Over at the RAC Blog, Stan Cowan shares a reflection for the fourth night:

Tonight, when my partner and I light the fourth candle on our menorah, I’ll be thinking about 4 widely disparate countries where the light of equality just got a little brighter. In Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and even Ireland, courts and legislatures are putting gay and lesbian equality at the top of their list. The Canadian Supreme court ruled the other day that Ottawa has the exclusive jurisdiction to decide who has the right to get married in the country, and that religious groups are not obligated to perform marriages. In Israel, the attorney general granted legal recognition to same-sex couples in financial and other business matters. New Zealand, same sex couples just gained similar legal rights to married people (though the legislation does not change the Marriage Act which still only applies to heterosexual couples). And in Ireland, the Prime Minister Bertie Ahearn stated that same-sex couples deserved better rights, and Justice Minister McDowell said that Ireland should pursue civil partnerships for unwed couples, both gay and straight, but should not institute a full process of gay marriage. After a stunning defeat for gays and lesbians in 11 states in last November’s election, I call what’s happening in those 4 countries real progress.

When I came out in 1991, none of these things were even possible. In fact, if equality seemed like some sort of enchanting dream, gay marriage was a true work of science fiction. But as Dr. King so aptly stated, the arc of history is towards freedom and equality. So tonight, when my partner is saying the blessings over our Shabbat and Chanukah candles, I’ll be thinking about how much brighter the light seems tonight. The arc of history is proving itself to be true. For tonight, in four widely disparate countries, the light of equality for gays and lesbians is shining a little brighter. That is an amazing Chanukah miracle.

Chanukah sameach, and Shabbat Shalom.

Yale folks: Make sure to sign the petition supporting our financial aid reform platform to demonstrate the breadth of the constituency behind progressive reform and keep to pressure on President Levin to meet with students before MLK Day.

Words of comfort from the Secretary of Defense:

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense. Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question. “We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north,” Wilson said after asking again. Rumsfeld replied that, “You go to war with the Army you have,” not the one you might want […] And, the defense chief added, armor is not always a savior in the kind of combat U.S. troops face in Iraq, where the insurgents’ weapon of choice is the roadside bomb, or improvised explosive device that has killed and maimed hundreds, if not thousands, of American troops since the summer of 2003. “You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up,” Rumsfeld said.

A holiday message from the President, as transcribed by the White House:

We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation.

Hope Johnson and Mary Reynolds assess the lack of progress over the year since the arrest of 100 Yale women calling for change:

Diversity in the faculty and student body: There remains only one black woman with tenure at Yale. The fraction of tenured faculty of color hovers at 7.5 percent, and of women faculty, at 18.5 percent. To add insult to injury, when 300 graduate students submitted a formal grievance protesting the state of diversity at Yale, the administration claimed to have lost it, though the document was hand-delivered to the offices of several top administrators, including President Levin.

Affordable child care: Last February, a Yale Daily News editorial lauded the efforts of Local 34 and GESO to improve child care options at Yale. However, the only individual who has benefited from this effort is Yale Corporation member Linda Mason, whose child care firm, Bright Horizons, received a contract to study Yale’s child care needs. Shamefully, Yale parents and their children still lack access to affordable child care.

Dependent health care: At a time when Connecticut faces a budget crisis predicted to top $1 billion, the Yale administration continues to force the children of its graduate teachers and researchers onto state aid through its unaffordable dependent health care plan.

Retirement with dignity: Last fall Yale made an agreement to review retirement benefits for the 200 retirees not covered by Local 34 and Local 35’s latest contract. The average monthly pension for people who retired from Yale before 1990 with 26 years of service remains a disgraceful $410. Yale now refuses to negotiate.

Juan Gonzales on sketchy business in Ohio:

Among the complaints: In Miami County, nearly 19,000 new votes were “inexplicably” added to the final tallies after all precincts reported their vote, according to Nadler. In Franklin County, where the city of Columbus is located, 68 machines were never deployed on Election Day despite long lines for voters and despite the breakdown of 77 machines during the day. Several Ohio newspapers have reported that minority neighborhoods in Columbus had far fewer machines per voter than the suburbs of Columbus. Some voters in Franklin County reported waiting on line from two to seven hours. In Warren County, a Republican stronghold, election officials locked down the county administration building on Election Night and barred reporters from observing the count. Officials claimed a terrorist threat sparked the lockdown, but the FBI later said it had no information of any threat.

In many cases, election workers did a terrible job of instructing voters on using provisional ballots. In the city of Cleveland, for example, nearly 40% of 9,349 provisional ballots were rejected as invalid. More than 1,000 were tossed for no other reason than that the voter deposited the ballot in the wrong precinct. Statewide, 20% of provisional ballots were rejected. In Mahoning County, which includes the city of Youngstown, numerous voters claimed they voted for Kerry on a touchscreen voting machine but the machine registered a vote for Bush. “I hate to be part of the conspiracy crowd, but it happened to me,” said State Sen. Bob Hagan (D-Youngstown). Hagan said he then repeated his vote for Kerry, and this time his candidate’s name lit up properly. Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I reported recently that Kerry apparently lost at least 700 votes in black neighborhoods of Cleveland when machines in 10 precincts registered an unusual number of votes for two little-known third party candidates. Democratic leaders initially were astonished by those voting anomalies, but they have since conceded that the number of wrongly registered votes could be even more widespread.

