This was to have been today's post at Dispatch from the Trenches, but I've exceeded my bandwidth (all those damn pictures everybody likes) and they've closed me out, so you're getting it here instead.

The disagreement among unions about how to deal with the Bush policy of turning the US government into a corporate subsidiary has been simmering under the surface for months. It broke into the open briefly during the Democratic convention when Andy Stern, President of the largest and fastest-growing union in the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Bruce Raynor, President of Unite Here, criticized Kerry and the Democratic Party for their tepid response to the assault on workers from the Bush Administration.

"The Democrats have to decide where they stand on economic issues," Mr. Stern said in an interview on the convention's first day. "John Kerry's positions are fine, but they don't go far enough to deal with the issues that are facing people who go to work every day."

Raynor directly attacked the old-style unions' strategy of trying to hold on to what little thay've got left rather than devise aggressive plans for the future.

He said the structure of organized labor was outmoded, asserting that unions were too fractured, small and poorly structured to contend with global corporations.

"The labor movement needs to confront these issues, but not in a backroom," Mr. Raynor said. "We're not the Kremlin. It's not like people don't know that our ability to protect American workers has been weakened. We have to turn that around, and to some degree that debate has to be done publicly."

Well, it's public now. Andy Stern posted his demands on the SEIU website, then sent them in the form of a letter to the 54 members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council along with a threat: if the organization doesn't change to suit the times, he's ready to pull his 1.6 million members out of the AFL-CIO.

Unite To Win

American workers are at a crossroads.

For generations, America was a land of opportunity. When working people united our strength and spoke with one voice, we were able to create the broadest middle class in the world. Many people could support a family by working one job, not two or three, and together we won the security of affordable health care, paid time off, job training, a safe work place, and a pension on which you could retire with dignity.

Today, global corporations threaten American jobs, families, and the hopes of future generations. The middle class is shrinking, health care is becoming unaffordable, and guaranteed pensions are disappearing, yet corporate profits are booming and the rich are richer than at any time in history.

Yet now, when we need new strength and unity the most, working people find ourselves divided as never before. We are divided into union and nonunion as nearly 9 out of 10 workers are not part of the labor movement at all. We are divided within industries and employers as union members who do the same work often are divided into multiple unions that do not have a coordinated strategy. We are divided into a more unionized North where workers try to maintain hard-won gains, and an almost entirely nonunion South where employers can drive down standards virtually unchecked.

The need to adapt the labor movement for the 21st century has been discussed for years, but previous leaders failed to act, and workers paid the price. American workers cannot afford to wait any longer.

The reelection of President Bush creates new challenges for working people. We must be bold enough, strong enough, and courageous enough to give ourselves the best chance to win. To change workers' lives, union members must be involved in changing what is within our control, uniting our current strength, and then uniting millions more workers in each industry to grow stronger. That is essential to building a grassroots, democratic labor movement; taking on today's employers; and uniting a true pro-worker majority in this country.

American workers can win again, but only if we decide to act now. Our future is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.

At the top of Stern's list is the immediate taming of Wal-Mart.

1. Build New Strength by Stopping the "Wal-Marting" of Jobs

Good jobs are the foundation of strong and healthy families and communities. But today the Wal-Mart business model of providing low wages and few benefits, shifting jobs overseas to exploit workers under poverty conditions, and viciously opposing workers' freedom to form unions is setting a pattern that undermines good jobs for all working people at home and abroad.

Principle: A key function of the AFL-CIO should be to support a strategy to win good jobs in America that is larger than the members of any one union could accomplish on their own. The AFL-CIO should establish a center to support such projects and should allocate to the center all of its $25 million annual royalties from Union Plus credit card purchases. Challenging Wal-Mart should be its first project.

Regular readers of this site don't have to guess how we feel about that: we think Stern's exactly right and that it should have been done years ago before WM had a chance to dig itself so deeply into American communities. The WM model is destructive of everything the American Dream used to stand for and the leader in forcing a Race to the Bottom in wages and benefits: as long as they can get away with it, every corporation in the country is going to try to find a way to increase its profits by stripping its workers of their hard-won gains.

