Web abuzz with vote-rigging tales - Toronto Star
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Voting
Torono Star


John Kerry may have conceded the White House to George W. Bush, but millions of Americans have not.

My inbox is engorged with some of their emails claiming that the election was hijacked. There are appeals to "bombard" the Ohio secretary of state over the provisional ballots, pleas for "emergency funds" to force state recounts plus entreaties for "first-hand'' anecdotes for a book on election irregularities.

But you wouldn't know anything was out of the ordinary from most of the mainstream media (MSM).

Since Nov. 2, they've produced plenty of post-vote pontification over "moral values," predictions on future White House appointments and premature speculation on who will run against whom in 2008.

Meanwhile, there's practically nothing on the issue consuming my bandwidth and clogging my computer.

The Nation's David Corn feels my pain.

"The election's been stolen! Fraud! John Kerry won!" he writes in the latest issue. "In the (post-election) days, these charges flew over the Internet. The basic claim was that the early exit polls ? which showed Kerry ahead of George W. Bush ? were right; the vote tallies were rigged. Could this be? Or have ballot booths with electronic voting machines become the new Grassy Knoll for conspiracy theorists?"

Yes ... and no.

No because, in many jurisdictions, including the contentious Ohio and Florida, real problems have been reported. Some local MSM (e.g. the Cincinnati Inquirer) and all kinds of websites (VotersUnite.org, to name one) have documented incidences of machine malfunctions, discrepancies between exit poll results and actual votes, "disappeared" votes, "extra" votes and other problems.

Yes because, thanks to a patchwork system of machine and paper ballots, a vast and confusing array of irregularities are turning up in many different counties. That means little coherence and much chaos, propelling wild rumours around the cyberspace, along with legitimate accounts of trouble.

But is that any reason to discount the story? What little MSM reporting there is of the irregularities is done with the intent of discrediting any potential case, however flimsy, against certifying the election results.

"Mocking us as `spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists,' (Washington) Post reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating signalled their determination to put questions about Bush's victory outside the bounds of responsible debate," noted Sam Parry of Consortium News on Friday, before launching into a post-mortem of the paper's "sloppy mistakes and untrue assertions."

Also on Friday, the New York Times took a crack at the votejacking charges only to conclude that there is no there there.

"I'd give my right arm for Internet rumours of a stolen election to be true," David Wade, a Kerry campaign spokesperson, tells the paper. "But blogging it doesn't make it so."

This brings us to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, host of the best, although not best-rated, weeknight hour on U.S. cable. His Countdown With Keith Olbermann (at 8 and midnight) is a smart and snarky look at the day's events, with little of the spin you typically find on TV.

Not surprising, then, that Olbermann has been almost a lone voice in the MSM's treatment of voting irregularities, earning him hero status in blogistan.

Last Tuesday night, he asked Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford if "every news organization (gave) up on this story the moment John Kerry conceded the election." He got this reply:

"The glib answer, which is part of the truth, is I think everybody was tired after that election. And it was a gruelling one. And so, since John Kerry ? and this is the second factor ? since Kerry conceded, there wasn't the great desire to run out to Columbus or wherever and try to figure this stuff out. And the concession is the key, because we're often wimps in the media. And we wait for other people to make charges, one political party or another, and then we investigate."

Which once again confirms how journalism is dead while stenography lives and thrives.

Just like they did in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media are not asking the questions they should be asking.

I am not saying that, given all the irregularities put together, the election outcome would be any different. I am just wondering why there's been precious little probing of the problems and how they must be fixed before the next election.

Of course, driving all these charges of election hijacking is a healthy dose of paranoia based on the all-too-real 2000 election mess. Mix in bewilderment over how so many Americans swallowed the Bush administration lies about 9/11 and Iraq with a generous helping of sore loserdom ? and you have the perfect recipe for a conspiracy theory.

But this is one cow pie that stinks to high heaven. You have to wonder why the media aren't sniffing around it.

Oh Brother, Ohio, and O'Reilly (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? Keep your aluminum foil hats at the ready.

The purported linking of failed Florida congressional candidate Jeff Fisher and Ralph Nader, trumpeted on Fisher?s website, is news
Nader?s spokesman Kevin Zeese.

That?s particularly troublesome for Mr. Fisher because it is to Zeese that the connection is attributed:

?Kevin Zeese,? the Fisher site reads, ?officially announced that Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader will be consulting with Jeff Fisher and Jan Schneider regarding the investigation of voter fraud and a statewide recount for the state of Florida.?

When the nose-to-the-grindstone Countdown staff (as opposed to me, vacation boy) contacted Zeese, he said it was the first he?d heard of any ?official announcement.? Zeese acknowledges he?d spoken to Fisher, and surmises, correctly I think, that Fisher (he lost in the Florida 16th) and Schneider (she lost in the 13th, to Katherine Harris) were trying to increase their credibility by tying their efforts to the Nader campaign. Given the pounding Nader?s gotten for four years, Zeese laughed out loud at the irony.

Fisher has been cited in many places as claiming he has firm evidence of deliberate computer-hacking in the Florida vote, and was awaiting FBI agents with whom he was to share it. Not to dismiss him or his claims, but the show?s contact with him was not encouraging. He spoke vaguely of sources and whispered a lot.

Hell, ?Deep Throat? from Watergate whispered a lot.

Then again, so does the guy who wanders around Columbus Circle claiming the government caused the Red Sox to win the World Series.



We?ll reserve judgment on Mr. Fisher?s claims? and keep them out of this space until and unless they have stronger legs. But the ?consulting? role with Nader isn?t the case, and bodes ill for Fisher?s other assertions.

Meanwhile in Ohio, it?s not exactly the lead story on Nightly News, but the verifying of the provisional ballots has gotten the attention of the most influential, and underrated, news source in the country? the Associated Press. It is from this wire service that most smaller newspapers and nearly all local and national radio and television news departments glean their national material (and from which, though they?d never admit it, most newspaper columnists, draw most of their data).

The AP reports that by yesterday, 11 of Ohio?s 88 counties had completed vetting the provisionals and that ten of the districts have accepted the validity of more than 90 percent of them. One? Belmont County (along the West Virginia border)? has tossed 42%, and nearing the halfway mark in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the election board there has accepted about two-thirds.


And this afternoon, the AP?s TV and radio columnist Frazier Moore wrote a withering satire of the post-election television political landscape, so much in the manner of Jonathan Swift that it has been forwarded to me by conservatives claiming it ?proves? there?s no reason to cover any voting issues. Generally speaking, mainstream silence seems to be passing: Sunday, the Hartford Courant printed an op-ed from the Associate Dean of the Yale Law School, Ian Solomon - one of those Democratic lawyers dispatched to Florida to ?watch? the election - who suggested the monitors had been too busy verifying the paper ballots to pay attention to the prospect of computerized irregularities (thus, Dean Solomon admitted, ?I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud.?)

The Boston Globe plans a piece on the silence? which still seems more a case of media passivity than conspiracy?in the next few days. Even the
Washington Times addressed it yesterday (albeit with the headline ?Anti-Bush Internet Site Angles For Election Probe?) by focusing on MoveOn.org?s ?Investigate the Vote? campaign. Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of six Democratic congressmen who demanded an investigation by the General Accountability Office in the days after the election, says now he anticipates a response from the GAO by the end of this week, and that could stir the pot a little further.

