...A Virginia pro-family advocate says the people who helped re-elect President Bush don't support homosexual relationships -- the administration apparently does. Joe Glover, president of the Family Policy Network, has worked tirelessly for family values, including the fight against legalized homosexual "marriage." He says it was conservative Christians who put the president back in office and who held to the belief that the president shared their views. But Glover says the day after the election, that all seemed to go out the window. "The day after George Bush was elected president again, because of this morals revolution taking place in our country, he allows his vice president to not only put his lesbian daughter on the platform, but to bring her lesbian 'partner' up on the stage with him," Glover says. "It almost seems to be a slap in the face from the get-go against the very conservatives that re-elected the president at a time when he ought to paying them some homage and respect." Glover says the Cheney daughter's open flaunting of her homosexuality is the antithesis of what the administration claims to stand for -- and that the post-election display sends a mixed message to Bush supporters.

ABC Investigation Claims Matthew Shepard May Not Have Been Hate Crime Victim


ABC news is preparing an investigative report that claims Matthew Shepard may not have been the victim of a hate crime, but rather a robbery that went terribly wrong.

The report is scheduled to air on 20/20 on Nov. 26. The network has not provided advance copies to the media.

[snip]

In a press release promoting the program 20/20 says that it will present "surprising revelations, including Laramie's underground world of methamphetamine use that may have contributed to the crime and whether or not Shepard knew his killers."

The ABC promotion says that their first interviews since they were convicted, McKinney and Henderson now claim Shepard's sexuality had nothing to do with the crime.

In particular, during our election coverage we talked about the pending battle of Fallujah, about the timing of it being an election ploy, about how it was following in the constant Bush pattern of creating a media event to sway the election, as he did last time by making the run up to the Iraq invasion come to a head exactly on election week.

Well, the battle in Fallujah began hitting the media hard in the week before the election, right on cue. Of course it was billed as the solution, the battle that – if you just keep Bush in office – will wipe out those insurgence and solve the problems over there. This was yet another obvious use of our nation’s troops by President Bush as if they were campaign volunteers rather than non-partisan volunteers to defend our nation.

But Fallujah, it turns out, seems to be even more than that. Fallujah, in effect, was the get away care for an election heist.

Following the fiasco in Florida in 2000, Gore was able to battle on for 30 days to try and get a fair accounting. All the while, the Bush camp claimed he should just stop and give up because his delaying of what they were saying was the inevitable end was threatening the nation’s security and stability. They said the stock market was suffering, the nation was unstable, and so Gore should just give up and accept the result as is.

This time, John Kerry had made clear he was prepared to fight 100 times as hard and long as Gore did if necessary. In fact, he had solicited fund just for that eventuality so he could battle all over the nation if necessary to ensure that every vote was properly counted.

Enter Fallujah. As we know – and saw on election night, as Bush’s people began calling Networks and demanding they call Ohio for their camp – the Bush team’s strategy was to try and force all questions to be closed ASAP. Last time, they weren’t prepared for that part. This time, they were.

Picture if John Kerry had chosen to call the election into question. Immediately, the Bush camp would talk about how 50,000 of our troops are just about to launch the biggest military operation since the invasion of Baghdad. And, just a couple of days after the election, it was launched.

You can imagine the arguments from the Bushies: “How could Senator Kerry undermine our security while our troops are in the midst of battle.” Fallujah was to be the pressure point that would, if not stop Kerry from uncovering all the dirt and getting a fair election count, would at least tarnish his name with much of the nation and, as importantly, create something for the right-wing dominated media to hammer away at him on, making it seem as if he is only caring about himself and not the nation.

It was quite a well-crafted plan. Completely amoral, but smart.

Unfortunately for them, John Kerry was smarter.

As Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who has been about the only mainstream journalist to actually follow up on the many serious problems with regard to the integrity of the election, has pointed out, a concession speech, in effect, means nothing. It is not legally binding.

