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To the right you can see my absentee ballot for the state of Ohio. I’ve requested it so that I can vote by mail to keep the lines short for everyone else on Election Day; four years ago in my precinct the lines stretched for hours.

As you can see, at least in the state of Ohio we do not have a “two-party system.” There are 8 presidential tickets on the ballot for 6 political parties and two sets of independents.

After much consideration, I have narrowed down my choices to the Obama-Biden ticket and the Nader-Gonzalez ticket. Here’s my invitation to you: would you like to help swing Ohio one way or the other? Post your arguments in the comments section explaining which of these two tickets is most deserving of my vote.

Here’s why I have already eliminated the following tickets from my consideration:

Barr-Root: They ought to remain it the Libertarianish Party after the nomination of Bob Barr, who voted for the Patriot Act, who doesn’t extend religious freedom to non-believers, who thinks free speech is overrated, and who wants to take away the citizenship of American babies. Wayne Allyn Root is just an over-the-top blowhard.

McCain-Palin: anti-liberty, anti-peace, anti-choice, lobbyist-bought tools.

Duncan-Johnson: Richard Duncan is an Ohioan who gets on the ballot regularly but who hasn’t taken the time to post a website or write up anything more than the vaguest paragraph describing his intentions. I have no earthly idea who Ricky Johnson is. Not ready for prime time. Not even ready for public access cable.

McKinney-Clemente: I like the Green Party in the abstract. But Cynthia McKinney? Nope, sorry, nope. I just can’t vote for someone for President who punches police officers, who seriously thinks that George W. Bush was in on the 9/11 attacks, who praises the dictatorial Hugo Chavez, and who asserts that the U.S. government has been shooting thousands of prisoners in the head and dumping them in a swamp, telling us that she could give us the names of people who told her so, but she just doesn’t want to. I back away slowly.

Baldwin-Castle: Because no party that embraces Christian theocracy, opposes free speech and stands against a woman’s right to self-determination should refer to itself as the “Constitution Party.” Baldwin and Castle stand firmly within the “Constitution Party”.

That leaves the Nader-Gonzalez ticket, the Moore-Alexander ticket and the Obama-Biden ticket. I have both deep misgivings and some tepid support for both tickets. I would really appreciate your thoughts on these two tickets as I consider where to throw my support.

Sarah Palin says that she is against wasteful government spending, but the truth is that she just got caught in some very wasteful use of government money in Alaska. No, I’m not talking about the way that she allowed her husband, Todd Palin, to use the office of the Governor of Alaska in order to persecute her former brother-in-law, though that fits the bill too.

I’m talking about how Sarah Palin made the government of Alaska pay her to go to church.

No kidding. A new report shows that Sarah Palin has sent bills to the state government of Alaska, asking that she be paid more than $13,000 over the last two years to attend religious events and meet with religious leaders. The Alaskan Lieutenant Governor made some of the same religious trips, but refused to ask for payment because he regarded those payments as unethical.

Here’s the kicker: Sarah Palin’s office says that it was okay for her to make taxpayers give her money in order to go to church because she was going to church on official government business.

Think about that - what kind of official government business does the Governor have going to church on Sunday?

Here in the USA, we have a little thing called the separation of church and state. It’s established in the very first line of the very first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Sarah Palin apparently has a poor opinion of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, however. One Sarah Palin’s government-paid trips to go to church was a visit to her own home church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. During that visit, she took to the stage and told the members of the church that she would strike a deal with them - to use her power as Governor to enact the will of God.

If Sarah Palin was willing to charge taxpayers for her to go to church on Sunday morning, and conspire with church leaders to use the Alaskan state government to establish her religion, what do you think Palin would do with the power of President of the United States upon the death of a President McCain?

If Sarah Palin is willing to spend government money to go to church, what other extravagant spending would she engage in as President?

Yes, I know it’s a long headline. That’s because it’s news that makes a connection between three events.

1. First, the new revelation: the Associated Press reports today that Sarah Palin confirmed in a 2000 letter watching a video of Thomas Muthee. In the video, Thomas Muthee brags about running a woman out of his town, a woman he decided was a witch because there were some car accidents near her house. Police fired shots at her, police arrested her, all at the behest of mobs of Muthee followers who also threatened to stone her to death. Sarah Palin — who wants you to put her heartbeat away from the presidency — crows with pride about this in her letter:

“What a blessing that the Lord has already put into place the Christian leaders, even though I know it’s all through the grace of God,” she wrote in March 2000 to her former pastor. She thanked him for the loan of a video featuring a Kenyan preacher who later would pray for her protection from witchcraft as she sought higher office.

