politics

Via the Slog: the cutest thing ever, truly, is two four-year-olds debating the pros and cons of a certain two Democrats. It’s like that old Daily Show segment in which inane things said by TV pundits would be reenacted by children, but this one is definitely sui generis.

• Turkey reforms a controversial law prohibiting insulting “Turkishness”, but the reforms may not go far enough.
• E911 mistakenly sends help to Toronto rather than Calgary. Someone dies.
• In Israel, an Orthodox backlash against ultra-Orthodox domination of civil and religious institutions.
• Israel provides medical care to sick and injured Palestinians from Gaza. A bit of a bright spot in the middle of swirling chaos.
• A substitute teacher claims that accusations of wizardry cost him his job.
• The New York Times discovers (in the Fashion and Style section, naturally) that transgendered spouses face legal challenges in the United States. Feministe has some interesting and important reactions.
• Gas Tax Spam:
  

  If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a “GAS TAX HOLIDAY”. You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

• Privacy
  • Agents at the U.S. border can search your laptop without cause, on the legal grounds that they already have an exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows them to search any paper documents you have with you. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s JFK Airport will start using a new technology to electronically strip-search passengers. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • An atheist soldier sues the U.S. Army over personal threats because of his choice of religion. Privacy—and freedom of religion—advocates are concerned.
• Politics
  • A college student utterly pwns John Ashcroft during a campus appearance. If you haven’t seen this one yet, go read it; it’s amazing.
  • How does the Democratic primary end? There are three possibilities, and none of them are good for the future of the party.
  • On the other hand, if Clinton somehow manages to win, it’s payback time in Clintonland.
• Culture
  • Sun Myung Moon, worldwide cult leader and lesser-known owner of the right-wing Washington Times, was crowned as the Second Coming—in a U.S. Senate office building.
  • Richard Dawkins’s open letter to an unsuspecting victim of Ben Stein’s awful creationist propaganda film Intelligent Design-informed exposé of Charles Darwin, Expelled.
  • In Alabama, an experiment in gay hand-holding in public by the newsmagazine 20/20 generates an emergency call to 911 by a concerned citizen under the impression that laws were being broken.
  • Textbooks cost too much. What can be done about it, realistically?

Today in Toronto, Stéphane Dion extolled the gains the Liberals made in yesterday’s byeletions, despite the fact that such gains were rather thin. The Liberals took two seats in Toronto handily, both with former leadership candidates running. They squeaked by to take a third seat in Vancouver by 151 votes, and lost a fourth in Saskatchewan to the Conservatives. Yet Dion still sees this as a smashing victory:

“Yesterday has been a very good day for Liberals,” Mr. Dion announced at a Toronto news conference.

Okay, sure, that’s where the spin is going, I see that. But it gets crazier:

Mr. Dion seemed particularly pleased about the win in Vancouver Quadra, B.C., where former provincial environment minister and onetime tree planter Joyce Murray took the vote, despite heavy losses to the Green Party.

Conceding that “the main point in Quadra has been the Green vote,” he dismissed suggestions the increase in Green support was a concern for the Liberals, who have sought to distinguish their environmental policies as more far-sighted than the Conservatives’.

Just have another look at those numbers from yesterday’s elections returns. The Liberals scored 36% of the vote, down from 49% when they last took the riding in 2006. Meanwhile the NDP and Greens took 13–14% of the vote each. The whole platform of the Greens has been that neither the Liberals’ nor the Conservatives’ positions on climate change and the environment were far-sighted or aggressive enough enough. Joyce Murray’s laughable assertion that ‘The public has spoken and it’s about the environment’, as we discussed on Monday, is flatly contradicted by the polling numbers. When 13% of the voters choose the Green Party over yours, you can bet your boots it’s about the environment. Just not in the way you think.

The Liberals saw their share of the vote in Vancouver Quadra fall to 36% from 49% in the 2006 election, despite devoting weeks in the House of Commons to questions on the Cadman affair, which the party hoped would resonate in the riding.

Oh, so that explains why the Liberal leadership have been wasting time during each and every Question Period to asking the same questions and getting the same non-answers from Harper and Moore and other Conservatives about the Cadman affair. I’d wondered about that: why were they letting the Bloc Québécois and the NDP ask real question about real matters, such as NAFTA-gate or, y’know, the environment. These then end up looking like pet political issues because the official ‘opposition’—if the Liberals truly deserve that moniker—won’t take them up. Instead, they devote their time to making the Conservatives repeat the same half-truths about ‘financial considerations’ because they think this will resound in Vancouver Quadra.

Well, the Cadman affair didn’t resound in Vancouver on Monday. The environment did.

A mock political advertisement from this week’s edition of the Rick Mercer Report on CBC. (Again, the transcription is mine, as is the addition of hyperlinks.):

[The scene: a father reading a newspaper, talking to his son of about ten years.]
Billy: Dad, why is Stephen Harper suing Stéphane Dion?
Dad: Well, Billy, the Prime Minister had no choice but to sue Stéphane Dion. Mr. Dion said some pretty nasty things about him.
Billy: But he’s the Leader of the Opposition. Isn’t it his job to do that?
Dad: To a point. But if you damage someone’s reputation, well, then that’s libel.
Billy: But what about Dion’s reputation? Harper ran all those ads saying he’s not a leader. He looked like a total tool.
Dad: Yes, yes he did. But that’s not libel.
Billy: Why not?
Dad: Well, if it were, Mr. Dion would sue Mr. Harper.
Billy: Oh.
Dad: You see, Billy, suing people makes Stephen Harper feel good inside. Like when you score a goal in hockey.
Billy: Is that why he’s also suing Ralph Goodale, and Michael Igna…
Dad: Ignatieff. I believe it’s Russian. Always sue everyone, Billy, remember that.
Billy: Thanks, Dad.
Dad: Take no prisoners, Billy. [The two of them high-five.]
[Shot of Parliament at night, with inset of Harper.]
Voice over: Stephen Harper is bringing change to Ottawa. Strengthening democracy. Through lawsuits.
[Back to scene of home.]
Billy: [whining] Dad, Stephen Harper’s suing me now!
Dad: Well, it’s your own fault, Billy. You asked too many darn questions. Should have kept your mouth shut.
Billy: [Grunts, falls backward onto couch.]
[Conservative Party logo.]
Voice over: The Conservative Party of Canada. Consider yourself warned.