So, if you were thinking like a Bush goon, you would expect that either Kerry would stand up to the mischief that went on, not conceding in the meantime, and so your booby trap would work perfectly, or that he would just give up and let it go, as wimpy Democrats are prone to do.

But John Kerry chose a smarter course. Ask yourself the question, what if John Kerry were to do both, concede publicly but, at the same time, look into every instance of mischief, and see if in fact the election was fair or fixed.

This would be a no lose situation for him. The booby trap set up for him would become irrelevant, as he would have done the right thing for the nation, not putting it into turmoil while its troops are in battle.

But at the same time, he is still just as free to look into any voting irregularities as he would have been had he not conceded. Even better, he could do it without the press going insane and the nation being kept on tension-creating edge. All of the lawyers he could have sent to look into things still could be sent to look into things, and if the election is truly called into question, he could then, with ample justification so as to make it legitimate, come out publicly and retract his concession. It is the prosecutor, also one of Kerry’s previous jobs, who knows well enough to thoroughly prepare and investigate his case be leveling charges. You may have a real hunch that someone is responsible for a murder, but until you believe you can win that case in court, you do not make the allegation.

This is called fighting smart. And the Bushies, in the same way they failed to plan for the subtleties of doing battle in Iraq, haven’t even caught on yet that this is what is occurring, that they are, in fact, being outflanked and attacked after being tricked into looking the other way.

...make no mistake, this is the election in which American Christianity destroyed itself. Today the church is no longer a religion but a tacky political lobby, with an obsessive concentration on a minuscule number of social topics so irrelevant to questions of governance that they barely constitute political issues at all. These are the points of contention tied into what are blurrily referred to as "moral values," though they have almost nothing to do with the larger moral question of how one lives one's life, and everything to do with the fundamentally un-Christian and un-American idea of forcing others to live the way you believe they should. The displacement of faith involved is eerie, almost psychotic: Here are people willing to vote against their own well-being and their own children's future, just so they can compel someone else's daughter to bear an unwanted child and deprive someone else's son of the right to file a joint income tax return with his male partner.

If this isn't Christianity—and it isn't—still less is it in any respect like democracy. The whole meaning of America was predicated by the founding fathers on the right of citizens to practice their own faith and conduct their lives as they saw fit; to interfere actively in others' lives, on the basis of "moral values" about which there is no agreement, is the most radical repudiation of constitutional values in our electoral history, reducing the word conservative to absurdity. Today the Republican Party is not the right wing of anything; it is a band of violent radical reactionaries preaching medieval totalitarian bigotry. And Christianity as currently preached and practiced in Middle America is virtually Satan, by the standards of anyone who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus. Having degraded themselves to the level of political lobbies, most Christian churches should certainly be compelled to register as lobbyists and pay taxes.

Our bogus Christians' desire to totalitarianize, ironically, is the mirror image of the thing they most fear, which was the other great paradoxical source of Bush's victory: bogus Islam. If it is only in the last four decades that American Christianity has steadily thrown up walls of hostility against the complex and disturbing changes of contemporary life, Islam has had nine or 10 centuries of practice at shutting out social change. The incursion of modern technology, though, and of windfalls from the Western world's craving for Middle Eastern oil, were beginning to alter the pattern of centuries for the better: There is today a small but emphatic body of educated Muslims desiring to be both modern and moderate.

The chief obstacle to their achieving this goal has been—bitter, bitter irony—our Republican administrations, which have had the persistent habit of arming Islamic extremists and totalitarians, then turning around and waging new mini-Crusades against them. Bush's repulsive attempt to redouble his father's mistakes in Iraq, as a diversion from his failure to capture Osama bin Laden, has made this hideous situation irreparably worse, with new outrages and new devastations almost every day. If the hopes for a reasonable Islam, decisively repudiating the "Islamo-fascists" whose main interest in life seems to be videotaping the decapitation of foreigners, have dwindled rapidly, it's Bush's Christianized view of world affairs that has made them do so. Christians who believe, as many Bush voters undoubtedly do, that all Muslims are terrorists by definition should take the beam out of their own eye before criticizing the mote in the mosque next door.

