Well, since my last post I’ve experienced(1) a chipped front tooth;(2) the news that Independence Air, which my family depends on for direct air travel from Washington to Savannah, where my disabled father-in-law lives, is shutting down;(3) the possible death of my car, which lost power on I-95 just north of Fredericksburg, and was loudly sounding an apocalyptic blooga-blooga-blooga by the time I reached Arlington.(4) the Sugar Bowl (I refuse to use the corporate adjective), wherein my Georgia Bulldogs came back from a 28-0 deficit early in the first half and then lost 38-35 after West Virginia pulled off a fake punt late in the game. All in all, my holiday season has been a rolling fiasco, but like the Dawgs, I am determined to make a comeback, and if things keep going wrong, I will remain bloodied but unbowed.

I fully intended to do a year-end thumbsucker post reviewing the baleful consequences of George W. Bush’s re-election, and the increasingly obvious dysfunction of his Republican Party. But it’s hard to blog when you’re wheezing and coughing and subsisting on NyQuil and antibiotics. I rang in the New Year sound asleep, and today I am hiding from a cold, rainy day in Central Virginia (as is the fog-shrouded Blue Ridge a few miles from here) and awaiting tonight’s Sugar Bowl.In this state of mind, any thoughts I have about the upcoming year are dominated by the depressing realization that Bush’s second term has three more years to run, accompanied by my Eeyore-like fears about Democrats’ ability to walk (make major gains next November) and chew gum (set the table for victory in 2008) at the same time.I can only hope that in a day or two I will feel better, the mountains will reappear, the world will look more promising, and the Donkey Party will kick off this new year with an intelligent strategy for reclaiming power.

Sorry for the lack of posts, but the last few days have been absorbed with the blessed chaos of an extended family Christmas involving complex human and zoological logistics, travel across the Southland, screwed-up delivery orders of presents, and in my own case, an attack of acute bronchitis. I only have one political point to make today: adding to the chaos, I’ve been trying to sign up my mother-in-law for the Medicare Rx drug benefit, which her current insurer is forcing her to undertake under penalty of massive premium increases. And as anyone who’s dealt with this particular beast can tell you, the new program is about as easy to navigate as The Name of the Rose. I know a fair amount about Medicare, and health insurance generally, but still, I’m terrified that I’m making serious mistakes. I cannot imagine what this is like for anyone without internet access or a rudimentary knowledge of the new system. I gather millions of seniors are depending on their pharmacists for guidance, which would be fine except for the fact that a number of drugstore chains are sponsoring or cosponsoring plans themselves, creating all sorts of conflicts of interest. And knowing the extent to which Karl Rove and company originally thought of this thing as a surefire political winner, it’s almost inconceivable that the administration has let the new benefit become such a nightmare–inconceivable, at least, until you remember its handling of Hurricane Katrina and the reconstruction of Iraq.I know some Democrats get angry at me for continuing to stress the Bush administration’s incompetence, instead of attributing every bone-headed move to corruption or pure malice. Lord knows I’ve written a lot about Republican corruption, and its ideological roots. But in the end, a gigantic and debt-ridden federal government that cannot even give away new benefits without creating a virtual parody of both public- and private-sector bureaucracy has blurred the lines between incompetence and malfeasance to the point where it’s a distinction without a difference.

There’s something about Christmas that tends to make people nostalgic for the past. That’s ironic, from a Christian point of view, since the Feast of the Nativity is the quintessential celebration of the radically New (preceded, in most Christian traditions, by the season of Advent, the quintessential time for looking forward).Still, the association of Christmas with simpler and better times probably has something to do with the seasonal upsure of Cultural Right whining about the good old days of the 1950s or 1960s or even later, when Christians could celebrate this holiday without worrying about church-state separation or the sensibilities of Jews, Muslims or other, heathen folk.As it happens, I ran across a quote today that nicely encapsulates the belief in the hellward trajectory of society shorn of official Christian trappings:

God has been driven out of public life by the separation of Church and State; he has been driven out of science now that doubt has been raised to a system…. He has even been driven out of the family which is no longer considered sacred in its origins….

Want to guess who said that, and when? James Dobson? Richard Land? Bill O’Reilly? Last year, or maybe last week?Actually, it was Giuseppe Melchior Sarto, better known as Pope (and Saint) Pius X, circa 1903, as quoted in Eamon Duffy’s Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes.

Via an email from the Georgia Democratic Party, I learned about an excellent idea for a seasonal gesture by a certain politician who has long proclaimed his fidelity to Christian principles. Yes, I’m talking about Ralph Reed, candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, who recently announced his regret that he harvested millions of dollars in Native American Casino money as a key player in Jack Abramoff’s elaborate scam to chase off competitors to the tribes he was ripping off.