You can watch the original video here (season 5, episode 18, second item: ‘Mercer: Consider yourself warned’).

The final numbers in Vancouver Quadra from Elections Canada are in, with all 237 polls reporting:

Turnout was abysmal: 28,165 of 83,121—a mere 33.9%—of registered electors voted. Still, this is a higher turnout than any of the three other elections held today, none of which even hit 28%.

Joyce Murray takes the seat for the Liberals, but by a margin of only 151 votes. This is a stunning result because the seat was considered so safe for the Liberals, even with many voters expected to vote for the NDP and the Greens, thus causing a spoiler effect. Furthermore, the counting showed a clear and consistent lead for Joyce Murray right up until the end. As this CBC article makes clear, the election was called before the results got really close, and the celebration was a hair’s breadth from being premature.

Murray said Monday night’s victory in Vancouver, and Liberal wins in byelections in Toronto, will make the Liberal Party more effective in holding Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper accountable in the next weeks and months.

“The public has spoken and it’s about the environment,” she said, promising to be a tireless advocate for the reduction of greenhouse gases and to push for social housing for those in need.

Yeah, not quite—if the Liberals had owned the environment issue, 28% of voters wouldn’t have voted for the NDP or the Greens. As I pointed out in my previous post, this should send a stunning message to Stéphane Dion and the Liberal leadership. The fact that over 28% of voters who might have voted for the Liberals did not do so stands for a stunning repudiation of the Liberal Party. There are a zillion issues on which he and his party appear not to have connected with voters, especially here in liberal (small l) Vancouver, B.C. The environment. Government transparency. Western alienation. The opposition’s failure to be effective against the ruling Conservatives in Parliament. These combine to give enormous appeal to parties like the NDP, and especially the Green Party, which finished only 0.2% behind the NDP in Toronto Centre.

Here’s another good quote from Joyce Murray:

“Tonight we are sending a very clear message to Stephen Harper: The Liberals are strong.”

The Liberals’ failure to own any of these issues—especially the environment, which Murray cited as the reason she won so, er, resoundingly and convincingly—is spoken to by the huge percentages of the vote being split by the NDP and the Green Party. If the Liberals are smart, they’ll take these issues far more seriously in the future, especially before they plunge the country into another federal election. Losing a seat in Saskatchewan to the Conservatives is a blow—not a huge one, but a noticeable one nonetheless. Coming within 151 votes of losing in Vancouver Quadra, a heretofore reliable Liberal riding in the wealthy heart of the Vancouver west side, is a victory, but only in a narrow technical sense. Today, the Liberals did not demonstrate that they ‘are strong’, in Joyce Murray’s words. This victory is one that must make the party leadership sit up, take notice, and take a good hard look inside themselves.

Four seats, all previously held by Liberals, were being contested in today’s Federal by-elections. The news media are reporting that the Liberal Party has won three out of four: two in Toronto and one in Vancouver. All three of these seats were considered fairly safe Liberal territory. The fourth riding of Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, elected the Conservative candidate Rob Clarke. There was a significant Nader effect in the Saskatchewan and Vancouver races: exact numbers are not yet available, but the latest data from Elections Canada seems to indicate that the results could have come out differently if the NDP and Green totals could have been added to the Liberal total. (One of these days, I’ll shut up about the single transferable vote system. But not today.)

Basically, these election results allow all sides to claim (read: spin) victory. The Liberals can claim that three out of four is a good hold, they held on to traditionally Liberal territory, this election sends a clear message to Harper’s government that people are fed up with its lack of transparency and distance from the common people, and is a good recovery from the Liberals’ failure during the by-elections in Québec last year. The Conservatives can claim that the Saskatchewan pickup is a vindication of their policies and their government, the Liberals should have run the table because the candidate there was hand-picked by Stéphane Dion, and if the people were really so fed up with the Conservatives, the Liberals should have picked up the seat. The NDP and Greens can claim, especially with the very high numbers they received in Vancouver Quadra and Toronto Centre, that both major parties are flawed and incompetent. For my part, I think Stéphane Dion really needs to take a long, hard look at himself and his leadership of the party.

More on this later. Analysis and actual numbers when Elections Canada finishes counting the votes, and I (and the rest of the country) have had a chance to sleep on it all.

There are several by-elections happening all over Canada today, including one in Vancouver Quadra. The riding is considered to be very safe Liberal territory, but party leader Stéphane Dion and deputy leader Michael Ignatieff (remember, the ones that the PM is suing) came out here to forestall fears that low turnout could harm elections results. The NDP candidate Rebecca Coad is a UBC student in philosophy; I met her some time ago, and she seemed pretty on the ball. The Green candidate, Dan Grice, is a UBC graduate in classical archaeology, which I think is fantastic. The Georgia Straight endorsed him, reasoning that they could not endorse the NDP candidate because of systemic problems with the NDP, the Conservative candidate didn’t even bother to show up to debates and meetings, and the riding is safe Liberal territory anyway, so people could be safe and vote their conscience to send a message to the Liberals about what issues they’d like to see on the party agenda. I think this is not a bad strategy, provided that it doesn’t skew the elections results, as Dion and the party leadership are obviously afraid of. Of course, if elections were held in accordance with an alternative system such as Single Transferable Vote, as I have argued, people could vote for the Green or NDP candidate to vote their conscience and send a message, and then mark the Liberal candidate as their second choice, thereby voting both ideologically and practically.