We may even have seen something of a reaction to this story on Fox News. There, our old loofah-wielding friend Bill O?Reilly is at it again, wandering further and further into semi-lucidity and self-contradiction. As reported by
Brian Stelter over at TVNewser O?Reilly managed to put himself at direct odds with his own boss, Roger Ailes.

?The Pew Research Center is out with which media was most trusted during the presidential campaign,? O?Reilly stated Monday night. ?On the TV side, Fox News wins big? Dead last was MSNBC, which was six percent of Americans trusting them. Obviously they have major problems over there.?

As usual when dealing with the O?Reilly Fact-or-Fiction, he leaves himself so open to fact-checking on so many fronts, that it?s difficult to decide where to thrust the first sword.

Let?s start with the Pew poll. Firstly, it had nothing to do with which media was ?most trusted? ? it only asked where people got most of their news on the election. And using Fox?s own criteria? they?re right and everybody else ranges from liberal to treasonous? they were cited as the respondents? primary source by 21%, compared to the NBC/MSNBC/CNBC combination (also 21%), and compared to the combined three broadcast network news departments (29%). The Internet was also cited as a primary source by 21%, suggesting respondents were permitted to give more than one answer. This not only isn?t ?Fox News wins big;? using some of the same massaging of numbers O?Reilly is fond of, it?s not even ?Fox News wins at all.?

Sorry about that ?massaging? reference to O?Reilly in there. Poor choice of words.

Most intriguingly, O?Reilly?s employer, Mr. Ailes, recently dismissed the company that did the survey O?Reilly trumpeted so loudly. In its recent piece on the network, "The New York Times" noted that Pew?s June survey reported that 41 percent of Fox News viewers identified themselves as Republicans, and 52 percent of them called themselves Conservatives.

Roger Ailes then told the paper that the Pew Research Center had produced ?a totally fraudulent survey done by a bunch of liberals.?

So O?Reilly is reduced to relying on a polling company that his boss believes traffics in ?totally fraudulent surveys,? to altering the questions posed by that company to fit his own boasts, and to accepting those numbers he likes from that polling and ignoring the ones he doesn?t.

Sounds like somebody hasn?t had a good falafel in awhile.

Comments? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Glibs reach their recount dough count (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  happy
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? A presidential vote recount in Ohio seems inevitable today with the announcement from Green Party candidate David Cobb that he and the Libertarians' Michael Badnarik have raised $150,000 in donations to meet filing fees and expenses.

That fund-raising goal was set last Thursday; on
Cobb's website the two parties now say they're going to try to raise an additional $100,000 for "training, mobilizing, and per diem expenses" for those "thousands" who'll be involved in the statewide effort. They're also calling for volunteers from Ohio, and elsewhere, to be the Green/Lib observers in the county-by-county process, or house out-of-state volunteers.

I swear: I'm on vacation (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  accident prone
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION?Golly, I?ve never been the subject of a conspiracy theory before.

Yet, there it is, flying around the Internet under the byline of a Peter Coyote: that when I attempted to break the ?lock-down? of coverage of the voting irregularities story in the media during Friday night?s edition of Countdown, I was fired, and left the studio in the middle of the program.

Um, no, actually.

I?m on vacation? it?s been scheduled since August; I?ll be blogging in the interim; Countdown will continue to cover the story in my absence; I not only wasn?t fired for ?mentioning? the story - but we covered it five nights in a row; and, I?ll be back on television on the 22nd (earlier, if developments warrant).

But we can now trace how just a dollop of the truth can be subverted into an item available for purchase in the Tin Foil Hat District - and we have another reminder that what you read on the Web, no matter how much it might fit your beliefs, anxieties, or even other facts, might still resemble more a game of telephone than actual investigative reporting.

I?m reminded suddenly of the lyric from The Talking Heads? ?Life During Wartime?: ?Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA??

What happened was this. We end nearly every Friday show with a news quiz. Each week my colleague Monica Novotny asks me a series of questions sent in by viewers. If I get half or more correct, I win a ?prize? - if not, I suffer a ?punishment.? This edition?s prize was a week?s vacation. I feigned surprise, asked when it began, was told it began whenever I wanted, and promptly got up and literally ran off the set.

Two insider facts:

a) We planned that gag to tamp down any surprise or speculation if people tuned in Monday and didn?t see me (I assumed reactions would divide into three groups: ones from the left which assumed I?d been ?silenced,? ones from the right which assumed I?d been ?suspended,? and, the largest group by far, ones who couldn?t care less).

b) The rest of the show is live, but, for reasons of technical complexity, we always pre-tape the quiz in advance. The whole running-off-the-set gag was recorded at 7:45. Temporally speaking, my ?mid-show firing? occurred before the newscast itself.

Thanks, though, to all who e-mailed fearing a reply ?Olbermann? No Olbermann ever worked here.? The e-mail volume since the first blog last week, incidentally, is up to 27,000 as of 2 PM ET Sunday, and it continues to run at about 22:1 in favor, with the ?ones? boiling down to messages like ?get over it? and the cordial greeting from a woman in late middle age: ?Shut the F up.? We do learn from this correspondence that not a lot of people like Ann Coulter, and that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is so infrequently read that the oxygen over there is being utterly wasted.

There is another fallacy in the Olbermann?s Been Disappeared story, and it?s the very idea that there is a ?media lock-down? of coverage. Nobody can argue that the MSM has been vigorous here - nor, in television?s case, anything but largely dismissive - but you can ring that up much more to hauteur than to censorship.


On Friday, David Shuster, who has already done some excellent research at Hardblogger, did a piece on the mess for Hardball, and Chris followed up with a discussion with Joe Trippi and Susan Molinari. There was a cogent, reasoned, unexcited piece about the mechanics of possible tampering and/or machine failure on CNN?s ?Next? yesterday, and Saturday alone there were serious news pieces in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake Tribune, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. NPR did a segment of its ?On The Media? on the topic (with said blogger as the guest).

And today the New York Times continues its series of ?Making Vote Counts? editorials with a pretty solid stance on the necessity of journalistic and governmental proof that the elections weren?t tampered with, nor the victims of Speak & Spell toys retro-fitted as electronic voting units. By way of contrast, though, the Houston Chronicle has an editorial so puerile that it may be the most naive thing I?ve ever read that was actually written by a grown-up.

I suspect the coverage is going to go through the roof as the news spreads that Nader has gotten his recount in New Hampshire, and that the Greens and Libertarians are actually going to get their Ohio recount. When reporters discover what Jonathan Turley pointed out to us on Tuesday?s show, namely that 70% of Ohio?s votes were done with punch cards and as Florida proved in 2000, in court, a lot of those punch cards? as Jon put it? ?turn over,? I suspect there will be long-form television on the process. As an aside: as of earlier today, the Green/Libs? should we just go ahead and call them the Glibs?? were at $118,000 towards their Ohio war-chest goal of $150,000. I?ve gotten a peck of e-mails about why neither party?s Website has details, and it turns out the site you want on this is VoteCobb.Org.


All that having been said, the most remarkable read of the day is probably the item buried on page A5 of The Washington Post. (Registration required but free). There, Charles Babington and Brian Faler take the wind out of the primary post-election grist for the yak-fests of radio and television: the overwhelming relevance of ?Moral Values? to 2004?s presidential voters.

