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Like conservative pundit and male prostitute Jeff Gannon, Haggard's been a frequent visitor to the Bush Crime Family at the White House.
 
The lady doth protest TOO MUCH.

Beware of those that sqaulk the loudest. They have the most to hide.

Also appropriate..empty barrels make the most noise (he says as he posts WAY too much.. LOL)
 
gay Gay GAY

What's even more ironic and fun about this whole this is the thing is this:

the best way to get rid of John Kerry's stupid remark out of the news headlines is by good ole' fashioned hot gay sex! Glad we could help, LOL.
 
Well.....They used us to get in power you know.... So the least we can do is help them "out" now. *GRIN* (and thats a really BIG grin)
 
Hahahahahahahahahaha

"Haggard was appointed president of the evangelicals association in March 2003. He has participated in conservative Christian leaders' conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied members of Congress last year on U.S. Supreme Court appointees after Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement. "

This is way toooo much fun for a Friday! By continuing to tell more lies he's only making it worse for himself. So how many high-level Pastors out there do you know that would let a gay prostitute give them a message anyway? Pleazzzze.
 
Randi Rhodes is playing the "massage therapist" call right now!

Oh, riot!

(I still think they won't be fazed by any of this, though.)
 
Gallileo was right, the earth is not the center of the unive

Keep in mind that Gallileo was tried in 1663 and it took the Pope until 1992 to appologize. So don't expect the Catholic Church to admit their errors, nor anyone else who still has these views.

I love the fact that we can all let it hang out here. And share our views. I wish we could tone down our feelings just a bit. I will vote for our present Governor, Schwartzenegger, because I think he does bring people together. Bush has no, that is none, not one, democrat in his cabinet.

I will vote for our Senator Diane Feinstein, because she also brings people together, and is a great lady.

I have been with my partner for 16 years, fortunately, and we have been registered domestic partners for about 6 years. As a State of California employee, we enjoy health coverage for both of us. There are some here in the state that want to take those previledges away from us. I could care less about the lable of "marriage". But I care deeply about my benifits. A married couple with kids is taking more benifits from the state. But I think that a lot of people would like to see that taken from me.

I believe that we will someday have a universal health coverage, perhaps with the best features of other modern states, such as Australia, UK and Canada. I don't mean free either, can be a combination of Value Added tax, or payroll tax, but Universal is the key.

I have Republican friends and Democrat friends, and Green frends and non-affiliated.
 
Now they tell us.

Great article in Vanity Fair.

"As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself."

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612
 
It is funny watching Reverand "Three-Chins" Falwell skwirm in a press interview when asked if he knew Haggard.
 
I was also overjoyed to hear another one of these gay bashers has been exposed as a big 'ol nellie queen! It will be interesting to see the oodles of people in the government and congress intertwined with this man squirm, flap around and distance themselves from him. I'll bet they won't hold his feet to the fire for this "indiscretion" as they did Bill Clinton. While he doesn't hold the position that Clinton did, his actions affect not only his congregation, but 30 million other people who looked to him for guidance in matters of faith. We'll never have any DNA tests, no intimate details, if there is or isn't a birthmark on the man's penis, nor will we ever see this man, or any other evangelical/gay-vangelical christian organization resolve themselves to the fact that homosexuality (a word they invented) is a reality they cannot supress. I think quite the opposite will be true. They will put this man in rehab, some private institution with a name like "Heartstone" that specializes in de-gaying men and women in the name of their savior. They will claim that he, in a weak moment, gave into sinful thoughts and deeds, but with proper counseling, he will be back to his position of respect and piety within a very short time. Once you ensconce yourself at the foot of the cross, it's nearly impossible to be cast out. That would be admitting defeat in their view and as we already know, that is out of the question. They are too big, too well funded and too organized to let this blip dissuade them from their real mission.

http://www.generationjoshua.org/dnn/Default.aspx?tabid=244
 
It all reminds me of an evangelist overhere. He claimed he used to be gay but got cured and now helped other men struggling with their gay feelings. He did healings with them. Later it appeared though that he had sex with those men just to check if they were still gay after the healings....
 
do i detect a hint of *Queen*? not that there is anything wrong with that. though Haggard thinks there is.

 
Quite a few things

A few people have given us their two cents. I'd love to give y'all my two cents too... too bad it's more like 20 dollars instead. ;-)

Yes, I have a lot to say. Please forgive me and bear with me, I have not talked to y'all in a while and I miss it. Life has been busy.

Let's start with one of my favorite people in the world, Ms. Manners... what I like about Ms. Manners is how all the other etiquette people dislike her and she seems to have a more down to Earth approach to most things, and to top it off she's at the very least funny. She's not about "Oh, oh, let's never offend anyone!" quite the contrary, her advice offends a lot of people and she's all about how to actually get things done and, sometimes, even how to deeply humiliate someone in front of everybody without actually being accused of ever being rude. And her sarcasm is worth it. A few of her gems:

Dear Ms. Manners: a {black, gay, lesbian, mixed race, foreign} couple just moved across the street from me. What can I do to improve the neighborhood?

Gentle reader: move.

Dear Ms. Manners: what should I say when introduced to a {black, gay, lesbian, mixed race, foreign} couple?

Gentle reader: shake their hands while asking "How do you do? How do you do?"

Dear Ms. Manners: how do I introduce my son and his gay lover?

Gentle reader: "This is my son Jack and his friend Joe" -- it's permissible to pause briefly before the word "friend".

