I'll be doing my usual David Brooks lampoon as soon as I figure out what the hell his latest column is about.

See you next week.

Well, they're at it again. These closet theocrats never give up. A Federal court struck down the stickers so now they're coming at it from another direction: a bill to force Georgia teachers to challenge evolution in class.

A bill filed Thursday would require Georgia's teachers to introduce scientific evidence challenging evolution.

State Rep. Ben Bridges (R-Cleveland) introduced a similar bill, unsuccessfully, eight years ago. He said the idea makes common sense. "It's just trying to teach our kids what's right, not what probably could be wrong."

Like science, for instance.

The measure would require teachers, when covering the origins of living things, to include "factual scientific evidence" for and against evolution. The state science curriculum requires teachers to cover evolution as supported by mainstream scientists — that all living things evolved from common ancestry through the gradual process of natural selection. Bridges, and many critics of evolution, see that as a biased approach.

"Since I was a child, it was taught as a theory." Bridges said. "But over the years, teachers have taught it so long, they're now teaching it as a fact."

Maybe that's because since Bridges was a child, the scientific evidence has been piling up. But don't let that stand in your way, Ben.

The good news is that the bill looks to have little support.

The House Republican leadership said the bill is not a GOP priority, and Bridges filed the bill without co-sponsors. "Each member of our caucus is elected by their district and they have every right to introduce bills they feel their constituents want," said House Speaker Pro Tem Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta).

Apparently the Georgia House has had all the pounding and sarcasm on this issue that it can take for the moment and doesn't fancy attracting any more. That's good because there's a fundamental flaw in the bill:

Eugenie Scott, director of the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education, said there is no "factual scientific evidence" against evolution.

Amen, as Ben would probably say.

On a lighter note, the UCC has responded to Fruitcake Dobson's homophobia by inviting SpongeBob to join them. Bob recently toured UCC headquarters. Pictures of his visit are here.

SpongeBob meets with the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's general minister and president, in his office. Explains Thomas, "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, SpongeBob, you're welcome here."

(Link courtesy of Digby)

Howard Dean's candidacy for the post of DNC Chair replacing the unlamented Terry McAuliffe has lefties twittering about 'saving the party' and 'having a liberal in charge again' (example here). We need to get a grip. Reality check for the 'reality-based' party:

1. Liberal? Hardly.

Whatever else Howard Dean might be--and he's a fairly interesting pol--one thing he isn't is a liberal. I live across the border from Vermont and watched him all the time he was Gov. He's basically a centrist, one of the NE types we get a lot of: left on social issues, right on fiscal ones. The liberal label is undeserved, mostly a result of his passionate anti-war stance combined with the fact that he sounds like a liberal next to the right-wing DLC corporatists who run the Democratic Party these days.

I backed Dean early and have a lot of respect for his ability and his charisma (which is startling in person) but let's not kid ourselves: this guy isn't Paul Wellstone. He'd be just as happy as a Pub moderate, if such a thing was allowed to exist by the radcon leadership. As a liberal icon, he leaves a lot to be desired.

Having said that, I will add that his committment and passion aren't fake, and he genuinely wants to see the Mule move in a more solid direction--toward its core principles. I'd support him for almost any position, including DNC Chair if he really wants it, but I'd rather see him loose to run again in 2008 after the Bush Fantasist Administration implodes.

2. DNC Chair? Why?

I honestly don't know why fans of Dean want him to take this job, or for that matter why he wants it. DNC Chair is almost exclusively a fund-raising job. It isn't involved with either direction or policy making; it isn't a position of power. Ron Brown didn't have any, neither did McAuliffe. Dean won't either. If anything, it's liable to lock him into adopting the corporate-friendly positions that will keep the money flowing. If the DLC wanted to get Dean off their backs by co-opting him, giving him the DNC Chair would be a good way to do it.

