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Writing for Salon.com, Michelle Goldberg goes into some of the long history behind the right-wing crusade against a non-existent liberal “war on Christmas.

Henry Ford was sounding the alarm about the war on Christmas in his notorious 1921 tract “The International Jew.” “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of [their] attack,” Ford wrote. He listed local outrages: “Christmas celebrations or carols in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Paul and New York met with strong Jewish opposition … Local Council of Jewish Women of Baltimore petitions school board to prohibit Christmas exercises … The Council of the University Settlement, at the request of the New York Kehillah [Jewish leadership], adopts this resolution: ‘That in the holiday celebrations held annually by the Kindergarten Association at the University Settlement every feature of any sectarian character, including Christmas trees, Christmas programs and Christmas songs, shall be eliminated.'”

To compare today’s “war on Christmas” demagogues to Henry Ford is not to call them anti-Semites. Rather, they are purveyors of a conspiracy theory that repeatedly crops up in America. The malefactors change — Jews, the U.N., the ACLU — but the outlines stay the same. The scheme is always massive, reaching up to the highest levels of power.

Goldberg is careful to avoid labeling the current crusade as anti-Semitic… but I’m not. At first I found the deluded rantings of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson to be so pathetic as to be funny. But I’m not laughing anymore. I’ve done a lot of thinking and a lot reading on this subject over the past couple days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is anti-Semitism, pure and simple.

When you talk about a war on Christmas, or anything Christian, most Christians do not instantly think of the enemy as secular humanists or even Muslims… they think of Jews. Yes, like other forms of racism, anti-Semitism has mostly been pushed beneath the surface of respectable American dialogue for the past few decades, but two millennia of institutionalized Jew-hatred is not so easily washed away. Whether the intent is to blame the Jews for the rash of secular “Happy Holidays” that’s supposedly destroying our nation is not the point… many Christians, in buying into this bullshit rhetoric, will naturally blame Jews… whether it be the Jewish lawyers of the ACLU or Jewish merchants or whatever. Furthermore, this latently anti-Semitic “war on Christmas” rhetoric is clearly being harnessed for political purposes.

In her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between good old fashioned religious Jew hating, and modern, political anti-Semitism. While the latter certainly draws upon the former, anti-Semitism is more of a secular, racialist ideology, generally harnessed for political purposes. Indeed, Arendt argues that far from being just a terrible by-product, anti-Semitism was actually an organizing principle of the Nazi’s totalitarian regime.

This is, above all, a political crusade, and when O’Reilly and his ilk rage against a “war on Christmas,” they dangerously appeal to the inner demons of Christian society, for when Gibson talks about a vast anti-Christian conspiracy reaching into the heart of American life, it’s only natural for some Christians to look towards their historical boogeyman. Gibson writes:

“Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find. Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards.”

No wait… that wasn’t Gibson, that was Henry Ford again, writing in his infamous 1921 anti-Semitic tract. Eight-five years later, Gibson and O’Reilly are careful not to name the enemy, but the vile rhetoric and its impact are unchanged. For who else would wage a “war on Christmas” than Christianity’s favorite 2000-year-old enemy… the Jews?

The right’s war on the “war on Christmas” is a political strategy intended to divide the nation along religious and cultural lines, and like all wars, there will be victims. How many Fox viewers have openly and angrily derided this attack on Christian America, and how many Jewish children have already been harassed by their schoolmates as a result? Anybody who has ever been a child should understand that this sort of open hostility happens everyday, and that the subtle strains of discrimination that lie beneath the surface of 21st Century America are not so subtle to the children who are its target.

And so the more the likes of O’Reilly and Gibson feign offense at this imagined attack on the rights of our nation’s white Christian majority, the more offense I shall take at their dangerous and hateful rhetoric. Intentional or not, they are harnessing the force’s of anti-Semitism to achieve a political end, and it’s time people started calling it for what it is.

One of the election “reforms” the Washington state GOP has aggressively proposed is eliminating the process of ballot “duplication”, through which ballots that could not otherwise be read by the vote tabulating machines are manually copied to register the clear intent of voters.

