church's position," Cleary said. "I can't allow her to be in a public posture -- to be standing up at the pulpit singing or directing singing."
Cleary says he has no problems with L'Italien receiving Communion or working with children "behind the scenes." While he says his decision was not based on her being a Democrat, Cleary did say Democrats, in general, are more inclined to be pro-choice.

I haven't seen a single example of similar acts to rid the church of those politicians who favored the Iraq war or who favor the death penalty. What's also striking about this incident is the moral values shown by Cleary when he doesn't see anything wrong with L'Italien working "behind the scenes". Cleary's own values appear to be in some turmoil here.

This is most likely just one person acting on his own, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a mass purging of Democratic pro-choice politicians from the church. I also wouldn't be at all surprised to see pro-choice Republicans completely overlooked in this.
-----
Link via Kos.

What the Right-Wing Pundits Say About Election Inaccuracies

You probably know that already. Preposterous! Idiotic conspiracy theories! And Keith Olbermann is attacked and ridiculed for covering the topic at all:

Media conservatives have labeled MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann a "voice of paranoia" and accused him of perpetuating "idiotic conspiracy theories" for his sustained spotlight on the numerous local news reports of voting irregularities during the November 2 presidential election. Olbermann's emphasis during Countdown with Keith Olbermann on voting irregularities has been part of a critique of what he has called the "Rube Goldberg voting process of ours" -- as well as a criticism of the major media outlets' failure to report on the irregularities.
In her November 11 nationally syndicated column, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter falsely asserted that Olbermann has been "peddling the theory that Bush stole the election" and referred to "Olbermann's idiotic conspiracy theory." A November 14 column by associate editor Bill Steigerwald in the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (owned by right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife) claimed Olbermann "really made a Dan Rather of himself" by focusing a segment of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on allegations of voter fraud. And in his November 10 "Inside Politics" column, Washington Times columnist Greg Pierce quoted the conservative Media Research Center's analysis of Olbermann's coverage:
"With 'Did Your Vote Count? The Plot Thickens' as his on-screen header, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Monday night led his 'Countdown' program with more than 15 straight minutes of paranoid and meaningless claims about voting irregularities in states won by President Bush," the Media Research Center reports at www.mediaresearch.org.

Maybe this is why the media has been so quiet and well-behaved on the issue of the recent elections? They fear the wingnuts. It has always been common practice to rehash elections for quite a few weeks, to report on problems and glitches, and to speculate on alternative outcomes. Yet very little of this is taking place. I wonder why.

Could it be that Jonathan Alter is correct in this statement:

"Even assuming there's nothing nefarious about the national election," Olbermann asked Newsweek senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter, "why has the cascade of irregularities around this country occurred virtually in a news blackout?" Alter responded by saying that "I'm not justifying this, but by way of explanation, I think it is that there's no sense that, with a three-and-a-half-million vote difference [between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry], that this would affect the outcome, even if there were widespread irregularities found."

But this is circular thinking. If irregularities were widespread, the three-and-a-half million vote difference in itself could be caused by such irregularities, and thus cannot be used as the reason for not talking about the problems that have been unearthed so far. Also, the popular vote difference between Bush and Kerry could rise quite rapidly if a machine registers a Kerry-vote as a Bush-vote for some reason: each mistake increases the difference by two votes. (Note that this is all purely theoretical, of course. I am just pointing out that Alter's argument is faulty.)

The real question that the media has not addressed is the transparency of U.S. elections. Without such transparency, conspiracy theories will flourish and ultimately no election keeps its credibility in front of the voters.

On Bev Harris

of the Blackboxvoting.org fame. She is busy in Florida trying to get a look at the tapes coming from the voting machines. Here is a Democratic Underground thread discussing her experiences on Monday.

It sounds incredible, like something from a detective story, and maybe it is incredible. The common wisdom is that Bev Harris is a gadfly and not to be trusted, but then this common wisdom seems to be largely a construct of the wingnuts. I don't know what the facts are, but whatever they are, something does not smell right in Florida. Or in most other states, come to think.

Troll Stories

Trolls are the bane of the internet. For those who have not heard this term in this context before, trolls are commenters whose aim is not to contribute to the discussion but to destroy it, if possible. Trolls range from the criminally insane to those who just like to press other people's buttons. My experience of trolls consists of two main types: trollus misogynistus and trollus wingnuttus, often in the same person. For some reason I get most of them via e-mail, rather than on the blog. I have been blessed with many memberships in online prayer groups, for example, and I'm also on the mailing lists for various embarrassing ailments. None of this affects me in the slightest except for the occasional giggle I get from some of the messages.

Another kind of troll is the one who is determined to be heard and will not stop e-mailing me various kinds of tracts. This is from a recent book review by one of these trolls:

We can thank Ms. Bentley for showing us the future, at least the liberal future of liberated, uncivilized, carefree, anonymous, abortion laden, sex, fueled by Britney Spears style commercialism, our bankrupt souls, and poor thinking. But, it is only the future if we continue to choose it.

This is how the term "liberal" is framed in the troll college. I thought Britney Spears was a Republican, by the way, but perhaps such trivia have no effect on the faith-based messengers of Wingnuttia.

The reason I'm writing about it is that it ties in with one of my earlier posts today, the one about war, in that the same attempt at dehumanization is going on here, too. Liberals are no longer regarded as Americans. The next step is to regard us as not human at all, and the step after that is one I'm not going to be here to witness if I can avoid it. The right-wing framework is one of war.

Of course I'm not totally innocent of this stuff, either. For example, I call wingnuts wingnuts, and that is quite insulting, or would be if they hadn't started the smear campaign and continued it for over ten years while I was trying to be a unifier. (Even bleeding-heart liberals have their breaking points.) But I don't dehumanize the wingnuts; I ridicule their very human faults.

Not Your Mother's Vulva

Sometimes I learn more than I ever wanted to know. This is a good example of what I mean: vaginal plastic surgery is on the increase!
This is something that used to be pretty much limited to sex workers, but now that porn is everywhere it seems that all women are sort of like sex workers: must look pretty down there, because he might make comparisons to his favorite one-handed websites.

Listen to this:

--She was 20 years old and had never contemplated plastic surgery. But one day at the gym, the pretty, smooth-faced receptionist in a Los Angeles doctor's office looked at her vagina and noticed that her inner vaginal labia stuck out past her outer labia. She was horrified.
"I looked in like, those magazines, and saw that inner labia shouldn't stick out like mine did," said Crystal, who requested her last name be withheld. "So I had a labiaplasty and now I love the way I look; nice and neat and new. My vagina looks perfect."

Gee. It seems that inner vaginal labia that stick out is a no-no. They are regarded as old-looking, and so women who wish to be hot should have someone clip out the protruding bits. All good now!

And this is a really sad story:

Ileana Vasquez is a 29 year-old Southern California housewife with four children. She read about vaginal rejuvenation after she saw an ad in a magazine. Her marriage was in trouble and she noted that her husband wasn't happy with her sexually.
"One time he had a few beers and told me that because I had all our kids and was looser now he didn't want me as a woman anymore," Vasquez said. "He did say he was sorry later on but I knew he was telling the truth."
Vasquez had the surgery and she noted her marriage is back on track and her sex life is good again. "He's become my sweetheart again," she said. "He bought me a house and he wants me all the time."
Then she paused. "But there are times I still can't forgive him for how he made me feel," she said. "Sometimes I get so mad, so hurt. I mean I had the kids, he should have understood."

