"Is the 'market' up or down?"

Naked! Pin-up! Rotarians????

Community leaders suck it up, in, for charity in pin-up calendar

Genius

It's beginning to look a lot like "Groundhog Day." Ever since 22 percent of the country's voters said on Nov. 2 that they cared most about "moral values," opportunistic ayatollahs on the right have been working overtime to inflate this nonmandate into a landslide by ginning up cultural controversies that might induce censorship by a compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV networks. Seizing on a single overhyped poll result, they exaggerate their clout, hoping to grab power over the culture.

Read the rest of Frank Rich's brilliant skewering of conservatives and their moral values. Do it now.

Washington democracy inaction

From the "If I had bothered to vote for either of these two knuckleheads, I would have needed to bump off only 41 people to make my vote matter" department:

Margin Now Just 42 Votes in Washington State Race

For the record, the apparent winner, Dino Rossi, is described in the article as a "commercial real estate agent," but I have it on good authority from another grad student who has lived in one of Rossi's buildings that the correct term for the would-be governor-elect is "slumlord."

Focus on the fallacy

From a New York Times story about the upcoming blockbuster "Alexander" and its historically accurate portrayal of Alexander of Macedon as having both a wife and a male lover:

"There will be people who see Alexander the Great's bisexuality as applauding that lifestyle, and unfortunately it will lead some young boys, young men down a path that I think they'll regret someday," said Bob Waliszewski, a film critic with Focus on the Family, a Christian group.

I'm not sure what's most offensive: that this "film critic" thinks seeing Colin Farrell in a love scene with Jared Leto could turn some blokes "gay", that he thinks being gay is a "path of regret", or that this Focus on the Family thing is basically a multimillion-dollar business that enjoys tax-exempt status despite propagating lies and bigotry.

The founder of this corporation, James Dobson, has claimed, unsurprisingly, that evolution is a fallacy: "Darwin tried to tell us that the various life forms evolved on earth from a single-celled organism swimming in a primordial 'soup.' ... From that spontaneous beginning in an African swamp came a dazzling array of evermore complicated species." It seems there's some subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) racism here. (Complicated species from an African swamp? Seems doubtful to any white supremacist.)

But beyond that, it's also highly offensive the way he uses his manifest lack of comprehension of science, the scientific method and the theory of evolution to smear perfectly good science:

"Now, after 135 years of exhaustive research, the transitional forms still have not turned up. They don't exist in the geological record. This and other convincing criticisms of classical evolution make it difficult to understand why so many intelligent and highly educated men and women still hold a position that is not supported by verifiable scientific data."

First off, there's a key difference between verifiable data and verified data. As in, just because we haven't found proof of a "missing link" doesn't mean the theory of evolution can be definitively refuted. Certainly I don't think Dobson will wait with bated breath as archaeologists search for such a fossil record. And, indeed, evidence is completely irrelevant to the agenda he's pushing. But all that aside, even if we claim Dobson is correct to say that evolution is unverifiable, that doesn't inherently disprove the theory. The nature of scientific knowledge is such that we can never really, truly prove that a "theory of gravity" is true, but it does seem to offer a pretty satisfactory explanation for why bureaucrats end up gravely injured when defenestrated from Prague windows. I would hope that even Dobson won't argue that point. My point about evolution, however, is that even if we can't conclusively prove it, no one has disproven it, and it remains the most probable theory yet posited for how humans came to be. Not to mention, we do have all those fossils of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men that show humans to have evolved over the past several thousand years.

Of course, the irony of it is that Dobson's own theory -- that of faith -- is profoundly unverifiable, by definition even. Yet I don't go around calling it a crackpot theory -- not until he starts passing it off as science.

Lest you think student activists are a bunch of crackpots...

...take a moment today to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, which began with a demonstration by tens of thousands of courageous students and culminated with the complete collapse of the Communist regime in just more than a month.

(And yes, I realize that this is an extremely oversimplified explanation of the fall of communism, but 17 November is widely recognized as the beginning of the Velvet Revolution.)

First we brand 'em, then we send them to Bovine University

Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.

Then the poor children get a shiny price tag before they're shelved on an end cap and sold at Wal-Mart.

Who's your Vladdy?

