Hurry up and get the voting over with, Americans, so we can go ahead and bomb the shit out of Fallujah. A major attempt to "pacify" the city is scheduled, but not until after Tuesday. Wouldn't look good for the Bush regime to launch Operation Fuck 'Em All until after the polls close.

But now that we may have broken the magic six-figure barrier, maybe this war thing will get a little easier. The Lancet, a big-time British medical journal, just published a peer-reviewed article estimating that more than 100,000 civilians have been killed, most by air strikes. The Independent (U.K.) says The Lancet piece is "the first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war." The authors of the article used detailed on-the-ground interviewing and then extrapolated from "cluster samples." Their closing "interpretation":

Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. We have shown that collection of public-health information is possible even during periods of extreme violence. Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce non-combatant deaths from air strikes.

How many Iraqis will die in the next big assault on rebellious Fallujah may never be known. Right from the start of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, American authorities contemptuously dismissed even the idea of putting numbers and names to the corpses, and that includes those of women and children.

General Tommy Franks was widely quoted as saying early on, "We don't do body counts." But others are. Over at Iraq Body Count, the latest estimate is that 14,000 to 16,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the invasion.

Why the disparity in figures? It's a big, dangerous country, enveloped in chaos, and the occupation authorities and their puppet regime that nominally has stepped in aren't interested in counting the corpses.

But the numbers may be even higher. Adding further confusion is that The Lancet study bases its six-figure estimate without considering Fallujah, because it's the most dangerous and deadly area and would thus skew the "cluster samples" upon which the figures are based.

By the way, "violent deaths were mainly attributed to coalition forces," and "most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children."

Reuters reports today that "U.S. planes have launched almost daily air strikes on what the military says are safe houses used by a network of Iraqi and foreign fighters led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." The latest raid killed three Iraqi men, and three more civilians were wounded.

"A full-scale U.S.-led offensive," Reuters's Michael Georgy wrote, "could be as devastating as a Marine attack in April that Washington called off after a world outcry over civilian casualties in Fallujah. Local doctors reported more than 600 dead in the fighting."

Hey, that ain't nothing. Brigadier General Dennis Hejlik told reporters on Friday, according to Reuters, "We are gearing up for a major operation. If we do so, it will be decisive and we will whack them."

On the morning of 9/11, George W. Bush looked like a child left behind. The president inexplicably continued to sit in a Florida classroom reading The Pet Goat after he had been told that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

That may be part of the reason that for his role in Fahrenheit 9/11, Bush has outpolled Gollum of The Lord of the Rings as the movie Villain of the Year, according to Total Film, a British magazine, which plans to publish the polls results next week. The news washes up on our shores from the London Evening Standard, via this story in The Register.

Lester Haines of The Register noted that in the poll of 10,000 readers, Bush also "eclipsed the contributions of Doctor Octopus, Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Elle Driver (Kill Bill)." Haines quoted Total Film editor Matt Mueller as having told the Standard:

It is possible that people have been a little bit tongue in cheek here, but they are also saying that Bush was very scary in Fahrenheit 9/11. He was absolutely terrifying in that film. He looked like a man who had lost control—the famous scene where he sits there in a school, absolutely paralyzed, after being told about the twin towers, is just one example.

Before the Bush regime destroys public education, you'd better hit the books.

The latest crack in the facade of the No Child Left Behind Act just became visible in Philadelphia, where the Inquirer reported that "school accountability gains that Pennsylvania education officials lauded resulted from lower standards, not improved performance."

Educators are caught in a bind: The new federal "standards" are impossibly high, even for good schools, and especially because the Bush regime and its pals in Congress didn't provide the funding for the new law's massive revamping and retooling. Schools that "fail" are in danger of being converted to charter status.

As we've said before, Bush's vaunted No Child Left Behind maneuvers are designed to suffocate public schools. In the '80s era, neocons tried to do it by calling for the abolishment of the U.S. Department of Education—Ronald Reagan himself promised to abolish it. (For background, read this PBS piece from 1996.) Now they're smarter and are drilling holes in the foundation of public education from within.