2. Second, knowing exactly what Thomas Muthee was and what he had done, Sarah Palin chose to attend the Wasilla Assemblies of God on October 11, 2005 to see Thomas Muthee preach about her and the special part she had to play in God’s plan. Read the transcript, or see the video of Muthee’s sermon for yourself:

In that sermon, a sermon in which Thomas Muthee appears to have violated tax laws by telling congregants to vote for Sarah Palin, Muthee makes the following case for the election of Sarah Palin:

A. God needs fundamentalist Christian believers to “infiltrate” and “invade” government;

B. After successful infiltration and invasion of government, fundamentalist Christians should use their positions to put Christian teachings in public schools to counter the social influence of Buddhists, Muslims and Wiccans;

C. Fundamentalist Christians who have infiltrated and invaded government should more broadly use their positions to enact and enforce Christian dominance over business and law;

D. And that’s why the election of Sarah Palin to office is so important.

3. Third, knowing that:

– Thomas Muthee’s mobs had threatened to stone a woman to death, had put local police up to invading this woman’s home and firing shots, had her arrested, and then had her run out of town because there were car accidents near her house;

– Thomas Muthee had violated tax law by endorsing her candidacy from the altar;

– Thomas Muthee had just endorsed her as the perfect opportunity for fundamentalist Christians to “invade” and “infiltrate” government in order to implement Christian theocracy in the areas of education, business and law…

Knowing all this, Sarah Palin chose to take the stage, have Thomas Muthee lay hands on him, and pray with him for his vision to come to pass.

This isn’t a mere matter of “guilt by association.” This is about the active choice of Sarah Palin to come up on stage and pray for the radical and violent theocratic agenda of Thomas Muthee to come to fruition through her.

This is, in short, not simply a matter of “character,” but of a policy agenda that stands in direct opposition to the Constitution of the United States of America.

America needs someone in the media ask Sarah Palin this question, point blank:

“Why, Governor Palin, did you take to the stage of the Wasilla Assemblies of God in October 2005 to pray with Thomas Muthee for your election to office when Muthee had just named your election as the lynchpin of a plan for the Christian ‘invasion’ and ‘infiltration’ of American government?”

I hope someone in the media is paying attention.

In times like these with wars and financial crisis, I know that it may be easy to forget even as deep and abiding a concern as the right to life, and it seems that our opponent kind of hopes you will forget that. He hopes that you won’t notice how radical, absolutely radical his idea is on this, and his record is, until it’s too late.

– Sarah Palin, who would have the government make abortion and even emergency contraception absolutely illegal even in cases of rape and incest committed against 12 year old girls, referring to Barack Obama, who agrees with the U.S. Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade

There’s nothing that says maverick like crime. Sarah Palin is now, in this respect at least, an official maverick. A new report finds that, when it came to following the law in her work as Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has thrown caution to the wind, and bucked the establishment! In other words, she broke the law.

If you want someone to come in and clean up Washington, well then you just might be happy with the choice of Sarah Palin… so long as you don’t mind a new group of criminals coming in to replace the ones that have been cleaned out.

I’m wondering how Sarah Palin will fit this new information into her claim to be a reformer. Will she say that you can’t reform the law unless you’re willing to break it?

More likely, Palin will blame the insiders. The commission that wrote the report concluding that Sarah Palin has engaged in illegal abuse of power as Governor of Alaska was bipartisan, after all - and you know what that means. It means that she’s willing to stand up to members of both political parties - in order to try to avoid the consequences of breaking the law.

Gosh darn it, that’s how to become a reformer with results!

Here’s how our Pumpkin for Obama T-Shirt for Kids appears in our Skreened shop:

And here’s how the kids’ shirt (made sweatshop-free in Los Angeles, California and printed sweatshop-free in Columbus, Ohio) looks in its natural habitat:

Yesterday, the Connecticut Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in that state.

Current weather:

Where’s the hurricane?

Because schadenfreude is so much fun.

It’s being treated as news, but it isn’t exactly new. A classified report is informing the Bush White House that Afghanistan is falling apart despite increased numbers of American soldiers. The Taliban is gaining yet more strength. Opium sales are up. The American puppet government of Hamid Karzai is weak and growing weaker.