George Bush knows when to kiss the baby. And that's a hard thing to teach. In fact, it's an impossible thing to teach. He's very good on the street and he's good with the message. His message was, I will keep you safe, and the other guy won't. And when you are the incumbent, it's a much higher standard for an opponent to prove that you're wrong. So...

ZAHN: The American public, by and large, didn't think John Kerry was the guy to do that.

KERREY: That's correct, because the president had a case, a very simple case to make: I am the commander in chief. I won the war in Afghanistan, even though John Kerry supported it, even though, by the way, there's a credible case that the president's own negligence prior to 9/11 at least in part contributed to the disaster in the first place.

ZAHN: How so?

KERREY: Well, the 9/11 report says in chapter eight -- now that it's beyond the campaign, so the promise I had to keep this out of the campaign is over.

The 9/11 report in chapter eight says that, in the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn't do anything to harden our border security, didn't do anything to harden airport country, didn't do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn't do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn't warn the American people.

The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn't made.

(CROSSTALK)

ZAHN: But what we continue to hear from this administration is that the threat was much too diffuse. There was no way you could zero in on the fact that al Qaeda was going to use jets as bombs and ram them into buildings.

KERREY: That is a straw man.

The president says, if I had only known that 19 Islamic men would come into the United States of America and on the morning of 11 September hijack four American aircraft, fly two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into an unknown Pennsylvania that crashed in Shanksville, I would have moved heaven and earth. That's what he said.

Mr. President, you don't need to know that. This is an Islamic jihadist movement that has been organized since the early 1990s, declared war on the United States twice, in '96 and '98. You knew they were in the United States. You were warned by the CIA. You knew in July they were inside the United States. You were told again by briefing officers in August that it was a dire threat.

And what did you do? Nothing, so far as we could see on the 9/11 Commission. Now, that's in the report. And we took an oath not to talk about it during the campaign, I think correctly so, to increase the capacity of that commission's report to be heard by the people's Congress.

But the report, I think, it's difficult for a challenger. If I had been the challenger, it's difficult to make that case when you are running against an incumbent. He can stand back and say, oh, you're just grousing.

ZAHN: Oh, we couldn't connect the dots is what we heard.

I worked for 3 days, including Election Day, on the statewide voter protection hotline run by the Ohio Democratic Party in Columbus, Ohio. I am writing this because the media is inexplicably whitewashing what happened in Ohio, and Kerry's concession was likewise inexplicable. Hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised in Ohio.

People waited on line for as long as 10 hours. It appears to have only happened in Democratic-leaning precincts, principally (a) precincts where many African Americans lived, and (b) precincts near colleges. I spoke to a young man who got on line at 11:30 am and voted at 7 pm. When he left at 7 pm, the line was about 150 voters longer than when he'd arrived, which meant those people were going to wait even longer. In fact they waited for as much as 10 hours, and their voting was concluded at about 3 am. The reason this occurred was that they had 1 voting station per 1000 voters, while the adjacent precinct had 1 voting station per 184. Both precincts were within the same county, and managed by the same county board of elections. The difference between them is that the privileged polling place was in a rural, solidly Republican, area, while the one with long lines was in the college town of Gambier, OH.

Lines of 4 and 5 hours were the order of the day in many African-American neighborhoods.

Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG. This was reported immediately after the polls opened, and reported over and over again throughout the day, and yet the bogus machines were inexplicably kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY.

Countless other frauds occurred, such as postcards advising people of incorrect polling places, registered Democrats not receiving absentee ballots, duly registered young voters being forced to file provisional ballots even though their names and signatures appeared in the voting rolls, longtime active voting registered voters being told they weren't registered, bad faith challenges by Republican "challengers" in Democratic precincts, and on and on and on.

