PSoTD

Outta Town Money Versus The State Flag

I think we all know which side of this issue history will finally adopt.

In 2001, there was a vote in Mississippi about whether to keep the Southern Cross on the State Flag. Vote to keep flag prevailed 64 percent on 2001 ballot. Since then, Mississippi's economy has paid a price.

From the

When the Mississippi flag forced a university's basketball tournament to be relocated earlier this month, Jackson's top convention promoter had a flashback.

"I thought, 'Oh God, not again,' " said Wanda Wilson, executive director of the Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau.

...

Because of the flag, Mississippi State University had to open its men's basketball season on Nov. 11 in Alabama — instead of as a tournament host. The National Collegiate Athletic Association forbids planned tournaments in Mississippi and South Carolina because of the Southern Cross.

After the new flag was defeated in 2001, the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters and the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity canceled planned conventions in Jackson.

The convention and visitors bureau reported 666 conventions brought 107,535 convention delegates to Jackson in fiscal year 2003, and 382 conventions have brought 118,205 people this year. In the two years combined, those delegates have spent an estimated $76 million in Jackson.

National Election Holiday: To promote democracy, our elections must be our most honored national holiday. Our election holiday could last up to four days, with voting Saturday through Monday. The Polls could close at the same time in each time zone throughout the nation, all the way to the most Western time zone, Hawaii. On Tuesday at noon, with all the polls closed, the voting results could be officially released from the "local election commissions." Polling results could not be legally released or broadcast before the official release of "local polling data." This delay would promote political discussion with candidates on the local level during this most revered of our holidays. This would, in fact, teach the civil values we claim with our words on other less meaningful holidays. Nearly all eligible citizens would vote.

A tougher anti-spam law, such as a simple ban on all unsolicited e-mail ads, won't get rid of all spam. But it would be a powerful tool for law enforcement to pursue some of the freeloaders and scam artists who make their living off of unwanted, unsavory and often unlawful spam.

From now on, readers wanting to see the reports of a panel that scrutinizes local government will have to look somewhere other than this newspaper.

County officials decided to stop printing reports of the El Dorado County Grand Jury in the newspaper as a way to save money.

For the 2003-04 report, the county published the document over the Internet and ran advertisements in the Tahoe Daily Tribune and the Placerville Mountain Democrat telling interested parties where they could read it.

"There was a sense people who were interested could go online. The printed ones were thrown away," county counsel Lou Green said Monday.

"We figured we save almost $7,000 by doing it this way, " Solaro said, adding the ads cost $400 each in both Sierra-area papers.

The Truth Will Be X-Rays

Dutch actress Georgina Verbaan has vowed to publish x-rays to settle a major controversy - is her ample bosom natural or silicone-based?

A spokesperson for Verbaan, 25, said the x-rays of her breasts would be published on her website (www.georginaverbaan.nl) sometime this week.

The greatest beneficiaries of video recorders, apart from those who loved both television and going out, were programmes relegated to the margins of the schedules.

Tourist Destination: Ethiopia

It's a busy work day and I have a neighborhood association meeting tonight, so I don't have a lot of time for the blog today. But I thought this U.N. program idea was interesting, although I don't think that Ethiopians should count on tourism as a long-term mechanism to advance their economy, it might be a step towards doing so.

Ethiopia is to become one of the first countries to be targeted under a United Nations scheme harnessing the country's tourism potential in order to tackle entrenched poverty.

Francesco Frangialli, secretary general of the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) announced on Tuesday that Ethiopia would benefit from a WTO-led, development-friendly, tourism scheme. The Sustainable Tourism Eliminating Poverty initiative focuses on encouraging sustainable tourism - social, economic and ecological - to ease poverty.

"It will target the world's poorest countries, particularly in Africa and developing states in general," Frangialli told IRIN at the opening of a three-day tourism conference in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia, with its seven world-heritage sites, is a magnate for tourists, he said.

The WTO, which was accepted as a UN specialised agency late last year, argues that tourism is an effective weapon in helping underdeveloped nations achieve the 2015 anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals. Globally, the tourism industry has created 100,000 new jobs a year, accounting for 11 percent of global employment.