“This whole process makes us very nervous,” [State GOP chair] Chris Vance says … “You’ve got human beings making judgments and human beings touching the ballots. It just leads to mischief. … We could say, ‘Let the machines count the ballots and that’s it.’ ”

Yeah… well… according to an article in today’s Seattle Times, calming Vance’s nerves would have required disenfranchising 8.3% of King County voters in November’s general election, and nearly 113,000 voters in the state’s nine largest counties.

There’s a reason the GOP’s early claims last year of a ballot duplication scandal were quietly dropped during Dino Rossi’s ensuing election contest: there is no scandal. WA is a “voter intent” state, and that means officials must do what they can to count a ballot if the voter’s intent can be discerned. Ballot duplication is a transparent, well-documented process performed in every county in the state.

“The purpose of an election is to discern the will of the majority,” says Dean Logan, King County’s elections director. “It’s not to determine whether voters can follow directions.

“Are we going to disenfranchise someone because they used the wrong pen?”

[Secretary of State Sam] Reed, a Republican, agrees. “To deny somebody the right to have their vote counted because they made a mistake is not something we want to do,” he says. Many of those voters are elderly or disabled, Reed adds.

What types of ballots require duplication? Well, some are damaged in the mail, and others are those where voters corrected a mistake, as instructed, by drawing an X through the oval they already filled in, then filling in the right one. But the vast majority are simply ballots where voters used the wrong color pen, or just didn’t follow instructions… circling, checking, or putting X’s through ovals instead of filling them… or using some other creative ballot marking method. On the vast majority of these ballots the voter’s intent is clear and unmistakable… the handful remaining go to the canvassing board for final determination.

So why would Vance and the Republicans want to disenfranchise people who simply make mistakes? Because a statistically significant majority of these ballots come from the very old and the very young, the very poor and the least educated, and of course, first time voters… demographic groups all of which lean Democratic. This is why Democrats, across jurisdictions, tend to pick up votes during recounts, when more care is given towards counting all ballots, and not merely those the machine happens to read on the first pass.

So let’s be honest. Republicans know that if not for ballot duplication, Dino Rossi would likely be our governor, and it would be Slade Gorton running for reelection next year, not Sen. Maria Cantwell. Nearly all of the electoral “reforms” the Republicans have pushed have been naked efforts to achieve a partisan advantage. The harder they can make it for somebody to register to vote, to cast their ballot, or to have their ballot properly tabulated, the easier it is for Republicans to win close elections. The voters who are most likely to be disenfranchised by these “reforms” vote disproportionately for Democrats. Out of touch with the mainstream of voters in WA state, and unwilling to match their agenda to the wants and needs of the majority of the people, the GOP has instead chosen a strategy of shrinking the voter pool to more closely match the demographics of their base.

Had all the Republican “reforms” been in place during 2004, over a quarter of a million eligible voters would have been disenfranchised statewide. That is the GOP strategy for seizing power in WA state, and nationwide. And that is a strategy that Democrats must make their number one priority to fight.

[Cross-posted on Daily Kos]

Does anyone else find it sadly ironic that the United States has to apologize to Germany about the way we treat prisoners?

Sen. Eugene McCarthy is dead at the age of 89.

I was only five at the time McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign became a fulcrum of the anti-war movement, and in the process, took down Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. But I’ve often looked back on that era and wondered whether I would have been caught up in his passion.

Indeed, the McCarthy campaign was so inspiring, and the times so politically divisive, that nearly four decades later, the large, Irish Catholic family I married into still celebrates the family split between the Robert F. Kennedy and McCarthy camps, with banners and words flying every St. Patty’s Day. The squabble has long since been dulled by time, whiskey and family ties into little more than an amusing reenactment, but knowing my history — and knowing this family — I imagine the contemporaneous debate must have been quite intense and entertaining.

As for me, my impressions of “the good McCarthy” are all second hand. He’s always struck me as a kind of ideal… a candidate willing to cite philosophy or poetry on the campaign trail, instead of just spouting focus-group-filtered talking points, perhaps most famously flummoxing his audience by quoting the ancient Greek historian Plutarch:

“They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view.”

In an age when high-priced consultants package their well-groomed candidates with petty, single-issue causes like tax cuts or gay marriage or a nebulous “war on terror”, one can’t help but pine for a politician more familiar with Putarch than with pollsters. From what I knew of the man, I suppose McCarthy might have despised the type of calculating, partisan politics in which I traffic. Still, that doesn’t stop me from longing for the type of ideal he represented to his fervent supporters.