Maybe Ms. Vasquez should have asked Mr. Vasquez to have some penis-fattening surgery instead?

This is just the latest (and saddest) instalment of the eternal quest for perfection in women, or, if you like, the quest of goodness. The culture tells us that women should be good, and being beautiful is part of being good. The really sad bit is that nothing will suffice; if your vagina is now all tight like a drum, your anus is probably sagging already. And so on.

An Update on Election Audits

First, in Indiana one local election led to switched results after a computer glitch was found:

A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a democrat enough votes to bump a republican from victory in a County Commissioner's race.
The glitch in the machines recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians.
The votes were re-counted last night, by hand.

This may be why another audit has been requested in Indiana:

The Indiana Democratic Party on Friday requested a recount of votes cast in the 9th district, where Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.) was narrowly defeated by Republican Mike Sodrel on Nov. 2.
The recount request was made after an election-equipment malfunction was discovered in Franklin County, which is not in the 9th district.
On Nov. 3, Hill conceded defeat to Sodrel, a trucking company owner, and the most recent vote tally available from the Indiana secretary of state?s office showed Hill trailing by 1,485 votes. As of midday Friday, Sodrel had 142,257 votes to Hill?s 140,772.

Second, there will be an audit in Ohio, and it will be carried out on behalf of the third party candidates Cobb and Badnarik:

WASHINGTON - November 15 - There will be a recount of the presidential vote in Ohio.
On Thursday, David Cobb, the Green Party's 2004 presidential candidate, announced his intention to seek a recount of the vote in Ohio. Since the required fee for a statewide recount is $113,600, the only question was whether that money could be raised in time to meet the filing deadline. That question has been answered.
"Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio," said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign.

I think that the New Hampshire audit that Nader is agitating for is also going to happen.

War Happens

A U.S. Marine shot and killed a wounded prisoner in a Fallujah mosque, according to a television pool report broadcast Monday. A Marine spokesman said the shooting was being investigated.
Pool pictures taken by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites embedded with the Marines 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment, were recorded Saturday as the Marines returned to an unidentified Fallujah mosque.
The video, according to a version aired by CNN, showed a Marine raising his rifle toward the prisoners but neither NBC nor CNN showed the shooting itself. The video was blacked out but the report of the rifle could be heard.

...

The videotape showed two of the wounded propped against the wall and Sites said they were bleeding to death. According to NBC's report, a third wounded man appeared already dead, a fourth was severely wounded but breathing and the fifth was covered by a blanket but did not appear to have been shot again on Saturday.
On the video, a Marine can be heard shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men against the wall in the mosque was only pretending to be dead.
The video then briefly shows a Marine raising his weapon toward one of the inert prisoners.
The video is then blacked out, but the report of the gunfire can be heard and Sites said in a written report that a Marine said "Now he is."

This is an atrocity. But war itself is an atrocity. The Marine committing this particular atrocity lives in hell. He is going to be punished, we are told. Will the ones who created the hell, who started this war, who caused such stress on human beings that they kill each other just for the killing, will those powers ever be punished? Will they sleep well at night? Will they grow rich on the carnage? Will they tell us why this particular atrocity is nowhere near as bad as the atrocities of the other side, the disembowelings and chopped limbs?

So many seem to want a war, a war like a computer game with a Great Hero leading the troops on his white horse, wielding the Sword of Justice. So many count the points each side scores and make bets about the winners. So many feel as if they are the Great Hero, as if the war that happens far away somehow makes them more real, more powerful, less humiliated. Purer.

Wars are not like that. They are exactly like the above events in the Mosque. They are about making the enemy into a thing, something squeaking in the undergrowth, something stinky and smelly and killable. On both sides. But the price of doing this is losing our own humanity, becoming the same squeaky thing in the undergrowth, only bigger, more bloodthirsty, less killable.

Do we really want to do this?

Grab the Tiger by the Tail

I was reading Kos and came across this idiom. It's an excellent one for describing where Georgie Porgie is right now. He's got the extremist fundamentalists in his camp (the tiger) and he's holding them by the smallest amount of tailhairs (promises, promises and more promises about banning abortion and then not doing anything about it).

Poor Georgie. He can't let go of the tail for obvious reasons, but hanging onto the tail while the tiger is leaping and bouncing and sharpening its teeth must not be that much fun, either. If Georgie is not extra careful he will end up in the tiger's belly whatever he does. That would be justice, actually. Maybe Nemesis is walking the earth again, practising her specialty? One can always hope.

Purity

Purity is an important aspect of extremist political movements. It doesn't matter which one of them you study, there is always this enormous pressure towards purity, and the form it takes is not some internal purification through prayer or contemplation but an aggressive external program aimed at getting rid of those 'others' who are impure. The purists never see themselves as stained.

Cleansing is the form most commonly employed to achieve purity. Movements are cleansed from members who are too tolerant, too nuanced or too compromising. Just as you can't make an omelet(te) without breaking some eggs, you can't cleanse a movement without drowning a few adherents. That's just the way things are.

It is interesting to watch the current cleansing in the administration. Out go those who are seen as too accommodating towards the "enemy": other parties, other countries. This includes both high-status members of the administration and organizations such as the CIA. It also includes the moderate Republican politicians such as Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Listen to Jan LaRue, Chief Councel of Concerned Women for America, a group which tries to bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy:

LaRue reiterates that softening the party's stance on civil unions, abortion and other social issues is not acceptable.
"Poll results show that religious conservatives secured this election," she says. "We expect that the policies we believe in -- and that the president has agreed with -- will succeed." And if that comes at the cost of alienating moderate Republicans, so be it. "There are still several RINO's [Republicans in name only] in the Senate in addition to Arlen. You've got Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island who admits publicly he didn't even vote for the president. I think it would be far more honest if these folks would re-register as Democrats."
During Bush's second term, she adds, "We expect great things."

They also expect purity, a squeaky cleanness which doesn't contain the slightest tinge of complicated thinking or actual political compromises.

Important News

Colin Powell has submitted his resignation as many have anticipated, and he's not alone:

Powell is the most prominent of four Cabinet officials whose resignations will be announced Monday, sources told CNN.
The others will be Agriculture Secretary Anne Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, the sources said.

Powell's resignation was expected. He's far too moderate for this lot.

In other news, our friends the beavers have once again proved that they have higher moral values than we do:

Beavers found a bag of bills stolen from a video poker casino, tore it open and wove the money into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek north of Louisiana Highway 48.
"They hadn't torn the bills up. They were still whole," said Maj. Michael Martin of the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office.
The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.

So sensible, don't you think? I once knew a little girl who cut out all the faces in her parents' hundred dollar bills and glued them into a scrap book. What makes us adults so much less sensible than beavers and children?

A Call for Transparent Elections

Lest you think that I have forgotten already! This opinion piece in yesterday's New York Times is quite good. Among other things it says:

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.