So, yeah, anyway, offensive stuff... I dunno if I'm that different from y'all, but I find things offend me differently. Most people pretend to be offended by the sex talk -- I know a bunch of you and some of the people who here pretend to be very offended by the sex talk were the people who could not stop talking about sex in person or in the chatroom, while most of the people who never complained about the sex talk actually talk about appliances in person. I find that sex talk doesn't offend me -- I realize most adults have sex and talk about it. I realize it's not the job of any web site to baby sit children, that's their parents' job, and for this site in particular, where the hobby can hurt people working on the appliances, if the kids are so young that they can't hear about sex, their parents should be supervising them not only on this site but everywhere: I think their parents should be warned about what goes on here and let them make their own decision and stick with it; I'd say we could put a "PG-13" rating here and stop telling people "OMG, shut up, think about the kids!", either their parents would be upset and not let them come here in the first place, or their parents don't mind and we should proceed as usual. Interrupting the conversation every ten seconds to go "think of the children" is nuts. That being said, I don't think that most of the people would come here to talk about appliances and then prefer to talk about sex, I know I can talk about sex anywhere and what's cool here is that we can talk appliances. Still, I don't think we should be censoring everything just because it touches the subject of sex. I don't need to hear who's doing who, but if someone tells a dirty joke, it's not the end of the world, for example. Think of when you were kids, did you really need to go far from home to learn swear words? I don't think we are so twisted that we'll be the first to introduce kids to the birds, bees and swear words, trust me they already know that before they ever show up here.

And while it's not our place to educate other people's kids, and maybe I shouldn't be trying to tell them how to raise their kids, I'll risk saying that if kids are still similar to what we were when we were kids, it's not websites that will twist their little minds and make them want to have sex -- and trying to shield them from sex info is not only going to make them more curious, but the more forbidden it is the cooler it will seem to them. If we want kids to delay sex as much as possible, the thing to do when they get to say, 10-12 years old is to tell them "Hi, your mom and I want to tell you a few things about the birds and the bees, and oh, by the way, we have sex -- a lot of it -- and this is how it works..." -- not only sex will be not cool instantly because your parents do it, but most kids seem to think "ewww, my parents have sex, I don't wanna even think about it" and that's the end of it. Remember, we don't really raise kids, we raise grown ups and if you are not preparing your kids to be grown ups by talking to them and teaching them, well, they are learning from the streets. I'd say they should be learning in the comfort of their own home, and not the crap from the streets.

Anyway, back to offensive, sorry. One of the things that really offends me on this site is that every once in a while people show up here (what was his username, "basement full of suds", for example?) and start talking about destroying appliances. Not that the specific appliance was all rusted and unusable even as a parts donor. Just random still-good-if-you-can-fix-it appliances or sometimes even still-good-just-old appliances. They talk about it and post links to movies of crunchers just to annoy people like us, as far as I can tell. I'd rather never see that kind of thread here, thank you very much. Go post that crap elsewhere on the internet where it will be appreciated.

The two other things that offend me to no end in this site in particular, is religious and political talk. Please remember that not only is the United States of America a multicultural/multiracial/multi-religious place, but the website has an international audience too and if you start offending people of some orientation, race, religion, nationality or political affiliation, you will start unpleasant flame wars that are completely unnecessary. I assure you, I've met a lot of people here from all kinds and they are all very nice and good people in person. Please drop the name calling and the labeling, it's not going to help.

Now, since I got started on this (and yes, I can hear all of you that were crying "Please, oh, please, don't get him started!!!"), I'd like to share some stuff for y'all to think about for a while.

First of all, I'll tell you a secret. You can tell politicians are lying because their mouths are moving. It has nothing to do with what party they say they're in, of if they claim to be liberal/conservative, or religious/atheists, or "pro universal health care"/"I hope you're screwed", or if they want to charge you more or less taxes, pro- or con- gay marriage, or the kicker of them all, "pro-life"/"pro-choice" -- have you ever opened a dictionary that told you that the opposite of "life" is "choice"? Anyway, they are all lying to you, some more than others, some with worse lies than others. Remember, if you believe the tabloids when they report that the opposition candidate was a terrible person, you will be thrilled to know that the president's wife is thinking of divorcing him because he's supposedly boinking a woman highly placed on the administration -- yes!, that woman that the other tabloids say is a lesbian, can you believe it?!? A lesbian in this day and time, no less!!! Can't he find a straight movie actress to screw, just like all the previous presidents (except perhaps for Carter, who may or may not have only lusted in his heart)? :-P

For example, some people promised to reduce taxes. It's not important if they actually gave you a few hundred bucks discount on your taxes for the first year. The first hit is free. What's important is that they spent so much in places like war that you'll be paying through the nose in taxes later. And that's not to mention that even if they didn't overspend and taxes were lower for a while, did you notice that the fuel price went thru the roof? Yeah, give me 500 hundred bucks per year in lower taxes and make me pay over three thousand more in fuel for my home and my car, see how much I'll love ya! And they always do that, it doesn't depend on what party they are in. It's not the first time it happened here for both parties. All I can say to that is that it doesn't matter who they are or what party they're in, they lied, they should be out of office pronto and make space for someone who may be a little more honest.

And speaking of honesty, I can tell you that while a lot of people voted for candidates that they thought would be good because "they were religious", those candidates (with very few exceptions) are very far away from religious, they are only using religion to get your vote. I can't say I am a little bit surprised to find reports of such "upstanding" people being outed as drug users and people who hire prostitutes. If you are, then you should reconsider how you vote, because they are using you to get to a place of power where they can further damage the country. Your country.

