We have a problem in the United States.  Our government has spent the past eight years or so acting in a manner that an honest, independent observer would describe as "borderline-fascistic."  Definitely some hard-right, authoritarian leanings.  But to describe this characteristic of the Bush Administration thusly, you will be called a number of heinous things, as we dare not insult the right wingers by tying them to Fascism, or worse, racism.  

Italy's got a different problem:

[The] National Alliance, are coalition partners in Berlusconi's government. In case anyone missed that, when the Alliance's Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome in April, his supporters gave the fascist salute chanting "Duce"

Duce.  As in "Il Duce."  As in Mussolini.  And scariest of all his supporters were chanting that.

In 2000, the voters preferred Al Gore on the issues.  Just about every issue:  his stance on taxes.  His stance on social security.  His stance on the budget surplus.  However, when they went into the ballot booth, they decided that those issues were unimportant.  They wanted a regular guy as President, not somebody fancy with good ideas, just crackpots ones.  They wanted the man they'd rather have a beer with.  And George W. Bush was swept into office.

Four years later, John Kerry had the same advantages.  Americans wanted him to end the war.  Americans wanted him to help install a national health care system.  But dammit, if he showed up at their bar on Saturday afternoon, they'd just feel too awkward when he ordered a Pinot Grigio.  Gotta go with that regular guy, George W. Bush.

Now, obviously, one might protest that Bush wouldn't have the beer you were offering him, since he doesn't drink.  But that didn't stop anybody.

So, as the votes came in last night in Washington State, a very curious thing happened.  They stopped counting them and called the election for McCain.  Now, I'm not talking about your usual network call based on exit polls and tallied results; the GOP party chair (who had endorsed McCain) stopped counting and declared the Senator from Arizona to be the victory.

One problem - the margin was only about 250 and moreover, there were still 13% of the precincts to report results!  

Huckabee, naturally, was pissed:

“At this point of time, I want to make sure that every vote is counted, and I’m not accusing anyone of mischief at this time; I’m accusing someone of bad judgment,” he [campaign manager Ed Rollins] said.

Oh, Gregg Easterbrook.  Somehow returning to ESPN after being fired for calling the Weinstein greedy, corruption-peddling Jews, he writes this gem of a "sports column":

http://sports.espn.go.com/...

If you can get past his positively boring complaints about continuity and realism in Harry Potter and the Sopranos, you get to this nonsense:

It's a shame, really, that after a victory for the bloggers, Amanda has felt obligated to resign.  I don't blame her for a second - I just wish that it had all worked out.  Here's her home blog statement:

If I may offer a humble opinion, Amanda Marcotte is one of the finest bloggers in the whole Left sphere.  Brilliant, funny, spot-on liberal: a real asset on her side.  Apparently ,I'm not the only one who thinks so, because she's just joined the Edwards Campaign as their blogmaster - or blogatrix.

You can see her announcement here!

or also the inaugural post on the web here.

All right - nothing too special here, but I'm looking for two things:

1.) Help and tips for planning an election night party.

2.) A bar in New York City that'll show CNN and have wi-fi for me to relentlessly press the reload button every twenty seconds until 1 am so that I don't have to actually host the thing.

It boggles the mind, doesn't it.  That the American people, who aren't the best educated in the world, granted, but still a pretty bright bunch of folks, could somehow doubt the conclusions of every scientist in the world.  Citing no other authority, even.  Just saying "I don't believe these scientists."

Of course, we should give them some credit - this isn't a majority opinion (http://pollingreport.com/...) and at least, 59% of Americans think that it's time to do something about global warming.  But a depressing 29% find global warming to be an urgent issue.  In a nation where the exact same percentage believe in astrology (e.g. the relative positions of stars, trillions of miles away, are going to have an impact; while the emissions of trillions of pounds of CO2 aren't).  Ghosts, UFOs clock in slightly higher.  Angel-belief is off the charts, relatively speaking.  (http://www.pollingreport.com/... scroll down).

And then, of course, we have the minority belief in evolution and natural selection.  Irrelevant?  Read on!

LIFEBeat cancelled a heinously homophobic concert, and blamed it on "potentially violent" gay-rights activists.  And they're AIDS activists.

Major hat tip to Pam Spaulding http://pandagon.net/...

To those of you who haven't been following it, TerranceDC did an excellent round up here: http://www.dailykos.com/...

The story is, simply put, that LIFEbeat, a group that works to spread AIDS awareness through organizing concerts, sounds absolutely fan-freaking-tastic in their offical mission statement

LIFEbeat is dedicated to reaching America's youth with the message of HIV/AIDS prevention.  LIFEbeat mobilizes the talents and resources of the music industry to raise awareness and to provide support to the AIDS community.

But then they went and scheduled a concert featuring some of the most heinous homophobic artists I've ever heard of.  Prussian Blue would be proud,  Lyrics below.

Not all criticisms of Israel are anti-Semitic.