New York’s legislators override Pataki’s veto to raise the minimum wage:

Republicans in the State Senate forced through a measure on Monday that will gradually raise the minimum wage in New York State by $2 to $7.15 an hour by January 2007, overriding Gov. George E. Pataki’s veto of the proposal. The vote was a stinging rebuke to the governor from members of his own party. Mr. Pataki had argued that raising the minimum wage would put New York businesses at a competitive disadvantage. But in overriding the governor, Senate Republicans, who have been struggling to maintain a majority in their house, kept a pre-Election Day campaign promise. The measure raises the state’s current $5.15-an-hour minimum to $6 on Jan. 1, 2005; $6.75 on Jan. 1, 2006; and $7.15 on Jan. 1, 2007. It raises the hourly pay for the lowest wage earners, restaurant and bar employees who earn tips, to $4.60 from $3.30, an increase that will also be fully effective by Jan. 1, 2007. New York will join at least 14 other states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, in requiring that workers be paid more than the federal government’s hourly minimum of $5.15.

The ACLU asks just who it is that the FBI is looking out for:

Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union accused the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on Thursday of collecting e-mails and license- plate numbers from peaceful activists labeled as terrorists. The ACLU disclosed documents that it says show the terrorism task force is spying on people who are politically active in environmental, political and animal-rights issues. In one instance, Colorado Springs police collected license-plate numbers of those at a peaceful protest against the timber industry and sent them to a Denver police detective on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the ACLU said. In another, the ACLU said, task- force members obtained e-mails from activists planning peaceful activities on animal-rights issues and a Palestinian rally, as well as a schedule for Columbus Day protests.

Raise your hand if you’re shocked, just shocked:

The Central Intelligence Agency was aware that dissident military officers and opposition figures in Venezuela were planning a coup against President Hugo Chávez in 2002, newly declassified intelligence documents show. But immediately after the overthrow, the Bush administration blamed Mr. Chávez, a left-leaning populist, for his own downfall and denied knowing about the threats. Long irritated by Mr. Chávez’s ties to Fidel Castro and his blistering anti-American attacks, the Bush administration provided the Venezuelan government in Caracas with few hard details of the looming plot, although American officials say they broadly talked to Mr. Chávez about opposition plans. Mr. Chávez was removed from power on April 12, 2002, after 18 people died in a spate of gunfire during a huge antigovernment protest. Taken into custody by dissident military officers, Mr. Chávez was spirited out of Caracas while an interim government led by Pedro Carmona, a Caracas businessman, took power.

The new government dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and hunted down Mr. Chávez’s ministers. But Mr. Chávez returned to power on April 14, riding the crest of a popular uprising against the coup plotters. In a senior intelligence executive brief dated April 6 – one of several documents obtained by Jeremy Bigwood, a freelance investigative reporter in Washington and posted on at http://www.venezuelafoia.info/, Öcq keep the slash a pro- Chávez Web site – the C.I.A. said that “disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month.” Those intelligence briefs are typically read by as many as 200 officials in the Bush administration.

Pandagon slams a blue-state lobbyist’s faux populism:

Let’s do this slowly:
• Kerry won voters making under $15,000 a year, 63% to 36%.
• He won among voters making $15,000-30,000, 57% to 42%.
• He won among voters making $30,000-50,000, 50% to 49%.
Now, asshole, would you like to tell Democrats one more time about how out-of-touch we are from Americans who have to stretch paychecks? Trent Wisecup, writer of this trash, is VP of DC Navigators, a major lobbying and PR firm whose offices are in Washington, DC and Sacramento, California, and only in those two places. So please, rich blue-stater, tell us again how disconnected we are from struggling families in rural areas, whose plights you surely know so well. We’re all ears, and eager to learn from your pretend cultural populism.

House Democrats send Blackwell a letter demanding answers about voter suppression:

The letter, which asks 34 questions of the chief state elections official and Bush Ohio campaign chair, seeks a thorough accounting of a “one-two punch that may well have altered and suppressed votes, particularly minority and Democratic voters.” “It appears that a series of actions of government and non-government officials may have worked to frustrate minority voters,” the members write. “Consistent and widespread reports indicate a lack of voting machines in urban, minority and Democratic areas, and a surplus of such machines in Republican, white and rural areas.” The letter is signed by twelve House Democrats, including the minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, Jr. Among other things, the letter questions the terror alert lockdown in Warren County (the FBI says they know nothing about it; County officials said there was a level-10 threat they received a tip on from an FBI agent).

It also calls attention to Perry County, where voting tallies suggest some voters were allowed to cast more than one ballot, and to two additional precincts which had more votes for President than voters. Other irregularities include a county where voters cast 5,000 more votes for an underfunded Democratic Supreme Court candidate that they did for the most well-funded Democratic presidential candidate in history, John Kerry; heavily African American counties which cast huge numbers of votes for third-party candidates (nearly 3000 percent more than they did in 2000); extraordinarily high “spoiled” ballot rates in some counties; and a county where voters complained that votes for Kerry registered as votes for Bush. A second section deals with the shortages of voting machines in Democratic and minority counties versus the surplus of machines in wealthier, more Republican areas of the state.

New elections in the Ukraine:

Ukraine’s Supreme Court overturned the results of the country’s disputed presidential election today and ordered that a new runoff vote between the two main challengers take place by Dec. 26. The court discredited not only the official results that had declared Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich the winner of the presidency, but also the government of the outgoing president, Leonid D. Kuchma, saying the conduct of the campaign and the counting of the ballots had been marred by “systemic and massive violations.” The court’s ruling, announced moments before 6 p.m. here, was a striking and decisive victory for Viktor A. Yushchenko, the opposition leader who has asserted that Mr. Kuchma’s government denied him his rightful victory in the Nov. 21 vote.