Anyway, I’ll have some updates later in the day about the results of the by-elections. Look for the Liberals to make a few pickups, especially in urban areas like Vancouver and Toronto, due to dissatisfaction with the current government. Meanwhile, a few interesting links:

• How do you prove you’re gay when applying for refugee status?
• Religious groups are trying to shut down a Russian television channel because they show programming that is ‘anti-religious, violent as well as promoting homosexuality’, such as South Park.
• The hilarious malapropisms of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, such as ‘I deny the allegations and the allegators.’

Your must-watch for today: Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Hillary Clinton and the Geraldine Ferraro debacle. Seriously, take the ten minutes. It’s worth it for both the news/commentary value but also the journalistic candor that has been so lacking from the media lately.

From today’s Mercer Report on CBC (season 5 episode 17), Rick’s Rant perfectly sums up many of my feelings about the recent scandal involving the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party. (The transcription is mine, as is the addition of hyperlinks.)

Well, what a great week in Ottawa, hey, if by ‘great’ I mean ‘filled with scandal’. There was a new one every day, most of them involving the Prime Minister. Jack Layton was on Lou Dobbs, for god’s sakes; you don’t see that every day. But if I had to pick my favourite scandal it would have to be the Cadman affair. Did the Conservative Party offer Chuck Cadman, a Member of Parliament who was dying, a million-dollar life insurance policy in exchange for his vote? Because that’s what his widow says. But you don’t have to take her word for it. Stephen Harper is on a tape saying yes, ‘financial considerations’ were offered to a dying man. Well, if you buy the adage that where there’s smoke there’s fire, there’s so much smoke coming out of this sucker you can see it on Google Maps.

And so what’s the Prime Minister say now? Forget my voice on the tape, the only thing we offered Chuck Cadman was a chance to join the Conservative Party. Stephen, no offence, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life. Can you imagine, if you were on your deathbed, a couple of Tories came over to your house to try to buy you off and they offered you a membership in the Conservative Party? Because apparently a lot of people on their deathbed think, ‘Hmm, I wish I’d spent more time with the Tories.’

And so what’s Harper’s reaction once the opposition started asking questions? He’s suing. He’s suing the leader of the opposition. Never before in the history of Canadian democracy has a prime minister sued the leader of the opposition, but that’s what Harper’s doing. Suddenly, he’s like that guy on TV from upstate New York who’ll sue anyone anytime for anything. This coffee’s too hot? He will sue. Ask him a question outside of Question Period? He will sue. A lawsuit, by the way, that’s going to cost the taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. Our money being spent to ensure the Prime Minister won’t answer any questions that should be answered. Yes, it’s been a crazy week. And it could also be a tipping point, because Stephen Harper has always had one ace in the hole: his reputation as a straight shooter. Well, you can wave that goodbye, because when it comes to preserving reputations, Conrad Black had a better week.

In an op-ed in today’s LA Times, Aaron Miller takes a stab at explaining why large segments of the American Jewish population seem to have it in for Barack Obama—or anybody else who can even be remotely connected with criticism of Israel:

Don’t get me wrong. Jews—and yes, I am one of them—worry for a living. Their history compels them to and to be always vigilant. Yet in America, where they have achieved a level of security, acceptance and power unparalleled in their history, their existential worries paradoxically seem to have grown even greater. When Jimmy Carter writes a book—a bad book, incidentally—comparing Zionism to apartheid, many American Jews go crazy. When two university professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write another bad book—about what they call “the Israel lobby”—many Jews react as if the sky is falling.

Essentially, what’s going on is a severe overreaction to any perceived threats against Israel. Israel is equated with the Jewish people both there and in the Diaspora. Never mind that the ultra-Orthodox elements in Israel, which have de facto control over the country’s civil life, hate—to the point of considering Not Jewish—liberal Jews, or even Orthodox Jews who don’t wear the right hat. (In case you missed it, Gershom Gorenberg had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine demonstrating the extent of this ultra-Orthodox control and craziness when it comes to ‘proving’ your Jewishness for the purpose of marriage in or immigration to Israel.) Back to Miller:

This “us versus them” mentality still runs deep, and it is particularly harmful when it comes to the Arab-Israeli issue. That conflict is not some kind of morality play in which the forces of evil do battle against the forces of light. It is a conflict in which both sides have legitimate needs and requirements and do both good and bad things in pursuit of them.

This point, unfortunately, is correct in its essence. However, as we’ve learned time and time again, nuance simply doesn’t sell. And if your message is at all nuanced—not 100% rah-rah Israel, all Arabs are terrorists, etc.—then you are, by definition, an enemy not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. How pathetic is the discourse, how sad is the conversation? There is neither discourse nor conversation, because the attitude is ‘us versus them’—nuance equals betrayal.

When I was a first-year undergraduate, one of my friends, also a first-year who had Ideas And Opinions, tried to reform the student body elections system to conduct the voting according to the Single Transferable Vote system. I believe it succeeded, and it was still being used at the institution in question, largely because inertia is such a powerful force and nobody really wanted to deal with this guy on a personal level. There are two major problems with STV: one, it’s horribly complicated, compared with your standard first-past-the-post system, and two, it’s sort of hard to tell what happens to your vote without intimidating mathematics and figures. This is largely why the BC-STV system, proposed by the B.C. Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, failed when put up to a referendum in 2005. This editorial in today’s Vancouver Sun advocates for the adoption of the BC-STV system, as well as support for funding an educational campaign to counter the general ignorance that alternative systems of voting even exist in the first place.