People seem to be making some kind of tie-in where Dean's credibility = more Democratic victories, but I think everybody's on the wrong track, and not just about Dean. The whole discussion seems to revolve around how and/or which way the Dems have to change to win: who do we pander to, the core or the swing voters? how many right-wing positions do we have to adopt and how far do we have to go? which issues will win for us? All of this misses the point.

If the Democrats want to start winning elections again, the one thing they must do is to stop worrying about winning elections and start concentrating on communicating what they believe. More than anything else, they need to convince voters that they've got integrity. All this talk about 'how do we have to change to win?' just convinces people even more that the Dems have no guts, no core beliefs, and will change their minds with the polls--which is exactly how the Pubs branded them as opportunistic wimps.

They need to go back to their core values circa FDR and sell people on their agenda all over again--presuming they can decide what that agenda is. But even more important, they have to sell people on the beliefs behind the agenda. We're at a place now where people have to be re-sold on concepts like fairness, tolerance, and equality; when we have to remind them why sexism, racism, and getting religion involved in the state isn't a Good Thing. It's sad but that's where the Pubs have brought us over the past 25 years.

I don't think swing voters are anywhere near as crucial as a lot of people do but I'll say this: if you want them, don't pander. Swing voters are wimps and they tend to gravitate toward the side with the strongest opinions and the firmest beliefs. To overcome the Pub appeal to what's worst in us--fear, greed, intolerance--the only answer is for the Dems to appeal to what's best--tolerance, generosity, courage--and to do so forcefully and with passionate conviction. It can't be taken for granted any more.

Dean could be a lot more helpful to that effort outside than inside the DNC. It's his strength, it's what he does best. As the DNC Chair, he'll be wasted even if he isn't buried under the compromising he'll have to do to keep the coffers full.

I like Dean, so I'm hoping he doesn't get it.

Thanks to a hint (and the gift of the formula, which I didn't know) from cosa nostra, I reconstructed the BT Entry Page from a Google cache (Thanks, cn!). Unfortunately, there is no cache copy of BT02 itself. Only a third of it exists, unpublished, on Verizon's server. They appear to have re-booted by going back to the status of the server as of Dec 1, because everything done after that date has vanished. That means all of the first Aardvark Monthly and all of BT03--which was almost done--no longer exist.

The Good News--such as it is--is that I am told 'they' are still working on it, and indeed, I have been shut out of my webspace for the past 3 days. At the moment, Reality Check and Trench Warfare are still viewable, as is BT01. For those of you aware of it, Ponsonby is still viewable but episodes added after Dec 1 are gone, which I realize isn't much help.

From what I can gather, this was not all due to some routine glitch but a massive server failure on several different fronts. At least one of the people I spoke to hinted at an attack from the outside that had brought everything to a crashing halt. I can't speak to the validity of that--I know nothing about how such things are done or what limitations attackers might have--but what is clear is that this was no normal malfunction. And if it did come from the outside, it would seem to still be going on. I have read zero reports of this in the press, but that may be because Verizon is hushing it up. It doesn't seem to have affected any of their services except for the webspaces, which is either because those were the only servers affected or they're spending all their time keeping the phone and DSL operative and webspaces simply aren't a priority.

But all this is pure speculation. The point is that all the zines are on indefinite hold until this problem is resolved one way or the other. For the time being I will try to be patient and see how this gets worked out--I don't want to blame them because they were, maybe, a target for malicious hackers or the victims of some giant server meltdown--and hope that they get things back to normal soon. In the meantime, I'm removing the links to BT02 and BTHome from the sidebar. The BT01 link will remain for anyone still interested.

I realize this is small potatoes in a world where the Middle East is imploding and in a country where a total incompetent is Sec of State, an advocate of torture is going to be Attorney General, and the Emperor has just sold the entire state of New Mexico to the oil and gas industry for contributions rendered. No one is (or should be) waiting breathlessly for something as inconsequential as a blogzine, nor will anyone be terribly disappointed by its absence--or even likely to notice it. Still, when one makes promises, one should at least explain why one can't keep them.