Here's the thing. How would you like to have your entire life as an open book when you get a job? Do you think it's your boss(es)'s place to tell you which religion you should be, how often you can have sex, what kind and with this person and not that one? "Oh, no, you are a strapping blond guy, we won't let you marry that cute brunnete, it will spoil the race!"... Did you know that the people who have anal sex most often are heterosexual couples? No? Oh, well, now you do. And how about if and how much you can drink, or if you did any drugs in your spare time, or if you should have any guns at all or how many and of what kind, or even what sites you visit and what you post on them in your spare time? Or maybe irrelevant things, like collecting stamps or appliances, what if bosses wouldn't hire you because of that? Would you like that? No?!? Me neither!!! But guess what, that's how y'all are choosing your administration, and it just doesn't work. We are not the employees of the politicians, they are our employees, they're there to manage the place as best as they can, and we should be choosing employees that can do their jobs well, not employees that present a veneer of "look, I'm the perfect candidate, I go to Church" and then you find out they did all kinds of nasty things behind your back and they are bad employees that can't run the place and are in fact eroding all the freedoms. You will miss the freedoms when you land in jail, I'll tell you that in advance!

Besides, we are for whatever stupid reason, giving away our freedoms for no reason. Some time ago it was "sure one can refuse to hire someone because they don't look like a teacher" and now potential employers are googling the web to see what you have posted before they hire you, and instead of raising a stink about it and talking about freedom of expression, what do we do? We cower and say they have a right to. We need to take a serious look on how little freedom we'll end up with if we insist on continuing to hire people like that, including how we hire administrators by voting.

I beg you to go vote anyway. The whole game is to make the population in general think that "it doesn't matter who you vote for, they're all bad" because then a lot of the population fails to vote and even the ones that do think they'll be voting "for the lesser evil" instead of actually comparing the candidates' platform and voting for the better ones. When that game works (and it has in many many countries), then all the bad politicians take over and the population is screwed for a long time until they can fix it. Please don't let that happen here. Remember "when they came for the Jews, I didn't care because I wasn't a Jew.." thing and when you are the last group standing, it will be too late. The game with bad politicians is to divide people into "categories" so they can use one group to destroy the other. Both (or all) groups lose and by then the crappy wrong kind of people are in power and you are too busy trying to put a roof over your head and have food on the table to be able to be back to your previous nice life of comfort and abundance.

Of course I couldn't let this drop without "enlightening" y'all about a few other things. Because, y'know, I am the only one with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... :-P

First off, having grown up in Brazil, I can't understand what some people are talking about when they say that taxing the rich is "penalizing them for doing well". Should we penalize people for being poor then? Do they think the poor don't work hard enough, or do they think we don't need poor people because no one is needed to bring them their mail, fix the sewers, collect the garbage etc? And also, once there are too many poor people, they start stealing and kidnapping rich kids -- taxes and welfare are cheap insurance against nastiness, in my point of view.

And speaking of marriage, did you know that Brazil is one of the largest Catholic countries there are? Yes it is. Brazil is, if I'm not mistaken, the fifth country both in population size and area.

Anyhow, in Brazil, you can not be married in any religious terms at all. Marriage is a legal term that is defined only by the state. You are only married if you had your civil ceremony -- it can be performed by a priest that is also a Justice of the Peace, but it can only be performed by a Justice of the Peace, and a religious minister that doesn't happen to be a JoP can not marry you period end of sentence. The religious ceremony is only a blessing you get from your religious community and means nothing to the state or your rights. And Brazil is far from unique in that, most of our laws were copied from other cultures, like Portugal, US, France, Italy etc, so I would be willing to bet that in many other European countries marriage is only a legal term and you get your religious blessing/wedding separately. The only folks I've seen even blinking at the notion of having two ceremonies in Brazil are people from UK/US origin, everyone else just goes "but of course!" and it's not clear to me if they just are used to it or just figure they've just moved from another country and of course the laws are different so "whatever, dude".

And in any case, isn't it very obvious to you that marriage is a legal contract regulated by the government? How many places in USA can you just drive through a chapel and get married if you forget Nevada? In most, if not all the other states, you can't just decide to get married and ask a priest, you need a license from the state and sometimes blood tests. What's religious about that, I ask you?

So, no, I do not think that "marriage" is inexorably bound to religious practices, it can in fact be decoupled very easily. Nor do I think religion should have a leg up on this one, I see no reason (least of which "tradition") why religion should not get "religious union", "religious blessing" or even "religious wedding" and leave "marriage" to be the civil marriage meaning. I find that one of the things that irritates me about some religions in US is that they latch onto minuscule things and twist the meanings of the idea so everything is inside out and people fall for it. The "marriage" thing is only one of them. And I find that one of the duties of places like Brazil and US, where state and religion are separate is to really make clear that things in those countries are run by the state and the state is the only one that provides legal meaning to things, religion, important as it is (and religion is really important to me) comes second and should just shut up about things like marriage. No one is forcing a catholic priest to bless the union of homosexuals, but they should have no say on if they are married. And speaking of which, I think it would be highly profitable for the catholic church to just shut up about sex for a while and give people time to forget (and even maybe forgive) all the indiscretions that the priests, bishops, cardinals and popes have done against American kids.

Just to reinforce a point that I don't see people discussing often enough: not only it seems there is no unanimity to the idea that marriage is male/female, the only unanimity there is on the matter is that there is no definition of marriage that covers all cultures on the planet across all time.

Marriages came in all kinds and sizes, homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, polygamous, polyandrous, polygynous etc. The current idea of marriage as most people in US see it surfaced with the industrial revolution about 200 years ago.

About a thousand years ago, the Catholic Church used to marry homosexual couples inside the church because the union was clearly about love, while all the heterosexual couples used to be married outside the church because there could be no possible reason for the union other than property/money. There used to be (don't know if they adopted our ways or not) a culture in Africa that laughed at our idea that people of similar ages get married -- they saw it as a waste of resources; why would a couple marry at similar ages and labor all their lives to get some stuff and then die not leaving their stuff to each other? It's much better if an older person marries a teenager and they share everything for a while, then the older person dies and leaves everything to their now middle-aged partner that then marries a young person and the cycle repeats, isn't that completely obvious?