Angels' Vladimir Guerrero named AL MVP

And that's the story of how the Soviet army expelled the Turks in 1878

Seems Bulgarian kids don't know much about history.

What's ironic is that I was just thinking to myself yesterday that I don't know much at all about the history of Bulgaria, among other Eastern European nations. Which leads me to wonder which is worse, or perhaps more inexcusable: that young Bulgarians don't know their national history, or that I don't know much about it either, despite being an aspiring historian of Eastern Europe?

Paying the religious right due homage

Speaking just days after the American presidential election, which might have hinged on the votes of evangelical Christians, Bono said: "I don't talk about my faith very much, because the people you might want to talk with, you don't want to hang out with. -- from a review of U2's new album, "How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb"

Supply and command

Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data -- "from individual Social Security and driver's license numbers to geographic proclivities for Mallomars, or lipsticks, or jugs of antifreeze" -- stores on computers at its home office in Wallyworld, Ark. To put that in perspective, that's twice as much data at the Internet, according to experts.

So, naturally, Wal-Mart abuses this massive database of personal and consumer information to profit from a natural disaster:

Hurricane Frances was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida's Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology.

A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it.

The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products - and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer."

Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances. Most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly, the company said. -- from an article on how Sam Walton is the new face of Big Brother

Envy

Before the calendar changes, I just want to offer my regards to the German people, especially those of the former GDR, who today celebrated the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that other, more pleasant 9/11: 9 November 1989.

It's a real tribute to the German people, who after four decades of repression found the courage to stand as one and proclaim Wir sind die Volk -- we are the people -- and then Wir sind ein Volk -- we are one people.

Kudos to the Germans, for their bravery and refusal to tolerate an illegitimate regime.

Pop quiz

"The truth is that drunken peasants at a country fair behave better than these journalists do."

Who said it and in what context?

A: George Steinbrenner, remarking on a skirmish in which two beat writers from the New York Post came to blows over the last can of Sierra Mist in the press box ice chest.
B: Rupert Murdoch, scolding the head of ABC News for getting exit polls wrong in six swing states that ultimately went to George W. Bush.
C: Leonid Brezhnev, criticizing the Czechoslovak government for the lack of pre-publication censorship in the media during the Prague Spring of 1968.
D. Abraham Lincoln, lamenting the boorish manners and fabricated dispatches of field reporters "embedded" with Union troops during the American Civil War.

Winner receives the last pair of Yankee-branded tube socks given away in the press box during Game 7 of this year's ALCS (which I had to wrestle away from Bill Rhoden of the New York Times).

Paper chase

Paranoia? Perhaps. But there's quite a bit of evidence mounting that maybe that election last week didn't come off quite so clean as folks are being made to believe.

To wit, exit polls showed Kerry winning several key states. ABC's exit polling had Kerry winning Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which went to Bush after computerized vote totals came in.

Now, it would be logical to suggest that ABC's methodology for exit polling is simply flawed, which may well be the case. But ABC wasn't the only organization to come up with numbers projecting a Kerry victory. The Kerry campaign's own polling had Kerry believing he was president for about six hours on Election Day.

Even the Bush team came up with numbers that showed a Kerry win. Top operative Karl Rove said he felt sick when he learned of the exit poll results as Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base following a last-minute swing through swing states. The AP reported that Karen Hughes sat Dubya himself down to tell him he had lost the election.

By all exit poll indications, this wasn't even close. It was a clear and decisive rout ... for Kerry. If the exit poll data was accurate and Kerry carried the states he was projected initially to win but lost, it would've meant a swing of 73 electoral votes. That means the final tally wouldn't have been 286-252, but 325-213. A landslide.

But are we placing too much trust in the exit polls? Probably not.

In The Hill, Dick Morris wrote last week that exit polls are virtually never wrong. They're widely regarded as being more accurate than standard pre-election polls because they can separate actual voters from "likely" voters, and they rely on observation rather than guesswork to gauge actual voter turnout. Exit polls, Morris reports, are so accurate that they're routinely used as a measure for determining the relative honesty of elections in countries that require independent election monitors.

To screw up one exit poll is unfathomable. To botch six or more is improbable. Something is rotten in Denmark. And while Morris, being a Republican shill, immediately jumps to the irrational conclusion that it was a concerted effort by the major media to depress turnout for Bush, such a liberal bias interpretation seems less than likely.