Many critics of Israel, even on Daily Kos, are anti-Semitic.

Many critics who are called anti-Semites, aren't.

So, now that I've backed us officially into a grey area, generally speaking, full of those terms liberals really love like 'nuance,' let me explain exactly the distinctions that I'm trying to make here.

I wanted it all to go away once I spotted the diary haranguing us all that the Bible was fiction and Jesus was a myth.  But hundreds of comments later, well, here we are, and the merits of that diary notwithstanding, there seems to be a sizeable impression that athiests are a repressed group on dailykos.  

I wouldn't identify myself as an athiest, exactly, but I'm certainly on that end of the agnostic scale.  Needless to say, I'm much more sympathetic to an athiestic worldview than a theistic one.  But that's neither here nor there.

I want people to talk about their experience, on this website, as a thiest/athiest and how it's perceived.  There are legitimate questions of tolerance to be asked.

I'm including below the e-mailed result of a conversation about a New York Times article in today's paper.  http://www.nytimes.com/...

I don't mean this to be construed as taking the issues in the article too lightly, and a lot of my jokes in my commentary sort of lend that impression - I intend it merely for mockery purposes.  Sexuality in the media is something with real negative consequences, but my point is that this article so badly blows its perspective that it neturalizes the value of the study.  It's a scare piece directed at parents, a real local-news level bit of buffonery.  A very "I'm on your side, don't worry, we all want things to look like a 50s sitcom" head-in-the-sand kind of perspective.  

Anyway, here's what I think about it:

From the online edition of the Nation:

...this site [nowthatsfuckedup.com] has taken the concept of user-created content to a grim new low: US troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan are invited to display graphic battlefield photos apparently taken with their personal digital cameras. And thousands of people are logging on to take a look.

I'll excerpt a little more from the article below the fold, but take a look for yourselves, something gruesome is developing at the fringes of the war effort.

I saw this article in the Times today, and I really can't quite believe what it seems to mean: that David Brooks, BoBo extraordinaire is commenting on the racial and class-based ramifications of the New Orleans disaster:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html

let me just put up the paragraph, since the first few are entirely irrelevant:

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong?  I'm shocked.  Not that it's anything anyone should have been able to ignore, but it's DAVID BROOKS saying it.

First off, I'm sorry if this topic has been done to death already and I just haven't noticed.  Now that I have a real job, I can't check Kos quite as compulsively as I've grown accustomed to.

That said, I really haven't notice a lot of buzz around the progress in the Gaza Strip, which I think is an extraordinarily important historical moment in the Middle East peace process.  I'd like to throw some impressions and some gradiose posturing out there and see what sticks.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll start this off by saying that I am Jewish, but am almost entirely secular.  I am not a Zionist, and have long argued that the Israeli settlers need to bug out of the occupied territories, however, I do accept the Israeli right to exist as a nation.

This is well inspired by  Bob's fantastic diary and the resulting discussion, but it's thoughts I've definitely been tossing about in my head for a while anyway.  Anyway, this is what I see happening, and if we can have a fresh page to start up after that 400-comment piece, I'm happy to offer it!

I'm going to apologize out in front that I have somewhat disappointingly little evidence.  Of cousre, it's nice not to have that evidence just lying around, but still, this is much more speculation and instinct rather than rationale.

The basic problem, I think, is that the alliance between the neo-con PNAC movement, the Rapture Right conservatives, and a faction of AIPAC-inspired Jews is untenable, in the long term under the guise of the Republican Party.  The Evangelicals are going to lose it.  And that's where the troubles will come from.

Reading over the abstience front-pager by Plutonium Page (excellently written, by the way), I thought that it might be worthwhile to try and write our own curriculum, or at least try to put together a few core outlines and principles.  There's a lot of good stuff in there, and I want to funnel that energy into a more specific place.

Of course, before this can be dKos Sex Ed, it has to be Mikey Sex Ed, so you'll have to humor me at least a little bit as I put down a few key points that I think should be included/wish had been included.  

And finally, the other aspect of this diary is to try and figure out some of the more ridiculous parts of sex education in this country, as we learned them back in our high school days (or in our current high school days).  I'm not trying to make particular political hay in this part, I've read about Texas and everything else.  I just want to see how it comes across, where teachers get too embarassed, you know, the phenotype of our sex-fucked leadership.

So...

Well, thanks to this month's issue of Weird...er...Wired, I finally discovered what I'm sure many of you have been enjoying for quite some time now: Podcasting.

To briefly update the rest of you, podcasting is a way for you to make your own radio show, and then through the magic of the internet, get it constantly updated on everyone's iPod who's a fan of yours.  Illegal?  Guess not!  But who knows, really.

Generally, I think that podcasting is the equivalent to radio that the blogs are to the newspapers - an open-source, uncontrollable force that could potentially cause some real changes in the medium - just maybe a few days behind still.