Christmas or Winter Holiday?

Writing for Slate, Michelle Goldberg says that Christmas is doing just fine and implies that anyone who thinks the holiday is under attack is buying into a conspiracy theory - either one from 1958 put forth by the John Birch Society or an older one ascribed to by Henry Ford. The John Birch theory was that the UN was going to replace all of the signs fo Christmas with secular UN symbols. Ford worried about the influence of the International Jew.

[...] one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. (The operative Supreme Court precedent is 1984's Lynch v. Donnelly, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city-sponsored Christmas display including a crèche, reindeer, a Christmas tree, candy-striped poles and a banner that read "Seasons Greetings" was permissible. "The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday," the majority wrote. "These are legitimate secular purposes.") Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

In fact, if you search the ACLU's web site for "Christmas" you find several press releases about the ACLU standing up for people's rights to celebrate.

Goldberg goes on to say:

In order to prove this conspiracy, Gibson, O'Reilly and others like them gather anecdotes from around the country of officials putting petty restrictions on the speech of aggrieved Christians. Some of these are exaggerated, some legitimate, but none support their paranoid claims of a vast secular-humanist conspiracy.

So is it all overstated? Just a few incidents pulled from across the country? I don't think so. Here is Columbus, Ohio both the official city and state trees are "Holiday Trees". Here is the official press release for the City's tree lighting.

By tradition, the busy elves at Columbus Recreation and Parks annually produce the City Hall Holiday Display and Tree Lighting Ceremony for the citizens of Columbus. City Hall Square is aglow with thousands of miniature white lights that accentuate the city’s holiday tree and seasonal display. The ceremony features a performance from the Columbus Children’s Choir, and culminates with the Mayor, City Council, and friends throwing the “official” switch, signaling Santa Claus' grand arrival.

Join Columbus City Officials at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 29, at City Hall as they kick off the holiday season with the lighting of the City Hall Holiday Tree. This annual tradition unites Columbus residents in recognition of the season of giving and celebrates the efforts of the Columbus business community to make downtown your family's destination for the holidays. City Hall is located at Broad and Front Streets with parking nearby

So in Columbus, at least, it is a "Holiday Tree". The state house banished Christmas years ago. I remember an attempt at bringing people downtown in the mid-1990s. They had a stage show, displays, and light effects that projected a train onto the state house while projecting candles onto the pillars. A candle was as close as they got to any traditional Christmas symbol and the word itself was never spoken.

Even further back my sister-in-law, a Columbus school teacher, said that they had been told not to call it a "Christmas break". She said that the teachers were singing "We wish you a merry winter holiday...".

When she was in grade school, my daughter came home with a song about Chirstmas and Hanukah being the same, "they're both the winter holiday".

As Goldberg points out, none of this is required. Public officials simply think that they have to act this way. They think so because the ACLU does in fact try to eliminate a lot of Christmas trapings from public life. The Canada Free Press says:

The good news is that the ACLU has backed down and has lost some of its legal cases to eliminate "Christmas" from our vocabulary. In August of this year, the Bossier Parish School District in Louisiana shut down an ACLU attack, and in July a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that a woman who brought a suit against Christmas displays in Cranston, Rhode Island, had no standing to bring her claim. There are a score of other victories that the ADF has had throughout the nation.

None of these cases appear on the ACLU's own web site search. They cherry picked cases that make themselves look good and hide the others. Remember, this is an organization that has at least one full time employee devoted to removing religious symbols from municipal seals.

Then there is the corporate policy of stores such as Walmart and Target where employees are instructed to tell shoppers "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Walmart went a bit too far with this earlier this year when a search for "Christmas" on its web page informed you that you were being redirected to their "holiday page".

With the news media hitting us over the head with updates on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", you would think that the stores might want to remind you why you are giving them so much of your money.

With local examples so easy to find, an individual can be excused for thinking that there is some sort of attack on Christmas. Is it a conspiracy?

In order to qualify as a conspiracy the attack has to be planned and coordinated. I don't think that either condition exists.

What is happening instead is two separate but intertwined trends. The first is that there is an effort by secular liberals to remove religion from public spaces as much as possible. This includes the ACLU attacks on any sort of religious item in a municipal Christmas display. It also includes a genuine effort to be inclusive to non-Christians.

Mainly, though, it revolved around an attempt to emulate European-style secularism. In modern Europe any public display of religion is considered bad taste. The French claim that there, everyone is Catholic and no one believes (somehow this slogan misses the 10% muslum population).

These people ARE attacking parts of Christmas. It is not coordinated and most of them would deny that it is an attack.

The other trend at work is people trying to keep a low profile. In the Christmas version of zero-tollerance, they have decided that it is easest to eliminate all references to Christmas. This probably accounts for most of the assault on Christmas with the multi-culturists coming in second.