Yesterday morning, our good friend Stefan was apparently honored by the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle for his work as a volunteer tutor in the Urban League After-School Program. I applaud Stefan for his volunteerism; I myself do the good parent thing as a volunteer in my daughter’s school… and I can’t tell you how desperate the need is for more parents and community members to get involved. So, thanks Stefan.

But…

I’m having a little cognitive dissonance problem here. I don’t mean to diminish Stefan’s admirable volunteer work, but surely an organization like the Urban League — dedicated to empowering African Americans — could have found some equally admirable volunteer to honor… who has not repeatedly gone on the record making racist comments about King County Executive Ron Sims, our state’s most prominent African American elected official. Take a look at the League’s mission statement:

The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle strives to empower, enable and assist African Americans, other people of color, and disadvantaged individuals in becoming self-sufficient through public advocacy, providing services and developing strong business and community partnerships.

And yet, the man they honored yesterday has repeatedly and shamelessly compared Sims to the brutal African dictator Robert Mugabe.

I was taken aback the first time I saw the Mugabe line on Stefan’s blog, but maybe it’s just my liberal, white man’s guilt. So I thought I’d inquire about Sims’ own personal feelings on the matter, and through a spokesman I was assured that Sims is deeply offended by the Mugabe reference, and clearly understands it to be racist. Furthermore, he was shocked and disappointed to learn that the League would honor a man who publicly makes such racist remarks, and Sims has since made his feelings clear to Urban League president James Kelly.

Now, Stefan clearly believes he is not racist — he told me so himself, at which time he also made clear how offended he was at my insinuations to the contrary. But his repeated use of the Mugabe line not only shows a stunning lack of empathy for the sensitivities of others, but a complete and total disregard.

It is possible for a person of good will, through their own cultural isolation, to inadvertently make remarks that others might perceive as racially offensive. The appropriate response is to apologize, move on, and ask for others to judge you on the whole of your character, rather than a single incident. But Stefan has repeatedly been told by me, by the MSM, and by his own readers, that the Mugabe reference crosses the line… and yet he continues to cross it. Stefan, who was quick to take offense at an anti-semitic sleight in one of my comment threads, could apparently care less that the target of his Mugabe slur clearly perceives it to be racially motivated.

So, how are we to judge Stefan’s character? I’m not one to criticize a blogger based on the contents of his comment threads (mine are often hateful), but given the level of invective spewed over on (u)SP, I wonder how many of his readers share the same sentiment voiced in this comment, which actually criticizes Stefan for his volunteer work:

If it was the horse’s ass receiving an award from a hateful “civil rights” group’s dinner, you be all over him as you should be. I guess it’s ok for Republicans to support hate-mongering racial causes if they are from Seattle. No wonder Seattle is such an Island of goofies–even the “conservatives” seem to be sniffing glue. Sing koombaya for me, Shark. this is a disappointment. These people want to defeat us.

Surely, some of Stefan’s defenders will attempt to use his Urban League award as an inoculation against charges of racism, but his words speak clearly. Ron Sims has now gone on the record stating that he personally finds the Mugabe reference to be racially offensive; if Stefan continues to use it, he will prove to his readers that he has no compunction about throwing a racial slur at the highest elected African American official in the state. And that will speak for itself.

I’m busy. So here’s an early open thread.

Campus Progress has put together a slick, fun new website lampooning Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s record on a number of crucial issues. Go to Alito’s America, and watch their minute-and-a-half video.

Also be sure to check out the “Future Headlines”, in which disastrous court decisions are predicted based on Alito’s prior rulings and writings. Legalize machine guns? Alito has previously ruled that Congress lacks the power under the commerce clause to regulate possession of a firearm. Scary guy.

Oy… is this really all the Republicans have going for them these days?

A state legislator is unhappy that some seasonal greenery in Olympia has been designated the “Capitol Holiday Kids’ Tree.”

Gov. Christine Gregoire should declare the 30-foot noble fir in the Legislative Building a Christmas tree and post “Merry Christmas” signs nearby, Rep. John Ahern, R-Spokane, said Wednesday on talk radio, urging listeners to call the Governor’s Office.

“We’re a Judeo-Christian nation. Of course we should have ‘Merry Christmas’ on signs there,” he said. “Our Constitution guarantees us freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.”

