History is made!

CNN just announced that Virginia goes to Jim Webb!!

I couldn't say it half as well

And now that Democrats are going to have the Senate as well...

Thank you to Thudfactor!

At the Polls

Now most of the time I try to run a civil blog here, not call anyone a ninny, or stupid, or anything insulting. I even decided to leave James Dobson's name (and some of the others that I think protest too much) off the previous post, since I don't have any real evidence that they are anything but what they state, and while they might be ideological supporters of Ted Haggard, they may have nothing else in common with him at all except the protesting too much, which we can all see and hear. They may be protesting for honest and upright reasons, and just feel that homosexual people are hurting them in some way. I have to say that none of the ones I know prevented my getting married and having babies, and they haven't hurt my marriage any way that I can tell so far.

Actually I sort of worry about Ted Haggard. Somebody should tell him that if he looked in the phone book he might be able to find a counselor who doesn't think he is a pervert who is going to hell. I am not so worried about Foley. He is, after all, getting counseling for the alcoholism, not to cure his being gay. As long as he can stay in counseling, he may be able to avoid prosecution for doing things he wanted other people prosecuted for. I think he should be prosecuted. Notice I would send him to prison, not hell. So I still think that is pretty civil of me. I support prison libraries and oppose the death penalty and torture, so in my mind there is still a difference between prison and hell.

Anyway, I worked at the polls today handing out sample ballots for the Democrats, who represent both the conservative and the liberal viewpoints in this election, and opposing the authoritarian ideologues who are calling themselves Republicans. They aren't Republicans. Some of the good people voting for them are, which still mystifies me. How you can stick a cartoon of an elephant on a photograph of a racist bigot and make people believe he is a pillar of the commonwealth escapes me somehow. If people don't read, surely they can watch TV, and if they can't parse grammar or understand complex sentences, surely they can see actual events that happen before them. How do they get a driver's license? It takes the same skill set to get a driver's license that it takes to understand most of the issues before the voters today. Didn't I see them drive up?

The first question by a reasonable person ought to be why Virginia would propose a constitutional amendment that is redundant with existing law. In this case, the reason is obvious. The amendment was a smoke screen (no fire anywhere, folks, just the smoke of an issue) so that George Allen would have an issue to run on. He had no record to run on, and with the Iraq war showing so badly in opinion polls, he had no issue either. And he kept insulting people and pleading ignorance, so people started to see him as ignorant. So the way it played in Virginia was that Allen's campaign could at least point to one reason that people had to vote for him: to make same-sex marriage illegal in Virginia. No matter that it already was. Same-sex marriage was a get-out-the-vote Republican issue, and "vote yes" signs appeared all over the place.

These comments about the amendment are from a GOP supporter passing out sample ballots:

• "I wish they would write this in plain English. That first one was written in such a confusing way that I voted opposite to what I wanted to vote." Apparently the question she expected was "Do you want to let gays and lesbians get married, move into your house, pet your cat, paint your windows black, and rearrange your furniture?"


• "If people are just dating, they are on their own. The government can't take care of everybody." -- a response to a comment that the marriage amendment in Virginia is too broad, and would put dating couples outside the protection of domestic violence laws.


• "We have just let people go too far in this country just living however they want to live."


• "The Constitution has served us well for many years, and I don't see any reason to change it now." When I suggested that a "yes" to the amendment quesiton would be a change, she disagreed.


• "I know there is already a law, but laws can be changed and this would be in the Constitution and could not be changed." I did not point out that this ballot question was about an amendment to the Constitution, and if constitutions could not be changed, we probably wouldn't be voting on an amendment.

I don't think people are ordinarily that stupid. Really, I don't. But I do wonder what the Bushites have been putting in the punch.

Voting your values

In the "another one bites the dust" category, we haveTed Haggard, who rounded up the vote for the federal marriage amendment and helped elect George W. Bush on Christian family values. On the "protest too much" platform we still have lots of candidates for possible nexts. So if you are thinking of voting the one-man, one-woman ticket tomorrow, consider the sources of your inspiration. Also you might want to think about:

• 300,129,764 men, women, and children in the United States no longer protected by the guarantee of Habeas Corpus.


