1. Dominic Nutt of Christian Aid notes in The Guardian that the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq is in violation of a U.N. resolution over its handling of reconstruction funds from Iraq's oil income:
Under UN resolution 1483, the UN also obliged the coalition to set up an independent monitoring board to oversee and to publish these oil accounts. This was meant to happen in May this year and failure is no minor matter.
Does this mean the Bush administration will now be advocating regime change for the CPA?
2. At Ethicsdaily, Greg Garrett notes that the Bush White House fails to live up to "The Chandler Rule":
I would be less pained by the Bush administration if it did not profess to be Christian, called to restore morality to the White House and, in the recent words of a much-quoted general, placed in office by God himself.
Other writers can talk about how policies of the Bush White House starve the hungry, harm the widow and orphan and discomfort the prisoner. That is not my aim today. I am simply trying to teach my son to tell the truth, and I’d appreciate it if the president of the United States would give me a little backup.
3. Here and here are two cautionary items on the state of the economy, both written by the AP's Hope Yen.
William Safire is crowing optimistically about the "Pollyanna Brigade" and the coming of the "Bush Boom." I want to be a little more cautious when I'm still reading pessimistic articles from someone whose first name is "Hope" and last name is "Yen." (You're free to supply your own one-liner speculating on what Ms. Yen's middle name might be.)
4. It's 23 days and counting since I first noticed that the FEC no longer has the National Mail Voter Registration Form available online "due to recent changes in federal law." ("The new form will be available shortly," the FEC says, perhaps referring to some time in December 2005.)
El Conspirateer provides this helpful link for anyone who needs to register themselves. Useful, but unless I get a laptop with wi-fi, it doesn't help me conduct a guerrilla voter-registration campaign. For that I need the (still unavailable) paper form.
5. Today is William Cullen Bryant's birthday. I'm not a particular admirer of Bryant's poetry, but he was wise enough to know that if you're going to be a 19th-century poet, then you should do your best to look like a 19th-century poet.
6. Mother Jones doesn't have it's November/December issue online yet, so I'll have to type in this quote from Tony Kushner:
Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country's future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don't give him your vote.
Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.
7. Gerald Plessner on Grover Norquist, "The Most Dangerous Man in America." Norquist's hatred of the Constitution begins with its very first word, "We." (And he isn't terribly fond of the next two words either.)
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