Republicans like to talk about moral values a lot, but when it comes to actual moral behavior, Republican politicians become suddenly open-minded.

There are now serious allegations being investigated by federal agents that Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham was bribed not only with money, but with prostitutes. The federal investigation is looking into allegations that prostitutes were provided not just to Representative Cunningham, but to other members of Congress as well.

Oh, who, oh who, will they be found to be, changing votes in Congress in return for a bit of sex?

Former Democratic Party Congressman Tim Roemer hits on a winner of a rallying cry: Had Enough? Vote Democratic!

“Had Enough? Vote Democratic!” is a slogan that spotlights the many mistakes in Iraq, the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina and the mangling of fiscal responsibility with “bridges to nowhere.” Indeed, you can see and hear Democratic candidates rallying their voters at Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners with a passionate and rhythmic chorus:

“The administration said Iraqis would greet us with roses as liberators, yet our soldiers are attacked with homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Had Enough? Vote Democratic.

“The administration said it was prepared for a hurricane in New Orleans, yet our government’s feeble response prompted Bangladesh to offer us $1 million in aid. Had Enough? Vote Democratic!

“The administration said it would bring competency to our federal budget, yet our nation faces catastrophic deficits. Had Enough? Vote Democratic!”

And if you want to fire up the base, you can string together references to Jack Abramoff, Abu Ghraib and the Dubai ports deal. “Had Enough?” works well on classic campaign materials like buttons and bumper stickers while its simplicity makes it a cinch to “go viral” on the Internet.

Well, I’m not a Democrat, but I sure as socks believe that most Democratic candidates can help show us the way out of our national quagmire. So yeah, I’m good with that. Here you go, Mr. Roemer:

Right wing Republicans are fond of comparing the slaughter of Christians by lions in the Roman Colliseum to the refusal of secular Americans to allow the Religious Right to mix Church and State. Christians have always been persecuted, they say, and the First Amendment’s outlawing of things like forcing public school children to take part in Christian prayers is just the latest example.

These people need to get some perspective. Protections against persecution are not persecution. What’s persecution, then?

What’s going on in Darfur, a region of the Sudan, is persecution. There, government-supported Muslim militias from the north are engaged in a campaign of genocide against Christians and groups who follow traditional local beliefs. This persecution does not involve an attempt to establish a non-denominational pledge of allegiance, or an effort to promote the teaching of well-established scientific principles regardless of whether or not they agree with religious dogma. No, the persecution of Christians and others in Darfur involves rape, murder, and the destruction of entire communities.

So, who’s standing up for the Christians in Darfur? It isn’t the Republicans, that’s for sure. All the Republicans are doing is talk, talk, talk about how someone oughta do something, somewhere, somehow, later.

It’s the Democrats who are standing up to protect the Christians in Darfur from real persecution. 5 Democratic members of the House of Representatives, Tom Lantos, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jim McGovern, Jim Moran, and John Olver were arrested today as they blocked the embassy of the Sudan in Washinton, D.C.

Tom Lantos, who led the protest, knows about persecution. He is the only survivor of the Nazi holocaust ever to serve in Congress. Lantos knows that what’s going on in Darfur is real persecution, and he knows that it’s time for people of conscience to take a stand.

Upon his arrest, Representative McGovern rightly said, “Words are no longer enough. It is time for action. This is the first genocide of the 21 st century. The world has said, ‘Never again.’ Those words must mean something.”

Not a single Republican member of Congress participated in the action. Where were all the Republicans? They were off giving speeches, and attending fundraisers for their re-election campaigns. They were off talking about morality, and religious values. But, when real Christians were in real need, the Republicans were nowhere to be found.

Republicans talk about religious liberty, but that’s all they do. When real religious liberty needs to be defended, it’s progressive Democrats who do the job.