How ironic that it is people who are attempting to offend no one are offending lots of people.

On the bright side, Washington, DC just changed their tree back to a Christmas tree.

Christmas or Winter Holiday?

Writing for Slate, Michelle Goldberg says that Christmas is doing just fine and implies that anyone who thinks the holiday is under attack is buying into a conspiracy theory - either one from 1958 put forth by the John Birch Society or an older one ascribed to by Henry Ford. The John Birch theory was that the UN was going to replace all of the signs fo Christmas with secular UN symbols. Ford worried about the influence of the International Jew.

[...] one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. (The operative Supreme Court precedent is 1984's Lynch v. Donnelly, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city-sponsored Christmas display including a crèche, reindeer, a Christmas tree, candy-striped poles and a banner that read "Seasons Greetings" was permissible. "The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday," the majority wrote. "These are legitimate secular purposes.") Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

In fact, if you search the ACLU's web site for "Christmas" you find several press releases about the ACLU standing up for people's rights to celebrate.

Goldberg goes on to say:

In order to prove this conspiracy, Gibson, O'Reilly and others like them gather anecdotes from around the country of officials putting petty restrictions on the speech of aggrieved Christians. Some of these are exaggerated, some legitimate, but none support their paranoid claims of a vast secular-humanist conspiracy.

So is it all overstated? Just a few incidents pulled from across the country? I don't think so. Here is Columbus, Ohio both the official city and state trees are "Holiday Trees". Here is the official press release for the City's tree lighting.

By tradition, the busy elves at Columbus Recreation and Parks annually produce the City Hall Holiday Display and Tree Lighting Ceremony for the citizens of Columbus. City Hall Square is aglow with thousands of miniature white lights that accentuate the city’s holiday tree and seasonal display. The ceremony features a performance from the Columbus Children’s Choir, and culminates with the Mayor, City Council, and friends throwing the “official” switch, signaling Santa Claus' grand arrival.

Join Columbus City Officials at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 29, at City Hall as they kick off the holiday season with the lighting of the City Hall Holiday Tree. This annual tradition unites Columbus residents in recognition of the season of giving and celebrates the efforts of the Columbus business community to make downtown your family's destination for the holidays. City Hall is located at Broad and Front Streets with parking nearby

So in Columbus, at least, it is a "Holiday Tree". The state house banished Christmas years ago. I remember an attempt at bringing people downtown in the mid-1990s. They had a stage show, displays, and light effects that projected a train onto the state house while projecting candles onto the pillars. A candle was as close as they got to any traditional Christmas symbol and the word itself was never spoken.

Even further back my sister-in-law, a Columbus school teacher, said that they had been told not to call it a "Christmas break". She said that the teachers were singing "We wish you a merry winter holiday...".

When she was in grade school, my daughter came home with a song about Chirstmas and Hanukah being the same, "they're both the winter holiday".

As Goldberg points out, none of this is required. Public officials simply think that they have to act this way. They think so because the ACLU does in fact try to eliminate a lot of Christmas trapings from public life. The Canada Free Press says:

The good news is that the ACLU has backed down and has lost some of its legal cases to eliminate "Christmas" from our vocabulary. In August of this year, the Bossier Parish School District in Louisiana shut down an ACLU attack, and in July a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that a woman who brought a suit against Christmas displays in Cranston, Rhode Island, had no standing to bring her claim. There are a score of other victories that the ADF has had throughout the nation.

None of these cases appear on the ACLU's own web site search. They cherry picked cases that make themselves look good and hide the others. Remember, this is an organization that has at least one full time employee devoted to removing religious symbols from municipal seals.

Then there is the corporate policy of stores such as Walmart and Target where employees are instructed to tell shoppers "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Walmart went a bit too far with this earlier this year when a search for "Christmas" on its web page informed you that you were being redirected to their "holiday page".

With the news media hitting us over the head with updates on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", you would think that the stores might want to remind you why you are giving them so much of your money.

With local examples so easy to find, an individual can be excused for thinking that there is some sort of attack on Christmas. Is it a conspiracy?

In order to qualify as a conspiracy the attack has to be planned and coordinated. I don't think that either condition exists.

What is happening instead is two separate but intertwined trends. The first is that there is an effort by secular liberals to remove religion from public spaces as much as possible. This includes the ACLU attacks on any sort of religious item in a municipal Christmas display. It also includes a genuine effort to be inclusive to non-Christians.

Mainly, though, it revolved around an attempt to emulate European-style secularism. In modern Europe any public display of religion is considered bad taste. The French claim that there, everyone is Catholic and no one believes (somehow this slogan misses the 10% muslum population).

These people are attacking parts of Christmas. It is not coordinated and most of them would deny that it is an attack.