It's a beautiful union-busting maneuver. The two main groups of unionized workers left in the U.S. are teachers and government employees. If the conservative cabal can privatize in those sectors, America's labor movement, already laboring, will be on death's door as far as political power goes.

Educators Ken Goodman and Yetta Goodman warn of the broader, more disturbing implications. In the introductory material for their book Save Our Neighborhood Schools, they note:

Around the world there are countries trying to achieve what America had, our universal system of free, public, inclusive, neighborhood elementary and secondary schools which we count on to provide the education they need for full productive participation in a democratic society.

In developing countries children of those with money are sent to private schools of varying quality depending on what their parents can afford. The public schools, meagerly funded by local and/or central governments, serve the children of the working poor. Large numbers of even poorer rural and urban children either don't go to school or leave within the first few years.

We have worked extensively with schools and education authorities in Central and South America and the Caribbean, in Asia, Oceania, and Africa. We have seen heroic teachers teaching 40-50 children in tiny, dimly lit rooms. And we've met taxicab teachers in private and public schools in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. They teach in the morning in one school and jump in a taxi to teach in another school in the afternoon. Every economic downturn drives families of even moderate means to take their children out of costly private schools. Even in developed nations only a fraction of those that make it through secondary schools go on to some form of higher education.

The Goodmans insist that the No Child Left Behind Act "does not have good intentions," adding:

It is a major part of a sustained campaign being waged to transform American education from one in which almost all our children and young people attend common, neighborhood schools administered by an elected board of concerned citizens of each community under state laws, into a system which more closely matches the system of third world nations.

It's kind of humorous, in a way, how the Bush regime snookered Democrats in Congress into supporting this Draconian legislation in 2001. But it was couched as "reform," so there you have it. Veteran educator Gerald Bracey sussed it out quickly. Recalling his reaction for this Seattle Post-Intelligencer story by Deborah Bach, Bracey said last spring:

When it first came out, what struck me so much about it is it was totally unlike anything else coming out of the Bush agenda. This is probably the most anti-regulatory administration since before the Great Depression.

Everything [Bush has] done except for No Child Left Behind is very obviously aimed at helping corporate America and rolling back regulations. With No Child Left Behind, here comes this 1,100-page law with very strict requirements and hundreds of pages of regulations. I looked for an ulterior motive, and it wasn't very hard to find one.

And that motive is vouchers. The religious right wants them so it can get public funding of religious schools and stamp out the secular, humanistic garbage that's infecting America's youth. The neocon right wants them so it can privatize education.

Sounds like a conspiracy theory, right? Well, it's no theory. Media Transparency offers more on this in its "privatization" section:

The conservative movement, being thoroughly anti-union, has at its heart a desire to rid the United States of the two remaining unionized sectors of the national economy: public education (teachers unions), and public employees. In service of these goals, the movement has moved aggressively against both public schools and public school teachers.

Of course, the movement is also interested in converting to private profit the estimated $300+ billion annually spent on public primary and secondary education.

The vibrant Black Commentator has jumped into this issue right from the online mag's beginnings only a few years ago. Here's a sliver from its explosive December 2003 dissection of the pro-voucher movement promoted by right-wing foundations:

Vouchers are key to GOP ambitions to create an "alternative" Black political leadership and to simultaneously sunder the ties between African Americans and organized labor, particularly teachers unions. Beginning with a bucket of gold and a gaggle of hungry hustlers, Republicans have in a few short years succeeded in buying space for vouchers in the Black and general public discourse. An illusory voucher "movement" has been manufactured, despite the fact that nobody Black ever marched for vouchers and suburban whites want no part of such schemes.

But one of the savviest and most blunt pieces comes out of TeacherProfessionalism.com, a Minnesota group. Belying the boring title "A Brief Framework for Understanding the Anti-Public School Movement," Tom Siebold is neither brief nor confining himself to education. Here's part of his analysis:

Money and influence from the neoconservative secular right, combined with grassroots power from the religious right, has resulted in a dramatic reshaping of the American political landscape. One important point of intersection between the two is the movement to dismantle public education.