Boy, is that War on Terror working or what? I mean, boy howdy, read the latest:

The number of terrorist attacks worldwide increased nearly fourfold in 2005 to 11,111…

See, these increased terrorist attacks show how desperate the terrorists are getting, and how important it is that we keep on fighting the War on Terror. When terrorist attacks drop off, that means the War on Terror is working too, since they indicate the success of War on Terror tactics.

Long live the War on Terror. Long, long, long, long, long.

After commentator John wrote that “conservative americans are the only people keeping this country from going straight to hell,” Ralph responded with a few questions:

Are they keeping the Iraq War from going straight to hell?

Are they keeping the federal deficit from going straight to hell?

Are they keeping America’s human rights record from going straight to hell?

Are they keeping the environment from going straight to hell?

Did they keep New Orleans from going straight to hell?

Explain to me how conservatives are stopping this from going straight to hell.

Well, yeah!, what Ralph said. Explain it all carefully to us: exactly how are the conservatives in control doing such a great job?

“Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.” — Rush Limbaugh, October 5, 1995

That’s Right!

It’s a War on Drugs!

Miscreants!

Deviants!

(scary black people!)

No More Coddling!

Zero Tolerance!

Lock ‘em up!

Throw away the key!

Nothing’s too harsh for… for… hey, what’s that on the news, Marge?

Rush Limbaugh was arrested today on prescription drug charges, with his lawyer saying he has reached a deal with prosecutors that will eventually see the charges dismissed if he continues treatment for drug addiction.

Well, now, he’s a good man.

Fine upstanding citizen!

Responsible member of society!

Nobody’s perfect.

(nice white guy!)

Just a medical problem.

It’s under treatment.

Give the guy a break.

Another chance.

We should let him continue to make a contribution.

Community service, or something!

Keeping him behind bars wouldn’t do anybody any good, now would it?

Wrap it up.

Throw away the charges.

This morning, as I was surfing about the Internet, I ran across the following stunning quote on Simply Left Behind:

“Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things – every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.”

Holy cow! That just about said it all for me. But there was no attribution after this fine quotation. Who was the statesman with the presence of mind, the self-possession, the courage to stand up and publicly lay claim to the word “liberal” as a badge of honor associated with the best in 20th Century American policy? I had to look it up.

And so I did. This statement was made by a fictional character on The West Wing, a TV show.

Sigh. It’s too bad that the scriptwriter is not one of our elected officials in actuality. And it is a downright shame that none of our actual elected officials managed to speak these words first.

18 protesters who were part of the Grannies Peace Brigade were acquitted of charges that they engaged in an illegal political protest by blocking the entrance to a military recruiting center. The grandmothers came to the recruiting center in order to enlist, so that younger Americans would not have to die in their place, in a wrongful war.

This purported attempt to enlist was, of course, sarcastic. The grandmothers knew that they would never be accepted as military recruits, but wanted to use the disturbance they would cause to make a statement about the wrongness of the Iraq War.

The judge found all 18 grandmothers not guilty because, simply, the prosecution’s claim that the Grannies Peace Brigade had blocked the entrance was proved to be unfounded. The protesters left a space for people to enter and leave the office.

A larger issue was at stake, however: The issue of whether ironic use of government operations can be allowed. The military recruitment centers are, in theory, open to all who wish to use them. The protesters made use of that fact, saying that they wanted to join the military.

The sarcasm of their statement did not disqualify them from consideration, and that clearly enraged the government. But, whose fault is it that the protesters could make their sarcastic statement? It’s the fault of the government.

When the government creates a network of offices to recruit young people to kill and be killed, and welcomes people in to offer their lives, that is an invitation to controversy. It merits ridicule. It merits challenge.

In our democratic system of government accountable to the people, it is the right of us all to talk back to our government - in person. We have the right to go into government offices and speak, earnestly or sarcastically, when we believe that the office is not representing us well. So long as we do not block the ability of other people to do the same, the government needs to accept our presence in these public offices.

The grandmothers didn’t block access. Therefore, they didn’t commit a crime, no matter how much they irritated the government.

