The Threat Level Remains Unchanged

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has a book coming out in which he says the Bush administration politicized the terror alert system — Tom Ridge: I Fought Against Raising Security Threat Level On The Eve Of 2004 Election. Everyone is very excited about this revelation.

But this isn't really news, is it? Didn't Ridge say more or less the same thing in 2005:

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

And Ridge did it anyway one way or another. He sat there and allowed the national security apparatus to be abused for political gain. He made the country less safe by allowing false alarms. He gave the terrorists free victories they didn't even have to work for. And then he and Cheney trashed Howard Dean and anyone else daring to say it was the unprincipled slimy political move it turns out to be.

Once upon a time we had a concept of “disgrace”. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn't get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media.

Maybe it's time to bring the notion of respectability back. If we won't have public justice to sort out truth from fiction, no special prosecutors until after the statute of limitations has run, maybe instead we need a quiet form of the private personal justice we can manage based on the facts on the public record. Shun Ridge. Shun Yoo. Shun Rove. Shun Gonzales. Shun all the torturers and torture enablers, and shun the perverters of law and justice. Don't ever put anything their way. Don't give them a visiting gig. Don't invite them on TV. Don't buy their books. And make it contagious. Make them professional lepers. Make the people who give them treats sorry they did it.

But it won't happen. Not because there's always the risk that social shunning gets out hand, brings out the worst in some people who then punish the innocent, for all that these are real and demonstrated dangers not to be taken lightly. No, it won't happen because the people who put those unprincipled traitors to law and decency in power and who then coined it thanks to their connivance at kleptocracy hope to do it again and again and again. And that means that even used and dishonored tools need to be kept on financial life support so as not to discourage their successors.

Angry? I'm beyond angry. I'm tired of angry.

Nixon was a piker. He kept cash in a safe. These guys moved it by the airplane load.

The Hearing You Are Not Hearing About

“There’s reason to suspect that our 2004 election was stolen.”

A House Administration Committee field hearing will be held today in Columbus, Ohio to look into the allegation that there is something odd about Ohio's numbers. Although whether a Republican-chaired committee will give the matter a fair hearing, which would require breaking through the obstructionist tactics of a very partisan Republican Ohio Secretary of State, remains a question mark.

And the vote process in Ohio needs a real investigation.

Delay, Delay, Don't (re)Count the Votes

Is there any way to understand this sort of tactic as anything other than an attempt to prevent an honest recount: Ohio Official Refuses Interview Over Vote? (Note that the headline is British understatement — in fact the Ohio Secretary of State is apparently trying to get a court order to block having to explain the weird things he's done to lock out recounters, prevent observers from actually observing, and other very suspicious hijinks.)

Update: The Kerry-Edwards team have intervened in the case to preserve the evidence

Much Smoke In Ohio. But Is There A Fire?

Much to-ing and fro-ing in Ohio:

• The Ohio Supreme Court was asked to step in
• The state's electors, however, have already voted

The Cosmic Iguana has been finding links about Ohio:

• Once again, a Republican stepped in to prevent ballots from being counted.
• Ohio Recount Affidavit - Richard Hayes Phillips is an affidavit (by a hydrologist who claims statistical expertise) suggesting a pattern of vote fraud in Ohio. Whether it would be enough to alter the result is unclear, but if true it would get close. (As the site is hard to reach, I've quoted it in full below).

But I suspect nothing will come if it all. If this election was stolen -- and I'm not at all sure about that -- it's staying stolen.

OHIO RECOUNT

AFFIDAVIT
December 10, 2004
From: http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/supreme.htm


I, RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS, do swear and affirm the following:

1. I hold a Ph.D. in geomorphology from the University of Oregon. I am a professional hydrologist and am well versed in standard techniques of statistical analysis, with special expertise in spotting anomalous data. A copy of my curriculum vita is attached to this Affidavit as Exhibit A.

2. I have analyzed unofficial precinct level results from the November 2, 2004 general election in nine Ohio counties, including Cuyahoga, Franklin, Warren, Butler, Clermont, Miami, Montgomery, Hamilton, and Lucas. In have compared these results with those from the November 7, 2000 general election where such data is available. I have examined the unofficial and official results for the November 2, 2004 election, county by county. I have examined, in Franklin County, data on the number of voting machines deployed in each precinct. I have also examined United States census data for 2000 and 2003.