So anyway, on Monday, there was an election in Alberta, and nobody noticed. The Conservative Party won their eleventh straight majority, picking up 73 of 83 seats in the provincial legislature. However, there was only a 43% turnout of registered voters, and of those votes only 52% went to the Tories. However, because of the way the votes were distributed and because of the low turnout, this translated into an 88% yield on seats. This was made possible because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, in which whichever candidate gets a plurality of all votes cast wins the election. The Sun editorial theorizes that had an STV system been in place instead, the results would have been something like 44 Conservatives, 22 Liberals, 7 from the NDP, 6 from the right-wing Wildrose Alliance Party, and 4 Greens. A far cry from 73 out of 83 seats going to the Tories, as it has been for the last several decades. Sure, they would have still had a majority, but it would not have been of the unreasonable 88% completely dominant majority type that we’re going to see again in Alberta.

When you have multiple significant parties several of which share similar platforms, such as, say, the Liberals and the NDP, or the Conservatives and the Wildrose Alliance, or (in the States) the Democrats and the Greens, you might want a way to be able to vote your conscience as well as vote pragmatically. STV allows you to do that by letting you vote your number-one preference for, say, the NDP, and your number-two preference for the Liberals. Or in whatever order you prefer. The standard first-past-the-post system pigeonholes you into exactly one of a few categories of opinion, and in doing so, penalizes small parties or small candidates. The effects of this can be far-reaching: for example, if you don’t have any safe way to vote for Ralph Nader, your vote for him is an unsafe one, because it might have gone to your second-choice candidate Al Gore, but without that vote to count towards his total, George Bush will win your state’s votes in the Electoral College. With STV, this scenario can be avoided because if you marked Ralph Nader as your first choice but Ralph Nader did not accumulate the necessary number of votes to pass a round of electoral counting, your second choice vote will go to Al Gore and tally up in his column.

At any rate, B.C. should adopt the BC-STV system in 2009 when it comes up for another vote, and this sort of lopsided elections mathematics can be avoided. All it takes is a little effort to understand, and a willingness to commit to the rights of all people to choose the parties and the people that will represent them.

Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, is beginning a libel action against the Liberal leadership, including Stéphane Dion, the party leader, as well as several other high-ranking party officials. He wants ‘defamatory’ articles to be removed from the Liberals’ web site, and that Dion read an apology, drafted by the Conservatives, before the entire House of Commons in both French and English, thus ensuring that embarrassment will stick to the Liberals in both French and English Canada. What, you may rightly ask, the hell is this all about?

From 1997 to 2005, the riding of Surrey North, in Metro Vancouver, was represented in the House of Commons by the independent MP Chuck Cadman. Independent MPs are somewhat uncommon in Canada, given the dominance that the three (in Québec four) major parties have over the system, but they can wield considerable power given that several major parties means frequent minority governments. Cadman was a former Conservative Party member, who lost the party primary, ran as an independent anyway, and won (think Joe Lieberman). In 2005, Cadman voted with the Liberals and New Democratic Party in favour of a budget proposal; the vote was eventually tied which meant the Speaker of the House of Commons had to cast the deciding vote. He voted with the Liberal bloc, which allowed the government to survive confidence. At the time, Cadman was terminally ill with cancer, and he died later in 2005.

Cadman stated that he voted with the Liberals because he didn’t want to put his constituents through more election turmoil only a year after a tumultuous election in 2004 that handed the Liberals minority control of Parliament. However, his wife Donna stated (before the vote), and his daughter Jodi has since reiterated that the Conservative Party offered Cadman a life insurance policy to the tune of a million dollars if he would vote against the Liberal budget and thus bring down the government. What is more, an audio tape has surfaced in which Stephen Harper, who was at the time the Leader of the Opposition, and is now PM, appears to give the plan his approval, in an interview with a CTV reporter in the driveway of Chuck Cadman’s house.

This appears to be attempted bribery, and as such a criminal offence, under Canadian law. But now Harper is moving to sue the Liberals for libel over their allegations that he personally was involved in this scandal. If you go to the Liberal Party website today—surely this will be gone in a few days’ time—you can see the ‘libellous accusations’ for yourself. The big headline: ‘Harper Knew of Conservative Bribery’. The problem for the Tories, of course, is that audio tape doesn’t lie, so they’re trying to turn the argument around and reframe the discussion: the Liberals are trying to slander my good name and the good name of the Conservative Party, oh poor me, you can’t possibly believe the Liberals because they’re lying cheats only trying to parlay this into their political advantage, and by the way Stéphane Dion should apologise both in English and French so that in Québec they hear a French-from-France accent (the equivalent to North American English speakers is a British accent) reading obsequious submission copy to the Conservatives. What’s weird, though, is that most of what’s on the web site consists of quotes from Question Period in the House of Commons, which are protected by parliamentary privilege and therefore not prosecutable as libel. The CBC is supposing that Harper wants to sue over the headlines, which are not so protected. Yay for legal hair-splitting.

I have a feeling that this could be more dangerous to the Conservatives than any of the other current issues, such as the military mission in Afghanistan and the federal budget and the environment. The issue, as Nik Nanos rightly points out, is that the Conservatives like to portray themselves as more trustworthy than the Liberals, but even the allegations of high-level bribery, even if nothing comes of them, could do great harm to the Tories’ image of trust, and harm the Conservatives when they have opportunities to pick up votes in minor byelections like in Vancouver Quadra, or in today’s snoozer provincial election in Alberta (which the Tories will win anyway, no doubt, but they seem to be suffering in turnout rates), or also in an impending federal election, if such comes to fruition.