Siebold breaks it down:

The secular right, which consists of influential military, political, and corporate leaders, is outraged by social change spawned by women's rights, civil rights, worker rights, the ecology movement, unionism, corporate regulations, etc. In response they have spent vast sums of money to fight back. Armed with big bankrolls and convenient access to media outlets, dedicated social/political warriors are fighting to reshape America with a new conservative mindset commonly dubbed neoconservatism. … Neoconservatives see society as an economic hierarchy where a corporate elite works to save the nation from the liberal tendencies of the masses.

Although they are powerful, the small number of neocons makes it almost impossible for them to win elections on their own. This is where the religious right becomes useful. Legions of citizens from organizations like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the Christian Coalition are convinced that America has been betrayed by liberal leaders who have undermined core values and set the nation adrift in a sea of secular humanism and decadence. By pushing "hot button" issues like moral relativism, homosexuality, secularism, multiculturalism, sexual freedom, liberal courts, and a general deterioration of the Christian ethnocentric order, charismatic figures like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Gary Bauer can rally large numbers of voters. Karl Rove estimates that over 15 million voters from the religious right turned out for Bush in 2000.

Wonder how many will turn out next Tuesday? There will be huge numbers of "believers" flocking to the polls. That may be enough to save the monumentally bungling Bush.

Back in early February 2003, a mere six weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a nation's leaders gathered for a formal day of prayer. The leader of the country was there, along with his top military person, his chief spy, and more than half of that nation's lawmakers.

Various people spoke at this ceremony. Finally, the nation's chief spy walked up to the podium and, with no introductory remarks, told the audience:

God teaches us to be resolute in the face of evil, using all of the weapons and armor that the word of God supplies.

Citing one of the major works of his nation's dominant religion, the chief spy continued:

We're told, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stance against the devil's schemes. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore, put on the whole armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground and after you have done everything to stand, stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of justice in place and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes with the gospel of peace.

Take up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and pray at all times.

Citing another tract of his nation's religious works, the chief spy continued:

At the same time, the word of God also calls us to a life of forgiveness and mercy. … We are told, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back, despairing of no one, and your reward will be great and you will be the sons and daughters of most high, because He is kind to the ungrateful and selfish.

Be merciful even as your father is merciful. Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you.

A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you give will be the measure you get back. The word of the Lord.

And having said that, George Tenet sat down.

The National Prayer Breakfast, on February 6, 2003, at the Washington Hilton in D.C., was nearly over. The invasion of Iraq would begin the next month. Questions about how good the armor was wouldn't arise until later.

We're being constantly strafed by obvious propaganda in these last few days of the most expensive—and potentially most costly, if you know what I mean—presidential campaign in history.

But we're also being shelled by friendly fire. And these wounds ought to convince people not to trust the bullshit that pollsters are spreading around and that newspapers are passing off as news.

The usually reliable (see this AIPAC story) Robin Wright of The Washington Post recently based an entire story on a poll of Iraqis by the International Republican Institute. In the story, Wright noted that religious leaders were leading in the poll. The whole story was spin city by the U.S. government and its puppet regime in Iraq, even though Wright noted that chief puppet Ayad Allawi was losing ground.

Despite that bad news, the story's slant was ridiculous. Wright quoted an unidentified congressional staff member as saying:

"We had convinced everyone—Americans and Iraqis—that things might change with the return of sovereignty, but, in fact, things went the other way."

When exactly were Iraqis "convinced" that things might change? There is no evidence of that whatsoever.

The story's full of other bull, too, like this paragraph:

Despite the current strife, about two-thirds of Iraqis do not believe civil war is imminent, the poll found. Asked if their households had been hurt by violence, injuries, death or monetary loss over the past year, only 22 percent of those questioned said yes—a figure that surprised pollsters and U.S. officials.

And elsewhere, Wright noted:

More than 45 percent of Iraqis also believe that their country is heading in the wrong direction, and 41 percent say it is moving in the right direction.