Um… hey “John” with an “h”… speaking as one of those “Judeos” you claim to be defending, I’d just like to point out that we don’t celebrate Christmas. So if you want to fill our government buildings with goyish tchotchkes, please cut the disingenuous “Judeo” crap, and say what you mean. You think this is a Christian nation, don’t you? So stop co-opting my identity by hyphenating my religion to yours… it’s beginning to really piss me off.

Oh… and as for the so-called liberal “War on Christmas”…

The tree is named by the Association of Washington Business, which organizes an annual tree-lighting and gift drive for needy youngsters.

If the AWB’s liberal, I guess that makes the BIAW a bunch of Trotskyites? (Hmm… I know somebody who’s getting an ice-pick for Christmas.)

I’ve always been opposed to gambling expansion, but I never fully understood the prevalence or devastating impact of problem gambling until I jumped headlong into the fight against Tim Eyman’s incredibly stupid slot machine initiative, I-892. My personal tutor on this issue was our state’s leading advocate on behalf of problem gamblers, Jennifer McCausland of Second Chance Washington, whose passion and perseverance played a major role in securing passage of last session ‘s landmark (and long overdue) legislation to provide permanent funding for problem gambling treatment and prevention programs.

McCausland has a guest column in today’s Seattle P-I (“Teens are gambling with their lives“), spelling out the desperate need to educate parents and teens about the dangers of gambling addiction, at a time when poker and other forms of wagering are being aggressively marketed to our nation’s youth.

The gambling industry’s deliberate effort to hook the young is eerily reminiscent of tobacco industry campaigns decades earlier. From the glamour of Bravo’s celebrity poker tournaments to the daily poker-as-sport programming on ESPN, Fox Sports and elsewhere, the industry is attempting to both normalize and entice, much like Big Tobacco once used Hollywood to sell a long drag and the seductive trail of cigarette smoke as the epitome of cool.

While access to gambling has exploded, and youths are being exposed at an earlier and earlier age, there is virtually no effort to inform parents and children about the very real dangers involved. Proceeds of the national tobacco settlement enable Washington state to spend $28 million a year on its highly successful campaign to curb teen smoking; unfortunately only pennies are spent to warn parents and teens about gambling addiction.

A Harvard Medical School study found teen gamblers are three times more likely to become addicted than their adult counterparts and the younger the age of initial exposure the higher the incidence. Other studies estimate that between 2.5 percent and 6 percent of teens are already addicted. The 1999 National Gambling Impact Study made two crucial recommendations: raise the legal gambling age to 21 and launch “targeted prevention efforts … to curtail youth gambling.”

Six years later, it’s time to start acting on these recommendations.

Last year a WA State Gambling Commission sting operation found that five casinos of the seven surveyed permitted a 16-year-old agent to gamble and buy alcohol. Drinking and gambling are inextricably mixed; WA needs to follow the national trend and raise the legal age to 21 on all forms of gambling. And following the example of our state’s highly successful $28 million a year campaign to curb teen smoking, WA should set an example by devoting a few million dollars a year to educate parents and teens about the dangers of gambling addiction as well.

We’re not talking about banning gambling, or shutting down casinos… we’re talking about educating the public about the very real risks involved. Parents and teens need to understand that gambling can be just as addictive as alcohol… and just as destructive.

When I was a teen, my parents sometimes purchased beer for my high school parties; understanding that we would likely drink with or without their permission, they preferred that we do it under their careful supervision. Today, that “responsible” attitude would get them shunned from the community, if not arrested and jailed.

We need a similar paradigm shift in parents’ understanding of gambling… that it is not a harmless activity that should be promoted to children and teens — who are three times more likely to become addicted than adults — and that parents and educators should always be vigilant for the warning signs of addiction. With the poker craze in full swing and access to gambling expanding at a steady clip, teen gambling is becoming a growing public health crisis whose young victims will struggle with their addiction for the rest of their lives.

My understanding is that there are legislators who recognize the need to act now, and I hope you will all join me in supporting legislation to raise the gambling age to 21, and to provide sufficient funds for a substantive teen gambling addiction awareness, education and prevention campaign.

Funny, funny clip from The Daily Show (via Brad’s Blog) of Jon Stewart sticking it to Bill O’Reilly.