3. There are numerous examples of incorrect presidential vote tallies in certain precincts in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County. These irregularities include at least 16 precincts where votes intended to be cast for Kerry were shifted to other candidates’ columns, and at least 30 precincts with inexplicably low voter turnout, including 7.10%, 13.05%, 19.60%, 21.01%, 21.80%, 24.72%, 28.83%, 28.97%, and 29.25%, and seven entire wards where voter turnout was reportedly below 50%, even as low as 39.35%. Kerry won Cleveland with 83.27% of the vote to 15.88% for Bush. If voter turnout was really 60% of registered voters, as seems likely based upon turnout in other major cities of Ohio, rather than 49.89% as reported, Kerry’s margin of victory in Cleveland has been wrongly reduced by 22,000 votes.

4. The systematic withholding of voting machines from predominantly Democratic wards in Columbus, many of them with high black populations, severely restricted voter turnout in these wards and cost John Kerry 17,000 votes. I have meticulously compared election results with the number of registered voters per voting machine for each precinct in Columbus, and for each ward in Franklin County. In Columbus, the median Bush precinct had a 60.56% turnout, while the median Kerry precinct had only a 50.78% turnout. County wide, the 73 wards with fewer than 300 registered voters per machine had a 62.33% turnout; 58 were in the suburbs, and 54 were won by Bush. The 73 wards with 300 or more registered voters per machine had a 51.99% turnout; 59 were in Columbus, and 58 were won by Kerry. In addition, there were 68 machines not provided to anyone, according to data provided by the Board of Elections.

5. It has been widely reported that in Warren County, the administrative building was locked down on election night and no independent persons were allowed to observe the vote count. Based upon the official Board of Elections reports, there has been a 15.51% increase in voter registration in eight months time, and voter turnout was reportedly above 80% in 55 precincts. Since the 2000 election, voter registration was reportedly up by 79.0%, 38.3%, 32.4%, 31.0%, 29.7%, and 28.4% in six townships that provided 68.75% of Bush’s margin of victory in Warren County. While the county population has increased by 14.75% since the 2000 census, 87 of 157 precincts had shown declines in voter registration at other times since the 2000 election, and yet every single precinct, 157 of 157, showed increases in voter registration since March 2, 2004. In Butler County, there are nine precincts and two entire townships where Kerry received fewer votes than Gore despite a sharp increase in voter turnout; and there are precincts with reported increases in voter registration, since November 7, 2000, of 177.9%, 143.5%, 69.3%, 65.5%, 64.5%, 48.2%, 43.3%, 38.8%, 36.9%, 34.3%, 34.0%, and 33.8%, compared to an increase in population of only 3.12% county wide. In Clermont County, where the population has grown by 4.39% since the 2000 census, voter registration was reportedly up by 85.4% and 67.6% in two precincts, and down by 49.4% in another precinct, all in the same township; there were 23 precincts where turnout was up, but Kerry got fewer votes than Gore. All these data are indications that votes may have been shifted from Kerry to Bush. According to the official results certified by the Ohio Secretary of State, these three counties combined provided Bush with a plurality of 132,685 votes, which is 13,910 votes more than his statewide plurality of 118,775 votes. Given that George Bush carried these counties by 95,575 votes in 2000, the net loss for John Kerry could be as high as 37,000 votes.

6. It is my professional opinion that there is compelling evidence of fraud in Miami County. Early on election night, when 31,620 votes had been counted, and later, when 50,235 votes had been counted, John Kerry had exactly the same percentage, 33.92%, and the percentage for George Bush was almost exactly the same, dropping by 0.03%, from 65.80% to 65.77%. The second set of returns gave Bush a margin of exactly 16,000 votes, giving cause to question the integrity of the central counting device for the optical scanning machines. Compared to 2000, voter turnout increased by 20.86%, while the population increased by only 1.38%. Voter turnout was reported at 98.55% and 94.27% in two precincts in Concord, numbers nearly impossible to achieve. Voter turnout was reported to have increased by 194.58% and 152.78% in two precincts in Troy compared to the 2000 election, and by more than 30.0% in ten other precincts. There are no data for voter registration in 2000, so the ballots cast offer the only meaningful comparison. Comparing the results of the 2004 election to the results of the 2000 election, there is one precinct where the reduction in turnout exactly matched the reduction in votes counted for the Democratic presidential candidate. It is my professional opinion that these numbers are fraudulent, in that the true election results have been altered. Given that Bush officially carried Miami County in 2004 by 16,394 votes, and that Bush carried Miami County in 2000 by 10,453 votes, the net loss to John Kerry could be as high as 6,000 votes.