That close, eh? Don't believe it. We don't know how the poll's questions were worded, let alone any other details of its methods. So who or what is this International Republican Institute? Wright tells us (kind of) at the end:

The IRI, founded in 1983, is a private, nonprofit organization that has worked in more than 60 countries to advance democracy worldwide. With U.S. grants, it has been in charge of public opinion polls in advance of the election.

Why was IRI picked by the Bush regime to conduct polling in Iraq? Go to Wikipedia's entry, which includes this detail:

The International Republican Institute, or IRI, is a Washington, D.C.–based political organization in the United States. The IRI is loosely affiliated with the Republican Party and works closely with other rightist think tanks and foreign policy groups, including the National Endowment for Democracy. Some of its funding comes from the federal government.

IRI's stated mission is to "support the growth of political and economic freedom, good governance and human rights around the world by educating people, parties and governments on the values and practices of democracy." However, it has also been linked to efforts to foment a violent military coup in Haiti.

IRI was set up by the GOP's cold warriors in 1983. By complete coincidence, Dick Cheney got the IRI's Freedom Award in late 2001, and this year's winner was Condoleezza Rice. Past winners include Ronald Reagan, Lynne Cheney, Bill Frist, and Colin Powell. And our current Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai.

Yes, when I think of "freedom," I think of that bunch. Check out Cheney's acceptance speech here. And go to the IRI's website and you'll see that its own story on the poll of Iraqis is headlined this way: "Optimistic Outlook on the Future and Support for Democracy."

Now why did the estimable Washington Post give a poll by this partisan group so much ink? I expect that behavior out of TV nitwits, not the print media.

If you're going to write about polls, at least consider the source. A good U.S. fount of Iraqi and American opinions is available at PIPA, run by the Center on Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. Another careful and exhaustive poll of Iraqi opinion was conducted by the BBC last spring. (See this Bush Beat item, "Our Man in Baghdad.")

How—and how often—these numbers are drummed into our brains is another matter. I'm in the camp of those who think that polls produce self-fulfilling prophecies. The constant reporting by the mass media on poll results is destructive, not just a waste of time. Most polls are done poorly, reported poorly, and vastly overemphasized. News organizations rely on them, instead of doing the heavy-duty reporting that organizations like the Center for Public Integrity do. Check out the center's latest report on the communications industry, "Networks of Influence."

Numerous other watchdog groups—even congressmen like Henry Waxman and Carl Levin—do the kind of investigative reporting that most news organizations shy away from. (The Washington Post is not one of those news organizations; its coverage of the Bush regime has far outstripped that of The New York Times.)

For more on this perspective, either watch Canadian news or read up on CBC's chief news editor, Tony Burman. You get only a taste of this from the U.S. press.

This morning, for instance, the Post's own director of polling, Richard Morin, wrote a lengthy apologia on behalf of pollsters. Only near the end of this story do you get a hint of another side of the media, as represented by people like Burman. To Morin's credit, he does give Burman a say, even if most readers won't get that far:

At least one news organization has decided to stop doing pre-election polls altogether. Not because they're inaccurate but because they're addictive.

"They suck all of the oxygen out of the coverage by reducing the whole thing to who's up and who's down," says Tony Burman, chief news editor of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. "Besides, the methodology is really becoming suspect. The response rate has become low, and reliability has suffered. So we decided not to commission them on our own and be very restrained in covering them."

The CBC abruptly quit pre-election polling in May, weeks before the Canadian national election. The goal, Burman wrote in an e-mail to staff, was "to ensure that more coverage and attention during the campaign will be devoted to the actual issues in front of the electorate—leaving the determination of actual 'voter preference' to the voters on election day."

Burman urges his counterparts in this country to do the same. "There is a lot of empty coverage in the United States devoted to horse-race polls that just fill up the airtime. It's the quintessential example of lazy journalism." He says he's "not lecturing anyone on it. We're just happy that we're getting the balance right."

