Jesus didn't turn people away
Neither does the United Church of Christ: "No matter who you are or where you are in life's journey, you're welcome here." There, that wasn't so hard, was it? I finally saw the ad tonight -- Josh Marshall has been writing about the controversy it's sparked all week.

It's really a beautiful ad, a tremendously good thing, especially now somehow. I almost wanted to join them myself. I've gotten a little too used to thinking very poorly indeed of American Christianity lately. May God bless them, they have certainly restored a little of my faith.

And may the rest of us question and heap scorn on the shriveled executives of Viacom* and NBC for refusing to air this decent statement of acceptance for such transparent, pathetic, cowardly reasons as these:

Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations," reads an explanation from CBS, "and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks."

A dead center response by Reverend Robert Chase, the UCC director of communication ministry:

We find it disturbing that the networks in question seem to have no problem exploiting gay persons through mindless comedies or titillating dramas, but when it comes to a church's loving welcome of committed gay couples, that's where they draw the line.

Yep, can't have that. The banner phrase of the United Church of Christ campaign is interesting in its own right: "God is still speaking," punctuated with a comma, not a period -- i.e., "God has yet more light and truth to break forth from the Word," in the earnest church version, or the more down-to-earth "Never place a period where God has placed a comma," by comedienne Gracie Allen. A welcome antidote to preening, hateful "moral values" elsewhere.


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* Viacom owns the CBS and UPN networks. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 AM -- |    

 
Gerrymandered moral values
In what I think is a good insight, Andrew Northrup (The Poor Man) connects creationism, moral values, The Passion of the Christ, and Iraq with the common denominator of arguments from authority. Pointing out that creationism doesn't extend as far as actually suffering for it by, say, using medicines for bacteria that have evolved resistance to them, Northrup suggests there's something deeper going on:

This is about fear - the fear that the theory of evolution points out a flaw in a world view which puts them in a privileged position in the universe. In this construction, having "moral values" is code for publicly upholding black-and-white rules which are gerrymandered so as to always prove that you are right and everyone else is wrong, and uphold these rules in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I'm reminded of the antebellum debate on God's view of slavery as revealed by the Bible. Not just antebellum, for that matter. Northrup continues:

This is how it is possible to treat a bad Mel Gibson movie about how an innocent Middle Eastern man was tortured to death 2,000 years ago by an occupying army as an important cultural moment and moral lesson, and then consider our occupying armies torturing some unknown number of Middle Eastern men to death no big deal, and then reward the folks who ordered this torture with another term in office using as your justification "moral values". There may not be much point in making rational appeals here. Rationality may be the problem.

"Gerrymandered rules" is a great, great concept -- as big as all Texas. In other news, Lynne Cheney's book of lesbian love in the Wild West really is a hoot.

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UPDATE, immediately: ...make that really was a hoot -- the livejournal of the Cheney book was suspended since I drafted this post. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:35:00 PM -- |    

 
Nephew wins 2 Zulu awards
It's true: album of the year ("USA DSB") and best male singer. The Danish band bio explains how they chose the name: it was "short and nice and with associations to a little irritating boy!" Yeah! It's been a good year for Nephew, writes gaffa.dk's Michael Jensen:

2004 har for opkomlingene fra Nephew været et veritabelt festår. Deres pladesalg er gået strygende, deres koncerter har alle som en været udsolgte, og i weekenden vandt bandet en Nordic Music Award i kategorien ”Bedste Nye Danske Band”.

At least I think that's what he writes. Way to go, Nephew!
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:30:00 PM -- |    

 
China declares December 3 National Lionel Richie Day
We have what they want -- the Miss World 2004 official website explains:

The Chinese hosts of the 2004 event are so thrilled at his attendance that 3rd December, the day Lionel Richie arrives in China, has been declared National Lionel Richie Day by the Chinese Government.

(Via dekaf) In possibly related news, U.S. officials are hopeful that China is taking seriously the issue of revaluing its currency by dropping the yuan's peg to the U.S. dollar. This in turn could allow China to rent or buy outright even more American lite pop production sources -- a "win-win-win" for America, China, and the global economy. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:00:00 AM -- |    

 
Making a list, checking it twice
Just in time for Christmas, ChooseTheBlue! provides helpful color-coded breakdowns of company (and/or their employees') campaign donation patterns -- blue gave more to Democrats, red to Republicans. According to the FAQ, "Corporate totals are based on donations from PACs, employees, subsidiaries and affiliates for the 2003-2004 election cycle."

