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It's always dangerous when politicians claim to be doing God's will. So, as the novelty fades from Al Gore's selection of Joseph Lieberman, journalists should ask some probing questions about the ticket's conspicuous piety.

Over the years, Republican policymakers have been fond of saying that they rely on divine guidance. Cementing his alliance with fundamentalist Christian groups, President Reagan loved to perform at high-profile prayer breakfasts and the like. All too often, political leaders -- especially conservative ones -- have tried to blur the separation between church and state.

Now, the Gore-Lieberman campaign has launched itself with a very public display of devout posturing. For them, the Old Testament has become fine grist for the centrist mill. The New Democrats are morphing into New Theocrats.

At the formal announcement of his selection for the V.P. slot, Lieberman declared that Gore "has never, never wavered in his responsibilities as a father, as a husband and, yes, as a servant of God Almighty." The vice president stood a few feet away, beaming.

AUSTIN, Texas -- What with George W. Bush moralizing all over us from Philadelphia and Al Gore back in his Dudley Do-Right mode choosing the seriously righteous Joe Lieberman, looks like we're in for a season of moral one-upmanship and sanctimoniousness.

I'm sure that all this will improve our characters, but in the meantime, we need to solve a few problems -- like the energy mess.

The Republican answer to energy problems is always: "Drill more! Open up the Arctic wilderness! Let us drill on the beaches! Give the oil companies more tax breaks! Free Saddam Hussein!" and other useful slogans.

The D's mutter about ratcheting up the mileage requirements on cars (a move stalled in Congress by auto lobbyists for the past five years) and gigging the auto companies to produce less pollution.

The environmentalists urge us to invest in renewable energy sources and ditch our SUVs.

None of this helps either electricity bills or the price of gas right now, though you'll never hear the pols admit it.

An interesting semi-historical footnote concerning Dick Cheney's oft-reiterated references to President Clinton's weaseling under oath. "He knows what the meaning of 'is' is," says Cheney in his campaign stump speech to show the moral superiority of the Republican camp.

Which leads us to this story about Karl Rove, Bush's campaign manager and the man they call "Bush's brain."

Rove, as all the world knows, has been a Republican political operative in Texas for 23 years. During that time, Texas Democrats noticed a pattern that they eventually became somewhat paranoid about: In election years, there always seemed to be an FBI investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press.

After the election was over, the allegations often vanished, although in the case of Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, three of his aides were later convicted. The investigations were conducted by FBI agent Greg Rampton, who was stationed in Austin in those years.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Gosh, the most balloons EVER! I bet all you slackers out there who weren't watching are sorry now.

Just a few hints to Gov. George W. Bush's speechwriter: When you go into the riff about "I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect," try putting it more than two paragraphs away from your last attempt to stick a shiv in the Democrats.

If it had come just a few grafs later, we might already have forgotten the seven paragraphs of jabs at Al Gore, including the one that worked, "He now leads the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the only thing he has to offer is fear itself."

See? Just a little more separation, and you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can trash the D's and still call for "civility and respect" without being accused of hypocrisy.

Item Two: For eight years, the R's have been attacking Bill Clinton with a focus that often bordered on the maniacal. It is simply an obsession. And it has never worked.

Now, it's the turn of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman to be flattered by the same moist-eyed press corps that's been hailing the stultifying Republican convention in Philadelphia as a masterpiece of political stagecraft. Gore is being congratulated for pre-empting popular anger at the moral turpitude of the Clinton years. Yes, this is the same press that told us for an entire year that the American people were so furious at Bill Clinton for his conduct toward Monica Lewinsky that they wanted him to step down. Of course, poll after poll showed the American people rallying to Bill Clinton's side.

I write on the morning after the announcement of Gore's pick. Mostly, it's a day of shame for journalism. Column upon column of newsprint hails Gore's acumen in undercutting the supposed "moral edge" in public esteem now held by the Republicans. Beyond anecdotal assessment, no evidence for this edge is advanced. Column upon column dwells upon Lieberman's powers of ethical discrimination, symbolized by his observance of the Sabbath and his criticisms of Bill Clinton.