As soon as the situation is resolved, I'll let you know. I don't have the money to pay for space from a different host, so I'll just have to deal with whatever I'm left with when the dust settles. I may simply delete BT02 and start from scratch. I don't know yet.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast, theoretically already in progress.

I was going to do this as a correction but it turns out there may be nothing to correct.

An anonymous commenter found an exact copy posted on a BBS in Nov of 2000 and left the link. it was posted by one Kassandra Calhoun, but she didn't write it. She says it was passed on to her by email. She apparently didn't know who wrote it.

But the piece was then published and signed by Cleese in the Dec 15 issue of Bellaciao--last month.

Did somebody attach Cleese's name to it? Was he the original author in 2000? (It shows up, unattributed, in a collection of English jokes about the 2000 election on a British website.)

It certainly reads like Cleese, and I suspect he wrote it originally in 2000 and then simply recycled it when we did it again and Bellaciao wanted a response. But I can't find a reference from 2000 with his name attached to it--they're all anonymous so far.

So did he write it? Or is it the work of an anonymous Brit wit?

I'm going with Cleese. His style is very distinctive and this piece is swimming in standard Cleese-ish word-play and the outraged uber-Britishness of Basil Fawlty, a character he created and wrote all the dialogue for.

Those two or three of you who may be waiting with baited breath for the 3rd issue of Blog Tower, originally due out about now, have a right to be advised that it ain't gonna happen fo' a while. My webhost--or so it laughingly calls itself, apparently unaware that hosting entails some, you know, duties besides collecting the monthly fee--had a few little problems the last couple of weeks. First, it cut off access to several of my sites, posting a big FORBIDDEN notice if you tried to view them. Unsatisfied with that as lacking in severity, it then completely lost them for about a week. All of them. Finally, after frantic phone calls were exchanged, they found them again, but everything I had changed or added after Nov 15 has for some reason vanished and would appear to be gone for good. This includes, of course, all the work I did on Issue 03, which now no longer exists in any form.

This is depressing. I'm forced to start all over again from scratch. Meanwhile, Aardvark Monthly, the humor zine, and an as yet unnamed zine of original material from blog writers of note, are hovering in Limbo--should I put them together and risk losing all that work while my host attempts to get its act together?

Part of the problem here is that everybody is disavowing all knowledge of responsibility. Verizon says it's not their problem, it's Trellix, the site builder. But Trellix has been cut into four different pieces and none of them will admit to having responsibility for maintaining Verizon's webspaces. 'Site Technical Support' goes straight back to Verizon, who tell you they don't know what to tell you but 'They' have been having problems. Who is they? We don't know. What problems? We don't know. Well, who's fixing it? We don't know. Then who do I talk to about this? We don't know. They're very nice and very friendly but they don't know much.

They're still working on it, supposedly. I'm going to give them a couple more days and then if the rest of my work isn't restored, make a decision about where to go from here. I swear, if this wasn't the cheapest deal around ($7/month for 100mgs of space and unlimited bandwidth), I'd be looking for a replacement. The good news is that in the, what, 8 months or so I've been actively using their hosting, this is the first time anything like this has happened, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them.

Still, it's a bummer losing all that work.

Stay tuned for further developments. Otherwise, go on with what you were doing before I interrupted you.

This is really Rob's territory, but I couldn't help noticing that the Bobbsey Twins of the NYT political staff, Nagourney the Noble and L'il Dick Stevenson, who have between them written almost as many stories flattering Bush as Dan Bartlett told them to write, teamed up today, combining their considerable talents for a) toadying Bush and the GOP, b) dissing the Dems back-handed, and c) devising silly political narratives almost but not quite divorced from recognizable reality. In the new NYT double-bladed soap opera, they have at last, after four years of an arrogance unparalleled in American politics since the days of Hayes, noticed that the Pubs are maybe over-reaching just a tad.

The White House has described the election results as a mandate, and in his Inaugural Address on Thursday, Mr. Bush laid out his vision in sweeping terms.