Not surprisingly, perhaps, most business sectors are a sea of red. One exception was computers and software, including Intel, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and even IBM, which surprised me for some reason. Very few companies gave 100% to one party or another. Hard Rock Cafe gave 100% to Democrats (another surprise to me), Hooters gave 96% to Republicans (how about that). Wal-Mart heavily favored Republicans (81%, about $1.2M), Costco gave more to Democrats (98%, about $200K).

More importantly, Costco is known to be a better place for people to work as well -- higher pay and better benefits than Wal-Mart, according to the Boston Globe -- so I hope you'll consider driving a few extra miles to one instead of Wal-Mart for your Christmas shopping regardless of your politics.

For more information on political campaign donations, check out PoliticalMoneyLine, they also cover 527s.

(Via Democratic Veteran) posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:45:00 PM -- |    

 
Paying for staying the course
Brian Gifford forced Monday Washington Post readers to think more clearly about the U.S. casualty rate in Iraq in an op-ed titled the "The Costs of Staying the Course." To summarize, Gifford noted that there are many more wounded soldiers per dead soldier (nearly 8 to 1) in this war than in previous wars, that the total dead and wounded casualties add up to a significant percentage of available U.S. military strength, so that the rate of dead or wounded soldiers per soldier per day is actually around 80% of Viet Nam levels.* Gifford summed up:

The focus on how "light" casualties have been so far rather than on what those casualties signify serves to rationalize the continued conduct of the war and prevents us as a nation from confronting the realities of conditions in Iraq. Even more troubling, daily casualties have almost tripled since before the first attack on Fallujah in April. Conditions are getting worse, not improving. To be sure, American forces are winning the body count. That the insurgency is nonetheless growing more effective in the face of heavier losses makes it difficult to imagine an exit strategy that any reasonable person would recognize as a "victory."

The post has drawn two interesting responses already so far. Kieran Healy wrote:

There is a tension in warblogger rhetoric between the wish to emphasize the great sacrifices that soldiers are making in Iraq and the desire to deride those who worry about the casualties. The former leads them to emphasize the hellish nature of battling guerilla forces in urban settings, but the latter demands they argue that fatality rates are trivial compared to Vietnam or other much larger wars. Brian treats the fact that the U.S. military is the best-equipped, best-trained and best-supported ground fighting force in the world as more than just rhetoric. As he argues, this should force us to see the casualty numbers in a new light.

Matthew Yglesias suggested that Bush may have carte blanche to either spend more blood and money in Iraq, or pull out soon after the January election no matter what the probable effects on Iraqi democracy or stability would be. I think Yglesias is right, and that this is what Bush's mandate amounts to, for what it's worth: the right to choose when to choose between bad outcomes in Iraq.

It's not just American (and coalition) soldiers dying in Iraq, of course. An October Lancet article** puts the best estimate of excess Iraqi deaths since the war began at 98,000, mostly by violence --with a 95% confidence interval, to be sure, extending from 8,000 to 194,000. While the width of that interval has sparked guffaws from some, it doesn't include zero -- so unlike one may have wished, the awful situation in Iraq prior to the invasion was less lethal than the situation since then. We may continue to hope that may change, but as far as I can tell, we may not confidently claim it has yet done so. For convincing (and readable) defenses of the Roberts et al study, see Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber and particularly Tim Lambert.

It's true that the estimate may include a great number of combatants killed in action, even if "[m]ost individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children." Whether that's a point for or against the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq is up to readers to decide.

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* Gifford also compares Iraq to World War II, which he calculates had a corresponding rate 4.8 times higher, and evaluates as 'not tremendously higher.' I asked what he meant by that; barring an answer, I guess he's talking about orders of magnitude-- i.e., it wasn't 100 or 1000 times higher.
** Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey. 2004. Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham. Lancet 2004; 364: 1857–64. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:10:00 PM -- |    

 
W stands for wimp
From the BBC:

The president will not address parliament in the capital, Ottawa, apparently because of the risk of being heckled.

[wiggly fingers] Oooooo... scary Canadians! [/wiggly fingers]

(Basically the whole post via Electrolite, W-slogan by Avedon in the comments there) posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:10:00 AM -- |    

 
Nobody's perfect, reloaded
Once again, officials at the German intelligence agency BND ("Bundesnachrichtendienst") seem to be having trouble getting their stories straight. This time, it's Kosovo, not Iraqi WMD -- and this time BND missteps may have directly cost lives.