"Tourism is the only service industry where there is a positive balance of trade flowing from first world to third world countries," Frangialli added. Cities like Addis Ababa, he said, where half of young people account for about 50 percent of the population, could reap enormous rewards from growth in the tourist sector. According to the WTO, 50 of the world's poorest nations rank tourism in their top three income sources, attracting vital foreign exchange. "There is growing awareness about the economic importance of the tourism sector," Frangialli said, warning that tourism has negative effects if not properly managed.

The new initiative will offer technical and operational expertise, promote quality ethics and practices, and establish a unit to attract funding for tourism proposals. Tourism features Ethiopia's Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) that aims to combat poverty and encourage development in the Horn-of-Africa nation. The government has revamped its regional airports, is restoring historical sites and offers visas upon entry to the country in a bid to attract more tourists. Last year, according to the tourism commission, some 180,000 people visited the country generating US $80 million.

Ethiopian President Girma Wolde-Girogis said at the conference that tourism promoted greater integration.

"Ethiopia has once again become keenly aware of its immense development potential in tourism and efforts are underway to exploit that potential in the best interests if its people," he noted.

Southlake's holiday display will remain completely secular this season, according to community services director Malcolm Jackson.

Jackson, who is charged with the city's Christmas displays, recently received a citizen request to consider placing a menorah among the items displayed.

"We took the request seriously and carefully researched the issues," he said. "We, as a staff, have tried to maintain an absolute secular display in the holiday season." After considering federal and Supreme Court rulings on the subject as reviewed by city attorney Allen Taylor, Jackson determined that it would be inappropriate to place any religious symbols in the city's Christmas season displays. Jackson emphasized that he had made the determination, and the city council had not participated in the decision making.

The city attorney briefed the city council during executive session at the Nov. 16 council meeting on the current state of federal law relating to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and city Christmas displays. His assessment is that the city's current display complies with federal law. Taylor said that the Supreme Court has said that Santa Claus and Christmas trees are sufficiently secular in origin and nature as to not violate the Establishment Clause. "They merely represent a celebration of the holiday and a close of the year," he added.

VeriChip says its microchip implants could save your life if you're kidnapped or rushed to hospital. But would it spell an end to privacy?

'We could monitor you anywhere on Earth,' said VeriChip Corporation president Keith Bolton, if the chip was coupled with a small GPS transmitter hidden in a watch or belt.

'We see a billion dollar market place in Latin American countries.'

'We're doing it there (Mexico) first because there are no regulations or privacy groups,' admitted Mr Bolton.

Radio Station Again Taking Issue with Comments by Rocker Ian Anderson

A couple of days ago

Someone at WCHR-FM is again taking issue with comments by rocker Ian Anderson.

In Tuesday's Press, the Jethro Tull leader reflected on last year's controversy over allegedly anti-American comments he made in an earlier Press article, which led to a boycott of Jethro Tull songs by the Ocean Township-based radio station. WCHR staffers and supporters later protested an Anderson show in Red Bank.

"Mr. Anderson is enjoying some revisionist history," "Dr. Phil" LoCascio wrote the Press via e-mail. LoCascio is an afternoon drive personality at WCHR (which also goes by the name "105.7 The Hawk").

"On the contrary, we were encouraging people to go in and wave the flag. The radio station didn't get our 'knickers in a twist'; it was the listeners of The Hawk who instigated it, many of whom lost loved ones on 9/11. I wonder if those relatives would classify their reaction that way."

He added that most WCHR listeners "could still care less" about Jethro Tull's music, which remains banned from the station's playlist.

Don Imus Is A Dope

Hasn't it been obvious for years? Still, MSNBC won't spend any effort to come up with some sort of quality morning programming. So, they deserve what they get when Imus blunders:

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called for an apology from the MSNBC cable television network over comments on its "Imus in the Morning" program that referred to Palestinians as "filthy animals" and suggested that they all be killed.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also urged that the program's host, Don Imus, be reprimanded for failing to challenge his colleagues' inflammatory remarks. CAIR, which says it received numerous complaints about the comments, quoted a transcript of Imus' November 12th program in which he and his on-air colleagues engaged in the following discussion about live coverage of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's funeral:

DON IMUS: They're (the Palestinians) eating dirt and that fat pig wife of his is living in Paris.

COLLEAGUE: They're all brainwashed, though. That's what it is. And they're stupid, to begin with, but they're brainwashed now. Stinking animals. They ought to drop the bomb right there, kill 'em all right now...

IMUS: Well, the problem is we have (reporter) Andrea (Mitchell) there; we don't want anything to happen to her.