If the government really doesn’t want us citizens to engage in acts of sarcastic protest against its policies, then it needs to do right by us. If the government wants no more demonstrations, then it needs to demonstrate that no demonstrations are necessary. No more lies. No more attacks on our liberty. No more unnecessary wars.

It’s simple, but the Republican-led government just can’t seem to grasp this solution. So, until the government changes, expect many more earnestly sarcastic, and perfectly legal, protests.

The government has lied to us about the massive extent of efforts to hide public information about government activities, and censored huge amounts of information without reasonable justification. An audit of the classification initiative found that one third of the documents being classified were made secret for “inappropriate” or “questionable” reasons.

Ah, but it’s a warm and sunny afternoon, and besides, you don’t really want to know what your own government is up to, do you?

No, no. Too tired from staying up late last night to watch the Sopranos.

Go back to your nap. Sleep. Sleep.

So George W. Bush chose as his mouthpiece a FOX News commentator named Tony Snow who says:

Here’s the unmentionable secret. Racism isn’t that big a deal anymore. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It’s rapidly and thankfully becoming an ugly memory. (click here for a video feed of Snow’s remarks)

It’s no surprise for the Bush administration to have hired someone who says offensive things; the Bush administration has offended millions of people for years now. What’s much more important than Tony Snow being offensive is his being so confidently wrong. Racial discrimination is still a regularly observable fact of life in American society. I’m not just saying that as a Bomjonesque expression of intuition, either: careful audit studies of observable behavior continue to document unmistakable and consequential instances of discrimintation on the basis of race.

An audit study is a particular sort of research in which two individuals (called testers) are paired up and typically given equivalent identities: the same level of income, the same level of wealth, the same degree of education at similarly prestigious institutions, the same credit scores, the same scripts to use when interacting with others, and so on. In racial audit testing, one of the testers is white, and the other is black (or Hispanic, or Asian, or so on). Both members of the pair are then sent to do one of the many things that matter in our society and have consequences for our daily lives: buy a car, apply for a job, look for a house, try to get a mortgage. Since the only feature that varies between paired testers is skin color, any systematic discrepancy in treatment will be due to skin color.

The classic recent case of an audit study comes from the Urban Institute, which studied metropolitan housing markets in 1989 and 2000. In the year 2000, sending out thousands of paired testers, researchers found that in 16% of cases in which testers were trying to rent an apartment, only the white tester was permitted to see the available apartment. In 23% of cases, the white tester was shown more apartments. When testers attempted to see homes on the market to buy rather than rent, in 44% of cases the white tester was shown more houses than the black tester, and in 20% of cases the white tester was told s/he was qualified for a mortgage but the black tester was not. Remember, these are pairs in which actual ability to pay is set to be equal.

To give another example, in an audit study published in 2003 by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, testers of equal status and means, with the same scripts for interaction but of different races were sent to interact with real estate brokers in a search to buy a home in the state of Vermont. In 31% of cases, the non-white tester was asked if they had been pre-approved for a mortgage but the white tester was not asked, while in just 7% of cases the white tester was asked if they had been pre-approved for a mortgage but the black tester was not asked. In 34% of cases, the white tester was shown more listings than the black tester. In two illustrative cases, the authors write:

* The black tester was not given any listings at all, even though she requested them several times. She was only given an outdated general agency catalog. The white tester was given 9 listings sheets of houses currently on the market.

* The black tester was told there were no houses available in a certain town, but the white tester was told of 2 houses in that same town and was told they were located “where the doctors live… and next door to a famous author.”

In an ingenious variation on the audit study, in 2001 and 2002 researchers submitted job applications with attached resumes from fictitious people with common black and common white names. Despite equivalency in ability, education and experience across resumes, those resumes with common white names were 50% more likely to result in a call for an interview than resumes with common black names.

These are just a few examples that only touch the surface on the large number of audit (and other empirical) studies that demonstrate continued discrimination against people solely on the basis of their racial identity. I highly recommend the National Academies Press’ 2004 book Measuring Racial Discrimination for a fuller review of recent research (an free electronic version of the book is available here).