So no, I don't think there is a right answer for marriage, only we tend to think we have the right answer because we're so engrossed in our own culture that everything else is weird. People who are frequently shocked should get out more. ;-)

A person I know said recently that:

<< I think that the practical concern of the diminishing respect for marriage is actually most easily answered by making same-sex marriage legal as quickly as possible. For the past 15-20 years (at least), same sex couples have been picking apart the big, complicated bundle of rights that is "marriage", claiming one after another, individually, for themselves. The most extreme example is Vermont Civil Unions ("ok, it's *exactly like marriage*, except we call it something else"). I think that kind of step-by-step unravelling is far more damaging than same-sex marriages would be.

The way to preserve marriage as something important and unique is to say:
"You want health benefits for your partner? Sure, get married."
"You want to be able to adopt kids together? Sure, get married."
"You want to be each other's next of kin? Sure, get married."

The way to preserve marriage as important and unique is NOT to say:
"Well, straight couples can do X by getting married. You can't do X and want to, but we won't let you get married. But we don't really have a good reason why you can't do X, so sure, you can do X without getting married."

I don't think you're going to successfully argue against those individual rights going to same sex couples (at least, the prevailing cultural tide is clearly against you), and I think that if you want to preserve the specialness of marriage within the culture, you don't want the rights (and responsibilities) that come with it to be being handed out piecemeal to various other relationships, as they come up.>>

But since we're having so much fun touching on so many offensive things, let's think about some more sex, birth control, abortions and marriage. :-P

Sex has been a taboo topic for so long that when we actually start getting people doing research and publishing we get a lot of people who forget that Aunt Gertrude had many lovers of both genders in 1920, that her husband had 3 bastard kids with 2 different women, that his brother Jeff was married and his wife had 2 kids by two different fathers because Jeff was gay. We forget about all the gossip on the back fence and only remember how nice and quiet those times were supposed to be when recounted by our relatives. We concentrate on how many people divorce and what percentage are not straight as if those situations were new and therefore had to mean trouble -- we never remember that the situations have always been there, just talked about whispered from person to person and maybe dealt with in a completely different way. Yeah, divorces are happening more often, maybe because it's not such a shame anymore, maybe because women that get a job are not seen as whores anymore etc. Abortion rates have "gone up" now that women go to doctors to get one and doctors keep statistics about it -- 200 years ago it was a crime, people did it anyway, people died with no help because they couldn't go to the doctor and admit they tried to abort. If anything, I'd think fewer people get abortions now that we can find data on birth control and do something about it -- when was it 1890's or so that they kept putting this nurse in jail because she was distributing leaflets on the streets inviting people to her clinic for free information on how to use condoms etc?

Many times, when people ask for laws (and even get them passed) for some purpose or another, they forget that sometimes things have unintended consequences, or, some other times, that the way to get what they want is to do precisely the opposite of what they thought of at first.

How many people, in your opinion, thought that it would be just great to have skyrocketing crime rate and the Mafia to boot, when they passed the Prohibition? Raise your hands... I said raise your hands if you think anyone planned on the Mafia and rising rate! No one? Bueller? Didn't think so. People wanted a lower crime rate and no Mafia. Too bad they didn't get what they asked for, eh? Better luck next time! :-P

There are plenty of studies showing that legalizing abortion decreases the number of deaths, primarily of the mothers. The ideal would be if people were less stingy with sex-ed and access to contraception, fewer unintended pregnancies automatically mean fewer abortions. The biggest problem seems to be in portions of the South, where people don't even know enough about sex to know that what they are doing is sex and get pregnant. The least successful method seems to be censoring info about sex and/or telling people to "keep it in their pants". A frank discussion seems to be much better, even supposedly third world countries are doing better with education and contraception than USA is. Pity.

Which brings me to the fact that many studies show that there are fewer divorces and unintended pregnancies (with fewer abortions too) in places like Massachusetts than in places that frown on sex before marriage, sex-ed, contraception, no-fault divorces etc. The rising of people cohabiting (and avoiding marriage like the plague) in the 60's/70's had a lot to do with the fact that it was hard to divorce and people did not want to be stuck to the wrong choice or people who abused them (physically, mentally etc). The huge number of divorces in the South has a lot to do with the fact that people get pregnant and "need" to get married, even if the guy is a real jerk; if they could just have contraception or abortion, no need to marry/divorce later; if they would know at the time they are entering adolescence that some things are sex and can get people pregnant, they would either not be doing it, or they'd be careful enough to avoid getting pregnant (or a sexual-transmitted disease); I think preventing people from having to marry at 13-16 would be a good start.

But mostly, preventing people who are in a long-term, committed relationship from being married and a good example to others is shooting oneself in the foot/feet -- if anything, you are not only telling a large portion of the population that being promiscuous is just as good an alternative to being married, but you are also teaching the heterosexual couples that well, "marriage seems to be a sign of the big bad society oppression on the poor individuals, look!, there's an entire segment of our population happily screwing around free of all the shackles of marriage, let's do the same!" which I think is not productive. The best way to convince populations to conform to the establishment(s) is to give them positive reinforcement when they do, as opposed to punishing them when they don't. I would think it's obvious that celibacy has not worked well in thousands of years and it's not going to start working now, no matter what.