Without transparent elections there is no democracy. Even the Republicans would be called banana Republicans. It's in everyone's interest to guarantee that elections are fair. Ok. Now I'll shut up on this topic for a while.

Pass the chocs, sweeting!

Now this is the kind of news I like to hear:

WOMEN have compared chocolate to sex for decades. Now doctors have discovered a scientific link between the two.

According to Italian researchers, women who eat chocolate regularly had the highest levels of desire, arousal and satisfaction from sex.

There's probably no causality here, or any implied, either. People who have good taste just have good taste. Literally.

Quiz

Surfing the internet hasn't unearthed anything that wouldn't be deeply depressing or anger-causing or boring as a topic on which I want to blog. It's Sunday and I don't want to blog any more misery today. Instead, I'm trying to find something I could quiz you on that would be fun and that would also make me famous (or famous among others than snakes). Here's some possible ideas:

1. Who is your favorite wingnut in the media? Whom do you love to despise? Why?

2. Based on your experience, which places are bad ideas for some sweet sex?

3. Why should Echidneism be the state religion of the United States? Any disadvantages to this proposition?

Example answers:

1. This is a hard one. There's so many to choose from, but Rush Lintball is the arch-wingnut of them all. He's personally responsible for at least 30% of the misinformation of Americans and about 60% of the current right-wing hatred towards us liberal elitists. He's probably a thoroughly evil man.

2. How about on a secluded beach when there just happens to be a fishing competition that you didn't know about?

3. Because it is the literal truth. You can read it in the book I'm going to write, and it's going to be literally what a goddess says. How much better could things be? There will be free chocolate ice-cream and kindness everywhere, and lots and lots of laughter. The only disadvantage is in me having to wear some sort of a bishop's mitre and other religious gear, and I don't look good
in those kinds of clothes.

The Gender Gap in Politics Revisited

I stole this topic from Christine at ms. musings. She talks about a new survey (a pdf file here) which was done to establish how women and men voted this year. The survey is not based on the exit polls but on telephone questions around the time of the elections. (Check out Christine's analyses; they are much better than mine.)

The results indicate that women are still more likely to vote Democrat and men to vote Republican, but the difference is smaller than it has been in the past, because more men are voting Democrat and more women Republican.

White women, working women, married women and older women are the groups which show reduced support for the Democratic candidate. Not coincidentally, if you replace "women" by "men" in this list you get the men who are also less likely to support a Democratic choice. The gap is narrower, but it has not disappeared; for example, among older voters women were more likely to support Kerry than men.

The survey also asked whether the respondents thought that the presidential campaings had paid enough attention to the so-called women's issues, such as prevention of violence against women, women's equality under law and equal pay for women. The answers to these questions showed a very large gender gap: women were much more likely than men to say that the attention had been insufficient. A similar gender gap (which the report calls dramatic) exists where the survey asks questions about the importance of women's equality.

It's interesting to think of reasons for the different perceptions by gender here. One reason could be that there are more sexists among the men, but a more likely one is that these issues are not something many men think about a lot, given that they are not directly faced with the problems that women face. It's like the old parable about the supermarket door which is automatic whenever you go through it but which has to be manually pushed open when I go through it. The problem of fixing the door would take very different priorities for the two of us.

If I Should Suddenly Disappear

This is interesting. A judge has struck down one of the provisions of the Patriot Act, and a good thing it was for this provision just might have endangered my sharp tongue:

The ACLU, which brought this lawsuit, explains that before the Patriot Act, a 1986 law allowed the FBI to issue these National Security Letters "only where it had reason to believe that the subject of the letter was a foreign agent." Section 505 of the Patriot Act, however, removed the individualized suspicion requirement and authorizes the FBI to use National Security Letters to obtain information about groups or individuals not suspected of any wrongdoing.
"The FBI need only certify—without court review—that the records are 'relevant' to an intelligence or terrorism investigation." (Emphasis added.)
Who decides what "relevant" means? The FBI, all by itself. That's why its headquarters are still named after J. Edgar Hoover. You can trust the FBI.
Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the ACLU involved in this case, told me both why the National Security Letters are so dangerous, and what the effect of Judge Marrero's ruling will be—if it is upheld by the appellate courts all the way up.
"The provision we challenged [that the judge struck down]," says Jaffer, "allows the FBI to issue NSLs against 'wire or electronic service communication providers.' Telephone companies and Internet service providers [are included.]" As Judge Marrero noted, the FBI could also use an NSL "to discern the identity of someone whose anonymous web log, or 'blog,' is critical of the Government."

(Bolds mine)

A little scary, isn't it? Let's see if the provision remains struck down now that we are going to have a new Attorney General who loves the Patriot Act.
----
Link via Kos.

Cheney's Heart

This is the headline of Reuter's article about Cheney's recent hospital visit because of shortness of breath:

Cheney Visits Hospital for Tests, Heart Is Fine

On reading this I immediately imagined Cheney marching in and going to the laboratory where his heart is kept in a glass jar. After checking its condition, he marched away equally heartless.

So naughty of me. But one has to take ones pleasures wherever they're found these days.

Saturday News

Just reminding you that I rant and rave on the American Street on Saturdays, the day with the lowest readership figures. If you have extra time on your hands you could go there and read all the erudite posts and then my rants. And no, they don't pay me. Yet, anyway.

In fact, nobody pays me and that's starting to cause some problems. I have some plans to start selling cute stuffed snakes with mine own embroidery on this blog for a pittance of, say, a thousand dollars per snake. And you could decide what the name of the snake is and there would be real adoption papers and stuff!
Or maybe t-shirts with snakes slithering around the shoulders and peeking at you from the armpits? Or my memoirs, written on parchment that's made to look like freshly-tanned hides of Karl Rove and his ilk with ink that's as red as some states supposedly were. And if you lick the paper you die.

Or I could just do more real work and less scribbling here. Choices, choices. Why are they almost always between two unpleasant things?

Although I have to decide whether to bake my famous peasant cookies or my infamous walnut cookies today, and that's a nice type of choice. Probably the walnut cookies as I have some batter ready frozen.

More Wacko Conspiracy Stuff from Lefty Bloggers (Drat Them)

Or, rather, more odd patterns in the elections, perhaps. This time in North Carolina, and yes, the link is to the Democratic Underground, not the most academic of sources. But the analysis is quite interesting. What it consists of is comparing the results based on absentee ballots only, the results as exit polls predicted and the actual final election results. The pattern that appears to hold is this: absentee ballots predict the same as exit polls as the final elections in all elections, whether about people or issues, except for two: the choice of a U.S. Senator and the choice of the U.S. president: in these two elections the final results were considerably different from both the absentee results and the exit polls, though these two agreed. Note that in North Carolina a very large number of people used absentee voting.

Many here agree that there were problems with the elections without any implication of fraud. I think that transparent elections are the very foundation of democracy, and this may explain why I feel it is so important to keep studying the results and their legitimacy. This makes me into a conspiracy-theorist wacko, but what do you think having half of your body human and half snake makes me into? So I don't mind that too much. To repeat, I'd rather that we are all weirdos this way and find that there is no reason for concern than the opposite alternative where we offer more tea and cucumber sandwiches to each other while tut-tutting all that is wrong with the Democratic party, and all the time, maybe, just maybe, the elections are completely unreliable.