Anyway, Question Period in Parliament is coming up in a few minutes, so I’ll put this topic to bed for now and watch the Liberals get outraged, as one MP told CBC just a few minutes ago: ‘How dare the Conservatives sue the opposition for doing their duty as the opposition’ (or words to that effect). It’s sure to be a goodie—CPAC will have it live, streaming, and in easy-to-swallow podcast format, as usual.

The odious John Hagee, supporter of John McCain, has added yet another stupid set of assertions to the racist and ridiculous things he’s done lately, like organizing a ’slave sale’ and calling the Catholic Church ‘the great whore’. Now, I know it’s unfair to hold candidates accountable for every last thing said and done by their supporters, as people are doing with Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama, but the difference here is that Obama has repudiated Farrakhan while McCain appears to be sticking by Hagee and his endorsement. (There’s a serious double standard with how the media are handling both of these cases, but what else is new.)

And now, Hagee apparently believes that Jews are responsible for their own suffering and persecution:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day. …

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come … it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.”

That was me, sorry. My personal rebelliousness and disobedience brought on God’s wrath, and made Him send John Hagee and Louis Farrakhan to earth to let me know just how bad I was for eating a California roll with real crab that one time, or for driving to Seattle yesterday on the Sabbath. My bad.

This is not a new idea, theologically speaking—the Bible provides this justification over and over when bad things happen to the Jewish people, notably in the Book of Lamentations (check out 1.8, 3.39–47, and 5.16–18 for some typical examples). However, nobody except religious nuts and douchebags takes this ‘line of reasoning’ seriously. Kingdoms and countries are always getting sacked by other kingdoms and countries. This is the human race we’re talking about, people. What a douchebag, this religious nut Hagee.

(Hat-tip: AMERICAblog.)

Update: Josh Marshall has video and analysis of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) both totally blowing it on McCain and Hagee on television today.

For the past day or two I’d been working on an essay about Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his recent remarks that seemed to imply ‘that some aspects of Muslim Sharia law could become part of British law.’ Of course, as is so often the case, Dr. Williams said nothing of the sort, but made it very easy for various parties—notably the media, who love a good controversial headline—to misinterpret what he had said. The full text of what he actually said, if you can parse the highly technical and academic language, is up at the Archbishop’s website. I was going to go through the relevant bits and try to pick them part, but now that I’ve read today’s Language Log, I’ve discovered suddenly that everything I could think of had been written by Geoff Pullum, with at least twice as much erudition and snark as I could manage on a good day.

Pullum’s key opinion is that Dr. Williams is an unsuitable leader for the Anglican church because he cannot ‘do the demanding job of holding this figurehead position without causing his church to fall apart in social and political discord.’ He further points out that Dr. Williams also took a number of positions on homosexuality that caused dissension in various sizable wings of the church. ‘The people who say he lacks the leadership skills for his job are basically right,’ says Pullum:

Dr Williams is a gentle, learned, brilliant, scholarly man, and a bit of a public relations doofus. I hate to say it, but the calls for his resignation are not unjustified. He should be the holder of an endowed Professorship of Theology and Law at some top-ranking university. He should not be a prominent church administrator, and certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury. Someone duller, more political, less original, and less intelligent must be found for that job.

Absolutely true, but I have a few caveats to add: First, would there really be no controversy if Dr. Williams were a professor somewhere, and not the Primate of all England? Just think of Ward Churchill and the media furor that surfaces whenever he opens his mouth. Furthermore, is it the case that religious leaders should not voice their political opinions? In other words, is it appropriate for a religious leader to use his religious pulpit as a political bully pulpit? (I have a very strong personal bias against this, but from a conceptual point of view I’m not sure what the answer is.)

But finally, this doesn’t address the underlying issue: to what extent should the secular state accommodate religious law? Back in 2004 there was a controversy in Ontario in which it was proposed to include shari’ah law in the Arbitration Act, which would make decisions rendered by shari’ah courts regarding private disputes legally binding. This had some Muslims, notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, worried that this would create a ’slippery slope’ and end up hurting Muslims more than it helped them. What do you do, for example, to prevent people—notably women—from being ‘coerced’ into using a system in which they might run the risk of unfair treatment? And what do you do when your religious law comes into conflict with established civil law? (And it is important to note that this is not just a Muslim concern; Jews, especially of the more Orthodox varieties, have many of the same problems with their own shadow court system, especially with the agunah problem).

Of course, there are no easy answers here: after all, this is one of the central post-Enlightenment questions in the Western world. But hopefully the current case of Dr. Williams can provide another data point and perspective in the current conversation, if we can get past the stupidity and sensationalism brought about by the media.

Over the last weekend, the rules for crossing the Canadian-American border changed: Canadians must now present a passport at the border to enter the United States. Previously, they’d let you across with nary a second thought, sometimes not even demanding to see your driver’s licence or any other form of identification: if you were driving a car with Canadian plates and appeared non-threatening, they would simply let you pass. This happened to me several times; usually they just asked me (on the American side) where I was coming from, where I was going, and waved me on through. I am given to understand that when you work in a profession like one with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or the Canadian Border Services Agency, or even security in general, you develop, over time, something of an eye for what might be trouble, and what will probably be fine. Now, of course, much of this is—consciously or otherwise—probably based on some underlying profiling (you’re white and drive a car in reasonably good shape? excellent, you’re neither a terrorist nor a drug smuggler), but that’s life, I’m told, in this kind of a world.