But some Republicans said they were worried about overconfidence, including Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who invoked his experience serving alongside Speaker Newt Gingrich when Republicans captured the House in 1994. "Hubris is deadly," Mr. Sanford said.

And to prove it, they quote no less an authority than--wait for it!--Gary Bauer. Now there's an expert witness.

And Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said that while he applauded Mr. Bush's ambition in pursuing two major domestic goals - overhauling Social Security and the tax code - those issues, if handled incorrectly, could undercut Mr. Bush's long-term goal for the party.

"They could provide the president's opponents with fodder for some of the old canards, that Republicans don't want a social safety net, that they're the party of the rich, all those things," Mr. Bauer said. "It's going to take a very astute effort and massive amounts of presidential involvement to keep that from happening."

Bauer, a far-right crackpot who looks extraordinarily like a cross between an evil Hummel and Phil Gramm on heavy tranqs, is so far out that he's on the fringe of the fringe, along with Alan Keyes, Man-on-Dog Santoro, and what's-his-name from Oklahoma, the one who's so concerned about lesbians in school bathrooms that he ran a campaign based on it. He's just the sort a couple of star reporters from America's top newspaper should be going to for inside information and 'the real scoop' on the future of the Bush Administration, yes, sir.

By their sources shall ye know them.

Note: Edited to eliminate an egregious error as brought to my attention by eRobin. Too bad, tho. It was one of my better moments of scatological snark.

"People would just come up to me and say, 'How'd you lose your arm?' " Mr. Acosta said. "And I'd say, 'In the war.' And they would be like, 'What war?' "
--Robert Acosta, who lost his hand when a grenade was thrown into his truck in Iraq.

Morbo at The Carpetbaggers Report reacts to last weeks NYT Mag piece by Roger Lowenstein (unfortunately no longer available online unless you pay for it) with the passion of someone whose scales have finally fallen. Lowenstein made quite plain about SocSec what some of us have been trying to say for years about the whole radical right-wing: they don't care about facts or policy; they're ideologues.

We've had an enormously difficult time getting that through much of the left's collective head. Lefties have misunderstood the problem for a solid 20 years, and, remarkably, many of us still do. We insist on trying to parse David Brooks, Bill Safire, Condi Rice, and the Emperor Himself as if they were rational beings who just had their facts wrong. Morbo, who gets it now, forcefully eviscerates this sad illusion.

In 1935, some Republicans screamed that the plan was socialism. They've kept up that drumbeat ever since. He notes that throughout the 1970s, Ronald Reagan attacked Social Security as a "sure loser" of a program. Amazingly, after 60 years of Social Security success, the right wing is still singing this same tired tune.

An understanding of this historical context is extremely important. Progressives need to understand what they are up against. "Reforming" Social Security isn't something that just popped into Bush's head one day. Rather, his scheme is part of a long-running attack on that system that has been under way since it was created.

Too many progressives forget or refuse to believe that for most "Beltway" conservatives, ideology trumps everything -- including facts, real-world experience and common sense. The more honest ones admit this to Lowenstein. They essentially say that it does not matter that Social Security works, it does not matter that it has enabled millions to live with dignity and it does not matter that Americans support it. The program must be scrapped because it's a Big Government Program and Big Government Programs are always bad. How do we know Big Government Programs are always bad? Ayn Rand said they were. Conservatives believe it. End of discussion.

There you go.

Stop and ask yourself, those of you who try to fight with facts and always lose, how many times have you heard radcons especially, but conservatives of all kinds, excoriate the left because we 'don't believe in anything'? Who take every compromise we make as further proof that we have no beliefs, no ethics, no standards, and no guts? Liberal ideology is largely fact-based and tends to shift to accommodate those facts. Conservative ideology is faith-based. Facts are irrelevant, even frightening--feeble, changeable, fly-by-night outlaws that trick you into belief and then alter unrecognizably a few years/months/weeks later. Faith, on the other hand, never changes. It's a comfortable old lounge chair you can relax into and know exactly what it's going to do: conform to your body rather than make your body conform to it.