This is the one thing that I could not live with. Just to explain why I flog what so many consider a dead horse (not that I'd ever flog any kind of horse, of course).

Hank!

Hank here! Hiya! 


Sorry for the quality of the pictures. I scanned actual paper pictures so the outcome is fuzzy. I'm going to get some digipics next time.

Henrietta the Hound

This is me. Am I not perfect? 

California in Jesusland by 2008?

That's what this Guardian article speculates:

Bush Sr called it the "Big Enchilada" - the giant, rolled tortilla shaped state on America's left coast that carries a whopping 54 electoral college votes. He was the last Republican president to win California - a state that has gone essentially uncontested in every election since 1988.
This year it stopped Bush Jr from recording an out of sight landslide victory over John Kerry. But Kerry's margin of victory in what both parties have considered safe Democratic territory for well over a decade was uncomfortably thin.
While Clinton and Gore took the state by double digits in their attempts at the presidency, Kerry beat Bush by only nine points, and strategists from both parties are thinking the unthinkable as they plan for 2008: Is the "Big Enchilada" back in play?
The unavoidable answer is yes and it should have Democrats worried, for if California slips back into the Republican column, it would likely thrust the Democratic party back into a wilderness that would make Britain's third placed Liberal Democrats look relevant.

Just in case you were getting used to the idea of a divided country, as long as your side was doing ok. I don't know how probable this would be as I'm not that well versed with California politics. Much depends on what happens in the media in general. If we don't get a more neutral media in place of this conservative-biased current one we can kiss our rights goodbye in most of the country. Or that's what I think right now. Talk me out of it, please.

Abdominal Pain?

Bloating? Discomfort? Constipation? Grinding of the teeth during the night? Raised blood pressure? Nightmares?

Are you a Kerry-voter? If so, don't worry, all this is perfectly normal for this time of the year 2004. You are just imagining things. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning. Provided that you have some health insurance.

Your health care provider
Echidne of the snakes and leeches

Snowing!

First snow: You run out without a coat or anything and you raise your face to the sky. The snow on your lips tastes like vanilla, and the way it melts on your eyelashes feels like someone else crying for you. Then you stick out your tongue to savor it properly, then you whirl around with your arms outstretched, then your neighbors call the ambulance for you.

Henrietta the Hound got on her hindlegs to look out through the window, and she got so excited. She had to run to the other side of the house to see if it was snowing there, too. When I let the dogs out in the fenced yard they ran around sticking their tongues out and whirling with their tails outstretched. Then they made dogangels in the snow. Conclusion: to go crazy about the first snow is a general survival instinct that has been hard-wired into us through millennia of harsh rooting-out of all those who shudder when it gets a little bit chilly.

Meanwhile, in Iran

A crackdown continues against pro-democracy forces, including those who advocate equality of the sexes:

11/9/2004 - Two leading female journalists were arrested this past week as part of the Iranian government's crackdown on pro-democracy journalists and websites. According to the New York Times, Mahboubeh Abbas-Gholizadeh, the editor of the Farzaneh magazine and an outspoken women's rights activist, was arrested on November 1. Fereshteh Ghazi, who writes about women's rights issues in a daily newspaper, was also arrested last week.

For your information, really. There's nothing to comment that I haven't said before.

Ed Gillespie Wants No More Exit Polls

Via buzzflash.com:

After early exit polls in Tuesday's election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.
In remarks Thursday at the National Press Club, Mr. Gillespie said he is among those who were stunned by exit poll reports, which leaked widely on the Internet. "I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession -- look at the precincts and the turnout, see who's turning out to vote," Mr. Gillespie said. "Don't build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be."

Why is this about the worst idea anyone has ever uttered? Because without exit polls and with a voting system that doesn't allow proper recounting where would we be? We are almost there already, but note that exit polls are regarded as very important in developing countries as a way to measure the likelihood of election fraud. Also see the next post below.

Some Statistics on the Exit Poll Mystery

Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania has written an interesting little study about the exit polls (a pdf file here). What he does is ask and answer the following question: If the reported election results were correct in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, what is the likelihood that from this true population of votes we would draw the three samples of exit polls in the same three states that we actually drew? This is how statisticians test hypotheses or theories. The idea is very simple: if it is extremely unlikely that the exit polls in those states reflect the same population of data as the reported election results, then our conclusion should be that they do not come from the same populations. In other words, either the exit polls were rigged or the election results were.

Freeman does the required calculations and finds that in each of the three states the test rejects the possibility that the exit polls describe the same universe as the final results (at p=0.01 level). Also,

The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.

So. I really enjoyed writing this, because statistics happens to be one of my many specialties! But if you didn't enjoy reading it as much, what it really says is that it's impossible for the exit polls to be so much off for the usual reasons that polls are off.

Instead, two other explanations need to be analyzed: Either the exit polls were wrong for some reason that biased them all towards Kerry (such as rigging by Democrats to stop Republicans in the West from voting or some odd refusal bias in answers by Republicans etc.) or the election results themselves are incorrect. Or both, I guess.

Added: After thinking about it I believe that we can discount the refusal bias of Republicans as a possible explanation. For why would they refuse in only these states and not in others? It doesn't make sense. That leaves the theories that the Democrats rigged the exit poll or that the results themselves are wrong.

I also don't know if Freeman's use of a random sample model is justifiable. The exit polls use some kind of clustering. But it's hard to see how the figures would change enough to change his conclusions. Though who knows.

Cuyahoga County, Ohio, again

Is this true? If it is, the goddess will go purple in the face:

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.

If this isn't true, then I have wasted another precious minute or two of your lives. But you probably would have used that minute to eat another Twinkie or to bite your nails or something equally immoral, so I'm not feeling any shame.

Counting the Votes?

This article summarizes the current state of affairs fairly well about the possibilities of recounts in New Hampshire. It is also rumored (via a Kos diary) that the third parties are going to ask for a recount in Ohio. I have followed all the evidence available in the blogosphere and on other websites with great care, and so far the few interesting data sets all have other possible explanations than the failings of the voting system. Though much is written about inaccuracies and even possible fraud, when you follow the references back to their beginnings you go back to those same few cases. And referring to Olberman's television program doesn't really help, because his sources are the same few cases, too.

This doesn't mean that everything is on the up-and-up, and clearly there were some obvious problems of vote suppression in traditionally Democratic areas in many places (long lines, fewer machines allocated this year than in 2000 despite much higher voter registration levels). But to talk about something else requires data which is hard to get hold of given the HAVA and its effects.

By the way, did any of you see Bush's Brain? Not that this movie has anything whatsoever to do with the topic of this post.

An addendum: It seems that Kerry-Edwards lawyers are also looking at Ohio, though they say they are not trying to change the winner of the elections.

Dr. Bob Jones III

has written a letter of congratulations to George Bush (via Salon):

The media tells us that you have received the largest number of popular votes of any president in America's history. Congratulations!
In your re-election, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Aren't you beginning to feel that there is a concerted effort to turn our attention to the wingnuts at this time? So that we won't talk about what else Bush is doing right now or what he may have done in the recent past? Or maybe I'm just really turning paranoid, but the Bob Jones people never really ruled this country before and I doubt that they do right now, either.