You will recall that the Exit Polling on November 2nd ranked the most important issues as follows:

Moral Values, 22%
Economy and Jobs, 20%
Terrorism, 19%
Iraq, 15%
The authors point out that those results came when pollsters offered voters a list of which issues factored most into their decision to vote. They note that last week, Pew Research went back and surveyed voters again, and took their temperatures in two ways? with a list (as was offered on election day), and without one (in other words, voters had to remember their issues; it ceased to be multiple choice). Those working off the checklist responded similarly to the election day exit pollees:

Moral Values, 27%
Iraq, 22%
Economy and Jobs, 21%
Terrorism, 14%
But the free-form Pew survey produced entirely different data. Given nothing to work with, simply asked to name the deciding factor in their vote, ?moral values? shrunk back to human size:

Other, 31%
Iraq, 25%
Moral Values, 14%
Economy and Jobs, 12%
Terrorism, 9%
Babington and Faler point out that ?other? included such gems as not liking Bush, not liking Kerry, honesty, and presumably ?I was following instructions from Jon Stewart.?

Oh and by the way: how come the ?Kerry?s winning? part of the election night exit polling is presumed to have been wrong, or tampered with, but the ?Moral Values? part of the same polling is graded flawless, and marks the dawn of a new American century?

On Vaco but still reading your e-mails. Write to me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Evangelical Christianity Has Been Hijacked
Mood:  bright
Topic: Church and State
'Evangelical Christianity Has Been Hijacked':

An Interview with Tony Campolo

Interview by Laura Sheahen
BeliefNet.com

Friday 12 November 2004

Speaking out on gays, women and more, a progressive evangelical says 'We ought to get out of the judging business.'

Evangelical leader, sociology professor, and Baptist minister Tony Campolo made headlines in the 1990s when he agreed to be a spiritual counselor to President Bill Clinton.

A self-described Bible-believing Christian, he has drawn fire from his fellow evangelicals for his stance on contemporary issues like homosexuality.

He talked with Beliefnet recently about his new book, Speaking My Mind.

Q - It's a common perception that evangelical Christians are conservative on issues like gay marriage, Islam, and women?s roles. Is this the case?

A - Well, there's a difference between evangelical and being a part of the Religious Right. A significant proportion of the evangelical community is part of the Religious Right. My purpose in writing the book was to communicate loud and clear that I felt that evangelical Christianity had been hijacked.

Q - When did it become anti-feminist? When did evangelical Christianity become anti-gay? When did it become supportive of capital punishment? Pro-war? When did it become so negative towards other religious groups?

A - There are a group of evangelicals who would say, "Wait a minute. We?re evangelicals but we want to respect Islam. We don?t want to call its prophet evil. We don?t want to call the religion evil. We believe that we have got to learn to live in the same world with our Islamic brothers and sisters and we want to be friends. We do not want to be in some kind of a holy war."

We also raise some very serious questions about the support of policies that have been detrimental to the poor. When I read the voter guide of a group like the Christian Coalition, I find that they are allied with the National Rifle Association and are very anxious to protect the rights of people to buy even assault weapons. But they don?t seem to be very supportive of concerns for the poor, concerns for trade relations, for canceling Third World debts.

In short, there?s a whole group of issues that are being ignored by the Religious Right and that warrant the attention of Bible-believing Christians. Another one would be the environment.

I don?t think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don?t like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world?s problems. The Republican Party needs to be called into accountability even as the Democratic Party needs to be called into accountability. So it?s that double-edged sword that I?m trying to wield.

Q - Are the majority of evangelicals in America leaning conservative because they see their leaders on TV that way? Or is there a contingent out there that we don?t hear about in the press that is more progressive on the issues you just talked about?

A - The latest statistics that I have seen on evangelicals indicate that something like 83 percent of them are going to vote for George Bush and are Republicans. And there?s nothing wrong with that. It?s just that Christians need to be considering other issues beside abortion and homosexuality.

These are important issues, but isn?t poverty an issue? When you pass a bill of tax reform that not only gives the upper five percent most of the benefits, leaving very little behind for the rest of us, you have to ask some very serious questions. When that results in 300,000 slots for children's afterschool tutoring in poor neighborhoods being cut from the budget. When one and a half billion dollars is cut from the "No Child Left Behind" program.

In short, I think that evangelicals are so concerned with the unborn?as we should be?that we have failed to pay enough attention to the born?to those children who do live and who are being left behind by a system that has gone in favor of corporate interests and big money.

So as an evangelical, I find myself very torn, because I am a pro-life person. I understand evangelicals who say there comes a time when one issue is so overpowering that we have to vote for the candidate that espouses a pro-life position, even if we disagree with him on a lot of other issues.

My response to that is OK, the Republican party and George Bush know that they have the evangelical community in its pocket?[but] they can?t win the election without us. Given this position, shouldn?t we be using our incredible position of influence to get the president and his party to address a whole host of other issues which we think are being neglected?

Q - Like what you just said - poverty, or our foreign policy?

A - Exactly. And we would also point out that the evangelical community has become so pro-Israel that it is forgotten that God loves Palestinians every bit as much. And that a significant proportion of the Palestinian community is Christian. We?re turning our back on our own Christian brothers and sisters in an effort to maintain a pro-Zionist mindset that I don?t think most Jewish people support. For instance, most Jewish people really support a two-state solution to the Palestinian crisis. Interestingly enough, George Bush supports a two-state solution.

He?s the first president to actually say that the Palestinians should have a state of their own with their own government. However, he?s received tremendous opposition from evangelicals on that very point.

Evangelicals need to take a good look at what their issues are. Are they really being faithful to Jesus? Are they being faithful to the Bible? Are they adhering to the kinds of teachings that Christ made clear?

In the book, I take issue, for instance, with the increasing tendency in the evangelical community to bar women from key leadership roles in the church. Over the last few years, the Southern Baptist Convention has taken away the right of women to be ordained to ministry. There were women that were ordained to ministry?their ordinations have been negated and women are told that this is not a place for them. They are not to be pastors.

They point to certain passages in the Book of Timothy to make their case, but tend to ignore that there are other passages in the Bible that would raise very serious questions about that position and which, in fact, would legitimate women being in leadership positions in the church. In Galatians, it says that in Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, all are one in Christ Jesus. In the Book of Acts, the Bible is very clear that when the Holy Spirit comes upon the Church that both men and women begin to prophesy, that preaching now belongs to both men and women. Phillip had four daughters, all of whom prophesied, which we know means preaching in biblical language. I?d like to point out that in the 16th chapter of Romans, the seventh verse, we have reference to Junia. Junia was a woman and she held the high office of apostle in the early Church. What is frightening to me is that in the New International Translation of the Scriptures, the word Junia was deliberately changed to Junius to make it male.

I?m saying, let?s be faithful to the Bible. You can make your point, but there are those of us equally committed to Scripture who make a very strong case that women should be in key leaderships in the Church. We don?t want to communicate the idea that to believe the Bible is to necessarily be opposed to women in key roles of leadership in the life of early Christendom.

Q - What position do you wish American evangelicals would take on homosexuality?

A - As an evangelical who takes the Bible very seriously, I come to the first chapter of Romans and feel there is sufficient evidence there to say that same-gender eroticism is not a Christian lifestyle. That?s my position.

Q - So you mean homosexual activity?