COLLEAGUE: Oh, she's got to get out. Andrea, get out and then drop the bomb and kill everybody...

COLLEAGUE: Look at this. Animals. Animals!

Life has improved for American women over the last 40 years, but big inequities persist and they vary substantially by state, according to an assessment released Tuesday.

Minnesota, Vermont, Connecticut and Washington are the best states for women, concluded the Institute for Women's Policy Research, an arm of George Washington University. That's based on the group's analysis of female political participation, employment and earnings, social and economic autonomy, access to sex education and family planning resources and general health.

By those measures, the toughest states for women are Mississippi, South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. Florida rated a "dishonorable mention," one step above the lowest-ranked group.

"All that individual variability that Kinsey discovered is something that we're now trying to make sense of," said Erick Janssen, a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute.

...

Controversy hounded Kinsey and his work from the start. Cultural conservatives deplored him for his homosexual experimentation and for encouraging his research colleagues to swap wives in the name of science.

Critics later charged that Kinsey had conducted sexual experimentation on children, an allegation that his defenders describe as part of a political witch-hunt.

Today sex researchers say they are again feeling the heat of a politically conservative crusade mounting against them. Last year the U.S. Congress threatened to withdraw government funding of several sex studies, including Janssen's.

Taxes & Spending
Santorum Backs Toomey for OMB Director
by John Gizzi
Posted Nov 15, 2004

Apparently hoping to heal some wounds, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum (R.-Pa.), who angered many conservatives when he supported liberal Sen. Arlen Specter against Rep. Pat Toomey (R.-Pa.) in this year's Pennsylvania Senate primary, now says Toomey would be a good choice to head the Office of Management and Budget in the Bush White House. "Yes, Pat would be outstanding in that position if it should become vacant," Santorum told me after a luncheon of conservatives held before the election. "He understands the issue of cutting spending about as well as anyone in Congress and he would also have an excellent relationship with his former colleagues." There are rumors that present OMB chief Josh Bolten may move to another position in the administration.

"I'm sure Bruce Springsteen gets a hundred death threats every week for his participation in the Kerry campaign," Anderson says. "But if you want to be John Kerry's running mate and be 'Born in the U.S.A.' at the same time, that's the way it goes."

DAVID COBB, [via Blair Bobier, b2@bobierlaw.com], www.votecobb.com
Cobb was the 2004 presidential candidate for the Green Party. He said today: "We announced our intention to seek a recount of the vote in Ohio. Since the required fee for a statewide recount is $113,600, the only question was whether that money could be raised in time to meet the filing deadline. That question has been answered. Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio." The Green Party is working with the Libertarian Party in securing a recount. The presidential candidates for the two parties have demanded that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who co-chaired this year's Bush campaign in Ohio, recuse himself from the recount process.

Ministers will order television companies this week to come up with a new set of rules to stop children being exposed to advertisements encouraging them to fill their stomachs with unhealthy food or drink, or face an outright ban.

Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, will be given the task of negotiating a new agreement that will affect all television advertising shown outside school hours and before 9pm.

John Reid, the Secretary of State for Health, believes that he has public opinion behind him for a campaign that could hit powerful commercial interests, but will ease worries about the number of overweight children.

His public health White Paper, expected this week, will warn that if the industry does not police itself, the Government will legislate to make it illegal to advertise junk food when children are watching.

Two Sacramento County men who recently died when they were shot with stun guns both were taking medication for mental illness, renewing concerns about the supposedly non-lethal weapons.

Ricardo Zaragoza and Gordon Rauch each were shot at least twice with 50,000 volt Tasers after they fought with Sacramento County sheriff's deputies. Zaragoza died Monday and Rauch last year, but they are among a growing list of suspects taking medication or other drugs whose encounters with the weapons proved fatal.

Experts say the incidents prove the need for studying the effect of Tasers on sensitive individuals, including those taking prescription or illegal drugs.

"There's really almost no medical research examining this issue," Dr. Kathy Glatter told The Sacramento Bee. She is a University of California, Davis Medical Center electrophysiologist, a cardiologist who specializes in heart rhythm disorders and sudden death.

"Many of those medicines can cause life-threatening heart rhythms, although it's rare, and they are generally considered safe," Glatter said. "But the combination perhaps in the wrong person could be lethal."

At least 76 people have died in the United States and Canada since 2001 after they were shot with Tasers, according to Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Colorado. A high percentage were using stimulants, and at least six coroner's reports found Tasers were a contributing factor.

