When I was a little boy in occupied France, I saw priests sprinkling holy water on tanks, canons and other instruments of war so that Christians of one nation -- now divinely empowered -- could slaughter Christians of another nation. I never forgot the surreal spectacle. I owe it (and the extermination of nine-tenths of my family in Hitler's gas chambers) a healthy aloofness toward religion.

Sixty years later, as France, a nominally Catholic democratic republic readies to celebrate nearly 200 years of secularism marked by absolute separation of church and state, the U.S. the ostensible symbol of tolerance and egalitarianism, is unmistakably tilting toward theocratic governance.

When conservative Christian groups rocked the vote in last month's presidential election, We the People did not witness the triumph of democracy but the trouncing of popular sovereignty by an unyielding religious juggernaut intent on ramming religious values down America's throat. Implicit in this blackjack victory, is the ominous proposition that religiosity is an articulation of patriotism. For those of us who love

NATURE OF THE ACTION   On December 13, 2004, numerous Ohio citizens contested “the certification of the election of the electors pledged to George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney for the offices, respectively, of President of the United States and Vice President of the United Sates for the terms commencing January 20, 2005…” and “…the certification of the election of Thomas Moyer for the office of Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court for the term commencing in 2005.”

LAWSUIT REFILED   On December 16, 2004, Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer threw out the complaint because it had two election challenges.  The following day, on December 17, thirty-seven voters and their lawyers refiled the election challenge for President and Vice President of the United States.  The other case for the office of Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was refiled on December 20, 2004.

It would be simple to write software that would count the first 3% of the votes cast correctly, then skew the remaining 97%.  In a recount like that in Ohio, everything would match during the hand recount of the first 3% of the votes.  Then the machines take over, according to Ohio law.

  Consider if you were hacking this election, setting things up back before Nov 2, and that in order to win the state, you would have to go after some of the counting machines that left paper trails (not the DRE, but the punch card machines.)  Would you not be aware of how your "fix" might be discovered during a recount?  Would you not put in the simple lines of code that would make everything look fine during the 3% hand count?  Of course you would.

  The only way to do a recount is to pick one of the counties with the most suspect statistics and hand count all the votes.  Anything else tells us nothing.  

Robert D. Klauber, PhD
Retired businessman, physicist

Was the melee between NBA players and fans a racial brawl?

The Nov. 19 game between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons resulted in nine players being banned for more than 140 games.

All of the players involved were black and most of the fans they confronted were white.

Initially race was a silent issue. But as pundits of every stripe have weighed in on this incident, discussions of race have become increasingly prominent.

The narrative that is emerging goes something like this: Most professional basketball players are poor black youths from urban America who are socialized in a culture that lacks social graces. They earn exorbitant salaries, live pampered lifestyles and lack the appropriate gratitude for their -- largely unearned -- good fortune.

What's more, these black athletes are performing for predominantly white fans who are affluent enough to afford the high cost of NBA tickets. It's a tricky arrangement.

President Bush's nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the top justice post in the country sends the wrong signal, at home and abroad.

Gonzales, Bush’s White House legal counsel, would become the first Hispanic to become U.S. attorney general if approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But while a number of groups embrace the nomination as a symbolic acceptance of Latinos, Gonzales’s troubling record should disqualify him.

In Texas, as counsel for then-Gov. Bush, he laid the groundwork for a record-breaking number of executions. He prepared more than a third of the case summaries that led to the execution of 150 men and two women in Bush’s six-year tenure -- a number unmatched by any other governor in modern American history.

As an elected member of the Texas Supreme Court, he took huge contributions from the energy giant Enron and Enron's law firm, according to the New York Daily News. And he was known to side with the oil industry. In May 2000, he was author of a state Supreme Court opinion that threw out a class-action suit by 885 Corpus Christi homeowners who were harmed by a 1994 refinery tank explosion.