A - That?s right. What I think the evangelical community has to face up to, however, is what almost every social scientist knows, and I?m one of them, and that is that people do not choose to be gay. I don?t know what causes homosexuality, I have no idea. Neither does anybody else. There isn?t enough evidence to support those who would say it?s an inborn theory. There isn?t enough evidence to support those who say it?s because of socialization.

I?m upset because the general theme in the evangelical community, propagated from one end of this country to the other--especially on religious radio--is that people become gay because the male does not have a strong father image with which to identify. That puts the burden of people becoming homosexual on parents.

Most parents who have homosexual children are upset because of the suffering their children have to go through living in a homophobic world. What they don?t need is for the Church to come along and to lay a guilt trip on top of them and say ?And your children are homosexual because of you. If you would have been the right kind of parent, this would have never happened.? That kind of thinking is common in the evangelical Church and the book attacks on solid sociological, psychological, biological grounds.

But even if evangelicals came to believe that it was not a choice, how should they approach the topic?

Well, beyond that, they seem to offer an absolute solution to the problem. They are saying, ?We can change every gay. We can change every lesbian.? I have heard enough of the brothers and sisters give testimonies of having changed their sexual orientation to doubt them?I believe them. But that?s rare: people who stand up and say, ?I was gay but Jesus came into my life and now I?m not homosexual anymore.?

But the overwhelming proportion of the gay community that love Jesus, that go to church, that are deeply committed in spiritual things, try to change and can?t change. And the Church acts as though they are just stubborn and unwilling, when in reality they can?t change. To propose that every gay with proper counseling and proper prayer can change their orientation is to create a mentality where parents are angry with their children, saying, "You are a gay person because you don?t want to change and you?re hurting your mother and your father and your family and you?re embarrassing us all."

These young people cannot change. What they are begging for, and what we as Church people have a responsibility to give them, is loving affirmation as they are. That does not mean that we support same-gender eroticism.

Q - What do you wish evangelicals might accept in terms of salvation for non-Christians?

A - We ought to get out of the judging business. We should leave it up to God to determine who belongs in one arena or another when it comes to eternity. What we are obligated to do is to tell people about Jesus and that?s what I do. I try to do it every day of my life.

I don?t know of any other way of salvation, excerpt through Jesus Christ. Now, if you were going to ask me, "Are only Christians going to get to heaven?" I can?t answer that question, because I can only speak from the Christian perspective, from my own convictions and from my own experience. I do not claim to be able to read the mind of God and when evangelicals make these statements, I have some very serious concerns.

For instance, they say unless a person accepts Jesus as his personal savior or her personal savior, that person is doomed forever to live apart from God. Well, what about the many, many children every year who die in infancy or the many children who die almost in childbirth and what about people who are suffering from intellectual disabilities? Is there not some grace from God towards such people? Are evangelical brothers and sisters of mine really suggesting that these people will burn in hell forever?

And I would have to say what about all the people in the Old Testament days? They didn?t have a chance to accept Jesus.

I don?t know how far the grace of God does expand and I?m sure that what the 25th chapter of Matthew says is correct--that there will be a lot of surprises on Judgment Day as to who receives eternal life and who doesn?t. But in the book I try to make the case that we have to stop our exclusivistic, judgmental mentality. Let us preach Christ, let us be faithful to proclaiming the Gospel, but let?s leave judgment in the hands of God.

But in the book you also mention the decline of mainline churches. Some people would say that this lack of taking a firm stand is wishy-washy, and that if evangelicalism is infected by relativism, that could be its downfall as well.

I didn?t say anything that was relativistic. I am just saying that when we don?t know what we?re talking about, we shouldn?t make absolute statements. And we don?t know how God will judge in the end. We do not know the mind of God.

As for mainline churches declining, my own particular analysis is that they're declining because they have been so concerned about social justice issues that they forgot to put a major emphasis on bringing people into a close, personal, transforming relationship with God. The Pentecostal churches, the evangelical churches, attract people who are hungry to know God, not just as a theology, not just as a moral teacher, not just as a social justice advocate, but as someone who can invade them, possess them, transform them from within, strengthen them for their everyday struggles, enable them to overcome the guilt they feel for things in the past.

Mainline churches have not sufficiently nurtured that kind of Christianity. They believe in it, they articulate it, it?s not where they put enough emphasis. They are not putting enough emphasis on getting people into a personal, I use the word mystical, transforming relationship with Christ.

I think that Christianity has two emphases. One is a social emphasis to impart the values of the kingdom of God in society?to relieve the sufferings of the poor, to stand up for the oppressed, to be a voice for those who have no voice. The other emphasis is to bring people into a personal, transforming relationship with Christ, where they feel the joy and the love of God in their lives. That they manifest what the fifth chapter of Galatians calls "the fruit of the Spirit." Fundamentalism has emphasized the latter, mainline churches have emphasized the former. We cannot neglect the one for the other.

Q - In your book, you put forward a sort of ideal creed for 21st-century evangelicals. What?s most crucial to understand about the additions you made to this creed?

A - The Apostle?s Creed I think is the ultimate measure for Christians. Some say it goes back as far as 1800 years. It has been the standard statement of faith that the Church has maintained, and I wanted to say, "An evangelical is someone who believes in the doctrines of the Apostle?s Creed." However, the thing that evangelicals would add to the Apostle?s Creed is their view of holy scripture. They contend, and I contend, that the Bible is an infallible message from God, inspired. The writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit and [the Bible] is a message that provides an infallible guide for faith and practice.

And not only that. It's necessary to know Jesus in an intimate and personal way. That's what it means to be an evangelical. I don't think it means evangelicals are necessarily in favor of capital punishment. I'm one evangelical that is opposed to capital punishment. I do not believe being an evangelical means women should be debarred from pastoral ministry. I believe women do have a right to be in ministry. It doesn't mean evangelicals are supportive of the Republican party in all respects, because here's one evangelical who says "I think the Republican party has been the party of the rich, and has forgotten many ethnic groups and many poor people."

I am an evangelical who holds to those three positions [Creed, Bible, personal relationship with Jesus] and is a strong environmentalist. I am an evangelical who raises very specific questions about war in general, but specifically the war in Iraq. The evangelical community has been far too supportive of militarism.

Q - You were criticized when you counseled Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Are you still in touch with Clinton?

A - Yes, and very much in the way I was before: trying to be a faithful follower of Jesus. I think it's the task of Christians to speak truth to power.

The president of the United States called upon me to help him and nurture him into some kind of relationship with God. He obviously had strayed away from what he knew was right, and he called me one day and said can you help me?

I don't know what you're supposed to say to that: "I'm sorry, but evangelicals only pray with Republicans?"

I was appalled that evangelical leaders wrote me nasty letters and said you should have no time for this man after what he's done to this country, to Monica Lewinsky, to his family. I can't understand that mentality. We're talking about being the follower of a Jesus who would never turn his back on any person seeking help.

If you're an evangelical, you should believe that every person, no matter how low or high, is capable of being converted, of repentance.

Q - If John Kerry or George W. Bush were to call you up and ask for your guidance on issues facing America today, what would you tell each of them in turn?

A - To Kerry, I think my major issue would be "Do you understand us? Do you understand evangelicals and why we're so upset about the pro-life issue? Do you understand why we believe all life is sacred?" I'd encourage him to do justice and to do righteousness.