Still, he does point out that the country successfully averted the rising threat of Echidneites: the Skin Shedders who are rising everywhere with their chocolate ice-cream spoons raised high above their heads in salutation to all that is fair, just and good-tasting!

Correlation is Not Causation

Honest. All sorts of things correlate and many of them are not related to each other in the cause-and-effect sense. Correlation does not prove causality:

from The Daily Oklahoman, Oct. 23rd, 2004 ...
Dobson warned those attending the Friday afternoon rally at Oklahoma Christian University that the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman must be protected.
He cited examples of countries such as Norway that have allowed same-sex couples to marry as proof that fewer men and women get married. Dobson said 80 percent of children are born out of wedlock in Norway.
"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage," Dobson said.
"It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth."
Dobson urged rally attendees to reach out to homosexuals and "bring them to Jesus."

Mr. Dobson knows nothing about the Norwegian society, but that doesn't stop him telling us lies. An equally likely explanation for the demise of marriage in Scandinavian countries is that marriage can't take extreme cold or eating a lot of fish. Norway, like the other Scandinavian countries, in fact regards living together the same as marriage, or rather as a prestage of marriage. If Dobson's 80% figure of births outside marriage is true (which I haven't checked) it still doesn't mean that 80% of births are to women living alone. The fathers are mostly there, the couple hasn't just gotten around to getting married, and the community treats the parents as a couple. In other words, for all practical purposes these people are married.

Where could I find someone as wonderfully out of his mind as Mr. Dobson, but on our side?

On Raking Leaves

Here comes another trivial story with a deep hidden message...(You know, sometimes I hate my own smart-aleckiness):

Leaves fall from the trees this time of the year and if you live in the suburbs your neighbors will shun you unless you get rid of them. This is one of the banes of my life. I love trees and plants in general, so my yard is packed with stuff which means that the leaves get stuck in dead plants and have to be removed with a fine comb and tweezers. But I try to be a good (and quiet) neighbor so I rake and pick and rake and pick. Never enough, though.

As a consequence, my neighbors cross the street when they see me. I am shunned! My morals are bad; I don't hire those people that come in and spend half an hour sucking everything that is not nailed down into the mouths of the extraterrestial machines which SCREAM. I also don't kill the weeds during the summertime, and that's another big minus in my morals report.

The condemnation of the Snakepit Inc. and its bad morals is pretty general in this neighborhood, and the strident voice of Henrietta the Hound doesn't help. So we usually slink in and out holding our collars high over our faces.

Anyway, I have witnessed the following event three times this autumn: the leaf-blower crews that my neighbors hire finish their job by blowing all the leaves along the edges to my side of the hedge. This is why I have about three times as many leaves than anyone else.

The deep moral of the story is obvious, I hope. The only remaining question is whether I should poison my neighbors slowly with some weedkiller or suck them up into one of those extraterrestial maws.

News from Gilead*

The first shining piece of news (praise God!) is this: Our righteous brother Jerry Falwell will lead the country to a new moral awakening:

From the AP: "Falwell, a religious broadcaster based in Lynchburg, Va., said the Faith and Values Coalition will be a '21st century resurrection of the Moral Majority,' the organization he founded in 1979.
Falwell said he would serve as the coalition's national chairman for four years. He added that the new group's mission would be to lobby for anti-abortion conservatives to fill openings on the Supreme Court and lower courts, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and the election of another 'George Bush-type' conservative in 2008."

The Bible is the only source of law! Let us all study what Jesus said on abortion and gay marriages! Let us rejoice!

But this, my sisters and brothers in Christ, is only the tip of the iceberg, the theoretical formulation of our goals. Real work is being done among the sinning masses! Hear this:

Women seeking abortions in Mississippi must first sign a form indicating they've been told abortion can increase their risk of breast cancer. They aren't told that scientific reviews have concluded there is no such risk.
Similar information suggesting a cancer link is given to women considering abortion in Texas, Louisiana and Kansas, and legislation to require such notification has been introduced in 14 other states.

Praise be! The Devil knows how to play with science and true believers will reject such heresies. We must punish the sinners!

And we must educate the children in Christian ways. In Texas the seeds are being sown:

The Lone Star State adopts school health texts that say nothing about contraception -- even though the state has the highest birth rate among high school students in the nation.

Hallelujah!
-----
*Gilead is the country in which the events of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood take place. Trust me, you don't want to live there.

Heh.

Is this for real? Who knows, but it's an interesting synopsis of the values debate:

Jesus speaks through the Republicans

I hope the election of George W. Bush is seen as a wake-up call to all the liberal Democrats who oppose God's will.

It is His doing that George W. Bush is still our president. Millions of born-again Christians helped win this election through our prayers and votes. Jesus speaks through the Republicans.

The Democrats will not be able to win elections until they renounce their sinful ways and stop encouraging abortions, gayness, and trying to take away our guns.

Name (deleted by Echidne)

Address (deleted by Echidne)

What Ails Us

I was walking in the woods today with the dogs and jumping into the piles of yellow leaves everywhere. They crunch most satisfactorily under the boots. It was quiet, except for my crunching and the dogs darting through the underbrush and the everpresent sounds of trees slowly breathing. Nary a wingnut anywhere!

While walking I psychoanalyzed myself and the rest of the liberals that I know, and my conclusion is that we suffer from an utter feeling of powerlessness right now. We worked so hard and achieved so much in a very short amount of time. Many of us gave more money and time than we really had, many of us spent time persuading others to vote or writing letters to the media. Unless one is as old as I am (thousands of years, actually), it may be hard to even remember another era when the liberals were rising. And the signs seemed to support us: the expressions on the faces of Bush and his henchmen, the way the sleek opportunists in the media suddenly started talking our talk, even many polls and exit polls, the voter registration news. Also, the facts were on our side: Bush decided to avenge 9/11 on people that had nothing to do with it (Iraq) and made a mess of it. This cost hundreds of thousand of lives. He has lost more jobs than any president for decades, and he has brought in laws which might limit our freedoms except that we don't even know if this happened. He has condoned torture and illegal imprisonment, he has increased the income inequality in this country and even abortion rates rose during the four years of his presidency.

All this seemed so obvious that it was hard for anyone still trusting in the idea of democracy not to be optimistic, despite the knowledge we had that the Republican machinery is everywhere, that the media are scared of its very shadow (except for the parts which are openly pro-Bush) and that the Democratic party is a wimpy shadow of courage inside a bloated pro-corporate facade.

When you regard all this, the election results amount to a total disempowerment: a reduction of every chance we had into nothing. Either the majority in this country did not care about the facts at all or it decided that keeping a wartime president, however terrible was more important than anything else or it is too ignorant to bother with learning anything and votes for whoever has more sound bites or the fundamentalists have indeed started a theocracy which will run our lives from now on. Or the election was rigged.

It doesn't matter for the emotional purposes which of these took place: all of the reasons will result in this feeling that we don't matter, I don't matter, our values and our striving and the facts don't matter. Not only that, but the media conclusions about the election results are the exact opposite: that we do matter but only in the sense of being immoral, depraved and extremist, in the sense of presenting a suitable target for all the hatred of the fundamentalists and free-marketers.