There's also another point of view people forget, because seeing progress is sometimes hard when you're in the middle of the situation. In lots of societies, being actually married was not common at all -- mostly, the rich people had enough worries to get their kids married "to the right people", which did not imply they were "OMG, so in Love, dude!" with their married counterparts, quite the contrary. Most people just got together with the blessings of their communities in what we now think of as "common law marriage" but at that time nobody bothered to call that marriage. Most of the (rich) married people found love on their extra-marital affairs and, as long as people were discreet, not much of anybody's wrath came upon them, and bastard kids were even recognized (particularly when there were no legitimate kids to take the late father's place). It's only recently (less than 300 years) people in general started getting married and doing so out of Love. So in general, things are not getting worse, they are actually getting much better than they used to be, more people are getting married and doing so voluntarily. There are small amounts of people getting married multiple times (because it's more acceptable to be forced to marry than to have sex out of wedlock) and a small amount of people that think that marriage is oppression to be avoided at all costs. And a few strange people that marry for 24 hours in a drive-in chapel. But if we recognize that most people (and thus the trend) are getting married, it's a good thing to let citizens who couldn't get married before do so. It's better than eroding whatever is special about marriage. In my opinion anyway. YMMV, of course.

I would also like to call your attention to the fact that in recent times (last century or so), the places where family is becoming special (particularly the rise of the nuclear family in suburbs) are primarily in North and South America, where societies put the least pressure on what people do. Places that have seen the deterioration of families have been primarily places where dictators and/or fundamentalist religions have put the biggest pressure on their citizens. In particular, places that place restriction on sex-ed and contraception, and/or divorce and marriage, have consistently seen the idea of family disappear. One could even argue that lifting restrictions on divorce and abortion, along with removal of laws against sex-ed and contraception were precisely what made New England successful in having stronger families than a large portion of USA.

And I will certainly point out that places in Europe that have consistently strengthened their family ties are places that in the last 40 years or so have consistently become very liberal with divorce, abortion and contraception, and they have certainly made sex-ed mandatory or very strongly encouraged their teenagers to take sex-ed. If they could see the light in what was going on here and made their societies better, it's certainly time we saw the light and be courageous enough to follow their example too.

Before we leave the subject of laws with unintended consequences, I'd like to draw your attention to another little known fact to most people who were not alive during the late 1800's to early 1900's. There are studies showing that USA had basically no problem with excess/undesirable immigration before it started restricting immigration to certain groups and/or putting quotas. Before that, it was basically come in, make money, get out, so thousands of people would just come, work for a while and go back to their country. After the restrictions, it was so hard to come in that they did not ever go away. After some time, to "correct" certain "injustices", they put in the law about family being able to have better access to bringing their family here. So now, once one person is allowed, their entire family comes in.

Which brings me to all this crap about "illegal immigrants" -- what do you think they do here, may I ask? Perhaps they just pack up one day, move in here and live in an eternal vacation? Because if you think that by law they need paperwork to be able to do anything, how are they working if there weren't "nasty" Americans giving them jobs for way lower pay and no paperwork needed? Also, if we put all those American citizens who are breaking the law in jail, and people who can't get a job do whatever people who can't get a job do (maybe move back to where they came from, or die?), now do you think lots and lots of American people will quit their white collar jobs and go work for next to nothing doing the gringos' jobs? And even if they did, would you be willing to pay more for all the stuff that was basically very cheap before? I have news for you: your fellow citizens are the reason there is cheap labor offered to "illegal" immigrants, if we didn't want them here, all we had to do was pay more for people who work legally, period end of sentence.

The other thing I am sick and tired of hearing is how "easy" it is for "illegal aliens" to just pop up anywhere in USA and get a driver's license. Really??? I was under the impression that most, if not all states demand a Social Security Number for driver's licenses among other things (also to get a credit card, get a telephone etc)... well, you can get a SSN any time if you are a citizen, but if you're not, you can only get one when you come on a student visa or when you become a permanent resident or when you naturalize. Those nasty politicians are just using you with cheap rhetoric to get your vote, dude! Also, it's probably true that there are way more fake driver's licenses from regular American folks that are underage and want to drink and/or drive than on the hands of "illegal aliens". Think about it.

And really, we can't leave now without talking about flag burning, oh, no! Did you really think I was gonna let that one go? Oh, you don't know me very well, do you?!? ;-) And why not talk about it, it's the other "favorite" subject of politicians that don't even want to work a little to stir up the shit to get some votes. It's instant flame war!

Here's what I'd like to say about the subject of flag "desecration":

1) The US Constitution does not guarantee protection from desecration to the US Flag.

2) The US Constitution does guarantee Freedom of Expression to the American Citizen (and other Citizens as well, I think) while said citizens are physically on American Soil.

3) I've been informed by friends that the intentional desecration of the American Flag has been declared illegal federally at least 3 times (the last one during the Reagan/Bush era) and every single time has been struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Several states have also prosecuted people for flag desecration under their "anti-flag-desecration laws" and have been ordered by the Supreme Court to release the "offenders". I haven't looked this up for correctness, but I assume that anyone that cares a lot about those laws and contributing to lobbying for those laws will be able to run a web search before they waste their money and time, as well as Tax Dollars to have the Supreme Court strike the laws down yet one more time.

4) The Flag, which happens to be a piece of cloth, paper or other similar material, does not have infinite life span; in fact, its life span is quite limited and its very existence is intended to remind us of Freedom enjoyed in US -- Freedom, however is an eternal concept while at the same time being more fragile than the physical flag in that while Freedom will live forever, one can fail to maintain Freedom and lose it while people in other Countries will enjoy it, happily unaware that you lost yours.

5) Last, but not least, I'd like to point out to y'all, that in all Communist countries, the desecration of their flags is verboten, often punished with death or long imprisonment. That is not reserved for Communist countries only, but it's certainly present in all dictatorial regimens -- I should know, I lived in Brazil during the military government. Brazil, at the time, shared with other bad governments around the world the fact that we had neat flags flying proudly everywhere to remind us that we did not have freedom and that some of our finest citizens were rotting in jail because they said something the government did not like, whether or not it involved desecrating a flag. Do you know what was the first thing they did when they kicked the military government out and wrote a brand-spanking-new constitution in Brazil? They put right at the beginning that Censorship in any form is prohibited, and the Freedom of Expression is guaranteed under all circumstances, including flag desecration. If that doesn't tell you anything important, I have nothing else to say to you. Thank you.