To George Bush, I'd say "The God of scripture is a God who calls us to protect the environment. I don't think your administration has done that very well. The God of scripture calls us to be peacemakers. We follow a Jesus who said those who live by the sword will die by the sword, who called us to be agents of reconciliation."

I would point out to George Bush that the Christ that he follows says "blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy"-which doesn't go along with capital punishment.

I would say different things to each candidate, but I would respond instantaneously to the invitation to speak to each of them. All the way to the White House, I would be praying, "God, keep me from chickening out. Help me to not be so overawed by the high office of these people that I fail to recognize I answer to a higher authority."

A Legitimate Recount Effort in Ohio
Mood:  a-ok
Topic: Voting
A Legitimate Recount Effort in Ohio
By Steven Rosenfeld
AlterNet.org

Friday 12 November 2004

An effort led by Common Cause and the Alliance for Democracy is underway in Ohio to conduct a statewide recount.

Efforts to launch an official statewide recount of the Ohio presidential vote are underway. While it's unclear if a recount will result in a Kerry victory, it's likely to highlight many flaws in Ohio elections that may have tilted results toward Republicans and against Democrats.

Common Cause of Ohio and the Alliance for Democracy, a progressive coalition, Thursday announced they were launching a recount campaign for Ohio. Columbus, Ohio attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who represents both groups, said both the Green Party and Libertarian Party presidential candidates would seek a recount if the $110,000 filing fee could be raised.

"Common Cause and the Alliance for Democracy are not partisan. The purpose of the recount is to verify the honesty of the process," Arnebeck said. "That is in the interest of anyone who would be declared the winner."

A coalition of progressive groups will hold a public hearing on election abuses this Saturday in Columbus calling on the Kerry campaign to pay for the recount.

Meanwhile, they have created a Web page to collect donations at the Alliance for Democracy site. The Kerry campaign reportedly was sending lawyers to Ohio to look into election irregularities, but Arnebeck said only the public interest groups were now committed to a recount.

While there have been many accounts of problems associated with the Ohio vote, from reports of 90,000 spoiled ballots, to software glitches resulting in more votes tallied than the number of registered voters, to new voters not being notified where their polling places were, to too few voting machines in Democratic strongholds, the only legal process that could immediately address some of these concerns is a recount.

The recount would be just that: a recounting of all the votes cast. If the results change, meaning more votes are added to Kerry's total ? then the official result, what the secretary of state certifies, is changed.

"It's re-certified," Arnebeck said. "If Kerry emerges victorious, he's president." Of course, a certification in Kerry's favor for Ohio won't take away the fact that Bush won the popular vote by 3.5 million votes.

And he clock is ticking on the Ohio process. In coming days, the Ohio secretary of state is expected to announce that the provisional ballots have been counted. A losing candidate for president then has 5 days to request a recount, filing the paperwork and filing fee.

That cost is $10 per precinct, which comes to slightly more than $110,000. As of Friday morning, $35,000 had been raised. There is a possibility that not all Ohio counties will finish the provsional ballot count, which would prompt those seeking the recount to pursue other actions, Arnebeck said.

In Florida in 2000, before the Supreme Court interceded in the election outcome, there was no statewide recount conducted. A coalition of newspapers later analyzed the vote, in essence, doing their own recount.

They found Al Gore had won.

That result was spun by those defending George W. Bush, however, saying that the smaller number of counties where Gore wanted a recount would not have made Gore president.

There is a big difference between this effort and what Bev Harris and Black Box Voting are doing. That group, which is investigating computer voting fraud, is making Freedom of Information Act requests.

That does not have the force of law behind it to change election results, unless it is entered as evidence in litigation sparked by a recount. The recount sought by the Ohio groups can revise the official state count.

There are three new areas where votes can come from in Ohio: absentee ballots, provisional ballots, and computer errors. Arnebeck said he has evidence how in one rural county more computer votes were counted than there were registered voters.

Arnebeck said that the issue has been referred to the FBI.

Arnebeck also said that the provisional ballots are also thought to favor Kerry, adding that this week the Ohio Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell was issuing new orders to disqualify provisional ballots if the voter did not enter their dates of birth. That shows how political a supposedly mechanical process already has become.

On the other hand, there are aspects of Ohio's vote that a recount is not likely to resolve. Questions such as what happened to people who did not vote ? because they never received notifications after registering by mail, or because of long lines and too few voting machines in their precincts, may not get addressed, as a recount is a formal procedure where local election officials redo the count.

In Franklin County, where Columbus is located, for example, there was a clear pattern of a shortage of voting machines in Democratic inner city precincts, where new registrations skyrocketed, compared to the more middle-class white, GOP-dominated suburbs.

Deliberately putting too few machines would violate the national Voting Rights Act. But that's hard to prove - especially because the county's election supervisor has said all the local boards are bipartisan. On the other hand, Ohio activists point out that people with longtime GOP ties supervised the county's election.

Still, there are many things that a recount could yield - apart from the possibility of Kerry victory. There is a tremendous need for a plausible explanation of what actually happened on Election Day in Ohio. Kerry's Wednesday morning concession pre-empted that explanation.

"Many people are saying, why bother to do this? The answer is we have not gathered all the facts," Arnebeck said. "Until you recount the votes, and look at the possibility of a sophisticated computer fix, you cannot draw conclusions.

Whatever it costs to properly analyze this is nothing in terms of enabling the country to move forward. They just have to raise the money to officially file the recount request. The case is ready."

More Info on the Draft
Mood:  sad
Topic: Impending Draft
Draft Coming, Students Told
By Susan Elan
The New York Journal News

Friday 05 November 2004

Reinstatement of the draft is imminent, war correspondent and author Christopher Hedges told a crowd of more than 120 students and residents yesterday at Manhattanville College.

"We are losing the war in Iraq very badly, but the Bush administration will not walk away from the debacle without trying to reoccupy huge swaths of the territory they have lost," Hedges said.

While working for The New York Times, he covered fighting in Central America, the Balkans and the Middle East, including Iraq during the first Gulf War.

To regain territory lost in Iraq, it will take double or triple the current 140,000 troops, Hedges said during the last lecture in a series called "The Costs of War."

The reservists and National Guard members who make up half of the U.S. forces are stretched to the breaking point and need relief, he said, and the draft is the only way to assemble the numbers needed.

Reintroduction of the draft will be made in the name of the war on terrorism soon after an attack in the United States or abroad, he predicted.

"The war in Iraq will no longer be an abstraction," he said.

"It will become deeply personal. In the next few weeks look for shifts in administration policy leading in the direction of an escalation of the war."

Hedges encountered no detractors at Manhattanville, unlike his experience at Rockford (Ill.) College in May 2003, when he was booed off the stage while giving a commencement speech shortly after President Bush's battleship announcement that the U.S. mission in Iraq had been "accomplished."

On the contrary, many in the audience last night said they had braved rainy weather to hear Hedges indict the seductiveness of war and the dangers of mindless jingoism as an antidote to their depression over the results of the presidential election.

"It's been a hard week and there are much harder times ahead. That's why it is so important for us all to be together tonight," said Connie Hogarth, who has a peace and justice center on the Manhattanville campus named after her.

"After we finish grieving, we have to get back to working for peace and justice, and an end to this war and its killing."

Hedges' audience remained rapt as he wove poetry, mythology, history and Freudian psychology with anecdotes about colleagues lost on distant battlefields and his own brushes with death.