The other trend at work is people trying to keep a low profile. In the Christmas version of zero-tollerance, they have decided that it is easest to eliminate all references to Christmas. This probably accounts for most of the assault on Christmas with the multi-culturists coming in second.

How ironic that it is people who are attempting to offend no one are offending lots of people.

On the bright side, Washington, DC just changed their tree back to a Christmas tree.

Christmas or Holiday?

Writing for Slate, Michelle Goldberg says that Christmas is doing just fine and implies that anyone who thinks the holiday is under attack is buying into a conspiracy theory - either one from 1958 put forth by the John Birch Society or an older one ascribed to by Henry Ford. The John Birch theory was that the UN was going to replace all of the signs fo Christmas with secular UN symbols. Ford worried about the influence of the International Jew.

[...] one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel. Christmas trees are permitted in public schools. (They're considered secular symbols.) Nativity scenes are allowed on public property, although if the government erects one, it has to be part of a larger display that also includes other, secular signs of the holiday season, or displays referring to other religions. (The operative Supreme Court precedent is 1984's Lynch v. Donnelly, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city-sponsored Christmas display including a crèche, reindeer, a Christmas tree, candy-striped poles and a banner that read "Seasons Greetings" was permissible. "The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the Holiday and to depict the origins of that Holiday," the majority wrote. "These are legitimate secular purposes.") Students are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school. If the administration tries to stop them, the ACLU will step in to defend the students' free-speech rights, as they did in 2003 when teenagers in Massachusetts were suspended for passing out candy canes with Christian messages.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

In fact, if you search the ACLU's web site for "Christmas" you find several press releases about the ACLU standing up for people's rights to celebrate.

Goldberg goes on to say:

In order to prove this conspiracy, Gibson, O'Reilly and others like them gather anecdotes from around the country of officials putting petty restrictions on the speech of aggrieved Christians. Some of these are exaggerated, some legitimate, but none support their paranoid claims of a vast secular-humanist conspiracy.

So is it all overstated? Just a few incidents pulled from across the country? I don't think so. Here is Columbus, Ohio both the official city and state trees are "Holiday Trees". Here is the official press release for the City's tree lighting.

By tradition, the busy elves at Columbus Recreation and Parks annually produce the City Hall Holiday Display and Tree Lighting Ceremony for the citizens of Columbus. City Hall Square is aglow with thousands of miniature white lights that accentuate the city’s holiday tree and seasonal display. The ceremony features a performance from the Columbus Children’s Choir, and culminates with the Mayor, City Council, and friends throwing the “official” switch, signaling Santa Claus' grand arrival.

Join Columbus City Officials at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 29, at City Hall as they kick off the holiday season with the lighting of the City Hall Holiday Tree. This annual tradition unites Columbus residents in recognition of the season of giving and celebrates the efforts of the Columbus business community to make downtown your family's destination for the holidays. City Hall is located at Broad and Front Streets with parking nearby

So in Columbus, at least, it is a "Holiday Tree". The state house banished Christmas years ago. I remember an attempt at bringing people downtown in the mid-1990s. They had a stage show, displays, and light effects that projected a train onto the state house while projecting candles onto the pillars. A candle was as close as they got to any traditional Christmas symbol and the word itself was never spoken.

Even further back my sister-in-law, a Columbus school teacher, said that they had been told not to call it a "Christmas break". She said that the teachers were singing "We wish you a merry winter holiday...".

When she was in grade school, my daughter came home with a song about Chirstmas and Hanukah being the same, "they're both the winter holiday".

As Goldberg points out, none of this is required. Public officials simply think that they have to act this way. They think so because the ACLU does in fact try to eliminate a lot of Christmas trapings from public life. The Canada Free Press says:

The good news is that the ACLU has backed down and has lost some of its legal cases to eliminate "Christmas" from our vocabulary. In August of this year, the Bossier Parish School District in Louisiana shut down an ACLU attack, and in July a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that a woman who brought a suit against Christmas displays in Cranston, Rhode Island, had no standing to bring her claim. There are a score of other victories that the ADF has had throughout the nation.

None of these cases appear on the ACLU's own web site search. They cherry picked cases that make themselves look good and hide the others. Remember, this is an organization that has at least one full time employee devoted to removing religious symbols from municipal seals.

Then there is the corporate policy of stores such as Walmart and Target where employees are instructed to tell shoppers "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Walmart went a bit too far with this earlier this year when a search for "Christmas" on its web page informed you that you were being redirected to their "holiday page".

With the news media hitting us over the head with updates on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday", you would think that the stores might want to remind you why you are giving them so much of your money.

With local examples so easy to find, an individual can be excused for thinking that there is some sort of attack on Christmas. Is it a conspiracy?

In order to qualify as a conspiracy the attack has to be planned and coordinated. I don't think that either condition exists.

