Here’s a fluff article. The title is “Change in GOP Running Mate Seems Unlikely.” But if you read the whole piece, it doesn’t offer any hard news on the situation; all it says about Cheney remaining is this:

Few expect a midcourse ticket correction. Cheney remains popular with the GOP rank and file and with social and economic conservatives who are increasingly uneasy about Bush’s deficit spending and immigration-liberalization plans.

You’ve got to suspect that Karl Rove has a short list of electorally-helpful replacements. But I suspect there won’t be a change with the ticket. Bush appears to value loyalty above almost everything else. The only people he’s replaced are those who told the truth rather than parroting the ideological talking points.

Donald Sensing offers an interesting take on the marriage issue from his pastoral perspective.
Sensing proposes that we divide marriage, as it is currently constituted, into two components–a civil-legal and religious:

• A state-issued “Civil Interpersonal Contract,” which grants adult partners most of the legal rights currently conferred by the marriage license.
• Religion-issued “Certificates of Marriage,” which have no legal significance. Churches, synagogues, or mosques would free to unite couples as they see fit.

“Civil Interpersonal Contract” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but I agree with the general premise of this idea. We should separate the legal from the religious. As Sensing rightly points out, the prevailing political rhetoric on this issue defies reality:

People who scream about the “sanctity of marriage” – a religiously loaded term – need to explain how sanctified Americans think marriage is when there far are more than a million divorces per year, an enormous percentage of children are born out of wedlock and, as I already said, the vast majority of men and women who do marry already are living together as de facto husband and wife. The fact is that America destroyed the sanctity of marriage long before homosexuals became politically activist.

One only need look to Britney Spears’ 4 a.m. wedding to see what a good job government has done in protecting the sanctity of marriage.

Nearly four years after the Florida fiasco, the Republican-controlled Congress has finally got around to establishing a commission to distribute funds to help states upgrade voting equipment. Of course many of the improvements won’t be made until well after this year’s election. The 2002 Help America Vote Act required states publish plans on how they are going to improve their systems. But until the Election Assistance Commission was launched yesterday, states had no way of doing so. Thus far only $650 million of the $3.86 billion 2002 authorization has been disbursed.
Congress and the Bush administration clearly made this a high priority.
I’m not as conspiracy-minded as some people on the Internet. But I don’t see how anyone who wants fair elections can’t be at least somewhat concerned about election stories that have surfaced since 2000.
Black Box Voting is a voting activist website keeping an eye on ballot tampering-related issues. It’s worth checking out.

Bremer lays down the law:

On Monday, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said he would move to block any effort by Iraqi leaders to put Islamic law as the foundation of legislation in the interim constitution, which is supposed to take effect at the end of February.
However, Mohsen Abdel-Hamid, the current president of the Iraqi Governing Council and a Sunni Muslim hard-liner, has proposed making Islamic law the “principal basis” of legislation, which many Iraqi women’s groups fear will threaten their legal rights.
“Our position is clear,” Bremer said when asked what he would do if the Iraqis wrote Islamic law as the principal basis of the legal code. “It can’t be law until I sign it.”

Interesting how the Republican party is dominated by those who claim America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles (the Ten Commandments). Yet the Bush administration is telling a Muslim country that they can’t base their government on Islamic law.
Curious, isn’t it?

It’s catching on. Vladimir Putin now has a website, with some English stuff here.
No sign of a blog though; they’ve still got work to do.