UPDATE:
Hey, check Dan Savage’s rant on Slog:

This “War on Christmas” bullshit would be amusing if it weren’t so fucking scary. This aggrieved/oppressed majority stuff doesn’t just smack of fascism, it is fascism.

Savage directly compares the Christian right’s assertion that American Christians are an oppressed minority to Hitler justifying his invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland by claiming that German-speaking people were being persecuted. Over the top? No more over the top than this whole “War on Christmas” crap. Savage continues…

The “War on the “War on Christmas'” is about a majority seeking to eradicate public tolerance for, or evidence of, the existence or rights of the minority groups with which it shares this country. It’s cute and funny now, and O’Reilly’s a blowhard and a gasbag, but it’s one small step down a road that’s lead to gas chambers in the past.

But, hey, let’s all salute Christmas��Merry Christmas, Bill!

Stiff-armed salutes, of course, are preferred. Next year they may be mandatory.

Man… I just wish Dan would loosen up and speak his mind for a change.

Damn… you think if I ran for U.S. Senate, the insurance industry would pay me $4.5 million too?

According to a filing today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Safeco CEO Mike McGavick will get a sweet $4.5 million package for leaving Safeco and challenging incumbent Sen. Maria Cantwell. I guess cutting over 1,200 jobs, pulling out of the hurricane prone Florida market, and dramatically hiking rates really does pay… if you’re the CEO.

Of course, this does raise a bit of hypothetical question… if Safeco pays McGavick $4.5 million to leave the company and run for the Senate, and then McGavick puts, say, $4.5 million of his own money into his campaign… how is this not a clever bit of money laundering designed to get around the campaign finance laws? Hypothetically.

Meanwhile, it looks like McGavick’s going to need all the money the insurance industry can launder give him. A new poll by the GOP pollster Strategic Vision has Cantwell leading McGavick 50% to 39%, and that doesn’t bode so well for the Republicans according to David Johnson, president of Strategic Vision:

“Senator Cantwell has reached the magic 50% mark in match-ups against possible challengers; that shows that Republicans will have a hard job in defeating her if these numbers remain.

That’s okay… McGavick has a lucrative future ahead of (and behind) him as an insurance industry lobbyist.

UPDATE:
Here’s the link to the SEC filing. In addition to the accelerated vesting of $4.5 million in unvested stock, he’s also eligible for a bonus for 2005. Sweet.

Voters brought Jim West to his knees yesterday… and not in the good way.

I don’t really have much to say about yesterday’s recall of the secretly-gay, gay-bashing, Spokane mayor, except that I hope voters kicked him out for lies, hypocrisy, and abuse of office… not because he was gay. My guess is there wouldn’t have been much of a scandal if West had been openly gay from the start. If West had been true to himself and true to voters, many of his former supporters probably would have remained true to him.

The dirty commies on the Seattle Times editorial board want to break up media conglomerate Time Warner:

The government is not going to do it

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The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Tonight is “Smoke ’em if you got ’em” Night, in honor of Initiative 901, which goes into effect on Thursday. (The Ale House is smoke free until 9PM.)

I don’t believe I’ll be smoking, but I’ll definitely be there enjoying some fine ale.

My righty trolls like to point to individual incidents and use them as a means of branding the entire political opposition as violent, un-American, immoral degenerates. So turnabout is fair play. Take for example this piece from the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World:

Douglas County sheriff’s deputies are investigating the reported beating of a Kansas University professor who gained recent notoriety for his Internet tirades against Christian fundamentalists.

Kansas University religious studies professor Paul Mirecki reported he was beaten by two men about 6:40 a.m. today on a roadside in rural Douglas County. In a series of interviews late this afternoon, Mirecki said the men who beat him were making references to the controversy that has propelled him into the headlines in recent weeks.

“I didn’t know them, but I’m sure they knew me,” he said.
…
He said the men beat him about the upper body with their fists, and he said he thinks they struck him with a metal object. He was treated and released at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
…
Mirecki recently wrote online that he planned to teach intelligent design as mythology in an upcoming course. He wrote it would be a “nice slap” in the “big fat face” of fundamentalists.

Of course, Mirecki intended to slap the fundamentalists metaphorically. At least two fundamentalists decided that was cause enough strike him back with fists and a metal object.

So much for “teach the controversy.”