Given how easy it is for a hacker to tamper with the computerized vote totals without leaving a trace, it's not so far-fetched to suspect significant fraud that accounts for the discrepancies between exit polling data and the actual (or "actual") totals. Of course, it's much harder to detect such corruption when the election lacks independent monitors, and particularly when the touch screen voting machines don't produce any sort of paper record to match up against the computer's count.

The irony of this all is that, had the Carter Center, or the OSCE, sent teams of independent observers to monitor our election, they probably would've concluded that there were sufficient irregularities and fundamental, systemic flaws with the process as to cast unmitigated doubt on the integrity of the results. Certainly, had the electronic voting machines used in the Venezuelan recall election a few months ago not dispensed paper records, the Carter Center would've rejected the results that saw Hugo Chávez defeat the recall with 58 percent of the vote.

Of course, we shouldn't let the doubts cast on the honesty of this election detract from important, overriding tasks, such as persuading the Democratic Party to at least resume giving the impression of representing liberal, working-class interests, and seeking to arrest what superficially seems to be steamrolling right-wing tendencies. But it would certainly go a long way to restoring people's faith to think that even in light of the generally low quality of Kerry's candidacy, a majority of the country views Bush as an illegitimate, major-league asshole. Big time.

Russian holidays

Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, a liberal in Parliament, said in an interview that it was time to rethink a calendar rife with absurdities. He favors abandoning Nov. 7, but opposes Nov. 4, since that date, too, would commemorate a violent struggle, not unity. Dropping Dec. 12 - Constitution Day - would be "one more signal that we do not support constitutional law," he said.

We may celebrate the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution in November, but the struggle for social justice and equality, not to mention nationalist squabbles over the past, continues in Russia.

The voice of reason

"Many liberal commentators have asked why so many workers voted against their interests on economic issues to back Bush. But the question really should be turned around: Why do the Democrats, the supposed party of the people, give working people so little to vote for?

No wonder that people who might have been convinced otherwise embraced religion or “moral values” to guide their vote--while others sank into cynicism.

If conservative ideas made inroads in the electorate, it’s because the Kerry Democrats echoed and legitimized those ideas at every turn--from support for the occupation of Iraq and the “war on terror,” to the homophobic attacks on gay marriage. If these assumptions form the unquestioned basis of acceptable mainstream politics, it shouldn’t be surprising that many people accept them--and stick with the conservative original, Bush, instead of the copy, Kerry."

-- From one of the most sober, poignant, incisive critiques of the election and Kerry's defeat, pinning blame squarely on the shoulders of the Democrats who pushed the party as far right as they could without offering anything to their purported "base." Naturally, it's in the Socialist Worker.

Political capitalism is the worst form of tyranny

In case there was any doubt that Dubya would spend his newly claimed "capital" on reversing the principles of freedom that have traditionally been considered a cornerstone of American society, his top political aid Karl Rove erased any illusions today on "Fox News Sunday":

"If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal, and the ideal is that marriage ought to be, and should be, a union of a man and a woman," Rove said.

Rove continued to expound on the levels of duplicity and hypocrisy the second Bush administration would scale, noting that there wouldn't be an abortion "litmus test" on judicial appointees, just a requirement that any would-be federal judge subscribe to the Bush team's same strict and inflexible view of the Constitution.

Here's hoping that their "hopeful and decent society" collapsed under the strain of that white man's burden. Or that Bush ends up blowing his political capital on a bunch of losing causes.

George Georgevich

Over the course of my research on Soviet foreign policy during the major crises of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, I've decided that the historical personage the current crusader-in-chief most parallels is one Leonid Ilitch Brezhnev, former leader of the Soviet Union.

The comparison first became stark when I read the following passage from At the Red Summit: Interpreter Behind the Iron Curtain, the memoir of Erwin Weit, a former interpreter for the Polish government who was present at the Warsaw summit the month before the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968:

"It was interesting to see how Brezhnev insisted on basing his arguments on the agreement of the five Warsaw Pact countries taking part in the meeting. It was the same old story. Anyone planning to put an evil action into effect always tries to implicate his audience in his decision. Clearly the Soviet authorities felt that their unilateral action in suppressing the Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been a mistake." [Emphasis in original. That's right, the original.]