Peace,
-- Paulo.

PS: Before I let y'all go, I'm reliably informed that God (if you believe in God) does not care about all the "sins" we keep talking about, if God really cared that much, you would already be screwed. What God really cares about is that one shouldn't waste (resources, intelligence, food etc) and that omission is bad (if you could be helping someone and you just go "Nah, maybe next time I'll help them..."). And, according to Jewel, "In the end, only kindness matters".

PSS: And lest people say I'm here just to make y'all feel down, I leave you with a few lighter thoughts. "Don't go away, we'll be right back after these messages..." ;-)
From rec.humor.funny.reruns:

A recent questionnaire sent out in the Soviet Union contained the questions:
1. Where were you born?
2. Where did you go to school?
3. Where did you attain your majority?
4. Where do you wish to live?

One return provided the following answers:

1. St. Petersburg
2. Petrograd
3. Leningrad
4. St. Petersburg

------

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev. 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

Lev. 20:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

;-) ;-) ;-)
 
Two books worth reading: 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins and 'Tempting Faith' by David Kuo.

Wow, this thread is going to hit 200 soon. Cake all 'round when that happens.

Thus spake Frigilux: "And the red shall sit at table with the blue and partake of cake whilst the Unimatic hums in the distance."
 
Subtle hint Paulo

You get an "A+" for effort for sure. and posting the equlivant of a short book could be kind of a turn off as it is exhausting.
 
RE: New Rules 11/03/06
On Bill Maher last night, An excellent bit of advice for the Democratic candidates, and everyone else.

Thank you Greg, that clip was groovy, I love Bill Maher!

OK so for the next three days the DNC should take that wonderful 4 minute clip and spend all the money they have left in their campaign bank account and use it as "their into the stretch" tv commercial nationwide.
 
Nee,

The next three days the democrats will spend all their time shooting themselves in the foot. Alienating the last undecided voters. Giving republicans every single last chance possible. I was a democrat as long as I lived in the US...and never once saw my party avoid a chance to screw things up at the last moment.
 
Oh, both sides do it now, constantly.

I despise Peter King and pray for his destruction but even I was startled when I heard him comment that downtown Baghdad was as vital and energetic as midtown Manhattan....

I have to believe that there are decent people in Long Island who fully realize that they'd inadvertantly attached themselves to an imbecile, but mostly just hoped that he'd be quiet about it, and ride the fading wave of the 9/11 occurrences to victory, and that they're honestly disturbed about his failure to do so.

Despite my best judgement, I find Kinky Friedman fascinating, and actually think his presence in Texas might just be good for the people of the state....

Katherine Harris is a train wreck, but I also turn the volume up whenever she appears on the tube because she is mesmerizing....as they say, she's rich, white, and insane....a dangerous combo.

And PLEASE, Sweet Mary of Silence, don't let Ned Lamont melt down on camera before Tuesday....please?
 
Paul Krugman op-ed

November 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Limiting the Damage
By PAUL KRUGMAN

President Bush isn’t on the ballot tomorrow. But this election is, nonetheless, all about him. The question is whether voters will pry his fingers loose from at least some of the levers of power, thereby limiting the damage he can inflict in his two remaining years in office.

There are still some people urging Mr. Bush to change course. For example, a scathing editorial published today by The Military Times, which calls on Mr. Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld, declares that “this is not about the midterm elections.” But the editorial’s authors surely know better than that. Mr. Bush won’t fire Mr. Rumsfeld; he won’t change strategy in Iraq; he won’t change course at all, unless Congress forces him to.

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by rampant cronyism — almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been FEMAfied — may come to be seen as an equally serious blow to America’s future.

And it should be a matter of intense national shame that Mr. Bush has quietly abandoned his fine promises to New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.

The public, which rallied around Mr. Bush after 9/11 and was still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt two years ago, seems to have figured most of this out. It’s too late to vote Mr. Bush out of office, but most Americans seem prepared to punish Mr. Bush’s party for his personal failings. This is in spite of a vicious campaign in which Mr. Bush has gone further than any previous president — even Richard Nixon — in attacking the patriotism of anyone who criticizes him or his policies.

That said, it’s still possible that the Republicans will hold on to both houses of Congress. The feeding frenzy over John Kerry’s botched joke showed that many people in the news media are still willing to be played like a fiddle. And if you think the timing of the Saddam verdict was coincidental, I’ve got a terrorist plot against the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.

Moreover, the potential for vote suppression and/or outright electoral fraud remains substantial. And it will be very hard for the Democrats to take the Senate for the very simple reason that only one-third of Senate seats are on this ballot.

What if the Democrats do win? That doesn’t guarantee a change in policy.

The Constitution says that Congress and the White House are co-equal branches of government, but Mr. Bush and his people aren’t big on constitutional niceties. Even with a docile Republican majority controlling Congress, Mr. Bush has been in the habit of declaring that he has the right to disobey the law he has just signed, whether it’s a law prohibiting torture or a law requiring that he hire qualified people to run FEMA.

Just imagine, then, what he’ll do if faced with demands for information from, say, Congressional Democrats investigating war profiteering, which seems to have been rampant. Actually, we don’t have to imagine: a White House strategist has already told Time magazine that the administration plans a “cataclysmic fight to the death” if Democrats in Congress try to exercise their right to issue subpoenas — which is one heck of a metaphor, given Mr. Bush’s history of getting American service members trapped in cataclysmic fights where the deaths are anything but metaphors.

But here’s the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush’s ability to make deadly mistakes has rested in part on G.O.P. control of Congress. That’s why many Americans, myself included, will breathe a lot easier if one-party rule ends tomorrow.
 
touching on voting issues - excellent

ovember 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Shouting Over the Din
By BOB HERBERT

We know that Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election, and that of the people who went to the polls in Florida, more had intended to vote for Mr. Gore than for Mr. Bush. But Mr. Bush became president.