He criticized military heroic ideals that thrive during war and the way war distorts the human imagination.

In the fervor of war the individual sacrifices thought for a false sense of belonging to something larger, he said.

"At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat," Hedges said.

"We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn't a pretty sight."

Those who confuse his anti-war stance with an anti-soldier position are mistaken, Hedges said.

"War in the end is always about betrayal. Betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and idealists by cynics."

Planet Rahab - The Bible Speaks...
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Down With King Dubya
http://www.sherryshriner.com/planet-rahab.htm

Planet Rahab - Planet X - Lucifer's Seat. Was there another planet in our solar system that disappeared? What happened to it?


Planet Rahab, the mysterious planet that was destroyed thousands of years ago of which is considered by many scientists and theorists today to be the creation and cause of what is known as our asteroid belt. However the asteroid belt could simply be the pieces of destroyed asteroids themselves. Either way, they're going to have to go back to work to figure out what exactly caused the existence of our asteroid belt around the Earth because it wasn't Rahab and I'm going to prove it.
The Bible speaks of an existing planet called Rahab the home of Lucifer, one of the highest ranking cherubs in God's Kingdom. It is widely held to have been located as our fifth planet in the solar system. However Rahab according to what I discovered in the Bible Codes was our sixth planet not our fifth.

Before the creation of Adam, the civilizations of celestial angels lived and cohabitated on the terrestrial planets. Throughout scripture there is a consistent reference to the first dwelling places of some of the ancient sons (and daughters) of God. It's interesting that the Bible writers themselves never mention female angels. Perhaps "sons" was another one of those sweeping generalized terms where the male pronoun was also to include females. There's no doubt there were females created and they were menstrual which also means they could reproduce. These angels created habitations on the Earth, Mars, Rahab, and the Moon .

Ezekial 28:

3 Behold you are wiser than Daniel;
every one of the secret things
is not hidden to you...
15 You were perfect in your ways
from the day you were created,
until iniquity was found in you.
16 By the multitude of your trade
they filled your midst with violence, and you sinned.
So I cast you profaned from the height of God,
AND I DESTROYED YOU,
OH COVERING CHERUB,
FROM AMONG THE STONES OF FIRE...
18 By the host of your iniquities,
by the iniquity of your trade,
you have profaned your holy places;
thus I brought a fire from your midst;

---------------------------

Psalm 148

"You were the anointed cherub
that covers, and I had put you
in the holy height of God...
YOU WALKED UP AND DOWN
IN THE MIDST OF THE STONES OF FIRE...
You were perfect in your ways from the day
you were created, until iniquity was found in you"



My Bible Code research into Planet Rahab uncovered a few things about this past planet. Where else should we go for information but to God Himself and let Him lead us? The Bible is His Record Book. And uncoded correctly, can reveal His mysteries.

The Bible confirms underneath its hidden layers that Rahab was indeed Lucifer's home, his ancient seat of power. He had a mansion there. The planet was a bustling fortress. Probably much like earth is now, the people were busy, it was a nation unto themselves that had turned lukewarm against their creator. They sought to break away and liberate themselves away from their creator and have their own freedom. On this planet they were capable of reproducing. They had an economic system based on money. It was politics and economics, and it was a system Lucifer wanted to turn totalitarian or communistic with all those on the planet worshipping him as God. Lucifer wanted to rule it all, and he did until he got greedy and self-exalted. He usurped God's authority by exalting himself and wanting to be worshipped as God.

Now do you see why there is nothing new about the New World Order? God told us in His Word there is nothing new under the sun. Lucifer failed in his first attempt to run a global communistic empire that worshipped him as God. Now he's going to attempt it again, and he'll have 1260 days allotted time on earth to do it. That's three and a half years from the time he proclaims to the world that he is the long awaited promised Messiah and God. This is the great delusion. In the codes it refers to it as a stumbling block. Who could it be a stumbling block to? Professed believers in Jesus Christ. Why? Because they fall for it. They're wavering in their faith so much that they don't understand right away that this coming Messiah known as the Antichrist is an impersonator of the real Christ and a liar.

Under Lucifer's "I" boasting he fooled the inhabitants of Planet Rahab into believing they could be completely liberated from their creator God if they worshipped him as God instead. In order for liberation, there has to be something to be liberated from. The celestial beings of Planet Rahab were under the Lord God's regulations, and they decided they had had enough of that and wanted to be free from His constraints. So Lucifer tried to cheat the real God through sedition, he became a traitor, and for this the entire lukewarm planet was judged.

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High"

Yet thou shalt be brought to hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake the kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners? Isaiah 14:12-17.




Most people read this as a future reference point when Satan will shake the kingdoms of the world and turn it into a wilderness. Although he will do it in the future, most overlook that he already did it in the past as well. His rebellion against the Kingship of Yahweh destroyed the nations and civilizations of several planets including the earth at that time.

When Satan and his angels rebelled, God destroyed their literal dwelling places. According to scripture this destruction was swift and decisive with hailstones of fire (see the code). The sixth terrestrial planet which God calls "Rahab" (boaster, pride), was obliterated.

Job 26:11-13:

The pillars of heaven are stunned at His rebuke.
He quiets The sea with his power,
- and by his understanding
He shatters Rahab,
-by His spirit the heavens were beautiful;
His hand forbids the fugitive snake

---------------------------------------

Psalm 89:10 :

You have broken Rahab
in pieces, as one slain:
you have scattered your enemies
with your mighty arm.



Based on the information I obtained from the codes, God saw this rebellion and as a result He revoked their celestial status and annulled Himself from them. They were changed from celestial beings to terrestrial beings. Shocking the inhabitants, He then destroyed the planet with a flood of inflammable hailstones with a vengeance, turning it into a wasteland. The same way He destroyed Sodom and Gamorrah. The planet was also knocked off of it's axis by the pounding hailstones and sent orbiting out of our alignment of planets and into space on its own. Lucifer was allowed to escape to the earth with some of his forces. However many of them were confined to the planet seeking shelter in its hollow cavity and have been imprisoned in it ever since.

And this is the planet that is returning to our solar system. Planet X, or otherwise called Planet Nibiru, is the ancient Planet Rahab! The fallen angels within its cavity are reinforcement forces for Lucifer when he arrives to power on Earth as the Antichrist and become the global world ruler. His forces will help him run, control, and dominate earth.

I had done codes in the past on Planet X and Planet Nibiru. I just simply never made the connection to Rahab until the Lord Himself led me to it on January 17, 2004.

At the time Rahab was destroyed, other Angelic civilizations were destroyed as well that had been in conspiracy with Lucifer to overthrow God's reign. These included Mars and Earth, and perhaps others.

God brought a fire of hailstones upon Satan's midst, in the center of his greatest planetary kingdom. The planet Rahab itself knocked off it's axis and cast out of alignment in our solar system. Hailstones also impacted on the surface of mars rocking the planet causing its oceans to spill over and wash over its dry land. The Martian atmosphere was blasted into space.

On earth virtually the same catastrophes took place, hailstones of fire pounded the surface destroying the cities that had been created by the angels. Long before Adam and Eve even existed or were created.