The point is that when Tony Snow talked about “the unmentionable secret. Racism isn’t that big a deal anymore. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it,” he was just plain wrong. Either Snow made this clearly incorrect yet highly public statement on national TV in an authoritative voice because he hadn’t bothered to look up actual research on the subject, or Snow was fully aware of continued racial discrimination in America and made his statement anyway.

The former possibility indicates that the nation should be prepared for a White House spokesman who says things without knowing whether they are true or not. The latter possibility indicates that the nation should be prepared for a White House spokesman who says things he knows to be untrue. Neither possibility inspires confidence.

They’re everywhere, these “How to Juice Up Your Search Engine Ratings” articles. These pieces are written by “SEO experts” (SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization) who promise to have the Six Surefire Strategems, or Top Ten Tricks, or Four Most Overlooked Mistakes that will, for real this time, catapult your website to the top of the list of results whenever some schmuck enters a set of key words in the Google searchbar.

You already know these SEO articles are everywhere; you’ve probably run across them, too. Nine times out of ten, when I see a link to “Six New Secret Tricks in Bed to Drive Your Google Rank Wild!” I just keep on trucking and ignore the link. But every once in a while I figure I’ve just got to give the article a read. “What the heck,” I think, “Maybe they’ve actually come up with something new and interesting.” I know, it sounds pathetic, kind of like your friend who talks about giving that slimy man in her life just one more chance. What can I say? I’m a naive optimist.

So yes, my naive hopes were dashed yet again this morning as I read the Washington Post. Against my better judgment, I started to read through Leslie Walker’s How to Juice Up a Site’s Rank. Other than a complaint by people in the SEO consulting business that, gosh, getting a high Google ranking for clients is really, really tricky, complicated work meriting a big fat commission, there wasn’t anything novel in Walker’s piece. Just the same old jargony fluff:

* “many consultants advise businesses to encode their sites with specialty phrases and keywords related to the business that people might type in the Google box.”

* “getting editorial links for his clients, partly by creating feature articles that Web publishers will link to: ‘We call it link-baiting. The idea is to attract a lot of natural links.’”

* “a two-step approach to boosting their Google rank. First, they should test search terms related to their business by purchasing Google ads for those words, which allows precise tracking of ad click-throughs and purchases. After learning which search words yield the best results on ads, businesses can hire a consultant to embed those terms into their sites and buy links relating to them.”

* “brokering paid links between sites with high Google ranks to those with low Google ranks.”

* “develops original editorial content to help get links Google might consider to be of higher quality. Often the articles are given away or sold to sites in a program he calls ‘hosted marketing pages,’ basically online advertorials with embedded links.”

and blah dee blah dee blah dee fuckidee doo dah up the cream bun and jam.

Those sure are some fancy words spouted by mighty fancy people in Walker’s article, but most of those current search engine optimization pitches really boil down to one of three strategies:

STRATEGY ONE
* tricksy, expensive consultants
* writing web pages with tricksy special words that simulate what people are interested in reading
* in order to trick other people into linking to those tricksy web pages
* so that still other people will be pulled into visiting those tricksy web pages when they type in words in a search engine

STRATEGY TWO
* tricksy, expensive consultants
* buying off people with your money (minus a big commission) to put links on their tricksy web pages to your tricksy web pages
* so that other people will be pulled into visiting your tricksy web pages, not the other tricksy web pages, when they search

STRATEGY THREE
* tricksy, expensive consultants
* coming up with impressive-sounding, techy, tricksy words like “encode” and “embed” that sound scienterrific and expertilicious
* so you’ll pay them to explain something really simple to you, like the use of meta tags, that you can learn about for free elsewhere

These strategies are like pyramid schemes of tricksy piled upon tricksy piled upon tricksy, with consultants relying either upon your web page’s readers to be stupid enough not to see through the your page’s tricksy content, or upon you to be stupid enough not to see through the consultants’ tricksy promises, or upon a combination of the two. But people who’ve been sucked into Amway, or Tupperware parties, or Beanie Babies, or interest-only mortages learn a sad truth the hard way: only a very few people get rich quick by getting tricksy, and those few people get rich by duping other people into thinking that you can get rich quick by being tricksy and paying a monthly fee of just $99.95. Here’s a hint: if someone else is telling you how to get rich by being tricksy for a fee, you’re on the wrong end of the trick.