I was very proud of the way so many Ohioans fought so valiantly for their right to vote, and would not be turned away. Many, however, could not spend the entire day and were afraid of losing their jobs, due to the severe economic depression hitting Ohio.

I do not understand why Kerry conceded and did not fight to ensure that all Ohioans would have a chance to vote, and for their vote to be counted.

The election vote mess is like one of those inflatable clown dolls. You knock it down with your hardest punch, it goes supine, and then bounces back up, in the meantime having moved an inch or two laterally.

The punch, of course, is the explanation that the 29 more-votes-than voters precincts in greater Cleveland appear to have been caused by the addition of Absentee Ballots. The total difference between registered voters and votes (93,000) might be explained by that process, but it does little for one’s confidence in the whole result from Ohio.

The problem is, the rubber clown immediately bounces back with the report that officials in Youngstown managed to catch a slight glitch in their voting there: a total drawn from all the precincts that initially showed negative 25,000,000 million votes cast. It evokes a Monty Python sketch (“Mr. Kevin Phillips Bong - Sensible Party - 14,352. Mr. Harquin Fim Tim Lim Bim Bus Stop Fatang Fatang Ole Biscuit Barrel - Silly Party -- minus 25,000,0000).

No reason to worry about the integrity of the outcome in Ohio, is there?

The most pleasing thing of the last three days of blogs and newscasts is the reassurance from political professionals that all of you (all of us) who have wondered about what went on a week ago yesterday are not necessarily nuts. We might not necessarily be right, but there are some very stodgy, very by-the-book folks who think we’re damned right to be asking.

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party.

"He told me he was thinking about it," Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor's failed presidential bid.

David Packman knocks on the motel room door and his wife lets him in. His 9-year-old son is waiting with sneakers on, hoping for a trip outside after a day of sitting around. Packman's other son, 4, dances gleefully around the room. Dad's home from work.

This is no holiday getaway; this motel room, for the moment, is where the family lives. Packman, 34, is one month into a four-month contract fixing computers at a local company, and one day closer to the end of the line. It's Monday, and the $50 in Packman's pocket will have to cover food, laundry and incidentals for the coming week.

Not long ago his family was settled in a rental house in Warren, Ohio, the kids chasing frogs in the yard and wife Sabrina, 30, baking bread in the kitchen. Packman was hiring himself out as a freelance computer expert, troubleshooting systems for any company that needed temporary help. But jobs disappeared, and the Packmans lost the house. So they wound up in a motel in a strange town, and now the $58-a-night bill is draining them dry.

Packman is among a wave of Americans taking to the highway to preserve a middle-class life. While few people nowadays expect to spend a career rooted to one spot, some information technology workers are having mobility thrust upon them as companies change the way they staff computer-related jobs. Foreign workers are cheaper for some basic programming and technical jobs, and short-term contract workers give companies more flexibility to add and subtract employees as needed.

Many displaced workers have been able to retrain and find new positions, often switching careers, or making one big cross-country move. But some who are unable to get permanent jobs have to keep roaming to find work, sometimes leaving families behind, sometimes bringing them along in a quest for something better.

A generation ago, it was blue-collar workers who confronted a grim future of layoffs and factory closures. Many turned to computer work as a way out. Thanks to the 1990s boom in personal computing and the Internet, jobs in information technology -- known as IT, or simply "tech" -- were supposed to spread the prosperity of a "New Economy" based on digital technology instead of on bending metal or stamping plastics.

But it's not working out the way many had hoped. Unemployment among tech workers, once almost nonexistent, is now higher than the overall jobless rate for the first time in more than 30 years, according to an analysis of federal statistics by Ronil Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Between 1983 and 2000, the field was among the fastest-growing U.S. job markets. Employment in all tech-related jobs peaked at nearly 6.5 million in 2000, according to a survey of government statistics by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Those jobs have declined every year since and slipped by more than 10 percent between 2002 and 2003 alone, the survey found. A recent study by the job placement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc. found that 16 percent of all U.S. jobs cut this year were from high-tech companies.