Jeremiah 4:23-2:

I looked on the earth, and
beheld it formless (laid waste) and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains,
and, behold, they quaked.
And all the hills were shaken.
I beheld and lo, there was no man;
and all the cover of the skies had fled.
I looked, and, behold, the fruitful place
was a wilderness; and all its cities
were broken down before the face of Jehovah,
before his glowing anger. For so Jehovah has said.
The whole land shall be a desolation;
yet I will not make a full end.

Jeremiah looked into the ages before Adam and described the destruction of the earth. There were no men, (descendents of Adam), yet there had been a fruitful creation where cities had once been and which were destroyed by God's wrath. Who dwelt in these cities? Angelic civilizations. They were the angelic host called the B'nai Elohim, that existed in a perfect state on earth before the rebellion.
The same words of Genesis 1:2 "and the earth was formless and void", are written in Jeremiah 4:26. In Genesis 1:1 it says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." In the next sentence it reads, "and the earth was without form, and void" in other words, formless and void and it is in error in most English translations. It should read, "and the earth became formless and void." The Hebrew word translated "was formless" in English versions of the Bible is "toh-ho" a verb which means, "to lay waste". It had once been a vibrant planet, but now it laid waste. Until God re-created it again.

After Satan's kingdoms were destroyed, many of the rebellious angels were bound and held until the time of judgment, the Day of the Lord. The end of the age when God gathers rebel angels on earth to receive His wrath. Other factions of the rebel angels continued existing with the ability to travel in the atmosphere outward from earth, space, and amongst the planets "the stones of fire". These angels not only lost their homes, but they lost their angelic forms as well and were cursed to look like ugly beings and creatures. They lost their beauty.

Many people get the groups of fallen angels confused and group them all together. This is not so. The Book of Enoch, quoted by Jude the brother of Jesus, and considered an important work by the early Christian Church, details the fall of the Watchers and the creation of their offspring with humans.

Lucifer's rebellion involving 1/3 of the angels, happened before the re-creation of the earth. After the earth was re-created, a second group of angels, called The Watchers rebelled against God and left their first estate (heaven) to cohabitate with the women on earth.

These Watchers were judged and some were punished by being held in Tartarus or in chains under the earth. Others were allowed to inhabit the second heavens. Watchers were falling before the flood and after the flood (Gen. 6:4). Even to this day Watchers can fall from heaven and lose their place. All angels are created with free will and are not forced to serve God, but if they rebel against Him, they are cast out of heaven forever. The Watchers were not cursed with losing their beauty. Many have described them, also known as Nordics, as being very tall, blond hair and blue eyed and looking very human. They are referred to as the humanoid looking alien races.

One has to wonder why the Book of Enoch was left out of the Canonized books approved by Constantine and the early RCC. Were they purposely trying to cover up the existence of the Watchers? And if so, was it to keep the people blind of thier past..so they wouldn't recognize the lies of the future?

Crossing the Church-State Line
Mood:  blue
Topic: Church and State
Crossing the Church-State Line
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com

Thursday 11 November 2004

Thomas Jefferson warned of the dangers of becoming a "priest-ridden people," but a conservative clergy was essential to Bush's victory.

The election of 2004 marks the rise of a quasi-clerical party for the first time in the United States.

Ecclesiastical organization has become transformed into the sinew and muscle of the Republican Party, essential in George W. Bush's reelection.

His narrow margins in the key states of Florida, Iowa and Ohio, and elsewhere, were dependent upon the direct imposition of the churches.

None of this occurred suddenly or by happenstance.

Nor was this development simply a pleasant surprise for Bush.

For years, he has schooled himself in the machinations of the religious right, and Karl Rove has used the command center of the White House as more than its Office of Propaganda.

Bush's clerisy represents an unprecedented alliance of historically anti-Roman Catholic, nativist evangelical Protestants with the most reactionary elements of the Catholic hierarchy.

Preacher, priest and politician have combined on the grounds that John F. Kennedy disputed in his famous speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960.

Every principle articulated by Kennedy has been flouted and contradicted by Bush:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President - should he be Catholic - how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope or ... any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."

From the White House, Rove operated a weekly conference call with selected religious leaders.

A WEEKLY CONFERENCE CALL WITTH SELECTED RELIGIOUS LEADERS !!! THIS IS PALASTINE AND ISRAELI SHIT FOLKS! MJK

Evangelical churches handed over their membership directories to the Bush campaign for voter registration drives.

According to the Washington Post, "clergy members attended legal sessions explaining how they could talk about the election from the pulpit."

A group associated with the Rev. Pat Robertson advised 45,000 churches on how to work for Bush.

HOW TO WORK FOR BUSH ?!?!?! MY GOD IN HEAVEN !!!

One popular preacher alone sent letters to 136,000 pastors advising them on "non-negotiable" issues - gay marriage, stem cell research, abortion - to mobilize the faithful.

The faithful ?!?! You mean "The PROGRAMMED"... Cult shit! -MJK

Perhaps the most influential figure of all was the Rev. James Dobson, whose radio programs are broadcast daily on more than 3,000 stations and 80 TV stations, and whose organization has affiliates in 36 states, and this year created a political action committee to advance "Christian citizenship."

BUSH USING THE MEDIA AND THE CHURCHES.. But, THE MOST POPULAR CHURCHES THAT TELEVISE! Right? MY GOD! -MJK

On June 4, Bush traveled to see the pope.

In another meeting that day, with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, according to a Vatican official,

Bush "complained that the U.S. bishops were not being vocal enough in supporting [Bush] on social issues like gay marriage and abortion," and suggested to Sodano that the Vatican "push the bishops."

The Vatican was astonished at the brazen pressure and did not accede.

Nonetheless, more than 40 conservative bishops worked in league with the Bush campaign against John Kerry - part of a crusade against their own declining moral authority.

The American church is in crisis as Catholic opinion on abortion and stem cell research leans closer to that of the general public.

And the exposure of rampant pedophilia among priests has undermined traditional belief in the church's sanctity.

Electing a liberal Catholic as president would have been a severe blow.

So conservative bishops denounced Kerry, spoke of denying him Communion and even talked of excommunication.

Sunday after Sunday, from thousands of pulpits, epistles were read and sermons delivered telling parishioners it was sinful to vote for candidates who supported gay marriage and abortion.

The Catholic Kerry received 5 percent less of the Catholic vote than the Southern Baptist Al Gore did four years ago.

In the crucial state of Ohio, where an anti-gay-marriage initiative was on the ballot, Bush won two-thirds of the "faithful" Catholic (those who attend mass every week) vote and 55 percent of the Catholic total.

Combined with the support of 79 percent of white evangelicals, this gave him his critical margin nationally and in the swing states.

The religious right is not a majority and hardly a "silent majority," but it was indispensable to Bush's victory.

Across the country, it has become the most energetic, reliable and productive part of the Republican organization.

The ultimate value in its values-based politics is power, just as it was worldly power that sustained the medieval church, and the assertion of that power began within days after the election.

When moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who is seeking the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, said that he would oppose any nominee to the Supreme Court who would seek to outlaw abortion (a nomination that might come soon, as Chief Justice William Rehnquist is dying), Dobson denounced Specter, "He is a problem and he must be derailed."

Who will rid the president of this troublesome senator?

Almost instantly, Specter clarified his position, announcing that he meant no such thing and that he had supported many judges who were against abortion.

"History, I believe," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

But we're not all Jeffersonians now.