What is happening instead is two separate but intertwined trends. The first is that there is an effort by secular liberals to remove religion from public spaces as much as possible. This includes the ACLU attacks on any sort of religious item in a municipal Christmas display. It also includes a genuine effort to be inclusive to non-Christians.

Mainly, though, it revolved around an attempt to emulate European-style secularism. In modern Europe any public display of religion is considered bad taste. The French claim that there, everyone is Catholic and no one believes (somehow this slogan misses the 10% muslum population).

These people are attacking parts of Christmas. It is not coordinated and most of them would deny that it is an attack.

The other trend at work is people trying to keep a low profile. In the Christmas version of zero-tollerance, they have decided that it is easest to eliminate all references to Christmas. This probably accounts for most of the assault on Christmas with the multi-culturists coming in second.

How ironic that it is people who are attempting to offend no one are offending lots of people.

On the bright side, Washington, DC just changed their tree back to a Christmas tree.

Drip Drip Drip

It seems like everyday something bad happened in Iraq and made the front page. I never see good news, at least not as a headline. Last week some prominent Sunnis indicated that they want to stop fighting and join the government. That was a major story on MSNBC for about an hour then it was removed and appended at the end of a story about the most recent bombing.

I know that several operations have been conducted against insurgents but none of them has been covered since the original one a year ago. Here are accounts of a few recent operations.

The road to the Bagdad airport is finally safe. It made the news constantly when it was dangerous but no one has bothered to report that it is now safe. It gets mentioned in passing. This gem is in the middle of a Fareed Zakaria piece about Iraq in general:

To understand the change, look at the airport road to Baghdad. For two years, when reporters would ask how it was possible that the mightiest military in history could not secure a five-kilometer stretch of road, the military responded with long, jargon-filled lectures on the inherent weakness of long supply lines and the complex nature of Baghdad's urban topography. Then one day this summer the military was ordered to secure the road and use more troops if necessary. Presto. Using Iraqi forces, the road was secured. Similar strategies have made cities like Najaf, Mosul, Tall Afar and even Fallujah much safer today than they were a year ago.

No wonder public opinion keeps turning against the war.

I don't think that the MSM is specifically trying to turn the nation against the war. I think that they are trying to be fair in a very warped way.

When the war first began everyone had embedded reporters who fed back enthusiastic stories about their experiences with the military. Then came the backlash. The stories were true but they were not the whole story. Critics of the war complained that stories of military success do not address larger questions about the validity of the war.

So the reporting we are seeing now is a reaction to that critisism. The MSM does not want to be seen as cheering for the Bush administration so positive stories are ignored or buried at the end of negative stories. Every death, be it American or Iraqi, is front page news.

It is a constant drip of one bad thing after another. With no good news, the idea of a quagmire seems more and more likely.

Other reporting is being slanted. When I heard the first reports about Murtha's call to cut and run I was given the impression that he had been for the war and had switched position. In fact, he was never for the war. His miltary history and general conservative voting pattern was given but his positions on the war were glossed over. In fact, he was always against it. The only new part was his call to bring the troops home immediately.

Strangely, Bush's plan all along has been to build a stable, democratic government in Iraq and to bring home American troops as Iraqis can replace them. Suddenly this is being seen as a compromise.

A little honest reporting would be nice.

What Did New Orleans Do to Us?

From MSNBC.com:

New Orleans Times-Picayune writer Jarvis DeBerry opened his column Tuesday morning asking, “I wonder what New Orleans did to the rest of the country that makes them hate us so?”

“It's very insulting and condescending,” says DeBerry, “to suggest that New Orleans, because of our geography, is somehow not worth the effort that would be put into San Francisco, Miami or Chicago or Boston or any other great city.”

This is a childish statement. A child breaks his toy and asks for a new one. When the parent says no he starts crying, "You don't love me."

New Orleans is broken and they want the rest of the country to buy them a new city. That gives us a lot of say in the process and that's what they did to us - they asked for our money.

If a city is knocked down by an earthquake then the building codes are amended before replacements go up making the new buildings less suseptable to future events. The same is true for most flood plains. Once your house is flooded out you can collect flood insurance but you have to rebuild elsewhere (this isn't enforced often enough but that's another post). But New Orleans wants to do it just the same. The only difference is that they want us to build a bigger wall around the city.

Rebuilding is expensive. It is also expensive to build a levee that can handle anything. This is why they under-built the existing levees - bigger ones cost too much. Then there is maintenance on the levees. That adds millions per year in upkeep costs.

Plus there are the floodwalls along the canals. In retrospect these were a collosal mistake but current proposals are to repalce them with ones that have deeper pilings. This may or may not help. Since one major breech was caused by a barge hitting the wall, deeper pilings may not be much of a guarentee.