Psssst. I tell you what. I’ll share with you my strategy for Search Engine Optimization. It’s not super, it’s not secret, it’s not tricksy and it won’t cost you a consultant’s fee:

STRATEGY FOUR:
* Write about the thing you do, or the thing you sell, or the thing you know.
* Use the actual, non-tricksy words that describe what you actually do, sell or know.
* Get one link from some permanent web page so that Google will index your website.
* Then go back to your web page and write something else about what you actually do, sell, or know.
* Then go back to your web page and write something else about what you actually do, sell, or know.
* Then go back to your web page and write something else about what you actually do, sell, or know.
* Repeat every day for five or ten years.

No, it’s not tricksy. Yes, it involves thought and work. But that’s how success has always been attained — except for the one in a million who gets rich by tricking the other 999,999.

Thursday can be cruel, putting us near the end of our work, but requiring us to remain sharp and skillful. I feel a creeping Thursday silence wrapping itself around my tongue this morning, and so today I will listen, not speak.

Speak, you, for J.Clifford has no tongue,
and I’m telling you, buster, at the top of my lungs…

… oh, that hurt.

Speak. Open. Thread.

Genesis 1: 11-12:

And God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

All Things Wise and Wonderful, The Lord God Made Them All. Including the cannabis plants. Ohhhh, the marijuana of it all, praise be. And God saw that it was good. So why get all uptight about one of God’s good plants?

A tip of the pen to Damen, who writes in the Diaries today:

What makes you think your god even cares about abortion? Nowhere in the bible is abortion ever mentioned; in fact your bible even says that if a man accidently kills a woman who is pregnant and the woman dies he shall be put to death. However, if only the unborn child should die then no punishment should come to the man. You’ll find that in Exodus 21:22-25.

Sounds to me like your god doesn’t care about abortion one way or the other.

Exodus 21:22-23 [New Int’l Version] reads:

If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [or she has a miscarriage] but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life.

The note in brackets is from the editors of the New Int’l Version of the Bible as an assistance to readers from translation, not my addition. This is a bit more equivocal than I think Damen implies: the death of a fetus merits a fine, kind of like an olde-time misdemeanor, and is certainly not “a serious injury.” But the death of a fetus is not comparable here to the death of an adult human, for which the punishment is death. God does NOT give fetuses and adults the same status.

Also of interest is Leviticus 27:1-8, in whch God says to Moses:

The LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If anyone makes a special vow to dedicate persons to the LORD by giving equivalent values, set the value of a male between the ages of twenty and sixty at fifty shekels of silver, according to the sanctuary shekel; and if it is a female, set her value at thirty shekels. If it is a person between the ages of five and twenty, set the value of a male at twenty shekels and of a female at ten shekels. If it is a person between one month and five years, set the value of a male at five shekels of silver and that of a female at three shekels of silver. If it is a person sixty years old or more, set the value of a male at fifteen shekels and of a female at ten shekels. If anyone making the vow is too poor to pay the specified amount, he is to present the person to the priest, who will set the value for him according to what the man making the vow can afford.

Well gosh and crackers, it looks like the LORD doesn’t assign any value to a fetus as a person. And for another example of God’s moral code, there’s always Hosea 13:16…

The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.

Let’s put aside that God has got some control issues here he may want to consider. Someone give the Guy a beer or something and tell Him to cool his heels. But hey, God’s the Abortionist in Chief!