The one exception to this rule, in my experience, has been the crossing at Point Roberts, a small exclave of Washington State that was created when the border was determined to lie at 49° north latitude, but before they had done the mapping to see what was out there (besides Vancouver Island, which was accounted for separately in the treaty). There are only two (major) reasons Canadians go to the Point: (1) cheap(er) gasoline and (2) visiting the U.S. post office or some other shipping outlet for sending or receiving purposes. Therefore, when you enter and leave the Point, they usually know what you’re on about, and therefore the litany of questions is very specific—if it even gets asked at all.

But now, an American law passed in the wake of 9/11 is mandating that everyone provide proof of citizenship (i.e. a passport) when entering the United States by sea and, more importantly, land. As of last January—over a year ago—the rules changed to mandate passports from all passengers entering the United States by air, which people appear to have dutifully followed, taking it as one of the many necessary of unnecessary changes that have taken place since 9/11, and for better or worse, going along with it. And carrying a passport for flights between the U.S. and Canada is a good idea anyway; it simplifies matters when you go through customs and immigration control—remember, they really are two separate countries.

I’ve been using the word passport relatively interchangeably with the phrase proof of citizenship; I should clarify that what is actually required is proof of identity and citizenship. A passport proves both those things, but so do some other things, which are listed in the NPR story linked to at the beginning of this post. A NEXUS card, for example, will serve these functions just as well as a passport, though I once tried to use my NEXUS card as identification in San Francisco Airport, which though totally legal, didn’t quite work because the agents I was talking to had no idea what it was. The other relatively new—and potentially quite scary thing that you will soon be able to use is an enhanced driver’s licence, which are now being rolled out in both British Columbia and Washington State. I will skip lightly over these except to note that people of the privacy-advocating sort are worried that these licences are the first step toward a national ID card in both Canada and the United States. But this is a discussion for another time.

What is amazing, though is that what with all the new regulations on the books, the U.S. border guards are not enforcing these policies. Let me repeat that: these new laws say you have to present a passport at the border, but those guys who work for the Department of Homeland Security will not turn you away if you don’t have a passport. They’ve pushed back the date on enforcement of law by at least eighteen months, meaning that it will come into effect in July 2009 at the earliest; until then you can expect to receive ‘an educational flyer’ when you cross the border sans passport. There appears to be some question, furthermore, as to the next step—that is, whether or not to press on with the regulations at all. Leading the opposition are three U.S. Senators: Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and Ted ‘Series Of Tubes‘ Stevens (R-Alaska). These politicians all come from border states, surprise, surprise—guess whose economies are going to lose money if cross-border traffic is hindered further than it already is.

But one of the most salient objections I can think of—and one that, to my knowledge, hasn’t really surfaced yet—is that we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration, for years and years, how insecure and unsafe America’s borders really are, and how desperately needed are new measures to strengthen border security. Well, the new measures just came into place, and guess what? Bush’s own government isn’t enforcing them! What blinding hypocrisy and idiocy!

With John Edwards out on the Democratic side and Rudy Giuliani out on the Republican side, this leaves only a few candidates remaining in the party primaries in the U.S. presidential race. Obama is looking increasingly strong, having raised $32 million from over 170,000 new donors in January alone, Romney is looking more and more like the doofus we all know he is, Hillary is wisely telling Bill to tone it down for fear he lost South Carolina for her, and the McCain train looks like it’s leaving the station, to the chagrin of much of the American right-wing. This is looking increasingly like a Hillary-Obama race that will be decided on Super Tuesday, versus McCain on the Republican side. But lest we overlook the positive demographic side of all this: the Democratic nominee is now guaranteed not to be a white male! As Jon Stewart put it on last night’s A Daily Show:

Edwards’ departure leaves the Democratic nomination down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which means that the Founding Fathers finally have a winner in their ‘How Long Will It Take Our Nation To Nominate A Non-White Male’ betting pool. Oh, I can’t wait to find out who is the winner. Ladies and gentlemen, George Mason of Virginia correctly guessed—two hundred and nineteen years! Congratulations, Georgey!

In related news from the world of primaries, Slate’s ‘Explainer’ column has an excellent explanation of what happens to Edwards’s delegates at the Democratic National Convention now. And it will be interesting to watch what happens with the first ever global primary for Democrats living abroad, which will be electing state-level delegates to be seated and vote at the Convention on behalf of the millions of Democratic voters residing outside the United States. This will be fascinating on both a political and a technological level: will it even ‘work’—however we define that—and what, if any, will be its long-term effects?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the solar system, Ron Paul’s campaign is, apparently, still going strong, and America is still, apparently, deeply in love with him. In fact, he is, apparently, the only Republican even bothering to show up in some states, which shows that he at least thinks that he can reciprocate that love to large portions of the country. Just check out some of his vastly impressive press releases if you aren’t prepared to take my word for it. And from even further reaches of our solar system, Ralph ‘I-didn’t-cost-Gore-the-election-but-Bush-and-Gore-cost-me-the-election’ Nader is thinking about throwing his hat into the ring once again. (Surely it’s no coincidence, as Chris Beam points out, that this is coming to light right after Edwards, the Democrat whom Nader had endorsed, dropped out of the race.) I can only sigh and wonder who’s funding Nader this time around.

On 13 February, Australia is going to issue its first formal apology to its aboriginal population, the AP is reporting. The newly elected Labor government is making this their first item of official business, according to Jenny Macklin, Minister of Indigenous Affairs. Furthermore, an anonymous citizen has providing funding for the writing of ‘Sorry’ in the sky above Sydney on Australia Day, which was over the weekend on 26 January.

I guess some sense of national, collective responsibility is one of the side effects of electing liberals to your government. Or at least it should be.

Bush’s (thankfully last) State of the Union is on tonight at 9 pm Eastern time. You can probably watch it live on every single channel your television gets. It might even be dubbed into Spanish on one or two of those channels. Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of the state of Kansas, will be delivering the response for the Democrats. But my reaction, I’m afraid, is similar to my reaction to the bit of news about WMDs in my last post: So what? Who cares?