A couple of weeks ago, following the last presidential debate, I said some rather inflammatory things about George W. Bush in a public post in my LJ, done in a satirical style. We laughed, we ranted, we all said some things. I thought it was a fairly harmless (and rather obvious) attempt at humor in the face of annoyance, and while a couple of people were offended, as is typical behavior from me, I saw something shiny and forgot about it, thinking that the whole thing was over and done and nothing else would come of what I said.

I was wrong.

At 9:45 last night, the Secret Service showed up on my mother's front door to talk to me about what I said about the President, as what I said could apparently be misconstrued as a threat to his life. After about ten minutes of talking to me and my family, they quickly came to the conclusion that I was not a threat to national security (mostly because we are the least threatening people in the entire world) and told me that they would not recommend that any further action be taken with my case. However, I do now have a file with the FBI that includes my photograph, my e-mail address, and the location of my LJ. This will follow me around for the rest of my life, regardless of the fact that the Secret Service knows that I am not a threat.

Obviously, I cannot link to the original LJ post that I made, because I have removed it from my LJ to protect myself and those who commented in that thread from receiving any further visits from the FBI. I apologized for the miscommunication, though I did *not* apologize for voicing my opinion of George W. Bush. I will never apologize for speaking my mind. I will, however, apologize when I say something wrong way and for unintentionally offending/threatening someone, because I am an extremely nonviolent person.

After having consulted an attorney to make sure that speaking about what happened to me will not incur another visit from the Secret Service, I am making this public post to tell you all several things:

A warning sticker in suburban Atlanta science textbooks that says evolution is ``a theory, not a fact'' was challenged in court Monday as an unlawful promotion of religion.

The disclaimer was adopted by Cobb County school officials in 2002 after hundreds of parents signed a petition criticizing the textbooks for treating evolution as fact without discussing alternate theories, including creationism.

``The religious views of some that contradict science cannot dictate curriculum,'' American Civil Liberties Union attorney Maggie Garrett argued Monday before U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper. The trial is expected to last several days.

But a lawyer for Cobb County schools, Linwood Gunn, held up a copy of a textbook's table of contents Monday that showed dozens of pages about evolution.

``The sticker doesn't exist independently of the 101 pages about evolution,'' Gunn said. ``This case is not about a sticker which has 33 words on it. ... It's about textbooks that say a lot more than that.''

The stickers read: ``This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.''

One of the parents who filed the lawsuit, Jeffrey Selman, said the stickers discredit the science of evolution.

``It's like saying everything that follows this sticker isn't true,'' he said.

• Marsh & McLennan to lay off 3000


• SBC communications to eliminate 10,000 jobs by end of 2005


• Delta Air Lines is cutting 2,000 aircraft maintenance jobs, up to 3,100 customer service jobs, and between 1,600 and 1,800 supervisory and administrative personnel as part of a previously announced plan to cut total staffing by 7,000.
  

In April, Julee Lacey, 33, a Fort Worth, TX, mother of two, went to her local CVS drugstore for a last-minute Pill refill. She had been getting her prescription filled there for a year, so she was astonished when the pharmacist told her, "I personally don't believe in birth control and therefore I'm not going to fill your prescription." Lacey, an elementary school teacher, was shocked. "The pharmacist had no idea why I was even taking the Pill. I might have needed it for a medical condition."

Melissa Kelley, 35, was just as stunned when her gynecologist told her she would not renew her prescription for birth control pills last fall.

"She told me she couldn't in good faith prescribe the Pill anymore," says Kelley, who lives with her husband and son in Allentown, PA. Then the gynecologist told Kelley she wouldn't be able to get a new prescription from her family doctor, either. "She said my primary care physician was the one who helped her make the decision." Lacey's pharmacist and Kelley's doctors are among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of physicians and pharmacists who now adhere to a controversial belief that birth control pills and other forms of hormonal contraception--including the skin patch, the vaginal ring, and progesterone injections--cause tens of thousands of "silent" abortions every year. Consequently, they are refusing to prescribe or dispense them.

