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Parts of the GOP plan to beat Kerry

The founder of a NYC-based PR firm asserted to me in a conversation yesterday that Kerry would crush Bush, and that the crush has begun with the cultural forces unleashed by Fahrenheit 9/11 and President Clinton's book tour.

I hope he's right. But, I'm quite skeptical, and think he misunderstands how urban and regional (i.e. isolated) the effects of the movie and book could be.

Here are some key GOP campaign initiatives Kerry's team will have to actively counter:

*An unprecedented door-to-door campaign to get out the vote. This includes everything from block parties (organized via the Internet) to organizing the logistical infrastructure to transport people to voting places. (Elizabeth Drew, "Bush: The Dream Campaign." The New York Review of Books. June 10, 2004. p. 24)

*Asking corporations of all types to encourage their white-collar workers and shareholders to vote. The assumption here is that at least 70% of them will vote Republican.

*Asking evangelical churches and Mormon temples to encourage their members to vote. The Left obviously lacks institutions like the nation's evangelical churches, which provide the Right thousands of captive audiences, assembled weekly, ready-made for obedience to their preacher's admonitions.

*Setting up a system by which U.S. businessmen abroad can register and get an absentee ballot by computer.

*Ditto a registration and ballot system for our troops, who are exposed to only one political talk-show and, perhaps, thus more inclined to vote for Bush. Rush Limbaugh is on Armed Forces Radio for an hour each weeknight. Limbaugh's in the only political or news talk-show on the station. (This is a horrible abuse of power by conservatives.)

Continuing decline of reason - part I

Today, presidential candidate John Kerry rightly said that the Bush administration places "politics over science," citing the administration's unreasonable and unscientific rejection of stem cell research. He might also have cited Bush's opinion that "the verdict's still out" on whether or not evolution is true. (True? Gee, I don't know. Is gravity true?)

In rebuttal to Kerry, Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said, "Only John Kerry would declare the country to be in scientific decline on a day when the country's first privately funded space trip is successfully completed."

Schmidt's monumental disingenuousness is odious. Note, Schmidt: "privately-funded!" What happened today is not primarily an advance of science, but of commercialism. Kerry is talking about government funding, and, by extension, governmental respect for scientific thought itself. A U.S. spaceship might fly all the way to Venus while the population of its nation of origin still is brainwashed by religion to reject natural history, evolutionary science, paleontology, genetics and more, with profound negative effects on medical science and our self-awareness as a species.

Kerry can be criticized only for his understatement. What Bush is really opposed to isn't just science, but the entire Enlightenment tradition of our nation's Founders, who valued reason above faith, who even when invoking a clockmaker God, had their eyes firmly focused on humanity and the individual, not the divine, and who developed our republic based on humanist, not religious, values.

But now the ill-informed beliefs of a growing number of Americans--a huge segment of our current president's base--threaten those values.

Birth heard from space - Arthur C. Clarke couldn't have written it better

In the light of the murder of Paul M. Johnson by religious fanatics in the brutally anti-democratic kingdom of Saudi Arabia--our supposed ally, or so Dubya Bush would have us believe--I welcome this story from the Associated Press, "Astronaut Hears Daughter Born From Orbit," about astronaut Mike Fincke.

Science, not prayer, made it possible for Fincke to be in the heavens, and yet to hear his child born....But into what sort of world? We should all strive to ensure that Tarali Paulina Fincke's world is rich with science and poor with religion.

Good comments on religion and 9/11 by Richard Dawkins, professor of the public understanding of science, University of Oxford:

I felt a savage anger, and an instant bonding with America. For all its faults, the USA is a major centre of world civilisation, in some ways (admittedly not many) the greatest there has ever been. It was under attack from a pre-medieval barbarism, incapable of developing advanced technology but happy to parasitise the technology of the very society it enviously wanted to destroy with it.

My first thought was: "Religion strikes again." And so it proved (when Mohammed Atta's notebook was published). It's possible for political fanaticism alone to drive people to suicide attacks, but it's hard. Religion makes it easy because, to the deluded perpetrators, it isn't suicide at all. It's a wonder that human bombs, such as those that terrorise Israel, aren't more common. Perhaps they soon will be in America. And here, if Blair goes on playing poodle to Bush.