Officials at Arizona-based Taser International said the weapon has been vindicated.

"Several studies have stated the Taser is most likely not a contributing factor during the custody deaths," said spokesman Steve Tuttle.

Monroe County Jail inmates will be put to work this winter clearing snow from bus stops to ease passage for riders, especially those with disabilities.

The Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority announced a partnership Tuesday with the Sheriff's Office to have inmates clear its busiest stops.

"Obviously it is difficult to get 300 bus drivers to go out and shovel out 4,500 bus stops if they are trying to stay on schedule and get people to work," said Mark Aesch, chief executive officer of the RGRTA. "We have selected the 250 most active bus stops in the RTS system for the inmates in the outdoor work program, to shovel away snow from those spots so folks can access those stops."

Inmates in the county's Outside Work Program will take on the task of snow removal. The program allows inmates who have earned the trust of jail officials to participate in outside chores such as road and park cleanup in the summer and installation of snow fences in the winter.

Video viewing in moving vehicles is another example of how quickly sex entrepreneurs convert new communications technology to their own use. Each year, hundreds of thousands of vehicles arrive in the dealer showrooms equipped with video systems. The original idea was to provide entertainment for passengers, particularly children, in the back seats.

But some drivers occasionally pop in adult videos for themselves or their passengers. Public officials and ordinary citizens who have glimpsed such naughty bits or heard about them are outraged. Already the trend is generating scornful labels, including "drive-by porn," "dirty driving" and "vehicular obscenity."

Conservative groups are urging Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to help lead the fight to deny the Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship to his colleague, Sen. Arlen Specter.

The groups noted that they already were upset with Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, for supporting Specter earlier this year in his GOP primary contest against Rep. Patrick Toomey, a conservative and strong opponent of abortion.

If Santorum hopes to avoid his own Senate primary battle in two years -and perhaps make a run for president in 2008 - he needs to heed conservative concerns about whether Specter, a moderate, can be trusted to shepherd President Bush's judicial nominees through the Senate, the groups said.

"When I was out on the road in Pennsylvania, people were so angry with Sen. Santorum for backing Sen. Specter" in the primary, said the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, head of the Christian Defense Coalition. "Wouldn't it be fascinating if Congressman Toomey ran a primary against Santorum?"

Twisted Sister's Dee Snider drops in on The USS Nimitz to host The VH1 Classic Thanksgiving Special

Twisted Sister frontman and radio personality Dee Snider recently visited the world's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, to tape a VH 1 Classic Thanksgiving special that features video requests and dedications from crew members serving on the aircraft carrier.

While aboard the Nimitz, Snider also hosted a live broadcast of his radio show on Philadelphia's WMMR and performed such infamous Twisted Sister hits as "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock" with a band drawn from the crew of Nimitz.

If fair-minded secular Democrats went to church - they are open to the public, by the way - here's some of what they'd learn: Lesson No. 1: Far more than abortion, evolution or homosexuality, Evangelical Christianity is about love, redemption, forgiveness, charity, humility, hope and self-sacrifice ....

Lesson No. 2: Evangelicals are scared, too. They are scared of the fruits of secularism and the deterioration of the culture in which they're trying to raise their children. Of hip-hop lyrics that encourage rape and murder. Of PG-13 movies and "family hour" sitcoms that tell children that if they're not having sex at 16, they're out of it. Of the scuzzy showbiz people who often surround Democrats ....

Lesson No. 3 for Democrats: Respect religion by nominating a presidential candidate who "gets it." Kerry gave the impression of faking it, visiting African-American churches only late in the campaign and, seemingly, for political purposes. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), an Orthodox Jew, clearly did "get" it.

Nuclear Weapons Testing in 2007?

What can we expect in future nuclear weapons issues now that Bush has been reelected? One possibility is a return to full-scale testing by the U.S.

The Bush Administration has been openly hostile to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (first sought by President Eisenhower). In November 2002 the U.S. was the only country to vote against keeping the CTBT on the United Nation's agenda.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is the semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency within the Department of Energy. Its FY 2005 budget now declares as "Performance Indicators" for its testing program:

...Readiness to conduct underground testing as established by National Security policy and documented in the Program Plan for Test Readiness... FY2005 - Produce list of possible test scenarios and confirm that plans will enable these tests [repeated for each year through 2009]. FY 2006... - Prepare plan for device-specific NESS.