And all of this so that new houses can be built 25 feet below the water level on land that is sinking.

As long as it is someone else's money, I don't care. They can assume the risk and take the loss if there is more flooding. Once my money is involved, though, I get a say.

I've only seen a small portion of New Orleans - mainly the French Quarter and the Garden District. I have no attachment to the 9th Ward so to me, it is an obvious choice - move to higher ground.

That's not hate. It's just common sense.

New Orleans is Doomed (Maybe)

60 Minutes aired a segment on New Orleans that included some quotes from Tim Kusky, a professor of earth sciences at St. Louis University and a flood control expert. Kusky says that the Mississippi Delta is eroding so fast that the coastline will pass New Orleans before the end of the century leaving the city as a bowl in an ocean. His advise is to move the city.

“Because New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50- to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city,” explains Kusky.

He says the city will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico just 90 years from now.

“That’s the projection, because we are losing land on the Mississippi Delta at a rate of 25 to 30 square miles per year. That’s two acres per hour that are sinking below sea level,” says Kusky.

Note - locally a football game ran over and pre-empted the broadcast but the essentials are here.

Not everyone agrees. The Times-Picayune, which has a vested interest, has a story on its website that quotes rival scientists as disagreeing.

In an interview Monday, Kusky said his projection of the city becoming an island was “based on a statement made by the director of the U.S. Geological Survey” in 2000.

But University of Texas at Austin geology Professor Charles G. Groat, who was then director of the U.S. Geological Survey, flatly disagreed with Kusky’s conclusions.

Groat said Kusky relied on “an off-hand comment that has often been repeated” that was included in a University of New Orleans magazine piece that compared New Orleans to Atlantis.

“No, no, no,” Groat said of Kusky’s island image. “You’ve got a lot of things between the city of New Orleans and the edge of the sea, and they’re not going away.”

There are other things going on, also. The Mississippi naturally changes course regularly. The Army Corps of Engineers keeps changing it back. Otherwise, the Port of New Orleans would have been left landlocked decades ago.

In addition, in an effort to keep the river from silting up they built a channel that funels the river silt into the Gulf. This is a major cause for the erosion of the Delta. The natural silt that would replenish it no longer reaches it.

Some people have suggested a massive effort to restore the Delta or at least to slow the erosion. The problem is that this is means letting nature direct the river again and we are back to the river wandering.

All of this is in the future. In the present we have a city that only has minimal protection from major weather events. The levees are fairly solid but the floodwalls that line the canals are a disaster. It appears that they were built on unsuitable ground and were not properly monitored.

This was done because it was politically easier to build narrow walls than to build wide levees in residential neighborhoods. The floodwalls are not as strong, the ground they sit on turns marshy, and sub-surface water barriers were not effective.

Similarly, the 9th Ward exists in the first place because if was politically easier to build below the water level than to tell people to go elsewhere.

The same politics are pushing for New Orleans to be rebuilt just as it was. The problem is that this will cost a fortune. Politics in Washington may trump local politics.

I've said before, I think that many of New Orlean's poor would be better off elsewhere. New Orleans was just too poor for its population. Unemployment and crime were far higher than in the rest of the country.

To an outsider, it makes little sense to rebuild houses in a flood zone so that the residents can go back to living in poverty.

But you can't say this in New Orleans without someone calling you a racist.

Ohio's "Stolen" Election

On November 8, 2005, Ohio's state issue 1 passed and issues 2-5 failed. Issue 1 authorized the state to issue bonds and spend the money promoting jobs and technology. Issues 2-5 were voter reform measures being pushed by Democrats and MoveOn.org.

According to a recent article in the Columbus Free Press (and picked up by a poster for the Huffington Blog), the election was fixed. All of the issues actually passed. Their reasoning? A Columbus Dispatch poll published November 9 showed all of the issues passing and the Dispatch polls have a history of being the most accurate polls in Ohio.

What happened? According to Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, the state installed new voting machines in 44 counties (around half the state) and these were all controlled by Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell using hidden controls planted by the manufacturer, Diebold.

Their proof? The Dispatch poll.

And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling---dead accurate for Issue One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked by someone wanting to change the vote count.

Before we pronounce democracy as we know it dead, we need to examine the other possibility, that the Dispatch poll could have been wrong.

To do this, you need to know some background information on how the Dispatch poll works and how the campaigns were conducted. Fitrakis and Wasserman neglected to provide this. They simple take it as a given that the poll is always correct.

First, the Dispatch poll is mainly a mail-in poll. Most pollsters reject mail polls as inaccurate. The dispatch defends their methodology because the act of having to fill out and mail a poll tends to select only people who will actually vote. Also, their track record normally speaks for itself. Despite using a methodology that is considered dated and inaccurate, they are usually the most accurate poll in the state. No one has ever been able to fully explain it, not even the Dispatch.