But an all-out campaign against WM's predatory labor practices is only the beginning. Stern has clearly been listening to his membership because #2 on his list is the issue I've been harping on continually for months: health care. It's the biggest expense we face and everybody's pulling out of doing anything about it, from the Bush Administration--which wants to pretend it's all because of 'frivolous lawsuits' so it can cap damage awards arising from shoddy and dangerous products sold by the corporations it works for--to employers who are focused merely on shifting more of the burden to their employees--preferably all of it, and getting out of the business of providing health care altogether. Emergency rooms are once again becoming our 'primary care provider' because we can't afford anything else. Stern seems to realize this:

2. Build New Strength by Leading a National Campaign for Quality Health Care for All

Out-of-control health care costs and declining quality have become one of the leading threats to every family in America. At any given time, 45 million people have no coverage at all, and even those that do see needed improvements in wages and other benefits undermined by the rising cost of health care. Health care costs are now a leading issue in virtually every strike or lockout.

Principle: The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions and allies should unite behind an all-out national strategy to win access to quality health care for all. The AFL-CIO should lead a grassroots campaign for this purpose with dedicated funding, campaign staff, and other necessary resources.

Furious at both his criticism of their methods and his challenge to re-structure their way of doing things, leaders of the old-style unions have blasted Stern's letter, and one oif them has even threatened to pull out of the AFL-CIO if Stern wins.

Mr. Stern's call for broad restructuring has fueled fierce divisions, even causing one union, the International Association of Machinists, to warn that it might quit the A.F.L.-C.I.O. if Mr. Stern prevails in his push to remake the federation.

Adding to the tensions, some labor leaders say that a close ally of Mr. Stern, John W. Wilhelm, the longtime president of the hotel workers' union, might challenge Mr. Sweeney, who is up for re-election next year.

In an interview, Mr. Wilhelm declined to say whether he would run against Mr. Sweeney, who says he will seek a new four-year term at the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s convention in July.

"We have to do things much differently in the labor movement because of all the challenges that we face," Mr. Wilhelm said. "Organized labor right now is obviously in trouble because we continue to decline as a percent of the work force."

Mr. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president, called today's meeting to discuss proposals to reshape the union movement and to assess labor's political efforts this fall.

He, too, sent a letter to labor leaders yesterday, saying that unions needed to reshape their movement "to better take on corporate America and win power for working families in today's economy." He added, "We should be big enough to discuss our different positions with respect for each other and without restoring to an 'us against them' stance."

Bush's election--and the inability of an all-out union effort to rule election day--has galvanized the labor movement in a way I've never seen in my lifetime. As Newt Gingrich's attempt to destroy PBS and NPR was the best thing to happen to them since their formation, energizing their audiences and involving them in saving public broadcasting, so may Junior's election prove to be a dynamic turning point in the history of the American Labor movement, forcing the changes that should have come 40 years ago and transforming Labor from a moribund movement in full retreat to an activist movement energizing and giving a much-needed structure to the Resistance.

After reading the letter and other material at SEIU's site, I must admit in the interests of full disclosure that I've just become an Andy Stern fan. I only wish I was going to be around to stick my 2 cents' worth in as the fight develops. But Jordan (Confined Space) and Nathan (Labor Blog) will no doubt be all over this like white-on-rice, so keep track with them.

If I don't see you again: Keep The Faith.

Eric suggested a PayPal button for donations. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered doing that. I have.

Like a lot of Americans--a lot of people, probably--I have 'issues' about money that I've never resolved. I'm profoundly schizophrenic about it. On the one hand, I like having it. It makes things a lot easier. I feel more human with some than I do when I don't have any. On the other hand, if you're not careful, it can take over awful quick. The burgeoning commercialism on the net is a prime example. I surf a lot of sites with so many ads the page takes 2 or 3 minutes to load. They're not horrendously intrusive in the blogosphere, as a rule, but they're a sign of what's coming. I've seen it before.

As a couple of you know, I've been on the verge of starting a couple of online magazines. One of them, devoted to humor, was going to be an experiment in pay-blogs. I was going to charge a small fee ($2) to view each month's issue and $6 for a year's subscription, and put ads on every page. I hoped to make only enough to pay for the site at first, but if it worked, to pay the writers who contributed just like a real litmag would.