In 2004, Mr. Bush outpolled John Kerry by more than three million votes nationally. But widespread problems encountered by voters in Ohio, especially those who had intended to vote for Mr. Kerry, raised doubts about who had really won the crucially important Buckeye State. If Mr. Kerry had taken Ohio, he would have won the White House with a minority of the popular vote, as Mr. Bush had done four years earlier.

These are not scenes from a flourishing democracy. If you’re looking to put a positive spin on the current state of politics and government in the U.S., you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Voters will head to the polls tomorrow for the most important off-year election in recent memory. But instead of a concerted effort to make it easier for Americans to vote, the trend in recent years has been to make it harder, through legal means and otherwise.

Tens of thousands of voters in Georgia will very likely be confused tomorrow. A judge struck down a state law requiring voters to show a photo ID before casting their ballots. But up to 300,000 voters have received letters from the State Board of Elections telling them that a photo ID is required.

A veteran Democratic congresswoman from Indianapolis, Julia Carson, ran into trouble when she tried to vote on primary day by displaying her Congressional identification card. It had her picture on it, but she was told that was not enough. She needed something issued by the state or federal government that had an expiration date on it.

Eventually, as The Washington Post tells us, she was allowed to vote after a poll worker called a boss.

This was a congresswoman!

With each new election comes a new round of voter horror stories: Hanging chads. Eight- and nine-hour waits in the rain. Votes lost. Votes never counted. Electronic voting machines, vulnerable to all types of mischief, proliferating without the protective shadow of a paper trail. People in poor neighborhoods shunning the voting booth because they’ve been led to believe they’ll be arrested for some minor violation, such as an unpaid traffic ticket, if they dare to show up at the polls.

Enough. We need to recognize reality. The aging system of American-style democracy is beset in too many places by dry rot, cynicism, chicanery and fraud. It’s due for an overhaul.

The gerrymandering geniuses have raised their antidemocratic notion of perpetual incumbency to a fine art. As Adam Nagourney and Robin Toner informed us in yesterday’s Times, it’s very difficult to transform even intense voter dissatisfaction into real political change. “For all the deep unhappiness that polls show with Congress, Mr. Bush, his party and the Iraq war,” they wrote, “only about 10 percent of House races could be considered even remotely competitive.”

I’ve already said that I favor the creation of some sort of nonpartisan national forum — perhaps a series of high-profile, televised town hall meetings — to explore ways of improving our deeply troubled system of politics and government. If we could get beyond the hellacious din of obnoxious television ads and mindless shouting heads, we’d find that there are a lot of people with good ideas out there who need to be heard from.

One of the biggest problems at the moment is the extent to which ordinary Americans feel estranged from the ruling elite, from those powerful (and invariably wealthy) men and women in both parties who actually influence the course of politics and government.

The key task of any national effort to revitalize American-style democracy would be to bring the citizenry into closer touch with elected leaders in ways that hold the leaders to greater account and make them more responsive. The absolutely essential first step would be to ensure that all who are eligible to vote are actually allowed to vote, and that their ballots are properly counted.

I don’t think the politicians, even with all the recent coverage, realize the level of dissatisfaction and outright anger that has gripped much of the population. Iraq may be the flash point, but the dissatisfaction runs much deeper than that. People feel that the U.S. has sailed off in the wrong direction, and that — as voters — they haven’t the clout to set things right.
 
Frank Rich from 11/05

November 5, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Throw the Truthiness Bums Out
By FRANK RICH

EACH voter will have a favorite moment from the fabulous midterms of 2006. Forced to pick my own, I’d go for Lynne Cheney’s pre-Halloween slapdown of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. It’s not in every political campaign that you get to watch the wife of the vice president of the United States slug it out about lesbian sex while promoting a children’s book titled “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America.”

The pretext for this improbable dust-up was a last-ditch strategy by the flailing incumbent Republican senator of Virginia, George Allen. Desperate to resuscitate his campaign, Senator Allen attacked his opponent, Jim Webb, for writing sexually explicit passages in his acclaimed novels about the Vietnam War. Mr. Webb fought back by pointing out, among other Republican hypocrisies, Mrs. Cheney’s authorship of an out-of-print 1981 novel, “Sisters,” with steamy sexual interludes suitable for “The L Word.”

When Mr. Blitzer brought up “Sisters” on live television, Mrs. Cheney went ballistic, calling Mr. Webb a liar. The exchange would have been a TiVo keeper had only the CNN anchor called Mrs. Cheney out by reading aloud just one of the many “Sisters” passages floating around the Internet: “The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.” But you can’t have everything.

Even without Eve and Eve, this silly episode will stay with me as a representative sample of this election year. It wasn’t just that the entire Cheney-Blitzer-Webb-Allen fracas had nothing to do with the issues that confront the country. It was completely detached from reality. Mr. Allen, who has been caught on video in real life spewing a racial epithet, didn’t attack Mr. Webb for any actual bad behavior, but merely for the imaginary behavior of invented characters in a book. As if it weren’t enough for Mrs. Cheney to regurgitate Mr. Allen’s ludicrous argument, she fudged the contents of her own novel, further fictionalizing what was fiction to start with. Then she turned around and attacked CNN for broadcasting nonfiction — a k a news — like her husband’s endorsement of waterboarding in a widely disseminated radio interview.

The incessant shell game played with fiction and reality turned this episode of Mr. Blitzer’s program, “The Situation Room,” into a sober inversion of Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report,” in which Stephen Colbert’s satirical Fox-style TV blowhard interviews real-life politicians. Here the interviewer, Mr. Blitzer, was real, but the politician, Mrs. Cheney, was bogus, shamelessly making everything up and hoping her playacting would make her outrageous fictions credible. Maybe in some precincts it did.