If Ralph really regrets his decision, shouldn’t he give the money to a worthy organization? He could give it to Gamblers Anonymous, or Ralph could give his tainted Abramoff money to Native American charities, like Senator Conrad Burns (R-Mont.). If he truly feels remorse about working with people now under federal investigation and indictment, he should donate the funds so that he doesn’t profit off this relationship that he now says he regrets.In addition to making the charitable contribution, Ralph could tell us all how he did not know the source of millions of dollars funneled to him — even with emails made public by investigators that appear to directly contradict his claims of ignorance. Ralph has expressed regret and issued general denials, but he hasn’t explained how it all fits together.Please take a moment and send Ralph an email calling on him to give the millions he took in from “Casino Jack” to a worthy organization. Also take a minute to check out some of Ralph’s other nefarious actions at http://www.therealralphreed.com/ And while you’re doing that, please check out the page that lets you forward the website to 10 of your friends, and help us spread the news.

I’m glad to see Georgia Democrats are working so hard to make sure Ralph gets into the proper spirit of the season.

In all the furor over the last few weeks about the various nasty provisions in House and Senate budget reconciliation bills, most of the attention was paid to a major rise in interest rates for student loans, higher copayments and tighter eligibility rules for Medicaid, and all sorts of shenanigans associated with reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid.But with relatively little notice, our Republican buddies have also sought to pull off a back-door maneuver that could unravel the consensus supporting welfare reform. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has the details, but here’s the big picture: Since the original welfare reform law of 1996 entered its last year in 2003, there’s been a deadlock in the Senate over the administration’s demand that work requirements for welfare recipients be increased without additional money for child care assistance, and the Democratic position (most notably promoted by Sens. Evan Bayh and Tom Carper) that the tighter work requirements will fail without the child care resources that make it possible for single mothers to go to work (a smaller group of Democrats oppose increased work requirements altogether),So now the GOPers are using the budget bill, which can’t be filibustered, to simply impose their position on welfare on the Congress and the country, even though some of these provisions were not in either the House or Senate version of the bill.When you consider the intense and free-ranging debate that accompanied the enactment of welfare reform in 1996–the tense back-and-forth maneuvers between the Republican Congress and President Clinton, who vetoed two versions of the bill, and the acrimonious national debate on the subject–it’s shameful that Republicans now want to make large changes in one of the most successful initiatives in recent history in the dark, with little or no debate. The fact that the changes they are insisting on are bad public policy adds injury to insult.

In these uncertain times, you can always count on congressional Republicans to be consistently devious. Last night’s–or more accurately, this morning’s–votes in the House were a case in point. First, the House GOP leaders rammed through a rules change, known as “martial law,” which basically suspended all the normal rules, including the requirement that Members have 24 hours to read major legislation before voting on it. That paved the way for snap votes on secretly assembled defense appropriations and budget reconciliation bills, in the dawn’s early light. The “defense” bill included Alaska wilderness oil drilling, cleverly linked to a big batch of money for Katrina recovery, not to mention funds for the military itself. And the budget bill, hammered out in closed House-Senate conference committee discussions with zero Democratic input, incorporated most of the House’s obnoxious safety-net cuts, including higher copayments for Medicaid beneficiaries, higher interest rates for people obtaining student loans, and most obnoxious of all, a self-defeating major cut in funds used to collect delinquent child support payments. All this was in a 700-plus-page bill that nobody got to read before it was enacted on a 212-206 vote (every single Democrat voted “no,” joined by a mere 9 Republicans). Adding to the deviousness of this grim night’s work, congressional Republicans had earlier decided to strip out new tax cuts from the budget package, not because they don’t intend to push forward with them in January, but because they want to distract attention from the fact that their brave spending cuts simply pay for a fraction of the revenues they will sacrifice in their mindless and regressive tax cut campaign. The GOPers are also cynically calculating that they can get new dividend and capital gains cuts without the filibuster protection of a reconciliation bill, by linking them to the alternative minimum tax relief that Democrats and Republicans want. (It’s also important to recognize that January 1 will bring two new tax cuts almost exclusively targeted to higher earners, that were enacted back in 2001 but deferred as part of the originally devious Republican strategy of hiding the costs of their fiscal malfeasance). It’s a pretty amazing shell-game, when you think about it, and the ability of Democrats to expose it will be a critical test of whether we can truly hold this dreadful gang accountable next November.