Conservatism, which sees itself as a profoundly optimistic philosophy, is in fact none of the three, yet it has clung successfully to that illusion for generations and each new generation has been more adamant, more extreme, and blinder in its fanatacism than the last. We have now reached the stage when, in Morbo's phrase, 'Ideology trumps everything,' and we are moving toward the final, cataclysmic stage, which might be summarized as 'Fear trumps everything.'

You can't fight the emotionalism of a Cult of Personality like the one around Bush by pointing out how obviously wrong he is about everything and has been his whole life, reciting reams of facts to back up your contention. Conservatives 'know' facts aren't trustworthy, and they know it because they manipulate them all the time. They make things up to support their position and claim their made-up numbers are 'factual'; obviously, we must be doing the same thing. Spin is everything to conservatives--as Lee Atwater recognized--because spin isn't just putting the best face you can on your policies, it's telling people what you believe; most importantly, what you believe in spite of any facts that might contradict that belief.

Liberals think it's important to ferret out the actual facts and develop strategies to deal with them. Conservatives most revere those who blatantly, openly and proudly ignore facts in the name of Belief. The closed-minded stubborness of absolute denial in the face of repeated assaults by 'facts' is what they think 'strength' is, and they worship strength.

Is it beginning to percolate through? The reasons we can't talk to these people? They live in different world, a world where it's a sign of your commitment to purity of purpose to insist that white is black and up is down even though everybody--including you--knows it isn't true. Because it isn't the facts themselves that matter (facts change, remember?), it's your refusal to knuckle under to them that proves your worth, that makes you a hero. Conservatives are always fighting the Tyranny of Facts with the Freedom of Belief, and he who dies with the most illusions intact, wins.

This nonsense comes from the particularly virulent form of relentlessly conformist Midwestern Xtianity that Sinclair Lewis satirized in Babbitt and that after the Second World War dumped Dale Carnegie on an unsuspecting society--Carnegie, the man whose idiotic book spawned 50 years of motivational speakers and writers who specialized in preaching the Carnegie Gospel of 'Positive Thinking' to three generations of American business. The pinnacle of denial conservatives have lusted after and finally achieved in the new milennium is a testament to Carnegie's 'philosophy', the underpinnings of which were always 'Ignore any reality that hampers your pursuit of success.'

Beneath all the Happy Talk about maintaining a 'positive outlook' and concentrating on success no matter what--or who--gets in your way was a fundamental fear and an unvarnished appeal to greed and arrogance: 'You deserve to be No 1, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. You have a right to be successful, but you better seize your moment or else somebody who does will come along and take it away from you.'

Under the disguise of a 'motivational guide' beats the heart of a Machiavellian manual for the modern corporate-shark wanna-be, and now three generations have been indoctrinated into his system of deny, deny, deny--to deny reality is 'Positive Thinking'; to persist in your goals even if the Real World says they're impossible is 'Courage'; to believe in yourself and your goals despite any and all evidence to the contrary is 'Optimism'.

To Carnegie, the goals themselves didn't matter and he never talked about their quality or offered advice for examining them for worthiness or even latent insanity. He wasn't concerned with what your goals are--that's a individual decision; he was only concerned with telling you how to get what you wanted. His assumption was that you wanted to achieve success in corporate America (he was writing in the 50's when the Corner Office and a Key to the Executive Washroom were the twin Holy Grails in the lives of the men he was talking to). You didn't have to think about goals because a) the Company did it for you, and b) they were involved primarily with getting ahead in the Company.

It's not that conservatives weren't single-minded before Carnegie but that Carnegie gave them a particular product to sell that people--especially people in what are now known as Red States--were emotionally and sociologically highly vulnerable to: pie in the sky. He promised that enormous wealth and happiness beyond measure could be the reward of anyone who just believed hard enough, and to a generation that had been born in an economic collapse, raised during the Great Depression, and come of age in a world war, his promises were what they had been waiting to hear all their lives: Things Can Be Better Than Everything You've Known Up to Now.