The important thing here is that mail polls are slow. Phone polls are usually conducted over a day or two but a mail poll takes between ten to twenty days. That means that a large portion of the poll was being conducted early in October.

This is important because of how the campaign on issues 2-5 was conducted. The pro-passage people started getting their message out early. The first yard signs went up Labor Day weekend. TV ads started in late September.

In contrast, the anti-campaign was slow to organize. Their yard signs didn't go up until mid-October with their TV ads following.

Newspaper endorsements are usually handed out in reverse order. The most important races are endorsed last. The state issues were the only state-wide races so they came out in late October. No Ohio newspaper endorsed all of the issues and some, like the Dispatch, rejected 2-5 completely. This was featured in the last-minute anti ads.

The timing here is critical and unusual. For much of the period that the Dispatch was conducting its poll the pro-issue campaign was the only one running. Then at the last minute an effective anti-passage campaign was waged, after much of the Dispatch poll had been conducted.

There is an old truism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In this case, Fitrakis and Wasserman are claiming that the entire voting system of Ohio has been compromised but all they offer is a single poll. They did not make any effort to break down the poll results with the actual results and find a correlation with counties that got new voting machines. They didn't even quote any other polls nor did they examine the Dispatch poll methodology for possible errors.

That's because these two men are conspiracy mongers. Everywhere they look they see conspiracies. They knew as soon as the election results were posted that there must be a conspiracy involved. They looked for supporting evidence but they didn't look for opposing evidence nor did they examine their supporting evidence very closely.

Walmart & Christmas

Over the weekend a friend mentioned a controversy going on with Walmart. It seems that the Catholic League has a couple of objections to Walmart's policy of referring to Christmas as "the holidays". They instruct employees to wish customers "Happy Holidays" and if you do a search on "Christmas" on their web site it tells you that you are being re-directed to their holiday page. This does not happen if you search on Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. They complained and got this email reply.

Walmart is a world wide organization and must remain conscious of this. The majority of the world still has different practices other than "Christmas" which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism. The colors associated with "Christmas" red and white are actually a representation of the aminita mascera mushroom. Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world.

When they complained to Walmart headquarters, they got this reply from someone named Kirby:

"As a retailer, we recognize some of our customers may be shopping for Chanukah or Kwanza gifts during this time of year and we certainly want these customers in our stores and to feel welcome, just as we do those buying for Christmas. As an employer, we recognize the significance of the Christmas holiday among our family of associates and close our stores in observance, the only day during the year that we are closed."

The Catholic League called for a boycott. This has been resolved. Kirby was fired and the Walmart web site no longer re-directs you.

My friend was upset at the treatment that Kirby received since she felt that he was fired for telling the truth.

There are several issues here. First, should Kirby have been fired? Yes. Low level employees are never allowed to make up their own press releases on behalf of the company. The fact that this led to a boycott shows why.

Second point - is Walmart's "holiday" policy a good one? No, for several reasons. This is a company whose owners have made a selling point of their own Christianity. They refuse to carry some magazines and CDs and dictate a milder content for others on the basis of their faith. Customers know that they are dealing with a Christian company and should have come to terms with that.

Also, to most Christians, Christmas and Easter are the big two holidays. Hanukkah is a minor holiday. Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday at all. There is no reason that an African-American cannot celebrate both. Something like 99% of American-born blacks are Christian so even those who celebrate Kwanzaa should not be offended by a clerk wishing them a merry Christmas.

At the same time, Walmart is already pushing Christmas down our throats. The displays have been up since late October. There is no reason for an employee to be wishing anyone anything in November when all of the holidays in question are in late December.

My recommendation would be to give the regular "Thank you for shopping at Walmart" to anyone who was not specifically buying holiday-related merchandise and even then, wait until December.

Third Point - was the Catholic League justified in being upset? Yes. You just don't tell a religious leader that one of his major holidays is a bunch of pagan rituals.

Final Point - how much Kirby's history of Christmas was true? Not much. The date of Christmas came directly from the Roman Saturnalia. Any relationship with Siberia would be pretty strained. The main Christmas colors are red and green, not red and white. Red and green have roots in druidic beliefs but were incorporated into Christian symbolism as referring to Jesus and Mary by the middle ages. Red and white as Christmas colors come from candy canes. These were white until the 20th century when technology allowed them to be painted like a barber's pole The red there goes back to when barbers were also surgeons.

Santa is an American invention although he was inspired by St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children and Holland (so Dutch children got treats on St. Nicholas Day). Mistletoe and yule logs are pagan but are also very tiny parts of Christmas. When was the last time you burned a true yule log - one big enough to burn for twelve days?