In an earlier post, I made my own dyspeptic attitude towards the alleged “war on Christmas” pretty clear, from a Christian point of view. But now this phony war is escalating into the halls of Congress and the strip-malls of America, with no end in sight other than Christmas Day itself.In one of its periodic exercises in pointless but divisive symbolism, the U.S. House of Representatives has duly passed a resolution defending Christmas from its shadowy detractors, sponsored by a Christian Right pol from my own state of Virginia. Opponents of the measure appropriately raised the rather stark contradiction between this bold stand for Christmas, and the budgetary measures recently passed by the House that defy pretty much everything we understand as the “spirit of Christmas.”But it gets worse: guerrilla bands of protesters in California are now harrassing shoppers at that archetypal red-state institution, Wal-Mart, thanks to the mega-chain’s decision to use “Happy Holidays” as its merchandizing slogan for the season. Cultural Warriors of the Right have already sought to organize boycotts of Sears, Wal-Mart and Target on the same grounds. The Sacramento protests represent a lurch into Direct Action.The AP story on this incident tells you a lot:

About 50 protesters took part in Saturday’s demonstration, organized by religious leaders. Dick Otterstad of the Church of the Divide donned a Santa Claus costume and greeted shoppers with the message: Don’t forget about the meaning of Christmas.”It is insulting that Wal-Mart has chosen to ignore the reason for the season,” Otterstad said. “Taking the word ‘Christmas’ out of the holiday implies there’s something sinful about it. … This is a part of our culture.”

But the protests aren’t much working, either:

[E]ven shoppers who agreed with the protesters weren’t willing to interrupt their quest for holiday deals.”I believe in Christ, and I don’t like the use of ‘xmas’ or the use of ‘happy holidays,”‘ said Steven Van Noy, 39, as he left the store loaded down with packages. “The bottom line is that they had what I needed at Wal-Mart, so I went to Wal-Mart to buy it.”

Now you do have to admire the truth-in-advertising honesty of a protest organizer who represents the “Church of the Divide.” But the shopper who shares the protest’s perspective yet ignores to join it is more representative of even conservative evangelical sentiment. I found it especially interesting that he objects to the use of “Xmas”–an objection I’ve been hearing literally for forty years, dating back to those simpler days when hardly anyone thought godless secular hordes controlled our culture.In fact, the substitution of “X” for Christ is an ancient Christian usage, reflecting the widespread adoption of the Greek letter “Chi” as a symbol for Christ (the “Chi-Rho,” which looks like “XP,” remains an abiding presence in priestly vestments and Christian art.)That significant numbers of conservative Christians don’t understand this simple fact reflects poorly on their leadership, and illustrates the contrived nature of the whole “war on Christmas” demonology.Christians should have better things to worry about during the Feast of the Nativity, also known as Xmas.

Being basically non-vindictive in nature, I didn’t spend much time wallowing in the agony of Republicans in Virginia and elsewhere over the outcome of the Kaine-Kilgore gubernatorial race. The good-government side of me hoped that GOPers nationally would learn the lesson that reflexive right-wing positions like opposing any and all taxes, demonizing immigrants, and demagoguing the death penalty, just don’t work any more.But it looks like Virginia Republicans are determined to ignore the evidence. As the Washington Post has reported in a news item and an editorial, the Commonwealth’s GOP leadership is putting out the word that ol’ Jerry lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. This is, to put it mildly, an odd assessment. Ol’ Jerry was an obdurate member of the anti-tax faction of the state party, a boon companion to the Christian Right, a big-time gun lover, and a guy who played every conservative card in his campaign. I can’t even imagine what GOPers think he should have done, other than maybe changing his name to Attila and refusing to pay his own taxes.The partisan side of me reacts to this strange development by saying to Republicans: Amen, and keep it up. If Jerry Kilgore is not sufficiently conservative for you, then you are living in a strange land and need to get back in touch with Virginia and America.

Today’s stunning Senate repudiation of the Bush administration’s demands for a permanent enactment of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act is a good example of what happens when you overreach with dirty hands. A shorter-term extension of the Patriot Act–even its most controversial provisions–would have probably won easily. But no, the administration had to go for a permanent law, fundamentally affecting U.S. civil liberties to deal with a war on terrorism that is no doubt a long-term threat, but not, we pray, a permanent feature of life. And it didn’t much help the Bushies’ case that the key vote in the Senate coincided with a New York Times report that they’ve been deliberately violating congressional procedures governing surveillance of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency, on the direct orders of George W. Bush. You know, when you don’t much ever tell the truth, there will be moments of truth when your demands for more and more power over the lives of real people, justified by the presumption that you should be implicitly trusted, just don’t work any more. That’s basically what happened in the Senate today. And it was not simply a setback for Bush and his minions, but also a reflection of a climate in Washington, largely engineered by the White House, in which it’s tough to rationally discuss the proper balance between security and the civil liberties security defends.