NNSA FY05 Congressional Budget Request, page 84

A NESS is a Nuclear Explosives Safety Study, required before an actual test. "Device-specific" indicates that a particular nuclear weapons type is being prepared for testing. Therefore we can expect the possible resumption of full-scale testing in 2007.

Solving the nation's spam problem will require a balancing act, legal and privacy experts said today in Washington, D.C., at a meeting sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission.

Dubbed the E-mail Authentication Summit, the meeting drew several hundred software industry officials, users and others to discuss the policy and technical implications of adopting industrywide standards for dealing with unwanted commercial e-mail by accurately identifying — or authenticating — who is sending it.

Once identified, spammers can be prosecuted under antifraud laws.

If industry adopts such standards, care must be taken to balance people's right to be rid of unwanted commercial e-mail and users' right to use e-mail for anonymous political speech, said Duane Berlin, general counsel at the Council of American Survey Research Organizations. "Both sides of the equation are important, both rights exist," he said.

"The e-mail world is very big and surprisingly fragile," Levine said, adding that making it secure poses challenges similar to making the U.S. Postal Service's system anthrax-resistant.

...one way bloggers can help guide the mainstream at times like this: source your stuff like crazy, and the stuffier the source the better.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that large numbers of Iraqi civilians would not be killed, "certainly not by U.S. forces," during the siege to retake Fallujah, even as the top U.S. commander there predicted a "major confrontation" between insurgents and up to 15,000 troops in the Sunni Muslim city.

Some potentially serious problems were reported late last week, as election officials continued counting and checking votes. One Ohio precinct, where only 638 ballots were cast, reported 4,258 votes for President Bush, according to an Associated Press report. Officials who found the error said Bush actually got 365 votes to John Kerry's 260.

Equally troubling, voters in some precincts claimed that the machines showed them summary screens reflecting different votes than the ones they had cast, but they were able to change to their preferred candidates.

"The thing that is worrisome about these [complaints] is that we've seen it across all systems," Cohn said. "It doesn't seem to be limited to one [brand] of machine." She said many voters may not have noticed that their confirmation screens listed incorrect choices.

Many of those who believe the e-voting systems are still too prone to errors and vulnerable to tampering said the technology did not prove itself Nov. 2.

"A lot of people are missing the big picture," said Aviel Rubin, a critic of e-voting and a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. "They're focused on whether the machines worked" from the voter's point of view.

But if something affected the final vote tallies, whether it was deliberate or accidental, voters would almost certainly never notice, he said.

"A smart person who wanted to rig the election would do it for a close race," he said. "This was the perfect opportunity. We don't have any evidence that it happened, but we don't know."

Rubin co-authored a 2003 report detailing security vulnerabilities in one version of Diebold Inc.'s Diebold Election Systems' voting machine software. Diebold is one of several firms that develops software for touch-screen voting machines and the back-end tabulation systems. Rubin has been a proponent of enabling the machines to create paper records that voters would verify before leaving. Polling places could use the records if a manual recount is needed.

David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold, argued that the Nov. 2 election experience validates electronic voting.

"This election did a lot," he said. "You see overwhelming acceptance, even preference, from voters. I think the national dialogue is good. Where the problem comes up — and, unfortunately, I think this happened some before this election — is when the dialogue serves only to confuse and frighten voters."

Mark Belling used the word "wetback," a derogatory term to describe illegal Mexican immigrants, in a discussion on his Oct. 27 show about potential voter fraud in Wisconsin.

"You watch the voter turnout on the near south side (of Milwaukee), heavily Hispanic, and compare it to the voter turnout in any other election, and you're going to see every wetback and every other non-citizen out there voting," he said.

He sarcastically apologized on the air last Monday, then joked about the situation for days and polled listeners about whether he should have apologized.

On Tuesday, the volume of conversations on the Web reached a crescendo. The number of postings to blogs rose to nearly 800,000, double the daily average, said David Sifry, founder and chief executive of Technorati, which monitors Web logs. David and Micah Sifry are brothers.

The party is split between the Kerry/Edwards gang, vs the Deaniacs, or those who see Hillary as the potentially strongest Democrat, able to raise the monies, and make the most impact in bringing people out to vote, and especially those who could have, but didn't show yesterday.

Hillarynow.com is leading this effort.