Scenarios like these--virtually unheard of 10 years ago--are happening with increasing frequency. However, until this spring, the issue received little attention outside the antiabortion community. It wasn't high on the agendas of reproductive rights advocates, who have been preoccupied with defending abortion rights and emergency contraception. But when Lacey's story was picked up by a Texas TV station and later made the national news, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and others took notice.

Limiting access to the Pill, these groups now say, threatens a basic aspect of women's health care. An estimated 12 million American women use hormonal contraceptives, the most popular form of birth control in the United States after sterilization. The Pill is also widely prescribed by gynecologists and family doctors for other uses, such as clearing up acne, shrinking fibroids, reducing ovarian cancer risk, and controlling endometriosis.

"Where will this all stop?" asks Lacey. "And what if these pharmacists decide they suddenly don't believe in a new lifesaving medicine? I don't think pharmacists should be in a position to decide these things."

Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written “I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2… My source said they’ve also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time.”

I didn’t get the memo.

We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Monday’s Countdown. There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who had personally encountered the ‘lockdown’ during the vote count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who’ve written the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we should gently call the Electronic Voting Angst. Conyers insisted he wasn’t trying to re-cast the election, but seemed mystified that in the 21st Century we could have advanced to a technological state in which voting - fine, flawed, or felonious - should leave no paper trail.

But the show should not have been confused with Edward R. Murrow flattening Joe McCarthy. I mean that both in terms of editorial content and controversy. I swear, and I have never been known to cover-up for any management anywhere, that I got nothing but support from MSNBC both for the web-work and the television time. We were asked if perhaps we shouldn’t begin the program with the Fallujah offensive and do the voting story later, but nobody flinched when we argued that the Countdown format pretty much allows us to start wherever we please.

It may be different elsewhere, but there was no struggle to get this story on the air, and evidently I should be washing the feet of my bosses this morning in thanks. Because your reaction was a little different than mine. By actual rough count, between the 8 PM ET start of the program and 10:30 PM ET last night, we received 1570 emails (none of them duplicates or forms, as near as I can tell). 1508 were positive, 62 negative.

Democrats, ask yourselves this:

Where would the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party have been without the energizing influence of Howard Dean, his campaign manager and Internet guru Joe Trippi, and their respective organizations, Democracy for America and Change for America?

Where would the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party have been without the imaginative and truly exceptional efforts of Wes Boyd, Eli Pariser and MoveOn.org?

Where would they have been without Michael Moore and George Soros and Bruce Springsteen and Al Franken and Michael Stipe?

Where would they have been without Rock the Vote, Vote or Die, Declare Yourself, and provocateurs like Chuck D., Russell Simmons and, yes, even P. Diddy?

Where would they have been without Air America Radio and the bloggers and grassroots groups like Operation Truth, Billionaires for Bush and PunkVoter?

And where would they have been without the nearly $130 million overall spending advantage the Democratic Party and Democratic-leaning groups had over their Republican counterparts?

These groups, and many others -- not to mention countless individual citizens -- did everything within their power to defeat George W. Bush. They contributed their time, their money, their energy and their talents. And yet, the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party simply didn't get the job done.

[snip]

...the Democratic Party has been getting away with this for far too long. There is a lack of accountability -- to funders, to volunteers and, most of all, to their voters -- that is breathtakingly irresponsible.

The bottom line for this election is simple: Individual citizens and independent groups, taking the burden upon themselves, did a superlative job of cultivating national dissatisfaction with the president and his policies. But the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party could not provide an acceptable enough alternative. They could not close the deal with America's swing voters.

There are no more excuses for this Democratic Party. It must change -- and change radically -- or it should die.

Something significant happened today and although it's significant I'm not talking about the storming of Falluja. (here and here) I'm talking about this; Saudi religious scholars support holy war.

