Knock it off about voting McCain
March 27

That heading is directed at Democrats who are saying they'll vote for McCain if their preferred candidate doesn't win the nomination. Maybe they're speaking in the heat of the moment or maybe there's something funky about the polls showing a large minority of Clinton supporters, and a smaller but substantial minority of Obama supporters, will vote for McCain over the other Democratic candidate. I hear the bitterness on liberal talk radio and see it in blog comments so I know it's real, even without the exact numbers.

To those Democrats I say, for crying out loud, quit being so emotional. Seriously, you'd vote for the candidate who wants to attack Iran? Who can't tell if Al Qaida or Iran is Sunni or Shiite, who says markets in Baghdad are safe when he needs a huge military escort, who has lobbyists as his senior campaign staff, whose plan for the mortgage crisis is to consider any plans that might be presented? You'd really vote for this guy?

I'm an Obama supporter who will vote for Clinton. Admittedly, voting for her is all I'll do. I won't knock on doors for her, put her sign in my yard, etc, but then again, that's all I'm asking of Clinton supporters. Just vote for Obama. You don't have to give him money or put his bumper sticker on your car. Spend his administration seeking another Democrat to challenge him, as I just might do with Clinton who was always by far my last choice. Nonetheless, I will vote for Clinton this year, because another Republican administration will continue the disaster.

And spare me the "we need to hit bottom" nonsense as a reason to let McCain get in. Hitting bottom is a false concept. You can always go down unless you're dead. People who hit bottom before turning something around didn't hit bottom. They may have felt like it, but if they were breathing, they weren't there yet, and the country won't hit bottom either. It can get worse and worse, and this "bottom" nonsense can always be used to justify letting the crooks and fools continue to run things. So suck it up Democrats, vote for whoever gets the nomination, and do your best to keep the next president doing what he/she should do.

Red Pill Award for Expelled
March 27

I became aware of the film Expelled thanks to the decision of the producers to boot biologist and blogger PZ Meyers out of a screening. The irony is that the religious producers of a religious film kicked a non-believer out of a film about religious people being denied free speech. No, they don't get the irony, judging by what Myers wrote on his own blog, any more than they've understood why their opinion pieces don't get published as scientific research. I watched the Expelled trailer, which runs a few minutes, has decent production values, and celebrity power in the voice-over by Ben Stein, but nonetheless, the argument is that doubters of evolution are being suppressed. It's just as true that believers in a flat Earth can't get jobs teaching geography. Maybe when schools teach the germ theory of disease, they should give equal time to those who believe disease is caused by evil spirits. I know conservatives believe there's no fact, just opinion, and the expression of opinion is equally valid from either tens of thousands of scientists or one fundamentalist. Nonetheless, wouldn't you think that when their research-free articles get published on editorial pages but not scientific journals, they might get a clue? Well, they may not have a clue, but as of now they do have a Take the Red Pill Award.

This is how to stop the election being stolen
March 25

I recently read Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast, and he convinced me of one thing. Touchscreen voting machines probably aren't as big a problem for the next election as the attention they've gotten would indicate. We don't know for sure that an election has been stolen by touchscreen, but we do know caging has happened. This is the scheme whereby Republicans (either party could do it, but funny, it's always Republicans doing it to likely Democrats) send non-forwardable letters to address of likely Democrats and if those letters get returned, those voters get challenged as not living in their precincts, removed from the voter registration rolls, and left ignorant of this removal until they show up at the polls and get handed a placebo ballot (provisional ballot which might get counted, or might not).

There is something we can do. Tell your senators to support Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's bill to ban vote caging. The bill requires challengers to show proof an individual voter is ineligible, which effectively ends the en masse challenges that have been used in several states by Republicans who still can't accept that non-whites have a right to vote, even if they're fighting in Iraq and voting absentee. What, they don't love the troops enough to support their vote? No. Soldiers posted overseas are among those likely to not be home to receive their caging letter, though of course only those living in Democratic precincts receive these. They stopped soldiers voting absentee in Florida in 2000, and they've taken the idea nationwide. Funny, voting ineligible is a felony, and Republicans claim they know it happens a lot, and they purge tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters, so shouldn't our prisons be full of these voters? The jails aren't full because, I bet you can guess this, there aren't tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters on the rolls.

While Whitehouse's bill addresses the issue, there's a better solution to election fraud that would address not just caging, but also the purging voters wrongly identified as felons, the purging of voters who have a mismatch in some data between their registration information and another database, and the use of placebo ballots to force voters to cast ballots that can be thrown away. That solution is registration at the polls. It's already done in several states, such as here in Minnesota, and we don't have fraud problems. We don't have voter fraud because the requirements for registration at the polls are the same as pre-registration in terms of ID, and we don't have election fraud because this foils the efforts to purge the pre-registration rolls and avoids the need for placebo ballots. I don't know of any congressman who has offered a bill to make this the national practice, but we can certainly suggest it to them.

So how's that surge going
March 25

If you really pay attention to the debates at the margins of the news, you might have gotten past the "surge is working" mantra the acting president has the media reciting and heard some mention of a cease fire. That would be the cease fire declared unilaterally by the Mahdi Army, one of the main Shiite factions. It was originally a six-month cease-fire, extended last month, so it's been going seven months. If you note that this is the same amount of time the surge has appeared to be working, good for you. It is not a coincidence. The security improvements credited to the surge are only a little because Bush stuck in some more troops. The other factors are the Sunni "Awakening Councils", hailed by the bushies even though it was before the surge that finally the US government figured out that the Sunnis aren't a monolith, and treating all of them as if they're Al Qaida was a bad idea. The other factor was the Mahdi Army's ceasefire. Uh oh, I said "was". Looks like it's over.

A political and racial double standard
March 17

It's a racial and political double standard that has made Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, such a figure of controversy. I claim it's a double standard in both senses because it's hard to believe Wright would be in so much trouble if he parroted the hate speech of McCain's pastors, even being black. He would be an unusual conservative evangelical megachurch pastor, but controversial, not so much. If Wright were white, I have little doubt he be the all-day story on Fox News, but he needs the skin tone to be the scary black man that sells so well on TV.

The important point to understand, that really makes this a double standard, isn't that the black gets in much more trouble than the white for the same thing, but that they aren't doing the same thing. There's a big difference in going over the top in denouncing evil, and calling for evil. Wright accuses the United States of causing misery for other countries. McCain's pastors call for causing misery for other countries. That's being mild. McCain's guys call for mass murder, and they're perfectly acceptable as mainstream Christian leaders. McCain claims Rod Parsely as a spiritual advisor. This is a man calling for war with Muslims. A generous person could stretch what he says to be merely metaphorical. I guess I'm more reasonable than generous, because I can't interpret his calls for war, is praise of Columbus for seeking to arm Christian armies to destroy Islam, as anything but a call for literal war, with all the mass murder that must entail.

John Hagee doesn't even have that much wiggle room. He actually called for a first strike nuclear attack on Iran. McCain appeared at a podium with Hagee to accept the endorsement of a lunatic who called for millions of Iranians to murdered. Don't like the term "murdered"? Got a better one? "Killed" somehow sounds like it leaves room for the killings to be accidental. No McCain's pastors are calling for mass murder. They open the question of how to get rid of Islam without getting rid of Muslims. They're not talking about converting them all. They're saying destroy Islam, and use nukes.

So McCain's pastors say kill lots of people, while Obama's pastor says stop killing people. Guess which one is more controversial.