Morin, of course, counters by ending his defense of polls with a section titled "Still a Valuable Tool." One of his points is this:

Pre-election polls in 2000 were the most accurate in nearly three decades. Pollsters point to data showing that in 2002, nearly nine out of 10 candidates who were ahead in surveys conducted immediately before the election ended up winning, with the overwhelming majority of these polls coming within 3 percentage points of the winner's victory margin.

Morin neglects to mention that, as I've pointed out before, more than 80 percent of U.S. House races in 2002 were won by landslide margins—more than 20 percentage points—because of gerrymandering. Wow, and the pollsters got those set-up races right? Congratulations.

Yes, he and other people who overplay polls are indeed valuable tools.

In the last frantic month of the presidential campaign, the GOP has finally caught on to recycling—even while it continues to spew irritants at us through its monopoly enterprises.

Call this episode an example of swing-state Swift-boat economics—recycling as only the GOP would do it: The Sinclair Broadcast Group, a GOP sugar daddy and the prime producer of its own Swift boat swill (last week's Stolen Honor pseudo-show), is also raking in revenue from other Swift boat propagandists.

It's a good way for Sinclair to recoup some of the money it lost for pre-empting prime time last Friday to sprinkle its own fairy dust on cathodized Americans.

And this set-up just keeps recycling wads of money from one anti-Kerry operation to another, paying for hit pieces every time the cash lands on someone's desk.

Sinclair's station in Pensacola, Florida, WEAR-TV, raked in a cool $142,111.50 on October 19 for airing anti-Kerry ads placed by the Swift Boat Vets for Truth, according to Federal Election Commission records of Section 527 "electioneering" committees. This specific 105-page report, covering only the week of October 15-21, shows that the Swift Boat Vets took in $3.8 million, mostly from millionaires, and spent $3.4 million on propaganda campaigns. Do we even have to point out how insane this spending is? (Yes, pro-Kerry forces do the same thing.)

Back to Sinclair: On the same day, October 19, the huge pro-Bush chain, the nation's largest single cluster of TV stations, also scored $4,471 through WTWC-TV in Tallahassee, Florida, from the Swift Boat Vets.

And in the other major battleground state, Ohio, Sinclair's WSYX-TV, in Columbus, hauled in $59,925. On October 20.

Keep in mind that we're talking about only one campaign committee giving money to one media conglomerate in one short period of time. And whatever cash Sinclair might take in from anti-Bush committees is just so much gravy.

For more information on the increasing corporatization of media outlets—electronic or otherwise—consult Columbia Journalism Review's Who Owns What.

One of the best watchdog orgs these days is Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which recently reported on the flip side of the Sinclair sordidness: Viacom's refusal to air anti-Bush ads. Check out the story here, in which FAIR notes that Viacom czar Sumner Redstone announced support of Bush over Kerry, after which its networks, which include MTV and Comedy Central (it also owns CBS), rejected anti-Bush ads. FAIR adds:

The independent progressive group Compare Decide Vote produced an ad comparing the presidential candidates' policy positions on issues important to young people, which the group says was accepted for placement by MTV Network's Comedy Central. Two days later, the station rejected the ad, citing an MTV Networks policy against running advocacy ads (Washington Post, 10/13/04).

"The reason behind our policy distinction between issue-ads and political campaign ads is simply that across all our properties, we talk about these issues every day," explained a Viacom spokesperson (Media Daily News, 10/13/04).

That reasoning—that outside perspectives on important political issues are blocked because Viacom's own coverage of the issues is sufficient—is undermined by CBS's recent decision to hold until after the election a 60 Minutes story on forged documents that the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war. The network said it "would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election." (See FAIR Action Alert, 9/28/04.)

The Bush regime is big on global warnings, but when it comes to global warming, forget it.

Big polluters run from the phrase "global warming" the way vampires flee sunlight. And the U.S. State Department feels the same way. It can hardly even bear to say the phrase, referring to it as "global climate change."

The absurdity of this is reminiscent of Lysenkoism, the idiotic, ideological denial of genetics and other state-disapproved science in the Stalin era. Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet version of James G. Watt, ruled science; biologists and others were sent to gulags and even killed for their ideas. (See this Wikipedia entry.)

