George W. Bush’s polling numbers continue to seek new lows. Even Republicans in the Senate are lining up behind resolutions pressuring the White House to set a timetable for getting out of Iraq and banning torture. Could our long, national nightmare be coming to an end? Are we turning a corner? Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

Don’t get your hopes up. Although the headlines at the top of newspapers are more encouraging than they’ve been for five years, there’s plenty of mischief occurring below the fold. Consider recent these stories from the past ten days:

– November 7 – The Los Angeles Times reports that All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena is being threatened with loss of its tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service because of an anti-war sermon delivered the Sunday prior to the 2004 election. Rev. George Regas, pastor emeritus at All Saints, specifically avoided endorsing any candidate in the race, saying a person of faith could be justified voting for Mr. Bush or John Kerry, but said Jesus would not approve of pre-emptive war and values the lives of Iraqis as much as Americans. The IRS said this sermon constituted “political intervention,” for which All Saints deserves to lose its tax-exempt status. Similar action has not been taken regarding churches whose leaders exhorted congregants to vote for Mr. Bush.
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A week after Harriet Miers withdrew her name from consideration for Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat on the Supreme Court, the search for a qualified candidate goes on. Yes, George Bush nominated Samuel Alito Monday morning, yes, Mr. Alito has experience as a constitutional lawyer and yes, 15 years behind the bench on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, but there are other considerations, like ethics.

According to Tuesday’s Washington Post, when Mr. Alito was nominated for the appellate post in 1990, he promised the Senate Judiciary Committee – in writing – to recuse himself from ruling on “any cases involving the Vanguard companies” a stock and mutual fund firm in which Mr. Alito has substantial holdings.

Flash forward 12 years and Mr. – now Judge – Alito is one of three judges hearing a case in which Vanguard was accused by a widow of seizing her late husband’s accounts and preventing her from obtaining his assets. Written promises to the United States Senate notwithstanding, Mr. Alito stays on the case and rules in Vanguard’s favor. After the widow and her attorney filed an ethics complaint with Mr. Alito’s boss, Mr. Alito withdrew his ruling and asked that the case be presented to a new panel.

What is that? “Do over! Do over! My skate was untied! I want to start again!” That excuse didn’t work for Tonya Harding in figure skating, why should it be acceptable on the U.S. Court of Appeals?
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In an increasingly theocratic America, an anomalous dispensation has been granted to gambling, a vice that was once grouped with excessive drinking and fornication. Deep in the Bible Belt, the Mississippi legislature and Republican Governor Haley Barbour have allowed the state’s casinos to come ashore (and expand) in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

My local newspaper, a mediocre product typical of the Gannett chain, gave over most of its front page Wednesday to feeding an idiot’s frenzy over the $340,000,000 Powerball jackpot. Although the story duly noted that the odds of winning were 146,000,000 to one, most of the piece read like an ad, comparing buying a lotto ticket with “buying a license to daydream.” It’s a sad commentary on America that people no longer think the system will give them a fair shake and the only way to get ahead anymore is to be struck with Lotto lightning.

The New York Times had gambling on its front page Wednesday, too but its story was about the Pentagon’s bingo games and slot machines, which net the Department of Defense $127 million a year from military personnel. The Times quoted a woman who studied military gambling for the Pentagon. Chaplains told her gambling addiction plagues one in three soldiers who visit them, but the padres are afraid to speak out “because they will be dishonorably discharged.” The Department of Defense says it cannot do without the gambling revenue, which is used to fund military recreation programs. Can’t take any money away from the no-bid Halliburton contracts to maintain a golf course for the soldiers, I guess we’ll just have to keeping keep swindling it out of the soldiers themselves. The Defense Department does have a treatment program for problem gamblers – it treats 25 patients a year – from all branches of the service.
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Warm evening air, too warm for Vermont in October, comes through the open window as I sit and write. I’m a hypocrite; I’m against global warming, but there are times when I like some of the symptoms.

I’m still trying to get some effects of global warming out of my head. At night, my dreams are covered with water and mud; I wake with a start, surprised to be in Vermont again. I was just a visitor in the Louisiana flood zone, a tourist. I can’t imagine how drowned dreams must be for those who lost everything in the hurricanes.

In Central America, Hurricane Stan, Rita’s successor, is killing people in mudslides. Commercial logging has stripped the hillsides of trees and so mud flows down, taking houses and villages with it. Mexico’s three major oil shipping ports on the Gulf of Mexico closed with the approach of the storm, but have reopened, so we can burn more gas and make more storms. In the southeast U.S., tropical storm Tammy is raining herself out over Georgia and the Carolinas, relieving a drought there. Even global warming has serendipitous eddies, in which one symptom cancels another.
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