7. In Toledo, Lucas County, there were 50 precincts with less than 60% reported turnout. All of them were won overwhelmingly by John Kerry, by a margin of better than 5 to 1 in the aggregate. There were 45 precincts with more than 80% reported turnout; 12 were won by Bush, 33 were won by Kerry, and most were competitive. When the precinct numbers are combined into totals for each ward, data not provided by the Board of Elections, a clear and unmistakable pattern emerges. The 14 wards with the highest reported turnout were won by John Kerry by a margin of 11 to 7 in the aggregate. The 10 wards with the lowest reported turnout were won by John Kerry by a margin of 6 to 1 in the aggregate. It is my professional opinion that the election in Lucas County was rigged, most likely by altering the vote totals in each ward by a percentage chosen for that ward, plus or minus, based upon voting patterns in past elections. If turnout in Toledo had been as high as that reported elsewhere in the county, John Kerry’s plurality would have been 7,000 votes larger.

8. There are still 92,672 uncounted votes in Ohio, exclusive of any uncounted provisional ballots. According to unofficial results provided by the Ohio Secretary of State, there were 5,574,476 ballots cast, and 5,481,804 votes counted, which leaves 92,672 regular ballots (1.66%) still uncounted. The official results, now certified, do not include these ballots, but differ from the unofficial results only in the addition of provisional ballots and some absentee ballots to the tally. In Montgomery and Hamilton counties, these uncounted votes come disproportionately from precincts that voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. In Montgomery County there are 47 precincts, all of them in Dayton, where the percentage of uncounted ballots is 4% or more. Kerry won all 47 of these precincts, by a margin of 7 to 1 in the aggregate. County wide in Montgomery County, the percentage of uncounted ballots was 1.70%. In Hamilton County there are 26 precincts, 22 of them in Cincinnati, where the percentage of uncounted ballots is 8% or more. Kerry won all 26 of these precincts, by a margin of 10 to 1 in the aggregate. Altogether there are 86 precincts in Cincinnati where the percentage of uncounted ballots is 4% or more. Kerry won 85 of these precincts, by a margin of 5 to 1 in the aggregate. County wide in Hamilton County, the percentage of uncounted ballots was 2.34%. Although I have not yet had time to examine similar data for Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Akron, Youngstown, Canton, or elsewhere, it is possible that the same pattern will emerge in these cities as well. If these 92,672 uncounted votes were cast for Kerry by a 5 to 1 margin, this would reduce the statewide margin between the candidates by another 61,781 votes.

9. There are still provisional ballots uncounted in Ohio. On election night the Ohio Secretary of State reported that 5,481,804 ballots had been counted, and 155,428 provisional ballots had been issued. According to the official results, now certified, 5,625,621 votes have now been counted, an increase of 143,817, which represents the number of newly counted ballots. Some of these were absentee ballots. The reported count of provisional ballots was 79,482 for Kerry, and 61,505 for Bush. This would leave 14,441 provisional ballots uncounted.

10. In summary, it is my professional opinion that John Kerry’s margins of victory were wrongly reduced by 22,000 votes in Cleveland, by 17,000 votes in Columbus, and by as many as 7,000 votes in Toledo. It is my further professional opinion that John Kerry’s margins of defeat in Warren, Butler, and Clermont counties were inflated by as many as 37,000 votes in the aggregate, and in Miami County by as many as 6,000 votes. There are still 92,672 uncounted regular ballots that, based upon the analysis set forth above of the election results from Dayton and Cincinnati, may be expected to break for John Kerry by an overwhelming margin. And there are 14,441 uncounted provisional ballots.

11. My research into the topics discussed in this affidavit is continuing, and I reserve the right to modify my conclusions as new information becomes available.

TO THIS I SWEAR AND AFFIRM,

___________________________________

Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.

Wayne Madsen Is At It Again ('Vote Switching" Software???)

I still think Wayne Madsen is not a nut, and that's why I have to give some credence to this well researched, and highly suggestive albeit not dispositive piece of reporting: Texas to Florida: White House-linked clandestine operation paid for “vote switching” software:

An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.

According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to “control the vote.” At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.

According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be “undetectable” to voters and election supervisors.

I just hope he's wrong — and I worry that the same hope may cause other people to dismiss this one out of hand rather then trying to find out where the facts lead.