Now, perhaps the "five", those nations that participated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia under the aegis of the Warsaw Pact -- the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany and Poland (don't forget about Poland!) -- were a bit more eager to use military force against a sovereign country than, say, the coalition of the willing. At least, the Poles contributed a good number more troops in this exercise in foreign military adventurism than they sent to Iraq. But there can be no mistaking that this was, above all else, a Soviet invasion. Even if the other nations supported the mission, even if they had wanted to tear into Czechoslovakia and depose the sitting government, it wouldn't have happened without Soviet approval.

But there's more. Militarily, the invasion was a terrific success. The Czech and Slovak resistance was, well, non-existent. The Czechoslovak army had been ordered to stay in its barracks and not resist, and in wake of the 200,000 foreign troops that invaded the country, it was the only practical course. You would think Brezhnev would've made a stunt landing on a barge in the Vltava to proclaim victory amid signs reading "Mission Accomplished," but no. Occupation, it turned out, were exceedingly difficult. Despite the military takeover of the country, spontaneous acts of civil resistance thwarted efforts to pacify the country and prevented the installation of a quisling government to form a puppet regime. Initial claims that members of the government in Prague had "invited' foreign troops were quickly dispelled. As a result, the rationale for the intervention had to be retroactively changed to offering "fraternal assistance." Civilian casualties were officially said to be no more than a few dozen, and these owed mainly to complications stemming from the occupation, such as traffic accidents caused by the presence of tanks on busy city streets. In reality, the death toll was in the hundreds, and many of the victims were felled by Soviet ordnance.

Thus, while major combat operations were over almost before they began, the process of making the country pliant lasted many months longer. It was almost a year before a new, wholly subservient government could be installed, and only then could the terrifying process of "normalization" be initiated. Ultimately, the population's will to resist was broken, but the hard feelings the occupation fostered endured. The new government lacked legitimacy and had to rely on coercion to keep the people quiet. Their dissatisfaction, however, was palpable, and ultimately, when the regime's Weberian monopoly on force was broken -- more accurately, when the occupying power had decided to pull out its troops and leave matters in the hands of local forces -- the regime fell, the system collapsed and the great imperial power died.

Now, perhaps the last parallel is mere wishful thinking on my part, but don't think that I'm laboring the similarities between Bush and Brezhnev. (Hey: both their surnames start with 'B'!)

For you see, during his tenure as top man in the Kremlin, Brezhnev presided over three unmitigated foreign policy debacles. The invasion of Czechoslovakia under the guise of "fraternal assistance" was only the first. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, which proved a long, costly and failed endeavor, one that put the Soviet Union on perilous ground and helped pave the way for its subsequent collapse. Of course, while tied down in Kabul, the Soviets faced another disaster when an independent trade union, Solidarity, formed out of exasperation with the supposed workers state in Poland. Much as the Soviets might have liked to play a bigger role in crushing that movement in Poland, they found themselves effectively unable to lend any assistance but moral support to the Polish government as it proclaimed martial law and brutally repressed the nascent civil society. Seems their military and economic commitments in Afghanistan precluded the possibility of lending brotherly aid once more. (Don't worry -- Brezhnev never found Osama bin Laden either.)

Then there's that matter of Brezhnev presiding over the worst period of economic stagnation the Soviet Union ever experienced. And repealing certain rights afforded to Soviet citizens.

I suppose I could also mention Brezhnev's propensity for popping pills and drinking heavily, but that'd just be getting unnecessarily personal.

Liberal media

At least they get it right across the pond.

I know that the bloated military hurts education...

...but this is ridiculous.

U.S. Warplane Strafes New Jersey Middle School

Unwishful thinking

It is to be hoped that the obsession of President Bush with fitness will guarantee his health for the length of his renewed tenancy of the White House. Otherwise we get President Cheney.

From Robin Cook's analysis of what the next four years have in store.

And I always thought I lived in a blue state

At least I'm not in one of the green states.

On democracy

You know how Communist revolutionaries always used to insist on having a dictatorship of the proletariat (which in effect was a dictatorship of the Party) because they argued that the working class had to be shown what its interests really were?

Yeah, it's kind of like that.