But science—and reality—can't be held back forever. In fact, the State Department under Bush and Colin Powell talks out of both sides of its mouth, as we already know thanks to Powell's mass deception at the U.N. in February 2003. (See this Bush Beat review of his artless performance.)

The Bush regime, funded heavily by big polluters, has bitterly resisted the Kyoto treaty, which requires countries to reduce emissions, but only if enough polluting countries agree to the accord. Now, Russia has finally done so, ratifying the contentious deal only a few days ago. As Peter Baker of The Washington Post explains:

The treaty, which commits industrial nations to curb production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that many scientists blame for global warming, required ratification by countries responsible for at least 55 percent of the world's emissions. Because the United States opted out of the agreement in 2001, only Russia, with 17 percent, could put it over the threshold.

But as I say, the U.S. continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth. In an official State Department report designed to be read by investors and business people—not the general public—on Uzbekistan and the frighteningly polluted Aral Sea, Tatyana Isaeva of the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent wrote in March 2003:

Global warming is an international problem. It concerns industrially developed and developing countries, as well as transitional economies.

There, the U.S. said it.

One of the many scandals sourly churning in the guts of the Bush regime that won't fully vomit into public view until after next week's vote is a massive electoral corruption case centered in Texas and swirling dizzily around House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

This is not an international incident, like the brewing Kazakhgate mess. But it's not just a local case, either. Focusing on influence-peddling in Texas, it explains a lot about how the country has been gerrymandered into the kind of non-democracy in which the vast majority of congressional races are practically uncontested—and why the House remains controlled by the conservative cabal. See the Center for Voting and Democracy's "Dubious Democracy" and this previous Bush Beat item from September 3.

The DeLay scandal is already at the stage at which pols are raising money from other pols to pay for lawyers to argue that the method they used to previously raise money to pay for other lawyers to hound other pols was not technically illegal.

This is the kind of hangover you get from being drunk with power.

Political Money Line reports this morning that the Tom DeLay Legal Expense Trust raised $185,300 during the third quarter of this year. He's defending himself from an ethics complaint filed by fellow Texas congressman Chris Bell. Money poured into DeLay from nine other congressmen, including Hal Rogers of Kentucky.

Rogers, hungering to become the next chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is getting in good practice: He held a summer fundraiser for the DeLay legal defense fund that scooped up more than $100,000, most of it from construction and highway contractors, according to Political Money Line. I'd like to personally welcome Rogers to the national arena. If George W. Bush wins a second term, and the GOP machine keeps rolling along, Rogers will be there to help pave the way.

The DeLay scandal pits the powerful Republican, who practically re-gerrymandered Texas's congressional districts in 2002, against veteran district attorney Ronnie Earle of Austin, one of the few DA's in the country whose official website features not only court dockets and press releases but also planting schedules for vegetables.

DeLay, however, could be the one getting buried. Go to Congressman Bell's website to see the official complaint and a host of good stories on the topic, including Lou Dubose's terrific Salon piece from March 2004 that lays out the sordid tale involving Indian tribes, the Texas House speaker, scared legislators, and D.C. lobbyists like Jack Abramoff who are major Bush fundraisers and DeLay's pals. The watchdog group Texans for Public Justice helped spur Ronnie Earle to bring a host of indictments of various characters in this drama.

My colleague Wayne Barrett also plowed this fertile ground last spring in "Inside Bush's Indian Bureau."

Oh, and while you're watching the third game of the World Series tonight, and you hear the announcers paying tribute to various Fox celebrities and others, keep in mind that baseball's owners and execs, whose PACman games I talked about yesterday, are also paying tribute: They chipped in $5,000 in June 2003 to DeLay's PAC.

What an entertaining World Series so far, no matter what Yankee fans say. And of course every broadcast carries the obligatory tag that all rights are owned by the "Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball." The games take your mind off politics, right?