AUSTIN, Texas -- My favorite factoid gathered by the 15,000 underutilized reporters in Philadelphia is that the opening gavel of the Republican National Convention was "acoustically enhanced" by a sound engineer to sound "better than real." Yup.

I loved the blind mountain-climber giving the Pledge of Allegiance. (Hint to Dems: In South Texas, we have twin dwarfs with 12 fingers apiece who play the accordion.) Of course, everybody noticed that there were more black faces on the stage than in the audience, but that's nothing.

At the 1972 Republican convention, there was an Ethnic Night party at which I saw John Volpe, the Italian-American secretary of transportation, doing the frug while a Chinese girl sang "Never on Sunday" in Yiddish. Is this a great country or what? Except the Republicans have proved yet again the tragic truth that White People Can't Clap On Beat. Or is it just Republicans?

By the way, one quarter of the Republican delegates are millionaires, and fewer than 10 percent of them make less than $50,000 a year.

It's "Reach Out" time. It happens every four years. Someone gets up in front of the Republicans and reminds the white people filling 95 percent of the convention hall that the party has to reach out. Who better than Colin Powell? He told the delegates in Philadelphia that it was time to "reach out to minority communities and particularly the African-American community." Then, he issued a warning: "The world is watching to see if all this power and wealth is just for the well-to-do, the comfortable, the privileged."

Someone should give Gen. Powell the news. The facts are in. Power and wealth in America are most definitely reserved for the privileged. At the level of substantive policy, both the Democrats and the Republicans are in cordial agreement on this point, with their only disagreement being how many padlocks to set on the door to keep the unprivileged out.

PHILADELPHIA -- Every day at noon, a couple of blocks from the convention complex where GOP delegates held their caucuses, destitute men lined up for lunch on the sidewalk in front of the Ministry to the Homeless. It was not a photo op.

More than a few journalists were visiting Philadelphia -- in fact, about 15,000 of them arrived to cover the Republican National Convention. But midway through the week, an aide at the Ministry to the Homeless told me, not a single reporter had dropped by to inquire about the bedraggled spectacle.

"We feed homeless guys," the staff member said. "Yesterday, we fed 223." At least three-quarters of them, he estimated, were living on the streets in the City of Brotherly Love.

Is this kind of situation unusual for an American city? He shook his head. "There's homelessness wherever you go."

That night, I overheard a few delegates discussing news coverage of the convention. About the only negative theme emerging, they agreed, was that the event had been carefully staged. "If the criticism is that it's scripted," said one, "well, God bless it."

What are the economic costs for American society of the vast expansion of our prison-industrial complex? According to criminal justice researcher David Barlow at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, between 1980 and 2000, the combined expenditures of federal, state and local governments on police have increased about 400 percent. Corrections expenditures for building new prisons, upgrading existing facilities, hiring more guards, and related costs, increased approximately one thousand percent. Although it currently costs about $70,000 to construct a typical prison cell, and about $25,000 annually to supervise and maintain each prisoner, the U.S. is currently building 1,725 new prison beds per week.

The driving ideological and cultural force that rationalized and justifies mass incarceration is the white American public’s stereotypical perceptions about race and crime. As Andrew Hacker perceptively noted in 1995, “Quite clearly, ‘black crime’ does not make people think about tax evasion or embezzling from brokerage firms. Rather, the offenses generally associated with blacks are those . . .

There are today over two million Americans incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails throughout the United States. More than one-half, or one million, are black men and women. The devastating human costs of the mass incarceration of one out of every thirty-five individuals within black America are beyond imagination. While civil rights organizations like the NAACP and black institutions such as churches and mosques have begun to address this widespread crisis of black mass imprisonment, they have frankly not given it the centrality and importance it deserves.

Black leadership throughout this country should place this issue at the forefront of their agendas. And we also need to understand how and why American society reached this point of constructing a vast prison industrial complex, in order to find strategies to dismantle it.