New Rumors Swirl Around Ohio Vote Count

I have no idea what to make of this.

Allegedly, a down-ticket Democrat polled 257,000 more votes than Kerry in Ohio. If true — and the web site offers some county-by-county vote figures — that's very odd, as barring the most unusual circumstances the top of the ticket polls well ahead of candidates with very limited advertising budgets. (spotted via Cosmic Iguana)

Bush is currently believed to have carried Ohio by circa 130,000 votes, although exit polls showed a narrow Kerry win. Were Kerry to have won Ohio he would have won the electoral collage although not, on current counts, the popular vote.

The Ohio vote count has had its oddities, notably the apparently false claim that the count in Warren County had to be held behind closed doors without the usual observers due to an FBI terror warning that … didn't exist. It would be enough to make you suspect some hanky-panky were we not all in the grips of … of what exactly?

Slashdot Does Voting Machine Post Mortem

Slashdot collates allegations of voting machine error and/or fraud. Interesting stuff, but politically going nowhere.

Vote Suppression, GOP Style

Of course the GOP didn't want UM students to vote. And they made it as hard as possible. But the students out-waited them.

e-Veritas, 11-04-04—Students turned out by the hundreds on Tuesday to vote at the new campus precinct at the UM Convocation Center. The turnout apparently caught the Miami-Dade Elections Department unprepared, despite the fact that their rolls reflected that students had registered in record numbers for this election. Nevertheless, the intrepid students and area neighbors maintained their good humor and endured wait times of up to five hours — sustained by dozens of pizzas and crates of bottled water provided by the University. The total number of voters exceeded 1,000, and there were as many as 300 people in line at any given time. University staff and student leaders provided support and helped maintain order, and the last voters finally cast their ballots just after midnight.

On Wednesday, President Donna E. Shalala praised students for their “passionate commitment to our democracy.” She subsequently filed a formal complaint with the Elections Department citing “woefully inadequate provision of voting equipment and knowledgeable staffing,” as well as the department's “lack of flexibility and inability to adjust to what were extraordinary lines during the course of the day.” The president also requested that the elections supervisor come to campus to meet with student leaders and assure them of adequate preparation for the next election.

Once again Shalala seizes the moment — feeding and watering the students was a wonderful move.

Tinfoil or For Real?

A scary item (is it true?) submitted to Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list by one Ken Deifik:

It occurs to me that one of the questions that could be answered without too much trouble, at least for someone with lots of access to data and a knowlege of statistics, would be: is there any difference in the Bush - Kerry percentages in precincts that used eVoting, especially Diebold but all eVoting machines, as opposed to those that used paper ballots or some other method of voting.  If this question has any meaning for you, I'd ask you to pose to the list, to see anyone with the proper skills and access could carry out such a study.

I hope in the next few days statisticians examine the issue of the exit polls.  Since the early 70's the exit polls have always been spot on.  I feel ashamed for any journalist who says the exit polls got it wrong in FLA in 2000, because it is clear they got it right.

I have to wonder how John Zogby, who predicted 312 electoral votes for Kerry at 5PM EST 11/2, could have gotten the exit polls so wrong.  Or really if he did.

One reason may be who votes at what time of day?

I just found this posting in the Democratic Underground site
…on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results.

In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.

So we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls vs. voting with audits
vs.
A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits.

Say it ain't so…

Avi Rubin, Cryptographer, On His Day as an Election Judge

Avi Rubin blogs My day as an election judge - take 2. Everything looks like it works, but the system has vulnerabilities…and the worst ones are not ones you could detect….

Kerry, Castor Concede

I think we are in for a rough time.

Will people abroad want to hold dollars if the people running the country have a track record of deficits and talking down the dollar?

Will the weakened Senate Democrats have the guts to filibuster extreme Supreme Court nominees?

Will a more right-wing court stand up to this administration's propensity for torture and arbitrary detention?

What will happen to global warming and environmental quality generally?

I would be delighted to be wrong, but I think that all but one of these questions are going to have really lousy answers, as will many others.

Cliffhanger?

I'm in Logan airport between flights, making the most of the wi-fi. First thing I see: the latest Zogby showing an electoral vote tie, with Pennsylvania holding the balance (because it has more votes than Virginia).

Readers of this blog do not need to be told to vote. (So go call all your friends and relations in PA.)