Throughout the political sphere, and more significantly on both sides of the aisle, nobody seems to care. Hillary Clinton is treating this non-event with downright disdain, though Fox News did attempt to spin her reaction into the headline ‘Hillary Excited About Bush’s State of the Union’. Tony Blankley, on last weekend’s Left, Right, and Center, noted that this is the first time in recent memory that the press hasn’t even really mentioned the speech in the week beforehand. John McCain will skip the speech entirely to campaign in Florida.

Bush’s opportunity to create a legacy for himself is over, both on the international and on the domestic fronts. The most he can do is to create the appearance that he did something about the economy before it becomes someone else’s problem in a year’s time. No action will be proposed or taken on Iraq, besides the vague and fuzzy feeling he’ll try to project, for the nth time, that things are going well. On the economy, Bush will propose some vague and ill-defined action, thus giving people—especially the Democratic candidates—a chance to continue last week’s competition in comparing the relative sizes of their stimulus packages. Generally, the speech will suck—and if Bush’s handlers have any brains left about them, it’ll be short.

Oh well. If your State of the Union parties need some spicing up—which they no doubt will—this year’s drinking game looks pretty good.

The heads of far-right political parties in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, and France are coming together to form a ‘pan-European “patriotic” party’. The leaders of the new party, according to the BBC, ’said their aim was to defend Europe against “Islamisation” and immigrants’. Also, the approved euphemism for this appears to be ‘patriotic’.

I have two—admittedly snarky and probably unproductive—thoughts: One, this might give Silvio Berlusconi some pause from his recent plotting to retake the government in Italy after Romano Prodi’s resignation. If this pan-European far-right party eventually reaches into the Italian right wing, it might draw away some support from that base. And two, is it possible that the Belgian far-right thinks this will help the country with its ethnic problems? They still can’t form a government: could the answer possibly lie in a reaffirmation of the supremacy of white Christians? They can all still agree on that, right?

Eugene Robinson has a very interesting piece in today’s Truthdig that wonders what exactly the deal is with Bill Clinton these days. Clinton, by far the most popular living ex-president, has been joining the attacks on his wife Hillary’s opponent for the Democratic nomination for President, Barack Obama, to such a fierce degree that Obama recently told an interviewer, ‘I feel like I’m running against both Clintons.’ The fundamental problem, Robinson suggests, is that Obama is peddling the message—or more importantly, the Clintons see him as peddling the message—that Bill Clinton’s accomplishments during his eight years of tenure as President were insufficient, or have been reversed by the Bush administration, or never really achieved much anyway in the way of actually uniting people. Bill Clinton seems to be taking this as a personal affront and is responding in kind, going after Obama himself, the media (for what the Clinton camp sees as biased pro-Obama media coverage), and by extension quite a large segment of the American electorate.

Furthermore, at least some of Obama’s appeal is tapping into the feelings of some Democrats that sure, Clinton was great, but do the people of the United States really want another four or eight years of triangulation, centrism, and the appearance of two straight all-in-the-family dynasties? Going a rather unfortunate step further, Republican author and ex-Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan suggested over the weekend that ‘Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton’ is a ’sickness’—a feeling she ascribed to ’so many people’, with no foundation at all. While she may be hyperbolic in her language, I have to wonder to what extent this issue is present and underlying much of what we’re seeing happen in the Democratic primaries, and what impact it will have on the general election come November. Expect more to be made of this as Bill Clinton’s involvement in Hillary’s campaign grows, along with his willingness to play the bad cop.

After providing crucial confirmation of his views that the United States Constitution should be amended to conform to ‘God’s word’, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has, in the same interview, directly equated homosexuality with bestiality. And this isn’t what is usually meant by ‘equates’, which is something like ‘mentioned in the same breath’. He means to draw the direct equivalence between that two men having sex with one another and a man having sex with an animal:

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

This has already been kicked around by the blogosphere a bit, especially by Talking Points Memo and by John Aravosis, who rightly points out that it’s about time the media start treating Huckabee’s nutty religious views as the same sort of fair game as he seems to treat Mitt Romney’s supposed beliefs, as a Mormon, in the siblinghood of Jesus and the Devil.

But I haven’t yet seen anybody raise the question: if two gay men having sex is like a man having sex with a (non-human) animal, which of the participants in the H. sapiens-on-H. sapiens sex is equivalent, from a physical, metaphysical, and/or moral standpoint, to the non-human participant in the latter case? Follow-up question: how far removed from ‘human’, taxonomically speaking, does Huckabee intend this equivalence to extend? Surely he means to exclude things in kingdoms other than Animalia, thus permitting the usage of, say, vegetable matter in lawful sexual relations between husband and wife as God intended. I foresee some tricky grey areas here.

Oh, and one other question: if we are to take the bible at its word–you know, literally–the prohibition on bestiality would seem to apply specifically, if perhaps not exclusively, to women (Leviticus 18.23)):

וּבְכָל־בְּהֵמָ֛ה לֹֽא־תִתֵּ֥ן שְׁכָבְתְּךָ֖ לְטָמְאָה־בָ֑הּ וְאִשָּׁ֗ה לֹֽא־תַעֲמֹ֞ד לִפְנֵ֧י בְהֵמָ֛ה לְרִבְעָ֖הּ תֶּ֥בֶל הֽוּא׃

Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

I have chosen the King James Version translation–which is close enough here to the Hebrew for my purposes–to try to reflect some of the theology underlying, as it were, the sexual philosophy of people like Mike Huckabee. What about it, Mike? Do you believe that women need to be specially interdicted from animal-human relations? Does this require a Constitutional amendment–perhaps in the same vein as an anti-abortion amendment? Why not just have a whole anti-female amendment while you’re at it? Oh wait, it’s halfway there already.