• 21,609,000 U.S. families with children under 18 who are living below the poverty level.


• 2,868 military dead and 20,687 military wounded in Iraq including someone who lived near you.


• 46.6 million people in the U.S. without health insurance coverage
  

I am sure others can come up with some more significant numbers, now that we are reasonably sure that even the ultra-right isn't as one-to-one as we have been led to believe.

Politics aside for a moment -

Look! My Alocasia x Amazonica is getting another new leaf! It appears that this one will not be as tall as the last one -- maybe an effect of the cooler temperatures, maybe a difference in watering. Click on the photo for more images, some with blossoms!

The alignment of stars

Here's another church sign.

"What?" you say, "It is just an expression of appreciation for the pastor."

But on the other hand, it is a Carrico sign, and Carrico is the Republican running for Congress. The name is not the same, but what is one "r" in a sound-alike look-alike name 50 yards away at 35 mph? Who can spell anyway?

I have driven by this church several times a week for years, and their sign usually bears scripture references or homilies, with an occasional announcement for a special service. This week, election week, it bears an appreciation message for the pastor. The question is of course whether the pastor would have been appreciated at this time and in this way if his name were Boucher or Webb and not Carico.

Of course, there is no visible proof of intention to influence political opinion. And I am a liberal, so I have to credit that maybe there is no such intention. However, the church signboard committee probably believes in the last judgment, so, if they have political intent, they are probably working on the assumption that God (like the lock-step Republican leadership) believes the end justifies the means. Like they do on torture, for instance.

And of course, this is just our little corner of Southwest Virginia. From the L.A. Times, GOP at a loss? Karl Rove has an 11th-hour plan to win - He taps government resources to boost candidates in need, a story by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writers October 29, 2006, we read about a timely whirlwind Rove trip to a storm-stricken area:

But the most significant element of Rove's effort to help four-term Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds keep his job may have occurred behind closed doors, when the White House strategist met with a federal disaster relief official contemplating how to respond to the storm. Four days later, Reynolds announced that President Bush would authorize millions of dollars in federal disaster aid for the area.

The timing was perfect: Reynolds broke the news hours after testifying before the House Ethics Committee about his role in the Mark Foley sex scandal, knocking reports on the scandal out of the spotlight.

And this strategy gets approval numbers:

Reynolds' fate Nov. 7 could be a bellwether for Republicans in the Northeast, in the midterm election as well as the long term. And his poll numbers crashed after revelations that he had known about suspicious e-mails the former Florida congressman had sent to male congressional pages. In the wake of the announcement about federal aid, a survey by a Buffalo television station showed Reynolds regaining a narrow lead over Democrat Jack Davis.

The White House and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will provide the funds, say Rove exerted no influence on the decision to grant relief or on the timing of the announcement.

"The stars were aligned. It was a coincidence," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Now we are all hearing the Bush administration say that the worsening conditions in Iraq are the terrorists trying to influence the U.S. elections for the Democrats, which is just ridiculous. The Republicans have won by playing the "fear of terrorism" trump card since George W. Bush's ill-fated drive into Iraq. If Iraq were calm, what would they campaign on? It is in their interest to maintain the conflict, which they are doing admirably. Their failure in Iraq has been their success at the polls. Their failed economic policy keeps the stock market up and drives working people's wages down. It is in the Republican interest to maintain insecurity and fear in the U.S. voter.

If we were thinking ahead to the future, voting our hope and confidence in each other, we would all be voting for Democrats.

The only way the Republicans can get votes is to stay the course -- continue to hike the fear and insecurity. Use the gay marriage issue to make people afraid of their neighbors for no reason, and to keep churches campaigning for them. Use abusive and restrictive laws and profiling to separate one group of citizens from another -- the rich against the poor, the immigrant against the native-born, the Christian against the infidel. Their plan is working so well it even got their own party bickering so that they had to round them up and explain the plan again. So now they are back in step. Campaign by innuendo and insinuation. Make racist comments that can be termed a "slip of the tongue" in public and re-phrased in private. Pander to the fundamentalists in public and deride them in private. Keep voters afraid. Keep voters from thinking. That is the only way you can get free people to follow a bully who keeps making bad decisions.