So what’s new?

Mother Davis wrote about these issues in June of last year. Peregrin Wood addressed these problems in two articles from June, 2006 and in February, 2005.

Yes, there are important classified details to the story, and yes, the situation in Afghanistan has gotten even worse since the Irregular Times articles were written. However, the essential insight of the report have been known for a long time. Year after year, conditions in Afghanistan have been deteriorating, not getting better.

The tools of war aren’t making it better. The Taliban have never been beaten. The victory we were told was achieved back in 2001 still hasn’t come about. How long will we stand for more of the same?

“President George W. Bush did 9/11. No Shit. Really.”

So says Mike Palecek at the very top of his website. This declaration is a fair summation of his new short novel Guests of the Nation, a novel that Palecek sent to Irregular Times with the request that we write a review. While written in the form of a work of fiction, its purpose is clearly to try and advance a conspiratorial tale regarding the attacks of September 11, a tale in which:

• an elevator company supposedly servicing the World Trade Center is actually a government outfit that places explosives throughout the building
• airplanes involved in the attacks are diverted by agents and replaced by replicas that actually complete the “mission”
• those on board the original airplanes are taken off and shot in bunkers, except for the chosen few to be squirreled away, and
• Ari Fleischer madly scrawls the message “Don’t Say Anything Yet” to George W. Bush on a dry-erase board as Bush reads My Pet Goat to children

This conspiratorial tale doesn’t meet the standard of a conspiracy theory, since a theory explains patterns in data. Palecek doesn’t provide any evidence that these events ocurred; he makes stuff up that’s meant to be plausible. The story is literally plausible, in the same way that it’s plausible for space aliens to be stored at Area 51 or it’s plausible that Queen Elizabeth is at the center of a cocaine trafficking ring. I mean, hey, you can’t prove it’s not true. It could have happened. I could be the King of Prussia, writing this review from the safety of my fusion-powered dirigible. To give his fiction an air of reality, Palecek peppers his 72-page story with quotations from various people in the 9-11 “truth” movement, additional quotations from historical figures such as Adolph Hitler, and some statistics compiled by New York Magazine. None of these “facts” compellingly connect with Palecek’s yarn about the events of September 11, 2001.

Neither do they connect with Palecek’s parallel story regarding “John,” a 9-11 “truth” activist who is detained by security goons for wearing a t-shirt that reveals Palecek’s truth. Dragged to a back room in an airport, “John” takes the stage during his interrogation, laying out what really happened on September 11 to the agents. This is a transparent wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author, with “John” being so important for knowing the truth that he must be detained, with “John’s” tale being so compelling that it takes over the entire interrogation, and finally with “John” winning his agents over, convincing them of his rectitude before… he has to kill them! Boom, boom! I mean, wow! This is so much more exciting than being ignored or told you’re full of it, isn’t it? It’s like, you know, the Matrix or something, but without the special effects.

If I don’t appreciate Palecek’s attempt to reveal the “truth,” and I’m underwhelmed by the channeling of Keanu Reeves, I’m also unimpressed with the basic mechanics of Palecek’s writing. Sometimes spoken words are placed in quotations, sometimes they aren’t. Now and again Palecek’s characters inexplicably question their own choice of words: “Some sort of tweed? WTF is tweed?” … “a better view of this fucking terrorist in their fucking midst. Midst?” Almost no paragraphs exist to organize Palecek’s thoughts; single sentences follow, one after the other, in an apparent stream of consciousness that winds its way from describing one interrogator’s ample breasts to another interrogator’s Bill Cosby face and nappy (yes, “nappy”) white hair. If the consciousness were less simply bizarre and more interesting, perhaps I’d be more interested.

I don’t recommend Guests of the Nation to you unless you’re already a 9-11 conspiracy theorist who is looking for some easy affirmation, someone to tell you that you are not only right, but important, so vitally important that the government is getting ready to haul you off into a back room somewhere and do its work on you. As for me, I think there are enough actual, demonstrable, documented outrages for me to think about. There is a wildfire roaring through our country fueled on ethical scandal, surveillance, lost liberty, lost income, lost opportunity and war. I don’t have much time or attention for Palecek’s hypothetical tinderbox as it fizzles and spits.