It is human to feel as if having been run over by a tank. Even goddesses feel some pain here. And just like after any major trauma thinking about the issues doesn't really help the pain. Only time will tell what actually happened, if anything ever will be known. But in the meantime, while we are holding our pain and trying to breathe the wingnuts are goosestepping on with renewed vigor.

I have no solution to any of this. It's natural to feel horrible right now, but I'm not sure if we have the time that would be needed for this. So I alternate between bouts of activity and bouts of making holes in the walls. Maybe you can find your own patent remedies.

The Post-Roe Era

What will happen if the fundamentalists force Bush to appoint enough anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court? Some people at the Planned Parenthood Federation have been thinking about it in some detail:

For the past four years, Williams and her group's 13 other members have explored the post-Roe challenge on many fronts.
Among other options, they've looked at maintaining services by strengthening state laws and the possibility of providing abortions in places where federal laws don't apply.
To prepare for what would likely be a health epidemic, they've urged physicians to get special training so they know how to treat infections, uncontrolled bleeding and other life-threatening complications caused by botched abortions.

The ideas they toss around are trying to see that states have clear pro-choice laws in their books and looking into alternative sites for abortion providers such as offshore facilities and Native American reservations.

The major problem will face the poor women who now have 57% of all abortions in this country. They would be unable to go abroad or to a nice, discreet provider that daddy or mummy golfs with. It is among this group that we are most likely to find the dead in a post-Roe era. If you don't believe that there will be deaths, consider this:

Abortion rates were higher in the United States before the procedure was legal, Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, has said.
More than 200 U.S. women died each year from the complications of illegal abortions in the decade before Roe vs. Wade, Stanley Henshaw, a senior fellow at The Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, has said.

Catch-22

So many things today are like Catch-22 or like 1984. An interesting one concerns the recent seizure of some Indymedia servers in London, England:

The facts of the matter are scanty. On Oct. 7, Rackspace Managed Hosting, an Internet service provider based in San Antonio, was served with a subpoena ordering it to hand over two Indymedia servers physically located in London. Rackspace immediately fired off an e-mail to Indymedia informing them about the servers and noting that it was required to comply, according to something called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, an international agreement that sets out "procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping, and money laundering."
In the e-mail, Rackspace noted that it was "acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter."
And that was that. Rackspace refused to provide a copy of the seizure order to Indymedia. Noting that it was under a federal gag order, it refused to even discuss the contents of the order. Indymedia was left wondering which government seized its servers and for what purpose. To this day, the group has no idea what was done to the servers before they were returned, what was being searched for, who did the searching, or why. All they know is that for nearly a week somebody, somewhere, with the assistance of the FBI, had a peek, and maybe more, at their machines.

What you don't know about can't hurt you? This seems to be the very motto of both the Bush administration and those who vote for it. But I can't help feeling that we have strayed quite far from the narrow and difficult path of democracy. Even from the path of freedom that Bush so advocates, although it's true that he never specified who exactly would be free under his rule.

Some More Irregularities In the Election

This is a very interesting website. It links to the sources for the data as well, and the data comes from proper state sources. If these original data are correct, then clearly something is wrong. Who knows?

Added: As many of you can't read the file I linked to (though I can, for some reason), I'm copying a little of it here:

There have been several emails regarding this page. I will be inquiring to Cuyahoga County in the coming days. It seems that the precinct/ward differences may be where the problem is as the official summary report does not show these spikes in turn-out.
The summary, however, does not report on the number of registered voters for precincts or wards, whereas the referenced link does. I am using the referenced link data below (more complete totals), not the summary report, which only reflects total districts.
Each precinct in Cuyahoga County, Ohio
Highlighted areas represent 90% (very VERY unlikely) and higher (up to 1160.78%) voter TURN-OUT! 30 are above 100%
Calculated from data on county page -
(Ballots Cast/Registered Voters) * 100 = % turn out.
Ballots Cast SHOULD NEVER be more than Registered, thus % should NEVER be higher than 100%
This amounts to 97,489 EXTRA votes beyond 100% in those precincts! This is just for ONE county!

As an example or two:

The number of registered voters in Beachwood was 9943.
The ballots cast in Beachwood were 13, 939.
This gives a turnout rate 140%

The number of registered voters in Bedford Heights was 8,142.
The ballots cast in Bedford Heights were 13, 512.
This gives a turnout rate of 166%
-----
What this means I don't know, except that the files are wrong, obviously. Whether it's because voter registrations are not correctly reported or because votes are not correctly reported or something else, I have no idea. But I do smell a skunk, somewhere.

No Comment

I sometimes go to mensnewsdaily.com to find out what the enemies have to say. Their boards are especially enlightening to those who believe misogyny doesn't exist. This time I just looked at the main page, though. Among ads for screensavers which showed an extremely big-breasted woman with two strips of material across her nipples and an ad for singles dating showing a woman with a bare stomach was an article about the election results. Some snippets:

A lot has been written since the election about how Democrats just don't get it, but the truth is that it is not just Democrats but liberals, regardless of party affiliation, who are befuddled by the recent repudiation of their agenda. Two statements following the election results prove the point.
The first is Sen. Arlen Specter's "warning" to President Bush not to send any "out of the mainstream" judges to the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration. We'll get back to that one.
The second statement came from washed-up New York pol (now an analyst for Fox News) Geraldine Ferraro. In the typical, dismissive fashion of a liberal analyzing why the "progressive" agenda lost — again — Ms. Ferraro look at that sea of red across America and said, "But look at those blue states! The country is nothing without them!"
Could there be a clearer expression of Northeastern liberal elitism than that? She went on to say that the blue states have all the great universities, cultural centers, business interests, etc., implying that we who populate the red states are backward, uneducated morons who reside in flyover country.
The visceral disdain of elites toward traditional conservative values informed by a Christian worldview is as blatant as we have seen it in our lifetime. Even after being soundly defeated at the polls, American liberals in both parties still believe that only those who share their "enlightened" point of view need apply — especially when it comes to the judiciary.
...
As Democrats strategize themselves into political oblivion trying to learn "the language of faith," liberal Republicans like Specter present a two-fold problem. First, they can create real obstacles in the president's efforts to defend traditional, pro-family values; and second, Democrats love to quote them. How many times have you heard Chuck Schumer say things like, "Even respected, moderate Republicans like Arlen Specter think the president's agenda is too radical"?

Heh. Not only is the idea of moral values a little confusing on this website but now the wingnuts are beginning to feast on their own. Well, that was the next predictable step anyway: to cleanse (term chosen on purpose) the party of those who are not wingnuts.

You know, this would be fun to watch if real people didn't die and suffer as a consequence. Other than that little problem, the next four years can provide me enough material to write satire until the cows come home.

A Short Explanation

To those of my readers who come here for feminism more than political cud-chewing. Right now the two are the same thing in my boiling brain and have everything to do with the U.S. elections. In a day or two I'll probably be able to write something on just feminism, but not yet. So my apologies.

The same apologies to those of you who want to hear more about my dogs or my snakes or the very hot sex I always promise I'll write about. All this will be forthcoming, but not today.