I was moved by the heroism of the New York firemen; by the faces of the bereaved; the agonising slow fall of tiny human forms; the inspirational, hands-on leadership of Mayor Giuliani – and the embarrassing contrast with President Bush, who spent the day zig-zagging aimlessly around the country in his private plane, like a squawking chicken. In the days that followed, my solidarity with America took a battering as the Bush tendency muscled in, the nauseating 'God bless America' became the unofficial national anthem.

I thought that the defeat of the odious Taliban was handled surprisingly well. But George Bush's identification of all trouble with a single abstract noun – 'terror' – is characteristically silly. The main way I have changed is in my attitude to religion. I used to think religion was harmless nonsense, entitled to at least some respect. I'd now drop the 'harmless'. And the last vestige of respect.

Voodoo history

President Ronald Reagan's concept of supply-side economics was the most preposterous idea since alchemy. In fact, according to economist James K. Galbraith, the entire economic legacy of Reagan was mainly destructive, and especially so for the world's poor and our own working class.

Under Reagan, it was economic sunset in America, and economic midnight marked G. H. W. Bush's presidency. Clinton gave us a new dawn. But, suspiciously, the hagiographic echo that Reagan's economic policies were laudable is bouncing back and forth from cable news to network news, to talk radio, to conservative commentary on the internet, and back again. It's seemingly everywhere…for now.

But echoes fade, especially when they are empty; especially when, like voodoo spells, they are ultimately nothing more than irrational means of solace for those who already believe in them.

The Reagan legacy of voodoo economics now has a similarly irrational partner, voodoo history: a history that our economy was made better by his policies. But don't believe such voodoo history for a second. It's as true as the healing powers of chicken blood and shrunken heads.

Remembering Ronnie...

The Ronald Reagan legacy is impressive . . . .

Defense spending nearly doubled in Reagan's eight years to $300 billion....With budget deficits spiraling ever higher, Reagan signed a major tax increase in 1982, and others later.

Even so, the federal budget deficit hit $208 billion in 1983, which at 6 % of the U.S. economy stands as the worst ever by that measure. Reagan had railed against the $79 billion deficit produced by President Carter's last budget.

And the cumulative national debt nearly tripled, from $909 billion just before Reagan entered the White House to $2.6 trillion when he left in 1989.

By persuading Congress to approve sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing welfare benefits and other social services like the federal housing assistance program, Reagan was blamed for a huge surge in the nation's poor and homeless population.

Many won't forget his administration's proposal to classify ketchup as a vegetable as a way of further reducing spending on federally subsidized school lunches.

Joe Conason notes:

In his 1991 book, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years, journalist Haynes Johnson came up with an unflattering statistic: 'By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations.

David Kusnet's reminder:

By 1989, the distribution of wealth and income had become more unequal than at any time since the 1920s....

The Reaganites claim credit for the boom of the late '90s. But Bill Clinton’s successful economic policies reversed Reaganomics by increasing taxes on the wealthy and cutting taxes on the working poor. Contrary to supply-side theory, the result was an even stronger economy than during the late '80s, with the added benefits that the federal budget started showing a surplus and inequality declined.

Judith Miller connection

ot From Uggabugga, this graphic charts The New York Times' place in the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Rumsfeld-Chalabi misinformation machine.

The idea of "the little person"

In light if today's declaration by a federal judge that the partial-birth abortion ban is unconstitutional, William H. Calvin's review in Natural History (June 2004) of Carl Zimmer's, Soul Made Flesh, seems particularly relevant.

One might think, in the enlightened present, that holding nonconformist views about the comings and goings of the soul would not be criminalized--but that's what is happening. The fallacy of "the little person inside"...has long confused matters.... Centuries ago, a little person was imagined to lie within a sperm. (Now the little person is imagined inside the fertilized egg. This is not progress.)

"When life begins" is a phrase that already carries with it the idea that the soul pops out of a starting gate at the moment the sperm enters the egg. Next we see the dubious line of reasoning that concludes that a single cell has achieved legal personhood. It's only another small leap to claiming that interference with such a one-cell stage of a fertilized human egg is manslaughter or murder.