It was their stubborn refusal--even after all that had happened in the previous 30 years, or maybe because of it--to give up their naivete, their native American Innocence, that fueled their easy acceptance of Carnegie's simplistic solution, and they were rewarded for their belief with more than twenty years of economic growth and, for most, the life they had only imagined as a sort of impossible Paradise before 1945. They left the cynical innocence of the WWI generation behind and embraced instead an innocence that was militant, proud, and disingenuous when it wasn't just a little bit arrogant and insular: the Americans had just saved the world's bacon; surely they had earned the right to stand before Europe as the first among equals (at least).

So they bought the denial, the simplistic solutions, and the mindless optimism as if it were their birthright; they made Dale Carnegie a wealthy man and a cultural icon; and they foisted on America an angry sense of entitlement that was almost Southern in the crippling insecurity that lay just below its shining surface of glittering rhinestones and faux gold leaf. Conservatives seized on that simplicity like an old friend--simplicity was their ally, complexity their enemy. They used positivism to undercut the ancient American distrust of people with too much money, and sell them instead on their bedrock belief that making money was the holiest of endeavors--anybody could be rich if they just tried hard enough and wanted it bad enough.

It was a two-edged sword, this pissed-off positivism. On the one hand it threatened to drown American exuberance under a suffocating blanket of conformity and turn the whole society into a national gathering of greedy fortune-hunters; on the other, the sense that we could do anything if we just set our minds to it leaked over into our idealism and made us think that inhuman traditions of sexism, racism, poverty, war, and cruelty to anybody who was different didn't have to stand just because 'that's the way it's always been'.

Which is what happened in the 60's. Conservatives--who had controlled America during the 50's by using anti-Communist paranoia as bait--were stymied for a short time by the infection of idealism that had suddenly invaded the carefully-constructed, fear-based optimism on which they had built their social supremacy. 'You can do anything' was never intended to extend to the disruption and idealistic re-making of the society they had successfully been running quietly but steadily for their own benefit. It was dangerous, unreliable, flaky, and it threatened to overturn the fragile balance of elements that--precisely arranged and cultivated--maintained their prosperity...and their control.

But in the militantly innocent Heartland, the siren lure of simple solutions and the promise of riches for the righteous never really lost its appeal, and conservatives furious over the changes they had been powerless to prevent--feminism, integration, diversity, pacifism--found fertile ground for their message there and went back at it with renewed vigor. As the last election sort of showed, it would seem that Dale has won after all.

Here's what worries me:

Term II is under way. The vicious Republican PR machine is of such potent talent that Bush could now walk up to a live TV camera and jam his thumbs in his big monkey ears and wiggle his fingers and stick out his tongue and say Ppppbbbtthhtt, ha ha America, it's my gul-dang war and I knew all along Saddam was an easy mark, a pip-squeak tyrant, never had WMDs, and I lied to the whole stupid nation to make me look manly and to help my buddies in Big Oil, and in the military industry, and in my daddy's Carlyle Group, and for my rich Saudi pals.

And he could say: Too bad about all those dead 'Murkin soldiers. Too bad about all those soldiers who will be dying very soon. Too bad they can't go AWOL and skip out on the war like I did. Too bad they're dying for reasons no one can justify, and never could. Okey doke, I'm off to the ranch for even more vacation, the most of any president in American history. Bye now. Oh, yes, one more thing: ppppbbbtthhtt!

And most of America would apparently sit there and watch him, and sigh, and go, oh that Dubya, such an honest and God-loving man, so simple and plainspoken and not all that bright. Just like the rest of us. He's a Good Man, isn't he? He's sturdy and stalwart and on the side of righteousness. I mean, isn't he, Lord? Hello?

He really could, couldn't he? And the Kool-Ade drinkers would say, 'What a charming man. What a funny joke.' and send him more money.