Today's deep thought:

Ambrose Redmoon: "Courage is just the realization that something else is more important than your fear."

The Grassroot Effort of the Right

Heh. It's hard to beat the pulpit they have for their grassroot energizing. While our side has to knock on doors and beg for a slot in the media programming (so hard to fit us in, what with all the advertizing form Republican firms), the right has both the Fox News and ready-made community-based centers for this:

The Post also describes how thousands of clergy received guidelines from the conservative American Center for Law and Justice for how to talk politics from the pulpit without running afoul of tax laws. "Such entreaties appear to have worked. [Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for ACLJ] said he believes that thousands of clergy members gave sermons about the election, and that many went further than they ever had before. The Rev. Rick Warren, author of the best-selling 'The Purpose Driven Life' and one of the most influential ministers in the country, sent a letter to 136,000 fellow pastors urging them to compare the candidates' positions on five 'non-negotiable' issues: abortion, stem cell research, same-sex marriage, human cloning and euthanasia."

Hallelujah!

Taking Back Some Power

The "winner-takes-all" principle of American politics leaves the loser without any power at all. All the votes for Kerry are null and void now, not only those in the so-called red states, but also those in the states that Kerry won. Almost half of all votes were for Kerry, but none of these votes matter now.

This idiotic rule leaves the opposition pretty much without any political influence. The administration will not push any of the policies that almost fifty percent of us wanted, and the administration will not listen to us. The people that have their ear are the corporations and the radical fundamentalist Christians.

So how can we get some of our power back? There is not much one can do about the fundamentalists. They live in a world of Rapture and if I approached them with the view of a friendly debate they'd most likely burn me on a stake. That leaves the corporations. We can't talk to them, either, but what we can do is make sure that our money doesn't go to corporations which guaranteed Bush for another four years.

What I'm advocating is selective shopping. Stop supporting those who got us into this mess. At least cut out the worst of the firms and let them get their money from the fundamentalists. I know that this will not be easy to do, but whenever there is a good Democratic alternative we should support it, especially in larger purchases.

Here is one good link to get the idea going: spending liberally. I'm going to look for more lists of corporations that love Bush.

A Slightly Different View...

To cheer you up!

What the Democrats Did Wrong

You can read all about this in almost any newspaper this weekend or you can hear it on the radio or watch it on television. You can even find it on the net. So I'm not going to bore you with my amateur interpretation of how the Democratic campaign could have been more efficient.

Instead, I'd like to point out that it takes two to tango. Somehow we have decided that the proper view of political engagement is similar to an ardent wooer going after someone uninterested. It is as if the politicians must not only inform the voters about what is at stake, but also personally get them out of the house and into the voting booth. The voter appears to have no responsibility, no obligation whatsoever. The voter is also seen as a buyer, a reluctant consumer, and the onus is for the political firms to sell their products by clever advertizing. In either of these metaphors an uninvolved voter is seen as blameless.

This is not what democracy is all about, of course. We have a responsibility to be involved, to educate ourselves about the issues and to vote. If we accept this view of voters as passive lumps to be manipulated by the right message, even against their will, we have no democracy but a system in which politicians manage the voters. It should be the other way round.

I'm just now hearing on the radio that voters can't get informed or involved because they are so busy with their lives, their children, their work. Fine. I'm too busy to have my teeth checked, too, but if I don't get them taken care of regularly I will end up with no teeth. In the same manner, those who are too busy for democracy will end up without it.

This is not to say that the pressures on people's time today wouldn't be real. They are, and we need to do more to make voting easier. For one thing, the election day should be a national holiday so that the poor don't have to choose between a paycheck and voting, and there should be daycare facilities and free buses to the site. It wouldn't cost that much for one day every few years, and paying the money would show real respect towards the voters. But it is still true that even if voting is a hard chore it is a necessary one for anyone who wants to live in a democracy.

The Democrats probably made many mistakes in their campaigning. Given that really atrocious and mortal errors didn't matter for Bush's chances of getting another four years, mistakes don't seem to matter too much. To be quite honest, I am much more concerned with the hidden message in all the articles that talk about how the Democrats could have done better, because the hidden message is that the voters are objects, passive lumps, to be manipulated at will by others. Politics is not consumerism, whatever the corporations try to tell us.

It's time to treat democracy seriously. This means making the voters understand not only their rights but their moral responsibility. It also means making sure that every vote counts, even the votes of minorities.

On Moral Values

Moral values is a religiously correct (R.C.) term for defining rightwing values (no gay marriage, no choice for women, a certain kind of hidden racism)as the Good Values. If you don't share these moral values you are a person without any values. You want to kill babies and appease terrorists, where the former is defined to include embryos and fetuses and the latter is defined to include any individuals of Arab countries and/or Muslim religion.

Many have pointed out that even a polite interpretation of the rightwing moral values only includes private values: those that apply to an individual's sexuality or family arrangements. R.C. values appear not to include public values. This may explain why the wingnut politicians are often the most shameless manipulators, liars and crooks. It suffices to sigh deeply over terrible tales of same-sex love or the butchering of innocent zygotes, whereas the deaths of Iraqi civilians from babies to the elderly can be passed over as just one unfortunate side-effect of the holy fight against terrorism. It is acceptable to tell the Americans that the country attacked Iraq to keep terrorists away from the United States, and nobody asks why it is ok to move our terrorist problems into the backyards of people who had nothing to do with causing them. Better that they be killed than someone here, perhaps?

The other interesting thing about these R.C. moral values is the odd mix of extreme duality and fuzziness. The wingnuts accuse the rest of us for fuzzy morals, and point out their extreme good versus evil values as the clear and correct ones. Everything must be totally right or totally wrong; thus, the so-called 'partial birth abortion' is totally wrong, even if the fetus is dead in the womb or rapidly dying. But the extra deaths of Iraqi civilians caused by our invasion (as many as 100,000, perhaps) are something fuzzy in value terms: lamentable, yes, but necessary. At the same time, the deaths that Saddam caused during his reign are totally wrong. No ifs and buts about that part. And it is R.C. to argue that anyone who thinks the world is not a better place without Saddam Hussein in power is a treasonist or even a terrorist. God help you if you try to explain that this comparison shouldn't be made as if the choices are 'Saddam in power' and 'perfect Eden', given that perfect Eden is not what is happening in Iraq right now. Then your moral values are terrible and you deserve nothing better than being called a Saddam-lover.

In reality most people have moral values, not just religious people. There is something extremely insulting in the R.C. assumption that only the fear of gods can make you act nicely. I have heard more than one wingnut commentator argue that I can't have any values if I don't believe in the Christian god; after all, what would keep me from acting totally selfishly if there is no eternal punishment? This tells a lot more about the wingnut than it tells about me.

Maybe the right wingers should take stock of their own moral values and consider lengthening their lists with a few more: honesty, compassion and justice. These are not R.C. right now, but they are real values nevertheless.

AWOL?

This is from the Salon:

A lieutenant in the New Jersey National Guard -- sent home after she was allegedly raped on a Mississippi base -- has been declared absent without leave in an attempt to force her to return to her old unit, her lawyer charged.

She does not want to return to her old base, because that would bring her into direct contact with her alleged rapist who is also an officer there. She had asked to be reassigned to another base while she is beginning her preparations for leaving the military.