That. to me, is how commercialism ought to work: up front, this is what you're getting and this is what it will cost. That ought to be separate from sites like the Alley and Dispatch. I never wanted those to be about money.

So when the shit hit the fan this summer, it occurred to me that just this once, maybe, I should ask for donations to pay the phone bill. I went round and round about it and basically stalled as long as I could believe that the work would come back before we got to the termination point. But it didn't and now I'm there and I have to stop ducking it and make a decision.

As of the time I wrote this, I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that as much as it hurt to stop doing this and give up this aspect of the battle, maybe it was time to move on. Bush won, and that means the next few years are going to be a long struggle dedicated pretty much to survival. I won't stop writing. I can't. I've tried and I hate myself when I'm not working. Everybody else hates me, too. I'm a bear--short-tempered, irritable, unhappy all the time and liable to snap at the slightest provocation. But I have projects sitting in my computer that I have stolen time from to do this. A hiatis, I thought, might be just what's needed here.

On the other hand (can you tell I'm bi-polar?), Bush won. That means that the next four years need as many of us plugging away as possible. Despite all the weaknesses of the internet in general and blogs in particular, this format holds the greatest promise of citizen-participation on a mass scale, and I'd hate for money to be the reason I'm not part of it. That somehow seems like handing them another victory: take away our money and you shut us up. See? Like Olsen said before the SCOTUS, 'Money is free speech.'

Last night the thought of being forced to stop this meant I was allowed to work on the book more regularly. After all, there are tons of good sites out there--I've even helped call attention to some of them--and the loss of this one is nothing in the Grand Scheme. You'll just move on to others that are (almost) as well-written (WARNING: ego-plug) and a lot more informative. Of opinion and analysis, there is so much that you could read 24/7 and still not scratch the surface. No single one of us is that critical to the effort. If one goes down, there are thousands more to take its place. And that's as it should be.

But today, it means Bush gets what he wants. Fuck 'im.

So--a compromise. I put a PayPal donation button at Reality Check. I put it there because it will go straight to my Verizon account (I think....). If enough comes in to keep the phone line from being shut down, then the Alley will stay in business and continue its snarky, sarcastic, standing-on-a-soapbox-and-screaming-at-the-top-of-its-lungs ways, and Dispatch will keep sniping at the corporations, reminding people that there is a class war and they're losing it, and standing up any way it can for the ones nobody cares about. If it doesn't, we move on and no hard feelings.

If you click the boot, it will take you to the page at Reality Check where the PayPal button is.

I'll keep my fingers crossed. And thank you.

The Awful Truth

Bush won this election not by pandering to the religious right, although that certainly helped, nor did he win by lying about his record, although that was critical. He won by playing Commander-in-Chief on tv.

The election, as the 'Sad American' letter tends to show, was about what everybody said it was going to be about for months: national security. Rove had Junior and His Snarling Veep Road Show play every conceivable variation on the Theme from Fear: The Movie in every key precinct in every swing state, sometimes so often that Bush could probably have called everybody in his limited, loyalty-oath-sanctioned crowds by their first names. Over and over: Kerry won't protect you, Kerry is indecisive, Kerry doesn't understand this is a war, Kerry wants to hand your security over to the UN, Kerry wants to ask Europe's permission to protect the nation, and on and on and on like a broken record, the same phrases, the same lines, the same lame gags.

Look at the convention. There was no talk about 'values' or the gay marriage amendment or prayer in schools. There wasn't even all that much talk of religion except in carefully couched, coded language. What did they talk about? What words were repeated endlessly by every speaker, particularly Giuliani? Terror. Terrorist. Terror. Fear. Attack. Terrorists. Destruction. Fear. Destroy. Weapons of mass destruction. Terror.

That's not an appeal to 'values', it's an appeal to fear. it's the commodity they were selling and they sold it like any other product: repetition, repetition, repetition. Every other word out of their mouths was Terror or Terrorist, every other sentence was about how unsafe we were. Thankfully, Rove had Bush dump the idea of wearing his uniform to accept the nomination but it was a close call.