If New Hampshire doesn’t go well for Hillary, which seems more and more likely now that the polls are consistently finding double-digit leads for Obama, you can bet she’s going to go through with some sort of shake-up to her campaign staff, most likely involving replacing the weird and ever-reliable-to-make-your-campaign-fail strategist Mark Penn. But it probably won’t be as drastic as this:

In what some party insiders are calling a Hail Mary bid to win Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton today attempted to repackage herself as a black man. … Speaking at a rally in Manchester, N.H., Clinton thanked her supporters for “keeping it real” and promoted her just-released autobiography, The Bodacicty of Hope. “This election is about whether or not America is ready to elect a black man president of the United States,” she said. “I believe I am that black man.”

As Little Buttercup once famously noted, “The poor bumboat woman has gipsy blood in her veins, and she can read destinies! … There is a change in store for you … be prepared!” And I fear that though a mystic tone she borrows, Hillary will learn the truth with sorrow. Here today, and gone tomorrow.

Yes I know—that is so!

The Iowa caucuses are over, and with Barack Obama’s and Mike Huckabee’s rather stunning and convincing wins over the rest of the Democratic and Republican fields, respectively, I though I would add my admittedly paltry two cents to the fray—what’s the blogosphere for, anyway?

The winners: Obama and Huckabee rightly deserve the praise for winning by such impressive margins, and at least in Obama’s case a clear front-runner has emerged and everybody else is playing catch-up. John Edwards, however, made a strong showing, and finished second—barely ahead of Hillary, but the only thing that registers with many people is the ordinal numbers in front of the names. He will definitely also be a factor in the upcoming weeks. The other clear winner is John “100 years in Iraq is fine by me” McCain, who seems to be getting a hell of a lot of media attention from various sources that for whatever reason simply love to fawn on him. He didn’t do very well in the caucuses, but he’s going to have lots of media momentum on his side.

The sort-of winners: Mike Huckabee may have won the caucuses by a 9% margin, but the Republican side is still extremely muddled. Giuliani finished sixth in the caucuses, except he had never really paid much attention to Iowa at all, and still definitely has the wherewithal to do well in many other states, especially those that hold their primary elections on Super Tuesday. The other person who had some kind of victory was Ron Paul, who managed to pull out a whopping 10%. This from a guy everyone wishes would just go away. Giuliani came in sixth with 3.5%, and he’s still getting invited to Fox News’s debate, whereas fifth-place Ron Paul is still being unceremoniously excluded. Ron Paul won’t win the Republican nomination, but be on the lookout for a possible third-party bid that could Naderize the Republican side of the 2008 elections. He certainly has the fundraising apparatus and crazy robot-like supporters—almost à la another erstwhile also-ran and his cult-like following—to make a fight of it.

The losers: Mitt Romney doesn’t come out of this looking good, but Hillary Clinton, obviously, is the big loser of the night. Her whole campaign was based on the inevitability of her candidacy, and now that approach is obviously broken and in need of some serious (and fast) rethinking. So she’s now reduced to insinuating that Obama is ‘too liberal‘ and that he has has associations with left-wing intellectuals. Err, the 1920s called; they want their rhetoric back. (Actually, it wasn’t historically just rhetoric: sometimes it was blatant xenophobia too.)

The whole primary/caucus process in the United States is silly, with various states wielding disproportionate influence. Complaining about this is old hat, however, and there’s really nothing new to be said about it. Nothing is going to change until the abolition of federalism and the recognition of all citizens of the great ‘democracy’ of the United States as truly equal—not just those who happen to live within arbitrary boundaries that for stupid historical reasons dictate that they can proceed to dictate to the rest of the country who’s going to be on their ballots in November.

So yeah, look for that.

All those of you who are concerned about theatre, or the developing world, or theatre in the developing world, must listen to today’s Q from CBC Radio 1. The middle item is an interview with Debebe Eshetu, the most famous actor and director both on stage and in film from Ethiopia. (He was in Shaft in Africa, which has been his only real exposure in North America before now. I certainly had never heard of him. But he’s really big in Ethiopia.) In the interview, he talks about the state of theatre in Ethiopia with specific reference to the political climate there. Eshetu stood for election a few years ago as part of a party of reformers and after sweeping the election results was subsequently thrown in prison for 22 months for treason. He is now in North America working on producing some material he wrote in prison and publishing his memoirs.

In response to the question of whether he is afraid of returning to Ethiopia after his travels abroad:

‘No matter what, I will still go back, because I have promised the Ethiopian people—not only the artists, but the Ethiopian people who fought for my freedom—those who are here in Canada, in the United States, in Europe, in the Scandinavian countries—Ethiopians in the diaspora have really fought for us. They fed our family. They liberated us. They fought to the court(?). They were out on the streets with the cold weather in winter when it was thirty-five below zero. How can I forget that? And what will I say to—what will I say to my children when they say, “Why did you run away?” Will I tell them, “I was scared”? No, I can’t. I have to go back.’

Asked for his thoughts on the future of theatre in Ethiopia:

‘I think each individual artist must start fighting for his own freedom. We must be able to communicate with the public, not on [sic] a translated play, but on the actual fact that is happening in the country. We must teach the public what they should do to get their freedom, to be able to live in their country, to be able for the children to go abroad, get their education, and go back home instead of staying outside their country. They should start developing their country. So the artists have the major responsibility, because they have a straightforward communication. Because they have the respect of the people, the people listen to the artists. The artists are part of the human society.’

The podcast of the whole show can be downloaded here; the bit with Debebe Eshetu begins at 16′ 05″.