The powers-that-be appear to have no knowledge of the psychological effects of acts on violence on their victims. Especially when the violence comes from someone you are supposed to regard as a fellow soldier, someone who was supposed to get your back when things get bad. Of course, this is assuming that she told the truth about the rape.

Some Bedtime Reading

About the exit polls and stuff, again. This link should be read.

Saturday notes

Just to remind you that I also blog on the American Street on Saturdays. You can go there if you want to get more politics today. Though why any of us is that masochistic beats me.

I am going to start boycotting certain firms from now on, by the way. The Whole Foods chain has been getting a lot of my money, but from now on they get none of it. They have been successful at taking over profitable organic food stores all across the country and then at profiting from their established reputation as good providers of food while all the time destroying their local delivery chains, leaving the local farmers bankrupt and substituting sources from places like Costa Rica and Chile. And the owner of the chain is a big Ayn Rand fan (I had Bush fan here earlier, but I can't prove it so I took it out; he's a Libertarian, though). Also, the company is fighting unionization of its work force.

This is going to create some real hardships for me as I'm a terrible cook. But that's what I'm going to do.

In other Saturday notes, I'm training Henrietta and Hank (the dogs) to sing while I accompany them with a harmonica. It sounds really good right now, and I might put up an audio of our concert in the near future!

Some More Questions

I am still digesting the election results, though now the process has shifted largely to the thinking part of me. And what I get is more and more questions.

Consider the information I had right before the elections: The most recent polls were showing a very close presidential race, and many were predicting Kerry slightly ahead of Bush. The news about new voter recruitment quite strongly implied that Democrats were being far more successful in this than Republicans. The exit polls that were leaked during the election day showed a very similar state of affairs.

Then the actual results were quite different. I have been told in various explanations in the media that the Republican effort of getting the vote out just happened below the media's radar. My question: How is this possible? How could the media not pay attention to the Republican vote effort? I am not blaming the media here, by the way, I am only trying to understand what happened.

Next the exit polls failed to reflect the actual results. Traditionally, exit polls have been pretty good at predicting the final results. Why were they so much off this time? Why were they all wrong in the same direction, i.e. showing too many Kerry voters? I would think that if they were off due to the fact that a sample can be unrepresentative by fluke, at least a few sets of results should have been wrong in the other direction, i.e., showing too much support for Bush.

I have also read that the early exit polls were wrong while the later ones were more correct. At the same time, I have read that the later exit polls available on the net were adjusted by the actual vote counts. This would seem to be a very bad thing if it is actually true. What are the facts here? Also, is it true that the exit polls were good predictors of the final results in paper ballot areas but not in the machine voting areas? And if this is true, why?

Finally, if the exit polls are not to be relied on, why are they relied on when it comes to the argument that moral values was the most important reason voters went for Bush? After all, if the exit polls are wrong, they can't be used for some arguments and not for other arguments. If the percentages in the exit polls were unreliable, do we really know what the most frequent argument for voting the Bush-ticket might be?

Questions. So many questions, so little time.

Abortion in the News

In Kenya, a physician is facing murder charges for performing abortions:

John Nyamu, a Kenyan obstetrician and gynecologist, will stand trial next week after being charged with performing 15 abortions. Dr. Steven Ochiel, the head of Kenya's Medical Association, is urging doctors to protest the murder trial, stating that "the case against Dr. Nyamu is not against him. It is against the medical profession," reports The East African Standard.

In Portugal, abortion is mostly illegal, and as a consequence:

Health statistics reveal that over 1,000 Portuguese women were hospitalized last year as a result of complications from back-alley abortions. According to Agence France-Presse, between 20,000 to 40,000 clandestine abortions are performed annually in Portugal.

In the U.S., abortion might also become mostly or totally illegal:

Anti-abortion advocates responding to the results of the presidential election announced that with President Bush's win and the Republican Party's increased control of the US Congress, they have hopes that the administration will successfully pursue an anti-choice agenda. Citing a net gain of three anti-choice senators, the National Right to Life Committee is planning to pursue legislation that would make it a crime to travel with a minor across state lines to obtain an abortion in order to circumvent restrictive parental notification laws that inhibit a woman's right to choose, according to Reuters. Anti-abortion advocates are also aiming to ban human cloning, even for stem cell research purposes, as well as secure right-wing, anti-abortion nominations to federal courts.

Banning abortions will not stop them. It will drive them underground and increase the number of women dying each year, though the rich will get their abortions safely in any case. What would severely reduce abortions is proper sex education, including information on both abstinence and the proper use of contraception.
Just look at abortion statistics in those countries which do have proper sex education.

Also, anti-abortion men and women could just say no to sex...But I doubt that this recommendation will work. I also wonder how much the anti-abortion movement is really founded on desires other than the belief that life begins at conception (rather than at some other point either before or after conception). There are some very primal reasons why many view women largely as a source for more population growth, and as population growth is very important for groups like the White Supremacists, to have this important political variable determined by individual women's decisions is not a good thing for them.

How We Oppress the Christians

Here is a clear example of the terrible Hollywood liberals' effect on the real Americans:

Nov. 5, 2004 - The Texas Board of Education approved new health textbooks for the state's high school and middle school students Friday after the publishers agreed to change the wording to depict marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The decision involves two of the biggest textbook publishers and represents another example of Texas exerting its market clout as the nation's second-largest buyer of textbooks. Officials say the decision could affect hundreds of thousands of books in Texas alone.
On Thursday, a board member charged that proposed new books ran counter to a Texas law banning the recognition of gay civil unions because the texts used terms like "married partners" instead of "husband and wife."

Moreover, one of the publishers agreed to even more fundamental changes:

After hearing the debate Thursday, one publisher, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, agreed to include a definition of marriage as a "lifelong union between a husband and a wife." The definition, which was added to middle school textbooks, already was in Holt's high school editions, Holt spokesman Rick Blake said.

That lifelong bit really shows the oppression of fundamental Christians who have gotten divorced! But at least the coastal elites didn't get this term inserted, though they tried:

Neither publisher added all the changes Leo initially pushed for. For instance, one proposed passage in the teacher's editions read: "Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use, and suicide."

Poor Christians. They almost got oppressed here, again and again.


-----
P.S. This is a very poor example of sarcasm.

On Exit Polls

The exit polls in this year's elections were unreliable. Supposedly the surveys across the country tilted towards Kerry early in the day and throughout much of the evening in some states.
Why this happened is something I have not been able to establish. It is an odd kind of mistake to make; one that causes bias in only one direction. I would have expected that some states would have had polls tilting towards Bush and some towards Kerry. Why would all exit polls tilt in the same direction, and one that was not the correct one based on the election results? I really want to understand this.

In any case, it is interesting to note that "Late in the evening, the exit polls were adjusted to reflect the official vote count."
Is this the common practice? If so, that would obviously account for the common experience that exit polls have been pretty reliable in the past. But I very much doubt that their reliability was caused by a trick like this.

This link shows some very interesting patterns in the comparisons between exit poll and final election results by state.

Voting is an important part of democracy and it's really very necessary to understand exactly what happened. If we don't understand this, our trust in the very concept of democracy will be reduced.