Yes, I think the election was stolen in the key states of Florida--where the massive irregularities we should have expected are just now beginning to surface--New Mexico, and, of course, Ohio, but if Kerry could have won the election in the EC, he still would have lost the popular vote even with legitimate recounts, and that's the Awful Truth here. In order to understand what really happened, we have to look more closely at the exit polls. We have been blinded by the '80% of the people who voted on values voted for Bush'. 80% is a lot, or so it seems. But only 22% of the respondents voted on values. That's 4/5 of 1/5, or about 16% give or take. That's lower than in the last election. With 84+% of voters giving different reasons, I don't see how anyone can make a case that it was 'values' that swung it.

In writing we would call 'values' a sub-plot in this election: important but not the dominant theme. The dominant theme was clearly the one Bush ran on: We're at War. Support Your Commander-in-Chief in a Time of War. That's what his cheerleader stump speech centered on, that's what Cheney's dour warning stump speech centered on, and that was what the vast majority of the B/C ads centered on. It was a bald-faced play to the guilt over Viet Nam and the angry cries of conservatives that the nation had been cowardly in turning its back on Nixon, in withdrawing its support of the troops. They lost that battle because Viet Nam was a tv charnel house, a bloody, unforgiving war with no redeeming features and a purpose that was a fantasy: the Domino Theory was a crock, and by 1972 everybody knew it. It was an unsupportable war undertaken for specious reasons that no one could explain or understand, and conservatives have been fuming about it ever since.

To some degree, the First Gulf War was a scam, a show meant to finally relieve the nation's guilt over Nam by letting us cheer for our boys again. It would have worked, too, for most of us, but not the hard-line ultra-conservatives and the neocons. They were furious that Poppy had refused to finish the job. But Poppy understood what they didn't: it was a Show, and when the Show is over, you let the actors and the audience go home. On the other hand, Karl understood what Poppy didn't: you don't call the Show off too far in advance of your re-election; you keep the audience entertained right up to the time they vote, because then they'll vote for you. Give them a few months to think about it and they might not. Once the Show is over, the actors are just actors again.

Viet Nam cut deep. Up to then we had never lost a war, we had never had to face either our naivete or our arrogance, we had never had to admit we wrong. Viet Nam turned the whole of America--or the large part of it that never came to terms with the travesty that was Nam--into the South after the Civil War when the humiliation of a loss that couldn't be borne was borne by translating it into resentment and an itch for revenge. Some of us simply refused to believe that Viet Nam was the hellhole it was or that the Domino Theory was crap or that 50,000 men had basically died for nothing or that the America of WW II, the Savior of the World, could sometimes act like a tyrannical overlord, or that uncle you have who only visits for a few hours on Christmas and spends the whole time explaining in great detail how each member of the rest of the family should live.

It wasn't a pretty picture and we didn't like ourselves very much, so we decided not to believe it. Maybe that wouldn't have been so bad, but we also decided to get even for it, and that is. The Viet Nam War encapsulated for a lot of people the whole messy time: the rejection of the previous generation's dreams of material success; the attacks on cherished traditions, thousands of years old, from the place of Woman (in the home, needless to say) to civil rights to drugs and rock'n'roll; the blithe indifference of a generation of plenty for the skinflint fears of a generation that lived through the Great Depression. Viet Nam wrapped it all up in a neat bundle.

There are two great underlying traumas in American life that we have steadfastly refused to deal with no matter how many chances we had. One is race, and the other is Viet Nam. We have treated both of them like malformed cousins we let out of the closet once a year but if anybody sees us together, we say, like Peter, 'What? Him? No, no relation to me. Uh-uh, no. Never saw him before in my life. Ugly little bastard, isn't he?' Instead of taking our medicine like grown-ups and admitting we weren't perfect and maybe even had a flaw or two we needed to work on, we buried the kid back in the closet and then went about our business as if he didn't exist.