Prominent Saudi religious scholars urged Iraqis to support militants waging holy war against the U.S.-led coalition forces as American troops prepared Saturday for a major assault on the insurgent hotbed of Fallujah.
The 26 Saudi scholars and preachers said in an open letter to the Iraqi people that their appeal was prompted by "the extraordinary situation through which the Iraqis are passing which calls for unity and exchange of views." The letter was posted on the Internet.

"At no time in history has a whole people been violated ... by propaganda that's been proved false," Sheik Awad al-Qarni, one of the scholars, told Al-Arabiya TV.

It's officially a "Holy War".

It's like when you're sitting at a bar (not me, I don't drink anymore) and you're making small talk with the guy next to you, somebody you never met before. And you're having a good conversation, then all the sudden the guy throws in some joke about jews or koreans or something, maybe uses the N word, talking real loud. And everybody thinks this guy's your buddy, so you get real uncomfortable and try to either end the conversation or talk loudly about how great it is to meet the guy for the very first time ever. That's what these Americans are doing. Guilting us by association. Thanks alot, assholes.

[snip]

You know what it feels like? It feels like they came up with some new science to miraculously revive JFK. But then they just shot him in the head again. They tossed him in a shallow grave somewhere along highway 99, took a piss on it, maybe marked it with a crushed Taco Bell cup. Then they laughed at us and snorted, "God bless America" with that shiteating ratfucker grin that Bush has been known and despised for since he was in college.

[note from me: Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like...]

I wasn't faking it. I really believed it. I thought we were gonna be able to have the Ewok celebration, with the dancing and drumming on helmets and shooting off fireworks. Ding dong, the witch is dead, etc. But they special edded this one up. Now the Ewoks mount their log and rock offensive, but they are no match for the machines. The stormtroopers just crush them, massacre them, burn their villages and sell their babies into slavery. Luke is paid off, moves in with Darth Vader and the rebels are all executed. The end.


We're talking about a president who has had below 50% approval ratings for months. Polls show that the majority of Americans now think the Iraq invasion was a mistake and that we are losing the war. 55% think our country is going in "the wrong direction." Bush clearly lost all 3 debates and seemed to get increasingly confused and irritable as the campaign went on. He even yelled at the moderator in debate #2 and had goo on one side of his mouth for #3. Nothing has been going well at all. Iraq has been getting worse and worse (there will be a major bloodbath in Fallujah any day now, now that everybody's voted), the economy and job levels are terrible, Cheney's company is under investigation by the FBI, Osama bin Laden just showed up on TV to remind us that Bush let him go. (No comment from the forgotten anthrax terrorist.) Kerry was pulling ahead in pretty much all of the polls for the week before the election. And even on election day he was winning all of the swing states in the exit polls.

With US forces massing outside Fallujah, 35 marines swayed to Christian rock music and asked Jesus Christ to protect them in what could be the biggest battle since American troops invaded Iraq (news - web sites) last year.

Men with buzzcuts and clad in their camouflage waved their hands in the air, M-16 assault rifles laying beside them, and chanted heavy metal-flavoured lyrics in praise of Christ late Friday in a yellow-brick chapel.

They counted among thousands of troops surrounding the city of Fallujah, seeking solace as they awaited Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's decision on whether or not to invade Fallujah.

"You are the sovereign. You're name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb," a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes, reflecting on what lay ahead for them.

The US military, with many soldiers coming from the conservative American south and midwest, has deep Christian roots.

In times that fighting looms, many soldiers draw on their evangelical or born-again heritage to help them face the battle.

"It's always comforting. Church attendance is always up before the big push," said First Sergeant Miles Thatford.

"Sometimes, all you've got is God."

Between the service's electric guitar religious tunes, marines stepped up on the chapel's small stage and recited a verse of scripture, meant to fortify them for war.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating about a dozen brokerage firms - including Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab and E*Trade Financial - on suspicion that they failed to secure the best available price for stocks they were trading for their customers, according to people who have been briefed on the inquiry.