Having traveled and lived in many other countries, the American system of just two parties seems hopelessly outdated. If a relatively small country like Romania has no less than 12 people running for president, representing at least 15 separate political parties, how can just two political parties adequately serve an American population more than ten times larger? That's like saying your local ice cream store can please all of its customers by only serving chocolate and vanilla. Are there no "strawberry" lovers in the United States?

NBC's "The West Wing," assuming it lasts past the end of this season, will continue to twist itself into a pretzel in an attempt to attract people who were never likely to watch a show about policy and politics in the first place.

More than 4,500 votes may be lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in local races around the state.

Officials are investigating whether the lost votes in coastal Carteret County can be retrieved somehow, said state Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett.

Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

Even with a lagging economy, an unjustified war on Iraq, fifty million Americans without health insurance and more, the religious right has successfully made "traditional moral values" a pressing political issue. But when they talk about "moral values" they are not talking about "morals" per se. When we think about morals, we think about character. We think about things like not stealing and not killing; we think about helping others and being good people. That is not what they mean. When religious conservatives refer to "morality" they are talking about sociopolitical issues like abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, stem-cell research and of course state-church separation issues and all that encompasses like organized prayers in the public schools, the Ten Commandments on public property, the teaching of evolution and creationism in the public schools, the removal of the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance, etc.

...

Unfortunately, the leaders of the abortion, gay, feminist, scientific and other progressive movements have failed to address the root problem, which hinders their causes and that is religion. They will not challenge religion or the religious for fear of alienating their religious supporters. Eleven states in this election passed referendums outlawing gay marriage. How did the gays allow that to happen? It happened because the gays want to befriend the religious and work with the religious in the hope of being accepted and ultimately change minds that way. It is a good idea in theory but we have just seen how successful it is in reality.

We Atheists have always been there to support their causes when it is they who should have been supporting ours, for that support would redound to their benefit. All too often liberal cause groups are reluctant to accept our support for fear of appearing anti-religious. One lesson from the November election, however, may be that until these groups more openly embrace the support of millions of Atheists and other "seculars" throughout the nation, they will be forever spinning their political wheels. Religion is the problem and not the solution. Religion has been the driving force behind the anti-choice laws, the opposition to stem-cell research, the opposition to gay rights and state-church separation. As long as scientific, feminist, gay and other such organizations fail to address the root causes of their issues then they will not make much progress. Gays, women, and scientists want it both ways. They want to advance their progressive issues and not challenge the threat to them, which is religion. We Atheists need to tell these leaders that religion is the problem and it must be addressed. We need to step off the defense bus and get on the offensive.

I'm tired of your lame excuses: Get out and vote

The presidential election is today. Voting is a constitutional right and many people have died to protect this important right. But, still many adults don't vote and give lame excuses as to why they can't.

...there is no good reason not to vote. If you choose not to vote, you are just fooling yourself. All adults can vote; all adults should vote. There is no test to pass, there is no fee to pay, and there is no reason not to vote.

When Will Americans Know Which Candidate Is Elected as President?
· Wednesday, November 3rd 73%
· Between November 4th and November 10th 16%
· Between November 11th and December 1st 4%
· Later than December 1st But Before January 20th, 2005 2%
· After January 20th 4%

An untold number of ballots from people who have died since casting them will be counted this year because of the haphazard and cumbersome process of enforcing laws in many states to weed out these votes.

With millions of voters taking advantage of new, in-person early voting in at least 30 states this year, it's even more likely that such "ghost" votes will be counted because, in most cases, those ballots are impossible to retrieve. Besides, it could be days or weeks after the election before local officials get word someone has died.

Earlier this month, in what would be her last conscious act, 90-year-old Trixie Porter gripped a pen in her weak, trembling hand, checked the candidates of her choice and scrawled a squiggled signature on her absentee ballot.

Within an hour, the petite woman who had been suffering from heart problems lay back in her hospital bed, closed her eyes and never woke up. Her ballot arrived at her local elections board two days later, Oct. 5 - the day she died.

In Florida alone, more than 1.8 million people, many of them elderly and sick retirees, have cast absentee ballots or voted early in person in the past two weeks.

How many of those voters won't be alive on Election Day? Considering that an average of 455 voting-age people die in Florida every day, and that the 2000 presidential election was decided by a mere 537 votes, dead votes that slip through the cracks could become a meaningful bloc.