The result is the Bush Cult. At root it feeds and feeds on these insecurities and guilt in the most effective way: it tells us there's nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to think about it, we didn't do anything wrong, and anyway it's somebody else's fault. The USS Lincoln flight accomplished exactly what it was supposed to: it cemented Bush in our minds as our C-in-C. We didn't know it was a stunt because we didn't want to know it was a stunt; we wanted to believe it, to believe in him. All those sycophantic Republican women oohing and aahing about his 'package' and how sexy he was should have told us clued us in--whatever else George W Bush may be, a matinee idol he ain't. He looked near-ridiculous in the suit, like a little kid playing dress-up, but it served its purpose.

We voted for Bush--and Nixon and Reagan and even, to a certain extent, Clinton--because we desperately wanted somebody to tell us it was alright. The very intensity of the right-wing's 'For gawd's-sake, get over it already!' response when we mentioned the eerie similarities between Nam and Iraq told us how sick they were of feeling guilty about it. We voted for Bush, in short, because he was the one who had finally shown us the 'package' we'd been waiting for, a 30-year wait: Not only wasn't Viet Nam wrong, it was the right policy and we shouldn't have flinched and here's the guy who going to prove it in Iraq. We were right all along.

And so exactly the same mistake is made all over again in order to prove that the first mistake wasn't a mistake at all.

But it was, and so is this one.

Reality has hit. Hard.

I wanted to say good-bye to everyone who has been so kind to me here, and to all the visitors who, I hope, got their money's worth (how could you not? it's free) over the past year both here and at Omnium before I vanish into the ether from whence I came.

The fact is that I have been struggling along on part-time work since June, rarely more than two days a week, and it doesn't look like the work is coming back any time soon. Three or four times in the last year and a couple this summer I have been in the same spot, but something always happened to pull me out--a couple of extra days' work, somebody buying something I was selling, my vacation pay--and as long as I had hope I hung in there. But this time it's different.

Barring a minor miracle, the phone company is going to shut off my service sometime this week, maybe tomorrow. I have nothing left to sell and no one left to borrow money from. I was hoping for just two extra days of work in the last two weeks and I could have staved this off but it wasn't there. Rumors of lay-offs are flying around, and it would hardly be surprising at this point. We've lost two huge accounts since June to companies in the South with lower labor costs and apparently haven't been able to replace them. Maybe it will get better, maybe it won't. I've tried to find other work but there isn't much for a 50+-year-old man without a college degree. Businesses aren't coming into this area, they're leaving--for the South, Indonesia, Borneo for all I know. It's an old story now. I'm not the first one this has happened to and god knows, with W back in charge, I won't be the last.

I hope you learned something now and again--I learned tons from you--and that you usually enjoyed whatever time you spent here.

To the friends I made here--Peter and Seattle and briank and eagle2 and Kathy and eRobin and Nick and Eric and all the rest of you--I'm going to miss you like hell. Hopefully this will be temporary, a few months away while I re-group. I hope so, but you never know--there's a Bush in the White House and I always seem to be scratching to survive whenever that happens. In any case, I didn't want to just disappear without telling you what you've meant to me.

I felt for years as if I was a lonelier and lonelier voice shouting into the wind. I watched the union workers I grew up with go for Nixon and Reagan; I saw my country making a hard right that it seemed everybody I knew either ignored or dismissed as unimportant; I watched people who had been hippies and counter-culturists and peaceniks and fighters against corporate power over democracy turn into their exact opposites: suits and investors, going for the gold the first time it winked at them. I watched most of my generation turn its back on everything it said it believed, and heard it stop talking about peace and justice and start talking incessantly about stock portfolios and earnings indexes. We had changed the world--we thought--only to run back to the safety of the very world we said we wanted to leave behind.

It wasn't until I got online that I discovered that not everyone had abandoned their beliefs to beef up their bank accounts. That's not fair, I suppose, but I have met people here who manage to make a living without turning their backs on those who can't, without swallowing the corporate line like a happy-pill. People who still talk about peace and justice as if they're important, still fight for something beyond themselves and their immediate families, so I know that all the excuses I heard over the years for why it couldn't be done were bullshit.