The Architects of Defeat
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Politics
The Architects of Defeat
By Arianna Huffington
The Los Angeles Times

Thursday 11 November 2004

For Kerry's team, it was the economy. Stupid.

Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars.

After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, he told the room - confidently, almost cockily - that the election was in the bag.

"If we can't win this damn election,"

the advisor to the Kerry campaign said,

"with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs - if we can't win this one, then we can't win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party."

Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what should be done.

But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.

At the breakfast, Carville, together with chief campaign strategist Bob Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg, seemed intent on one thing - salvaging their reputations.

They blamed the public for not responding to John Kerry's message on the economy, and they blamed the news media for distracting voters from this critical message with headlines from that pesky war in Iraq.

"News events were driving this," said Shrum.

"The economy was not driving the news coverage."

But shouldn't it have been obvious that Iraq and the war on terror were the real story of this campaign?

Only these Washington insiders, stuck in an anachronistic 1990s mind-set and re-fighting the '92 election, could think that the economy would be the driving factor in a post-9/11 world with Iraq in flames.

That the campaign's leadership failed to recognize that it was no longer "the economy, stupid," was the tragic flaw of the race.

In conversations with Kerry insiders over the last nine months, I've heard a recurring theme:

that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas (including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced that this election was going to be won on domestic issues, like jobs and healthcare, and not on national security.

As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me:

"I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you're going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality - they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone's strategy; he had none of his own."

Vallely, together with Kerry's brother, Cam, and David Thorne, the senator's closest friend and former brother-in-law, created the

"Truth and Trust Team."

This informal group within the campaign pushed at every turn to aggressively take on President Bush's greatest cl.

his leadership on the war on terror.

"When Carville and Greenberg tell reporters that the campaign was missing a defining narrative,"

Thorne told me this week, "they forget that they were the ones insisting we had to keep beating the domestic-issues drum.

So we never defended John's character and focused on his leadership with the same singularity of purpose that the Republicans put on George Bush's leadership.

A fallout of this was that the campaign had no memorable ads.

In a post-election survey, the only three ads remembered by voters were all Republican ads - and that was after we spent over $100 million on advertising."

Cam Kerry agrees.

"There is a very strong John Kerry narrative that is about leadership, character and trust. But it was never made central to the campaign," he said.

"Yet, at the end of the day, a presidential campaign - and this post-9/11 campaign in particular - is about these underlying attributes rather than about a laundry list of issues."

It was the "Truth and Trust Team" that fought to have Kerry give a major speech clarifying his position on Iraq, which he finally did, to great effect, at New York University on Sept. 20.

"That was the turning point," Thorne, who was responsible for the campaign's wildly successful online operation, told me.

"John broke through and found his voice again. But even after the speech the campaign kept returning to domestic issues, and in the end I was only able to get just over a million dollars for ads making our case."

Despite a lot of talk about "moral values," exit polls proved that Iraq and the war on terror together were the issues uppermost in people's minds.

And therefore as Thorne and Vallely, among others, kept arguing, if the president continued to hold a double-digit advantage on his leadership on the war on terror, he would win.

But those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them the economy was the way to go.

"We kept coming back from the road," said James Boyce, a Kerry family friend who traveled across the country with Cam Kerry, "and telling the Washington team that the questions we kept getting were more about safety and Iraq than healthcare.
But they just didn't want to hear it. Their minds were made up."

Boyce, along with Cam Kerry, were instrumental in bringing to the campaign four of the more outspoken 9/11 widows, including Kristin Breitweiser, who had provided critical leadership in stopping the Bush administration from undermining the 9/11 Commission.

"We told the campaign," Breitweiser told me, "that we would not come out and endorse Kerry unless he spoke out against the war in Iraq. It was quite a battle. In fact, I got into a fight with Mary Beth Cahill on the phone. I actually said to her: 'You're not getting it. This election is about national security.' I told her this in August. She didn't want to hear it."

The campaign's regular foreign policy conference calls were another arena where this battle was fought, with Kerry foreign policy advisor Richard Holbrooke taking the lead against the candidate coming out with a decisive position on Iraq that diverged too far from the president's.

Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart consistently argued against Holbrooke, and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden expressed his disagreement with this ruffle-no-feathers approach directly to Kerry.

But until the Sept. 20 speech in New York, it was Holbrooke who prevailed - in no small part because his position dovetailed with the strategic direction embraced by Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

Jamie Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman, had also argued that Kerry should stick close to the Bush position, and even told the Washington Post that Kerry, too, would probably have invaded Iraq.

Kerry was reportedly apoplectic but did not ask for Rubin's resignation, thereby letting the damage linger for two weeks before Rubin told Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times that he was not speaking for the candidate.

Just how misguided the campaign's leadership was can be seen in the battle that took place between Vernon Jordan, the campaign's debate negotiator, and Cahill and Shrum.

"They were so opposed," someone close to the negotiations told me, "to Jordan's accepting the first debate being all about foreign policy, in exchange for a third debate, that Jordan and Cahill had a knock down, drag out argument. It was so bad that Jordan had to send her flowers before they could make up."

It was a familiar strategic battle with Jordan siding with those who believed that unless Kerry could win on national security, he would not win period.

Behind the scenes, former President Clinton also kept up the drumbeat, telling Kerry in private conversations right to the end that he should focus on the economy rather than Iraq or the war on terror, and that he should come out in favor of all 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage - a move that would have been a political disaster for a candidate who had already been painted as an unprincipled flip-flopper.

Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq here and there until the end of the race (how could he not?), but the vast majority of what came out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address 10 days before the election, was on domestic issues.

Another good illustration of how the clash played out was the flu vaccine shortage, which ended up being framed not as a national security issue (how can you trust this man to keep you safe against biological warfare when he can't even handle getting you the flu vaccine?), but as a healthcare issue with the Bush campaign turning it into an attack on trial lawyers.

"This election was about security," Gary Hart told me.

But when he suggested that Kerry should talk about jobs and energy and other issues in the context of security, Hart said, he was "constantly confronted with focus group data, according to which the people wanted to hear a different message focused on the economy."

The last few days of the campaign, in which national security dominated the headlines - with the 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq, multiple deaths of U.S. soldiers, insurgents gaining ground and the reappearance of Osama bin Laden - show how Kerry could have pulled away from Bush if, early on, his campaign had built the frame into which all these events would have fit.

How the campaign handled the reappearance of Bin Laden the Friday before the election says it all.

"Stan Greenberg was adamant," a senior campaign strategist told me, "that Kerry should not even mention Osama. He insisted that because his polling showed Kerry had already won the election, he should not do anything that would endanger his position. We argued that since Osama dominated the news, it would be hard for us to get any other message through. So a compromise was reached, according to which Kerry issued a bland statesman-like statement about Osama (followed by stumping on the economy), and we dispatched Holbrooke to argue on TV that the reappearance of Bin Laden proved that the president had not made us safer."

As at almost every other turn, the campaign had chosen caution over boldness.

Why did these highly paid professionals make such amateurish mistakes?

In the end, it was the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters (who, Greenberg argued right up until the election, would break for the challenger) and an addiction to polls and focus groups, which they invariably interpreted through their Clinton-era filters.

It appears that you couldn't teach these old Beltway dogs new tricks. It's time for some fresh political puppies.



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Arianna Huffington's latest book is "Fanatics and Fools: the Game Plan for Winning Back America" (Miramax).