The 2002 midterms were ridiculed as the “Seinfeld” election — about nothing — and 2006 often does seem like the “Colbert” election, so suffused is it with unreality, or what Mr. Colbert calls “truthiness.” Or perhaps the “Borat” election, after the character created by Mr. Colbert’s equally popular British counterpart, Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentary about the American travels of a crude fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan opened to great acclaim this weekend. Like both these comedians, our politicians and their media surrogates have been going to extremes this year to blur the difference between truth and truthiness, all the better to confuse the audience.

But there’s one important difference. When Mr. Colbert’s fake talking head provokes a real congressman into making a fool of himself or Mr. Baron Cohen’s fake reporter tries to storm the real White House’s gates, it’s a merry prank for our entertainment. By contrast, the clowns on the ballot busily falsifying reality are vying to be in charge of our real world at one of the most perilous times in our history.

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

In a class by itself is the president’s down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of “traditional” marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make “La Cage aux Folles” look like “The Sound of Music.” Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney’s “Sisters,” alas, still awaits.)

And always, always there’s the false reality imposed on Iraq: “Absolutely, we’re winning!” in the president’s recent formulation. After all this time, you’d think the Iraq fictions wouldn’t work anymore. The overwhelming majority of Americans now know that we were conned into this mess in the first place by two fake story lines manufactured by the White House, a connection between 9/11 and Saddam and an imminent threat of nuclear Armageddon. Both were trotted out in our last midterm campaign to rush a feckless Congress into voting for a war authorization before Election Day. As the administration pulls the same ploy four years later, this time to keep the fiasco going, you have to wonder if it can get away with lying once more.

Given the polls, I would have said no, but last week’s John Kerry farce gives me pause. Whatever lame joke or snide remark the senator was trying to impart, it was no more relevant to the reality unfolding in Iraq than the sex scenes in Jim Webb’s novels. But as the White House ingeniously inflated a molehill by a noncandidate into a mountain of fake news, real news from Iraq was often downplayed or ignored entirely. It was a chilling example of how even now a skit ginned up by the administration screenwriters can dwarf and obliterate reality in our media culture.

On the same day Mr. Kerry blundered, the United States suffered a palpable and major defeat in Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, once again doing the bidding of the anti-American leader Moktada al-Sadr, somehow coerced American forces into dismantling their cordon of Sadr City, where they were searching for a kidnapped soldier. As the melodramatic debates over how much Mr. Kerry should apologize dragged on longer, still more real news got short shrift: the October death toll for Americans in Iraq was the highest in nearly two years. Some 90 percent of the dead were enlisted men and nearly a third were on extended tours of duty or their second or third tours. Their average age was 24.

When the premises for war were being sold four years ago, you could turn to the fake news of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to find the skepticism that might poke holes in the propaganda. Four years later, the press is much chastened by its failure to do its job back then, but not all of the press. While both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert made sport of the media’s overkill on the Kerry story, their counterparts in “real” television news, especially but not exclusively on cable, flogged it incessantly. Only after The New York Times uncovered a classified Pentagon chart documenting Iraq’s rapid descent into chaos did reality begin to intrude on the contrived contretemps posed by another tone-deaf flub from a former presidential candidate not even on the ballot.

In retrospect, the defining moment of the 2006 campaign may well have been back in April, when Mr. Colbert appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Call it a cultural primary. His performance was judged a bomb by the Washington press corps, which yukked it up instead for a Bush impersonator who joined the president in a benign sketch commissioned by the White House. But millions of Americans watching C-Span and the Web did get Mr. Colbert’s routine. They recognized that the Beltway establishment sitting stone-faced in his audience was the butt of his jokes, especially the very news media that had parroted Bush administration fictions leading America into the quagmire of Iraq.

Five months later, a video of Mr. Colbert’s dinner speech is still a runaway iTunes hit and his comic contempt for Washington is more popular than ever. It’s enough to give you hope that the voters may rally for reality on this crucial Election Day even as desperate politicians and some of their media enablers try one more time to stay their fictional course.
 
The planets are in the age of Scorpio.....

Maybe that is why this thread is SO INTENSE! Either that, or Our Friend Rick is hanging around here. So if he is, HI Rick!

BTW, Bob Casey still should lose the Unibrow.
 
by Greg Palast
for The Guardian (UK), Comment
Monday November 6, 2006

Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.

Note the past tense. And I'm not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We've found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in three easy steps:

Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind.

On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year's Eve hangovers, a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act -- strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. The New York University Law School's Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

But don't worry: those holding passports from their ski vacations to Switzerland are doing just fine. And that's the point. It's not the number of voters rejected, it’s their color. For example, California's Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, "verified" them and got almost every single one back on the rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics remain victims of the "José Crow" treatment.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the Republican's candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ -- partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

Theft #2: Turned Away - the ID game

A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with lists of new voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily Black and Hispanic(i.e. Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that perfectly matches registration data.

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them "caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot -- which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

Theft #3: Votes Spoiled Rotten

The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast in national elections but not counted -- 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card didn't punch (its chad got "hung"), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.

Officials call it "spoilage." I call it, "inaugurating Republicans." Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will "spoil" this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or "blank" are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That's where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don't respond to your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don't go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that's why Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

So Let's Add it Up

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for "improper ID."

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes "spoiled" by busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let's not forget to include the one million "provisional" ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there's one more group of votes that won't be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That's morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up -- all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled -- and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you … steal back your vote.

It's true you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime's sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can't get 55%, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to win back America.

********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE."

For specific advice on How to Steal Back Your Vote, go to http://www.gregpalast.com/steal-back-your-vote
 

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