You wish. The insane election spending spree continues—Political Money Line reports that "electioneering" committees have raised nearly half a billion dollars so far this cycle, with million-dollar contributions pouring in nearly every frightful day this month. That doesn't even count the regular fundraising by pols and PACs. And one of the newer PACs is controlled by baseball commissioner Bud Selig. The "Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball Political Action Committee" didn't even exist during the 2000 presidential election. So far this cycle, however, it has distributed more than $340,000 from baseball owners and front-office executives to a host of Congress members.

Arch-conservative Jim Bunning got $10,000, according to Federal Election Commission records. OK, he's a former pitcher. But so did House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and so did Wisconsin rep Jim Sensenbrenner. Baseball officials even greased Rick Santorum's PAC with $2,000.

Turns out that Sensenbrenner was an outspoken opponent of Selig's proposed contraction of the Minnesota Twins a few years ago.

Selig knows how to clump the shit and move it around—he's a board member of Oil-Dri, the world's largest maker of cat litter, as I used to point out in the Voice. Baseball's execs have spread some money around, and they've probably quelled forever all threats from Congress to repeal baseball's fortunate exemption from antitrust laws now that they've placed a team in D.C., the former Montreal Expos. Just another toy for the congressmen to play with, starting next year. Think of them being entertained by lobbyists in the new D.C. stadium's skyboxes.

Way down below them will be the average D.C. resident. The U.S. leads the world in wealth inequality, and the gap is continually widening. And income inequality in the District of Columbia is wider than in any other major U.S. city, according to an analysis of census data by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute:

The study found that the average income of the top fifth of DC’s households equaled $186,830 in 1999. This was 31 times higher than the average income of the bottom fifth of households—$6,126.

While Atlanta and Miami have income gaps similar to DC’s, income inequality is much less pronounced in most other cities. In the typical city in the analysis—which includes central cities of the nation’s 40 largest metro areas—the income of the top fifth of households is 18 times the income of the bottom fifth.

As the income gap in D.C. continues to widen, the House, which controls life and politics there because D.C. doesn't have its own Congress member, recently passed a measure to allow assault weapons in the nation's capital—over the objections of a host of liberal Congress members, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Mayor Anthony Williams, Police Chief Charles Ramsey, the D.C. City Council, and numerous District businesses. Check out watchdog congressman Henry Waxman's riff on this. The federal ban on assault weapons expired last month, by the way.

But Congress didn't need guns to conduct this holdup. D.C.'s new baseball stadium will be yet another egregious case of corporate welfare. In fact, even baseball officials, used to largesse from municipalities all over the country, called the deal to finance the bonds used to pay for the stadium the sweetest sweetheart deal they'd seen:

To pay back the bonds, the District would rely mainly on a tax on the District's big businesses and new and existing sales taxes within the stadium. Less than 18 percent of the money to pay for the District's stadium would come from the team—through rent payments—over the first 20 years of the deal, according to projections.

Other cities typically have demanded that teams pay 33 percent or more of construction costs, according to statistics compiled by teams and the Sports Business Journal.

When the boondoggle was announced in late September, Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins was a voice of sanity, but she was drowned out by the har-de-har-har crowd of the ailing capital city's officials and all the politicians and lobbyists who will be using the stadium's soon-to-be-smoke-filled luxurious skyboxes. Here's how Jenkins laid it out:

Washingtonians will have to subsidize $440 million in stadium building projects, which Mayor Anthony A. Williams will have to sell to the D.C. Council as a "good investment" despite a wealth of unbiased and informed research that shows it's a bad one. A stadium isn't a good investment, according to Stanford University economist Roger Noll, "it's a toy." While the emerald chessboard folks and rotisserie wonks may think new business and concession taxes are a fair price to pay for the whap of the old horsehide, some lower-income residents don't agree, and neither do 70 percent of Washingtonians polled last summer who objected to public financing, and neither do three incoming members of the D.C. Council.

"Any independent study shows that as an investment, it's silly," says Noll, the co-author of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums. "If they're trying to sell it on grounds of actually contributing to economic growth and employment in D.C., that's wrong. There's never been a publicly subsidized stadium anywhere in the United States that had the effect of increasing employment and economic growth in the city in which it was built."