I came online angry and cynical, and I'd be lying if I said I was leaving any other way. I'm still angry, still cynical, still snorting and pawing at the ground. But there is a difference: I came online with little hope that anything would change. I leave it, thanks especially to Kath and Rob, with some hope that the spirit I thought was dead is still alive, still breathing, still chipping away at that brick wall. Hope is a gift, and you have all given me some of that. I may remain a dour old fart, a black-hearted Scot with a perpetual cloud over his head and an evil eye, but I also have the gift of a small window opened where the sun never used to shine, and there's a little more light and a fresh breeze coming through it that wasn't there before. For that gift, I thank you. I'll try not to spend it all in one place.

As my parting gift--unfortunately, it's all I have--I've completely redesigned The Annex. Now called Reality Check, it looks better, it's easier to navigate, and only the stuff that's still relevant is included. It isn't done, of course, but I'll be adding new stuff right up to the time I can't any more. I hope you find it useful and/or informative. I only wish it could be more.

This is my last word about this. I'll post as usual until the line goes down. Good luck in the trying, testing days ahead, and remember: if a cynical, embittered old man thinks there's still reason to hope, then there must be. We're always the last to believe, and we always demand proof. Look around you. The proof is here.

Now here's an idea--Howard Dean replacing Terry McAuliffe as head of the DNC.

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party.

"He told me he was thinking about it," Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor's failed presidential bid.

Dean was traveling Monday in New York and unavailable for comment. His spokeswoman, Laura Gross, said "it was far too early to be speculating on that."

The roughly 240 members of the DNC will elect a new chair early next year. Several names are being mentioned, including former Clinton aide Harold Ickes; Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's presidential campaign; and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

Grossman said it is not too soon for Democrats to focus on their future leadership.

Grossman said that if Dean were to run for DNC chair, he would need to pledge that he would serve the full four-year term, thus ruling out a presidential bid in 2008.

High price to pay, but who better to break the stanglehold of the DLC? And that's going to be critical for '08, assuming there's an election.

Ooo, Ive got goosebumps.

Inspired by Supersize Me!, the LAT's Patrick Goldstein tried an experiment: he stopped reading left-wing newspapers and listening to traitorous liberal network NPR and watching the destructive secular-humanist programming on PBS and devoted himself entirely to Fox for one week--election week. He discovers in the process a number of things he didn't know, like about Kerry, like for instance that he had 'aligned' his positions with France and China; that he lives in a posh neighborhood inside another posh neighborhood; and some other things non-Kerry-related, like for instance that all the female reporters on Fox are blonde.

Monday, Nov. 1, election eve:

8: 15 a.m. My doctor says I'm in fantastic shape. My blood pressure is 111/64. My cholesterol is 108. My glucose level is 77. He checks my testosterone level. The normal range is 240 to 830. I'm a tad low, but pretty good for a liberal. My doctor chuckles darkly: "Let's see what happens to that number after a few straight days of 'Hannity and Colmes.' "

9:09 a.m. It's early, but today's Fox News theme is clear: pump up Bush, dump on Kerry. News anchor David Asman grills Democratic party strategist Tad Devine on why "we continue to hear from Kerry the stuff about Tora Bora and how we allowed Osama bin Laden to get away and yet he's on record when that took place saying he wouldn't do anything different from what George W. Bush did." When Devine disputes that, Asman jumps in: "He didn't say that in December 2001 ... "

Devine: "Yes he did."

Asman: "No he didn't. I can quote him."

Devine: "You can pull out part of what he said ... "

Asman: (waving papers in the air) "I'm looking at the whole transcript!"

10:04 a.m. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans appears, offering a tribute to guess who: "I've known the president for 39 years and I can tell you this is a man that has a big heart and a great mind who wakes up every morning thinking about you."

10:49 a.m. A Fox News update from Martha MacCallum. I make a note: Every female Fox News reporter I've seen so far is a blond. Coincidence or conspiracy?

6:07 p.m. Sean Hannity asks presidential brother Jeb Bush what might possibly be the easiest question he's gotten in 15 years: "We now have discovered the Democrats were out polling the position for John Kerry on Bin Laden," says Hannity. "What are your thoughts?"

6:59 p.m. Molly Henneberg reports from the battleground state of Ohio. (If you're keeping score — another blond.)