When Barack Obama came to speak at a rally in Columbus, Ohio on a cold February 2008 morning, he was just a primary candidate, and yet people camped overnight to get a place in line to see him. By 8 AM, hours before he spoke, there were hundreds lined up outside in bitter, windy, subfreezing weather, just waiting to get inside.

Now it’s October 10 of 2008 and Barack Obama has come to Columbus again. It was sunny and 55 degrees outside with a couple of hours to go before the gates opened, yet there were only a few handfuls of people lined up to get in. The line would lengthen, but it took a while. It seems that the intense public fascination with Barack Obama, at least here in Columbus, is wearing off.

As people lined up for a Columbus, Ohio campaign rally featuring Barack Obama on October 10 2008, t-shirt hawkers lined up right next to them. Here’s what I saw:

Nice design! T-shirt made in sweatshop-notorious Haiti.

Hope that it’s made in sweatshop-free conditions. Believe what you want. Know that this one is made in Haiti, too, and sold on the cheap for a reason. Figure it out.

This t-shirt complete with flying birds and royal lions is made in sweatshop haven Nicaragua.

These aren’t necessarily official Obama campaign products, but they are piggybacking on his popularity, selling a message of progressivism on a decidedly unprogressive product. That’s not the change I believe in.

Don’t say you weren’t warned. The story of government abuse of spying powers truly broke three and a half years ago, right after the 2004 election. George W. Bush was caught breaking the law, listening in on the personal conversations of millions of Americans, and grabbing information about their private use of the Internet as well. We wrote about it then, and we’ve been writing about the issue ever since.

But what did Americans do? Some engaged in activism to defend their rights. Most, however, just shrugged, mumbled, “Whatever they have to do to protect me from terrorists…”, and looked the other way. Then, in 2006 Congress legalized the illegal program, and did it again in 2007, expanding the spy program even further.

John McCain was in on the dirty deal - and Jim was on the job a couple of weeks ago when he personally confronted John McCain on the FISA Amendments Act - this year’s law granting George W. Bush even more telecommunications spying powers.

But, don’t kid yourself that this is a partisan election issue. It’s not. Barack Obama gave his support to the Big Brother spying programs to wiretap our communications just like John McCain did. So did many other Democrats in Congress.

This morning, we’re learning specifics about the what the FISA Amendments Act has been used for - it’s not counterterrorism. Two people who have been working on the inside of the National Security Agency’s spy programs authorized by the Protect America Act and FISA Amendments Act report that they were ordered to listen to, record, and even transcribe the personal telephone calls of American journalists, non-profit aid workers, and even U.S. military officers. The transcribed telephone calls included phone sex between spouses temporarily separated from one another.

None of these people were suspected of terrorism, or even having any acquaintances that were suspected of terrorism.

The FISA Amendments Act isn’t a Terrorist Surveillance Program. It’s being used against Americans who are serving their country, and the world, overseas. It’s being used against their family members back home. It’s being used to keep government records on just what American wives are telling their American husbands about just what sexy things they’re going to do for them when the couples are reunited.

Why is the government listening in on and transcribing these conversations? For blackmail?

These allegations come from just two of the huge number of people working for the NSA to spy on Americans’ private conversations. What other kinds of spying against us is being done that we aren’t being told about?

These revelations are shocking, but they’re only surprising if you haven’t been paying attention to what your government has been up to for the last eight years. I suspect, therefore, that most Americans will be very surprised to hear this news.

As humans at the tip of Manhattan worry about the crash in value of electronic accounts that represent paper that represent real wealth, the IUCN has reminded us that there is another crash coming along to worry about - a crash in biodiversity.

Last week came their report on the threatened biodiversity in mammals - one quarter are in danger of going extinct. This week, we’re hearing about the birds - populations of avian species around the world are plummeting.

Fish around the world are in trouble. So are corals. So are amphibians. So are reptiles. Jellyfish are blooming in massive amounts, though, thanks to climate change and overfertilization of ocean waters. Earth may soon be known as the jellyfish planet.

The steady march of bad news about the loss of biodiversity on Earth comes along with continuing discoveries about how rich the biodiversity of our planet really is. Hundreds of species never seen before have just been photographed off the coast of Tasmania, for example.

In human civilization as well as in nature, loss is an opportunity for new adaptations to come to the forefront. Let’s hope that the human downturn this year clears out enough conventional wisdom to make way for ideas about how we can change our lives so that we are enriched by the living wealth of our planet without leaving it spent.