The funny thing is that in relating all of this, Kirby was making a case for how universal Christmas is.

Lying About Lying

Since the CIA leak investigation didn't produce much, Democrats took up the strategy of claiming that Bush lied. We hear it from them again and again. Bush lied. He distorted and cherry-picked intelligence. A well-written answer for that is here. The main point is that too many Democrats also said that Saddam was re-arming.

The current Democratic response is to say that Congress didn't have access to all intelligence. They only got a summary. While true, it does not explain why the Clinton administration was saying the same things as Bush.

So why are they doing this? The obvious reason is that they hope to cripple Bush politically. Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on why democrats who voted for the war have signed on to the Bush Lied campaign.

Because, as I've noted, Democratic politicians voted for the war, but their activist donor base opposes it. They're boxed in, and claiming that they were misled seems like a way for them to explain away the contradiction while going on the offensive against Bush.

But there is more to it than that. Yes, some democratic leaders in Congress seem to be forced to take this route but they are just going along with the MoveOn/Sheehan/Moore wing. These people really believe it.

Look at all of the things that this group accuses Bush of doing. While numerous sources are on record as saying that Saddam was re-arming, Bush knew otherwise then pushed the war, anyway.

According to these people, Bush decided to go to war with Iraq around 9/13/2001. Some even say that he decided to go to war sometime in 1999 in order to raise political capital. This is only one of the reasons given for the war. The real reason - that given Iraq's sponsorship of terrorism and use of WMDs, Saddam was too dangerous to stay in power in a post-9/11 world - is never even considered.

Instead we are told that Bush wanted to raise political capital, that he wanted to enrich Halliburton, that he was seeking revenge for a plot to kill his daddy, that he wanted to clean up the blot on his daddy's record (leaving Saddam in power), or that it was a private feud between the Bushes and Saddam.

These people look at everything that Bush does in the worst possible light. His tax cuts were not to stimulate the economy, they were just to benefit the rich (and no one but the rich). Standard reviews of new environmental actions are portrayed as rolling back existing regulations. I look at Bush's growing deficit and attribute it to a moderate who doesn't want to cause the pain that tight fiscal controls would induce. The anti-Bush crowd claims that he is trying to cripple the government's future by running up the deficit.

And world-wide terrorism is a response to Bush. Nevermind that planning for 9/11 started in 1998 or earlier.

Dr. Sanity has a good piece on this. It is his opinion that democrats are afraid of terrorists and are projecting their fears onto Bush as a defense mechanism.

Bush becomes the "criminal mastermind", so devious, so evil, that everything he says is a "lie", everything he does is part of a vast global conspiracy. His family has intimate ties to Bin Laden and the Saudis; He is trying to enrich his oil business friends; He is trying to avenge the insult to his father by getting rid of Saddam; He plans world domination etc. etc. I could go on an on, but you get the point.

There is probably something to this. He goes on to say:

What is most funny is that these psychologically naiive individuals simultaneously think of Bush as this "criminal mastermind"--a genius of evil; and also as a complete moron who isn't capable of uttering a sentence without making a hash of it; or that his brain is controlled by the equally evil Karl Rove.

That is why the CIA leak was so important to them. They were convinced that Rove would be arrested (preferably "frog-marched" out of the White House) and Bush would be denied his brain. Some of the more delusional also hoped that the probe would go onto include the entire run-up to the war but the big prize was always Rove. Don't forget that prominent democrats demanded his resignation as soon as Libby was arrested.

Dr. Sanity calls for democrats to act like adults and recognize the real threat. Too bad it's not going to happen. The democrats have already started their counter-attack. It boils down to ignoring any statements about Saddam made by the Clinton administration and insist that Bush manipulated what information Congress had access to. This may help the democrats but it hurts the country.

How Bad Was the Election?

The story I keep seeing on the news: Republicans lost two governor's races and all of Schwarzenegger's ballot initiatives lost. Bush's unpopularity is dragging down Republicans in general.

Here's a completely different spin;

Voters in California and Ohio voted down ballot initiatives seen as benefiting the minority party (in California they would have helped Republicans, in Ohio they would have helped Democrats). Ohio, a crucial swing-state, voted down issues two to one issues introduced in the wake of 2004's hard-fought election.

In other news, Democrats kept control of two governor's offices.

Sure looks different when you put it that way, doesn't it? Granted Ohio doesn't have a move star governor, but it is considered a swing state. If the issues had gone the other way I am sure that it would have been reported. After all, it could have affected control of Congress.

The MSM wrote their narrative before the first votes were cast. The election was yet another referendum on Bush so the only things that were reported were events that fit this narrative.