7:26 p.m. A catfight breaks out between political analysts Susan Estrich and the very conservative (and very blond) Laura Ingraham. Ingraham says that when people go to vote they'll realize "if they support Kerry, they're aligning themselves with the people of France ... and China ... and you heard Osama bin Laden try to interject himself...."

Estrich: "I think what Laura is doing now is really destructive. People are sick of this kind of garbage...." I think it is time to check my blood pressure.

A small and probably temporary victory on Gitmo came about yesterday when a District Court judge called a halt to the trials on account of rain because they were un-Constitutional. Can't see why a little thing like that ought to get in the way of prosecuting bin Laden's limo driver as a terrorist, but Judge James Robertson did. Spoil-sport.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 8 - A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.

The ruling by Judge James Robertson of United States District Court in Washington brought an abrupt halt to the trial here of one detainee, one of hundreds being held at Guantánamo as enemy combatants. It threw into doubt the future of the first set of United States military commission trials since the end of World War II as well as other legal proceedings devised by the administration to deal with suspected terrorists.

The administration reacted quickly, saying it would seek an emergency stay and a quick appeal.

Judge Robertson ruled against the government in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan who is facing terrorism charges. Mr. Hamdan's lawyers had asked the court to declare the military commission process fatally flawed.

This ruling would be what you might call 'belaboring the obvious' in any democracy in the civilized world. Not in the First Empire, though. The Emperor is reportedly furious that he has been denied his pound of flesh, and Department of Injustice Factotum Mark Corallo, Ashcroft's own, personal Ari Fleischer, responded by declaring the Constitution void during the emergency represented by the fact that bin Laden has a car and--worse--somebody to drive it for him.

Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement, "The process struck down by the district court today was carefully crafted to protect America from terrorists while affording those charged with violations of the laws of war with fair process, and the department will make every effort to have this process restored through appeal."

Mr. Corallo said, "By conferring protected legal status under the Geneva Conventions on members of Al Qaeda, the judge has put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war."

Bur Judge Robertson replied that Factotum Corallo was missing the point.

In the 45-page ruling, the judge said the administration had ignored a basic provision of the Geneva Conventions, the international treaties signed by the United States that form the basic elements of the laws governing the conduct of war.

The conventions oblige the United States to treat Mr. Hamdan as a prisoner of war, the judge said , unless he goes before a special tribunal described in Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention that determines he is not. A P.O.W. is entitled to a court-martial if there are accusations of war crimes but may not be tried before a military commission.

The United States military did not conduct Article 5 tribunals at the end of the Afghanistan war, saying they were unnecessary. Government lawyers argued that the president had already used his authority to deem members of Al Qaeda unlawful combatants who would be deprived of P.O.W. status.

But Judge Robertson, who was nominated to be on the court by President Bill Clinton, said that that was not enough. "The president is not a panel," he wrote. "The law of war includes the Third Geneva Convention, which requires trial by court-martial as long as Hamdan's P.O.W. status is in doubt."

In other words, the Emperor's unilateral dictum wasn't legal. His High-and-Mightiness had ignored a treaty signed by one of his predecessors in Ancient Times. Not to worry, though. The Supreme Court Patsies will doubtless once more throw their previous passionate beliefs out the window in order to bow to the Emperor's latest tantrum edict, and we will soon again be safe from predatory chaffeurs with lead feet.

All Hail the Mighty Emperor Bush I!

Having lost the first round of their attempt to inject creationism into the school science curriculum in place of evolution, the Xtian right next demanded that the Cobb County, Georgia, School Board put disclaimers on all the biology books that described evolution as a 'theory' and encouraged students to look elsewhere for answers. That effort has now been challenged. Six parents, with the help of the ACLU, are taking the School Board to court to force the removal of the disclaimers.

Cobb County schools needed new biology books.

The textbook selection committee chose books recommended by the state. The books included concepts about evolution, a widely accepted scientific theory. The committee, working in March 2002, told the school board to buy nearly $8 million worth.

Enter Marjorie Rogers, a parent for whom evolution is a theory that doesn't fly.

Her 2,300-signature petition decrying "Darwinism, unchallenged" prompted the school system to put evolution disclaimers on the inside front cover of the science books used in middle and high schools. And that, in turn, prompted another group of parents to file a federal lawsuit with potentially national implications.