At issue is the way the companies executed trades of Nasdaq-listed securities when the markets opened in the morning, a period of intense trading activity resulting from the backlog of orders since the market's close the previous day.

After examining trading data from the last four years, the investigation found evidence that trades were often processed in ways that favored the firms over their clients, these people said.

Securing the best price is one of the industry's critical obligations to investors. If the investigators' suspicions are confirmed, these practices are not likely to add up to significant costs for individual investors - the difference would be pennies a share traded - but in total they could represent substantial amounts of money for the brokers.

More important, the investigation opens another possible conflict of interest involving the big firms on Wall Street. In the last few years, the financial industry has been jolted by a series of scandals over practices that rewarded company insiders at the expense of ordinary investors.

Brokers have a "best execution" obligation, defined by common law, fraud provisions of the securities acts and market rules to get the best possible price for investors.

The investigation - the first to look at this aspect of trading - can be expected to put executives and traders on notice that regulators are monitoring best-execution practices and could reignite the debate over how trades should be carried out.

An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment on the inquiry, as did representatives from Ameritrade, Schwab, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and E*Trade, all of whom said their firms did not discuss regulatory investigations. Peter Yandle, a spokesman for NASD, the Nasdaq market's parent company, said he was unaware of the S.E.C. inquiry.

SAN DIEGO -- A man was beaten just outside his University City apartment by a group of five men who believed he was from the Middle East, San Diego police said Thursday.

The victim was trying to park when the assailants, all white men, threw a beer bottle and shattered his car window just after 11 p.m. Wednesday, Sgt. Rich Nemetz said.

The assailants then knocked down the victim as he got out of his car, kicking him, yelling racial slurs and telling him to go back to Iraq, Nemetz said. The victim is of Portuguese descent.

The men took the victim's shoes and fled in a black SUV, threatening to return and kill him, Nemetz said.

The attackers remained at large Thursday, Nemetz said.

"I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so....."I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights. And I strongly believe that marriage ought to be defined as between a union between a man and a woman. Now, having said that, states ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people to be able to have rights like others."

American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday.

A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, American officials said.

The officials said they did not know whether missiles from Iraq remain there or have been smuggled into other countries, though a senior administration official said Friday that "there is no evidence that they have left the country.''

It was unclear whether Iraqi military or intelligence personnel removed the missile systems during the initial invasion of Iraq or whether they disappeared from warehouses after major combat ended.

a number of evangelicals, inspired in part by minister Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" novels, have come to view politics as part of their religion. "There is a strain of evangelical Christians who believe it is political figures who usher in the Second Coming," he said. As such, Bush "is the spiritual and political leader of a moral revolution."

Though such views are a minority, there were glimpses of that passion on the campaign trail. Last month, at an invitation-only meeting with Vice President Cheney, a questioner rose and said: "I personally think, next to Jesus Christ, [Bush] probably took the greatest load upon his shoulders of any individual, so it had to be with strong backing that he has been able to stand for his testimony for the Lord Jesus Christ."

At another invitation-only event, a questioner asking about Bush's "faith-based initiatives" told the president: "I believe that the enemy that we need the greatest freedom from right now happens to be Satan, and it's the enemy that we also don't necessarily always see. There's so many people who are being attacked on every level."

Leaders of Christian political organizations have spoken of Tuesday's results as providential. "Only the Lord could have orchestrated an election in which the president got a wonderful majority vote and at the same time we had a basic Christian institution of marriage on the ballot," Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family's vice president of public policy, said on the group's radio show this week.

The organization's head, James Dobson, said, "I think God has honored" Bush because "the president did acknowledge Jesus Christ." The same program broadcast a statement by Dennis Prager, a Christian commentator, saying "civilization as we understand it was in the balance" in the election, and "a beautiful man has been vindicated."

1: Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
2: "Thus, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.
3: But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,
4: so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
5: "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.
6: But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matthew 6:1-6, Revised Standard version)