D.C. officials trumpeted this deal by saying that big businesses in the District will assume the tax burden. Yeah, right. As Jenkins noted:

The promoters of baseball in Washington tell you that taxpayers won't feel a thing. But you will indeed feel it, and here's how. The city intends to tax big business to pay for the stadium. Two things will happen. First, businesses will raise their prices, and the effective income of district residents will therefore go down. And two, when a gap opens between prices in the District and prices in Maryland, people will stop buying in the District and shop there instead.

Here is something else you should understand about what you're getting, and giving: In order to succeed financially, the new team will need loyal fans who are willing to buy good reserved seats and attend games 20 or 30 times a season. These days it costs a family of four about $150 to go to a game. That adds up to about $3,000 a year. Who can afford that? Wealthy people.

"They're the real beneficiaries of the subsidy," says Noll. "It's taxing ordinary people for a stadium attended by upper income people, and then the income generated goes to even higher income people, namely players and owners. Basically, you're taxing people who make $30,000 a year to generate a toy for people who make $200,000 a year, and income for people who make millions of dollars a year."

Other numbers to keep in mind are those that you never see juxtaposed in the mainstream media. As I pointed out in early September, the richest 1 percent of American households own 38 percent of all wealth, and fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all itemized campaign contributions in the 2002 elections.

From the Suspicions Confirmed Dept.:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest collection of churches, is finally winding down its meal service for hurricane victims in the Southeast. That's the bad news.

The even worse news is that, now that the Baptists have even more of a presence in that part of the country than they did before, they're going to shift into "long-term ministry."

The church's members remind every American not only that the sole way to "salvation" is to believe in Jesus Christ in exactly the way the Southern Baptists believe but also that their denomination is "the third-largest disaster relief agency in the country, behind the Red Cross and the Salvation Army."

Church official Jim Burton told faithful readers of the Baptist Press that the 16 million "Southern Baptists need to remember that disasters aren't over when the cleanup ends" and that they need to keep supporting Baptist officials "in the affected states as they develop their long-term strategy not just of the physical rebuild but also of the emotional and spiritual rebuild."

Let's face it: These religious nuts can't wait to get their hooks in, especially through their annual summer "mobilization" of 24,000 missionaries called World Changers.

"The annual objective of World Changers, which is primarily the rehabilitation of substandard housing and sharing the Gospel, is going to blend well with the long-term recovery efforts of disaster relief," Burton said.

Of more immediate concern is how many of these faithful will flock to the polls next week.

Numerous observers, including The New York Times in this story by David D. Kirkpatrick, have noted how hard George W. Bush's handlers are working to get the evangelicals to say amen.

Skirting on the edge of election laws, former Christian Coalition chief salesman Ralph Reed told the sect's pastors this summer at the annual Southern Baptist confab, "Without advocating on behalf of any candidate or political party, you can make sure that everyone in your circle of influence is registered to vote."

The call-response is locked in: The Southern Baptists organized "I Vote Values," their first-ever major voter registration drive, Kirkpatrick wrote. Now that it's the 21st century, the Southern Baptists are no longer afraid to provide a link on their voter-registration website to even The Washington Post, especially when it's to an October 15 story headlined "Evangelical Leaders Appeal to Followers to Go to Polls." You should read it too.

Key, of course, is the favorite tactic of Bush-Cheney '04 Inc.: fear. In this case, it's fear of them heathen homosexuals.

Who knows how many people will actually turn out to vote in this strange and scary election season. But for sure a lot of Southern Baptists will. And amid all the soup-ladling and soul-saving is the steady drumbeat of anti-gay rhetoric.

Baptist preacher Dwight McKissic, a black man, spread that message in a speech earlier this month at the denomination's huge seminary in Forth Worth. As a Baptist Press story noted, McKissic "could offer no guarantee" that "the battle against same-sex unions would be won." But, referring to the black soldiers in the movie Glory, he said:

On the verge of a suicide battle and after an all-night prayer meeting, they said, "If we go down, we’re going down standing up."

All this talk about "going down standing up"—that's a different missionary position for religious sects in America.