At issue is whether the agency gave proper credence and weight to a Kosovar phone tap. The intercept revealed that a Kosovar Islamist, organized crime figure, and one-time* BND informant (SPIEGEL) named Semadin Xhesairi was urging other UCK veterans to make things "hot" and create a "explosive mood" (Bombenstimmung) in the weeks before March 2004. On the 17th and 18th of that month, German and other peacekeepers in Kosovo were caught badly off guard by an anti-Serbian pogrom that killed 19 people, burned many churches, drove thousands from their homes -- a huge setback for Kosovo and the peacekeepers stationed there. Jochen Bittner of the German newsweekly Die Zeit reported last week that BND chief August Hanning claimed to him that

...the BND and Bundeswehr (German army -- ed.) had "jointly intercepted" the message. It had then been evaluated in the so-called GENIC (German National Intelligence Cell) Center in Prizren. ... After some back and forth a BND operative apparently rated the message not relevant.

Despite not having seen the intercept himself, Hanning stuck with his analyst's possibly mistaken evaluation:

"We knew that Xhesairi was [involved in organized crime] and an Islamist. But he was certainly not a ringleader of the riots."

Judging by an 11/18 SPIEGEL article, that's a little hard to believe: the man Xhesari called complained he was having difficulties organizing enough buses to transport militant Kosovars to Prizren. Moreover, the day before the Die Zeit article was published, Hanning had led a Bundestag (German congress) committee to believe that the BND had no advance knowledge of the anti-Serb pogroms; as Bittner mentions, the committee cleared the BND in its report (Berliner Morgenpost). Thus, the ZEIT report was embarrassing. Bittner reports in his blog that the BND press office claimed that

Hanning [never] gave ZEIT the information that was cited in the article. The [Munich daily] Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports that BND circles considered the story a "giant mess" (Riesensauerei).

The strong implication of that last German word was that Bittner had purposely misquoted Hanning. That's out of the question -- Bittner is a respected journalist and spoke with Hanning three times the day before publishing the article. Maybe Hanning thought comments were off the record that really weren't, or maybe he was playing with the meaning of the word "knowledge" in his testimony to the Bundestag: reasoning that the BND didn't know for absolutely sure, he left it at "didn't know" -- and reaped an irritated Schroeder-Fischer administration (Sueddeutsche headline) and a lot of bad press for it.

Hanning and the BND have got away with changing another major story lately: their pre-war estimates of Iraqi WMD (see "Nobody's perfect"). That's either because too much time had passed, because no one in the German government wanted to share any blame with the U.S., or both. They may not be so lucky this time.


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* A report in Die Welt says Xhesairi may still have been an informant at the time of the wiretap. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:45:00 PM -- |    

 
RTFL (please, may we?)
The Istook Amendment scandal prompts a radical idea, courtesy of Representative Brian Baird (D-WA-3):

House rules for the 109th Congress should insist that members have a minimum of three days to read legislation before voting and, further, that any waiver of this requirement require a two-thirds vote of the full House.

Giddy with idealism, he continues:

Ideally, major pieces of legislation should be available for much more time so members have the opportunity not only to study the language personally but also to discuss the law with those who would be directly impacted.

(Via Yglesias) Where does he think he is, France or something? Actually, it turns out that the "three days" part of Baird's suggestion is already a "rule," but is "routinely overridden by the Republican majority." No! Who'da thunk it. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:02:00 PM -- |    

 
The revolution will be webcammed
The whole world is watching, and you knew what had to happen next: Kiev Independence Square webcam. (webcast by www.russland.ru; hat-tip to the German politik-digital.de blog "Metablocker")

This may or may not be brought to you by the amazing organization behind much of the protest over there, an outfit called "Pora" ("It's Time"), according to the New York Times article "Youth Movement Underlies The Opposition":

Within minutes they pitched tents, posted unarmed sentries and produced mounds of food and winter clothing. Within hours they set up field kitchens and medical aid stations, circulated broadsheets outlining details for civil disobedience and urging the police not to shoot, and passed out a seemingly endless supply of posters, banners, ribbons, flags, stickers and badges that turned the ever expanding crowd into a telegenic bright orange.

The planning behind the youth occupation could not be missed. "We heard that Yanukovich would try to organize this fraud, and we were prepared for this kind of situation," said Mariana Savytska, 19, a Pora spokeswoman. "We decided we also had to do something, to raise the people's will."

I don't know as much as others do about this, or how much I'm supposed to know before forming an opinion. And I'm aware that even if Yanukovich actually lost in the polls, he still has a sizeable minority behind him, likely expatriate Russians with some legitimate concerns. But I'm pulling for Pora, Yuvtschenko, and democracy in the Ukraine. Gary Farber comments:

We do live in amazing days, the early days of a better civilization, no matter how many setbacks ahead there are (and there are), and how much death, tragedy, and failure will litter the way (it will), but this I believe: freedom continues to slowly -- slowly -- break out around the world, our understanding of our universe grows, and better days are on the way.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:40:00 PM -- |