It’s worse than I thought; the number of comment spams might number in the thousands. Great. I’m cleaning up as I go, (One entry alone had 50 of them.) If you spot any I missed, drop me some mail.

I am reluctant to turn off comments altogether, but I’m taking intermediate steps, most notably: HTML in comments is turned off. If you have a URL to include in a comment, paste it straightout rather than put it into an <a href> tag. Similarly, use CAPITALS or *asterisks* for emphasis instead of <b>bold tags</b>.

Bray’s been hit by “comment spam” over the last week — hundreds of them. I’ve been deleting them as I find them, but I’m sure there are plenty more. Apologies if a legitimate comment got deleted, but after awhile they all start to look the same, whether or not they’re offering to enlarge some of my organs.

Atrios questions the rise of right-wing religious voters:

It took a British publication, The Economist, to point out that the percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical values as their prime concern is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent).

Why are the Democrats not pointing this out?… In 1996, when 40 percent of Americans based their votes on “moral values,” they re-elected Bill Clinton. Now that the number of Americans who base their votes on “moral values” has been cut almost in half, they selected George Bush.

Bray New World teams up with Radio Folded to present “The Bray Channel”, a collection of left-wing mp3s. Go check it out.

Right now the track list is woefully short (only a couple handfuls of songs), so if you know of any more topical, downloadable mp3s available on the Web, I welcome any suggestions you might have. Drop me an email.

Exchange between Clinton, Jennings on scandals … [Media Matters for America]

Some ostensibly “off-camera” transcription between Clinton and Peter Jennings.

Live:
(more…)

…though I probably won’t buy this after all.

In 1993, the GOP in the House pressed hard for ethics rules, such as one that prohibits members indicted by state grand juries to remain in a leadership post.

Curiously, now that Tom DeLay looks to be breaking ethics codes left and right, they now seem interested in repealing those rules.

McSweeney’s presents this classical take on the election.

America’s army of moral values: three people strong.

That’s $400,000 per person. Thanks, Mikey Powell!

While we’re on a map kick, I thought I’d show you my favorite post-mortem analysis of the election:

Though I’m a fan of the purple map, and the comparison to the southern confederacy is illuminating, this is my favorite map because it not only squeezes lots of information in it, but it also makes me think that I’m tripping in a social studies class.

Lest you think that the above is a Rorschach test (or a product of my hallucogenic mind), it is actually a cartogram by county, with the shade determined by the percentage of the vote. But I’ll let some University of Michigan professors explain how they created it.

Go ahead, Yankees! Feel superior!

(No, not the New York Yankees. They still lost.)

The Dems aren’t the only losers of this election. The party’s many constitutents fear retaliation from the Republicans as much as the party as a whole. Chief among the party’s supporters are the unions which, needless to say, have been having a tough time of it lately. As they gather in Washington, it is revealed (courtesy of the NY Times) that their ranks are in as much turmoil as the rest of the Democrats.

(Thanks to Jeff Z. for the pointer.)

While a Bush re-election wasn’t the vehicle through which I wanted to see Ashcroft gone, hey, I’ll take it; the guy occupied the #1 slot in my “Up Against the Wall” list for some time, before eventually being surpassed by Rove and Grover Nordquist. Now the key is making sure the new witch is better than the old one.

I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about vote tallying fraud – as Adam put it, it’s a couple steps closer to wearing a tinfoil hat – but this story comes from MSNBC, not rantingleftwingblog.com.

52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County— Bristol, Florida and environs— where it’s 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush.

51% Bush + 48% Kerry =

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.

It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.

If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

– Thomas Jefferson, in a letter of 1798, after the passage of the Sedition Act.

…in an opinion in the NY Times.

If we are to insert “faith” into the public dialogue more directly and assertively, let’s not be selective. Let’s go all the way. Let’s not just define “faith” in terms of the law and judgment; let’s define it also in terms of love, caring, forgiveness… Liberals are not against religion. They are against hypocrisy, exclusion and judgmentalism. They resist the notion that one side or the other possesses “the truth” to the exclusion of others. There is a great difference between Cotton Mather and John Wesley.

(thanks to the Big Z for the link)

Am I Blue? (washingtonpost.com)

I won’t quote the whole piece, but it’s good.

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don’t mind, that is.) It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same gender, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don’t, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don’t claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?

The New Republic Online: 30 Years’ War

Some really good (and heartening) analysis, here.

Bush was also fortunate in his opponent. John Kerry was an able debater, and his experience in Vietnam and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee partially neutralized arguments that would have been made against other Democrats like former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. But Kerry, an aloof New Englander, operated at a distinct disadvantage among white, working-class voters. Unlike Bill Clinton, he had trouble convincing voters that he “felt their pain.” In interviews conducted on the eve of the election, we asked white, working-class Bush supporters in Martinsburg, West Virginia, what they thought of Clinton. Even those who praised Bush for his “family values” said they had voted for Clinton and thought he was an “excellent president.” But it wasn’t Clinton’s politics they preferred; it was Clinton himself, despite the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Gore had exactly the same problem with these voters in 2000. The Democrats need to find a candidate that can talk to both PhDs and tractor-trailer drivers.

If they do this, the Democrats will be able to win presidential elections. Kerry, after all, came very close to winning this time despite his inadequacy as a candidate. Democrats showed that they can hold their own in states like Colorado (where Democrat Ken Salazar was elected to the Senate), Arizona, Nevada, and Virginia. In many of these states, demography is on the Democrats’ side. Colorado is going to become more like California and less like Utah or Montana, and Virginia is going to become more like New Jersey and less like South Carolina. The future of Ohio is Franklin County, not Butler County. Democrats also showed that they can compete in raising money without relying on corporate contributions and that the Internet is an important vehicle for organizing.

Sorry, Everybody.