Believing Their Own Spin

At one point, Saddam had WMDs. These included poison gas, weaponized Anthrax, and a nuclear program that was close to producing atomic weaponry. After the Gulf war, he agreed to destroy these and UN weapons inspectors monitored his progress. Saddam kept making it harder for the inspectors to do their jobs, finally expelling them in 1998. It was universally assumed that this meant that he was re-arming. (Actually, he was trying to build long-range missiles which were also denied to him by the cease-fire agreement.)

When the Bush administration was making its case for war, they identified a number of reasons that Saddam should be overthrown but they decided to push the WMDs as the primary case (the Downing Street Memo referred to this a "fixing on WMDs".) At the time most prominent Democrats agreed. John Kerry told about going to the CIA and being personally assured that Saddam had WMDs.

The world assumed that Saddam had WMDs but the world was wrong. Saddam was convinced that the only thing that kept him safe from Iran was the threat of WMDs so he hinted that he still had them. Also, some expatriates from Iraq told stories about WMDs in order to incite an invasion.

The Democrats know this. They should have read the same reports that I have.

Yes, Bush said that Saddam had WMDs and Bush was wrong. But being wrong and lying are two different things. If Bush lied then so did Clinton, Gore, and Tony Blair, and a host of others.

Partly because of Joseph Wilson's op-ed column (the one that started the Plame leak investigation), the Bush-haters have been insisting that Bush knew that there were no WMDs and lied about it to the world. They've said this so often that they started believing it.

Many Bush-haters were expecting that the Plame investigation wouldn't stop with who leaked Plame's name. They expected it to continue into the entire WMD issue. When this did not happen, Democrats went ballistic. That is why they shut down the Senate last week. The Democrats were demanding a new investigation, one that would show that Bush lied.

They should be careful. They are not going to get what they want - a declaration that Bush lied, that he ordered reports to be changed, and that he created the forged niger/yellowcake document. It will not happen. The most that they can get is an admission that Bush believed some reports over others. Along the way all of the major Democrats will get tarred right along with Bush. That can't help anyone.

The whole "Bush lied" mantra is being used to try to de-legitamize the war. If they can show that we should not have started it then they can whip up support for an immediate withdrawal. That would be a disaster for Iraq which will degenerate into a nasty civil war, for the US which will lose all claim to superpower status, and for the world. The beneficiaries will be militant Islam which will be able to claim victory over the world's most powerful nation and the America-haters.

I doubt that most of the people chanting "Bush lied" have thought things through all the way. They are too busy calculating how to turn the country against Bush in time for the 2006 congressional elections.

It used to be that politics stopped at the border. No matter what internal politics were going on, polititians were united once the country went to war. The Democrats may soon find out why this was true. If they succeed in pulling down the Bush administration they will be faced with an enemy that they strengthened.

Dirty Tricks?

In a recent column, Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) said:

What was the CIA thinking sending Joseph Wilson on a secret mission to look into nuclear weapons matters without swearing him to secrecy? It's almost as if the Agency -- whose director, George Tenet, had told President Bush that the case for WMD was a "slam dunk" -- actually wanted the mission to produce a hostile Op-Ed in the New York Times. Either that or they're just idiots, but either way it seems that some people at the CIA should be losing their jobs.

It is hard to believe that Wilson was not sworn to secrecy, or at least that he had to send any public statements to the CIA for approval. Not only was Wilson sent to Niger by the CIA, his wife works for them. Plus, as a former ambassador, he should know something about keeping secrets.

It is assumed that he felt so strongly about Bush's "falsehoods" that he had to go public but we now know that the report he turned in did not match his op-ed column.

The left has been totally accepting of Wilson and the CIA recently. This is because the CIA in general and Wilson in specific have been undercutting Bush. Still, it wasn't that long ago that the left thought that the CIA was worse than the KGB. There are still people who believe that the CIA is behind most of the world's drug trade. According to some theories, Crack was introduced into the US just to kill off minorities. The left has gone from blaming the world's ills on the CIA to supporting them unquestioningly.

So no one is looking critically at the CIA. The right is used to trusting them (at least somewhat) and the left has gotten over its hatred of them.

Still, the CIA's operations used to be know as dirty tricks.

Now, what if Wilson did pass his op-ed column past his wife's superiors? At the time, Wilson was maintaining that he had been sent by the Vice-President's office. That would inevitably lead to the following conversation:

Reporter: Is it true that you send Ambassador Wilson to Niger?
Vice-President Cheney: No, he was sent by the CIA.
Reporter: Why did they send him?
VP Cheney: His wife recommended him.
Reporter: What does she have to do with it?
VP Cheney: She works for the CIA.

You can substitute Karl Rove or Scooter Libby's names. It makes no difference. The important thing is that Wilson's column was bound to raise questions that would lead to the White House leaking Plame's identity. If the CIA approved the column ahead of time they should have seen this coming. They may even have been counting on it.

That would be a dirty trick.