Arguments start Monday before U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper in Atlanta in a case that could stir comparisons to the 1925 trial in Dayton, Tenn., when John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution.

The trial is expected to raise these questions:

• Is Intelligent Design, a leading alternate theory espoused by many opponents of evolution, religious? Intelligent Design holds that the variety of life on Earth results from a purposeful design rather than random mutation and that a higher intelligence guides the process.

• And, if the theory is found to be religious, do Cobb's disclaimers, which don't mention religion or Intelligent Design by name, violate the separation between church and state?

Six parents have sued the Cobb school system over the disclaimers, which read, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

Filed in August 2002, the parents' lawsuit is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. It contends that the placement of the disclaimers restricts the teaching of evolution, promotes and requires the teaching of creationism and Intelligent Design and discriminates against particular religions.

The school system, Georgia's second-largest with more than 102,000 students, contends the disclaimers in science books do nothing more than promote "respectful discourse that is going to naturally arise," said system attorney Linwood Gunn.

Some people don't want the system to "teach evolution as dogma or force people to choose between evolution and dogma," Gunn said.

Gunn's attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed were turned down by Cooper in a series of rulings this year.

They will never quit, these people. They want their religion taught as 'science' and even the courts can't stop them. Like all conservatives who think changing the image of a fact changes the fact itself, they think designating it 'Intelligent Design' somehow dodges the separation of church and state rules--if you don't use the word 'god' or the word 'religion' in describing it, then it isn't religious.

I don't think Judge Cooper is going to buy that specious line of reasoning, so look for him to be attacked the next time he's up for election. They'll call him an 'activist judge' and claim he's 'taking the law into his own hands' and 'twisting the Constitution' in order to illegally remove Xtians' right to worship as they please. See, if society doesn't bow to their beliefs, then society is preventing them from believing. It's an ugly argument only a bigot could love, but it's all theirs.

The pigs are already lining up at the Admin trough:

WASHINGTON — Lobbyists for the nation's leading business groups have been toasting the success of what they describe as an unprecedented effort this year to help elect President Bush and Republican congressional candidates. Now they plan to collect on that investment.

"With his victory and better numbers in the Senate and the House, we hope we would get to some things we believe are long overdue," said Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors and a leader of this year's effort to mobilize the business community behind the Bush candidacy.

Business was generally pleased with the first four years under Bush, but Tuesday's victory now brings within grasp some of the things it was unable to secure in his first term.

The list, according to interviews with lobbyists and trade associations, includes making tax cuts for capital gains and dividends permanent, limiting liability lawsuits, changing bankruptcy laws and opening previously restricted land in Alaska and elsewhere for energy exploration.

Business groups also count on more narrow shifts, such as changing health insurance rules in a way that benefits some of the GOP's most ardent allies, easing corporate government reform measures at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and making specific adjustments to the tax code.

Assembling interest group wish lists and agendas is a postelection rite in Washington, a modern-day spoils system in action. For businesses, spending time and money on a campaign is a practical and tactical decision, literally an investment.

And so it begins. The Boys have come to collect.

I argued recently, both here and at RANDOM THOUGHTS, that ignorance was a huge part of why Bush won. Bob Herbert makes the care far better than I could.

The so-called values issue, at least as it's being popularly tossed around, is overrated.

Last week's election was extremely close and a modest shift in any number of factors might have changed the outcome. If the weather had been better in Ohio. ...If the wait to get into the voting booth hadn't been so ungodly long in certain Democratic precincts. ... Or maybe if those younger voters had actually voted. ...

I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.

This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.

The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, "It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him."

I haven't heard any of the postelection commentators talk about ignorance and its effect on the outcome. It's all values, all the time. Traumatized Democrats are wringing their hands and trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who have arrogantly claimed the moral high ground and can't stop babbling about their self-proclaimed superiority. Potential candidates are boning up on new prayers and purchasing time-shares in front-row-center pews.

A more practical approach might be for Democrats to add teach-ins to their outreach efforts. Anything that shrinks the ranks of the clueless would be helpful.