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (III)

We've been having some substantial work done on our house, which means that between periods of frustrating inactivity it is overrun by armies of sub-contracted workers. Last week it was painters.

The sign gets a reaction from these transient visitors. By and large the sub-contracting bosses are not very pro-Kerry, although at least around us they profess to not be very pro-Bush either. And our general contractor says he may vote for Nader, or may stay home. At first I thought he was saying that to tease us, now I think he means it.

Several of the workers' cars have Kerry stickers.

The head painter, I'll call him 'Ernesto', mentioned in imperfect English that he'd seen our Kerry-Edwards sign. Ernesto told us with quiet pride that this was going to be his first chance to vote here since immigrating from Honduras.

His first US vote ever would be cast for Kerry, Ernesto said. 'Bush has not been good,' he explained.

A few days later, Ernesto waved a bunch of Kerry-Edwards signs from the back of his truck: all his friends are getting them.

58,000 is Probably the Tip of the Iceberg

Slashdot | Absentee Ballots Go Missing in Florida.

I've said for months that the real election fraud in Florida would be absentee ballots not voting machines. This has a tip of the iceberg feel to it.

If Bush should win the state by fewer than 58,000 votes, I will not believe the result unless these ballots are found. (I could even understand why a Bush supporter would say the same thing about a narrow Kerry victory…which just underscores the importance of getting to the bottom of this.)

Signage Update

Called home yesterday evening (London time) and among other things learned that the 'Morales' family (read about them here) now has a Kerry-Edwards sign, bringing our street's total to four!

Georgebush.com Not Viewable from UK?

Here's what I get when I try to access www.georgebush.com from London:

Access Denied

You don't have permission to access “http://www.georgewbush.com/” on this server.

And it's not just me, as you can see from a comment in this thread at Electrolite. Oh, and others have noticed this too, all around the world.

Could it be connected to this ?

More On Sign Theft

I'm told there was a spate of K-E sign thefts — well over a hundred stolen — earlier this week just south of me, in Pinecrest.

The Washington Post says that sign theft is running at normal levels nationwide, except for Ohio and Florida, where it's stratospheric (and, says the Post, bipartisan).

The all-time best sign stealing story, however, is this one:

A Republican in Colorado fell flat on his face trying to steal campaign signs touting John Kerry and other local Democratic candidates.

According to Wheat Ridge Police spokesperson Officer Lisa Stigall, Randal Wagner was already wanted for questioning about a rash of campaign-sign thefts when he was discovered lying unconscious across a stolen sign Oct. 13.

Earlier that evening, a homeowner reported to police that he saw Wagner, 50, cutting down a campaign sign bolted to his fence. The sign was in support of a local Democratic candidate running for Congress.

The man confronted Wagner, who allegedly fled in a truck with his wife. The man gave the vehicle's plate number to police.

While police located the Wagners' home, Wagner was busy at work on another sign put up by a store in the business district, Stigall said.

But he encountered resistance.

“He already had the sign in hand and was running out of the parking lot when he tripped over a low chain that blocked off the driveway,” Stigall said.

Wagner fell flat on his face and was knocked unconscious.

The Power of Belief

Belief, faith, call it what you will, it can be a powerful thing. Indeed, this powerful confession of belief by Thomas Schaller, Executive Editor of the Gadflyer, explains in a fashion even I can understand Why I Believe in Our President. Yes, there's much to ponder there.

GOP Election Spin

Somehow I got on a GOP mailing list. Here's today's wisdom from Chairman Gillespie:

There are only 8 days left until the election and, if you can, we recommend voting early.

Click here to find your early voting location. Because on Election Day we will need your help getting more people involved and getting voters to the polls. The Democrats have already begun to implement their plans to use lawyers and baseless allegations to skew the results in their favor.

We believe no legitimate voter should be disenfranchised, either by being denied a vote or by having an honest vote cancelled out by a fraudulent vote.

But a little intimidation never hurt anyone?

Democrats appear to be setting the stage to use the new provisional balloting rules to convert registration fraud into vote fraud, with the possibility of Kerry supporters voting in multiple jurisdictions or under multiple names.

In one contested election where provisional ballots have been cast, somewhere between 7-to-23 percent of them were valid. Democrats seem intent on making the case that every provisional ballot cast must be counted, and are deploying a horde of 10,000 lawyers to compel the counting of votes that were not legally cast.

Note that this says nothing about when or where that election was, nor what party cast the provisional ballots! It undoubtedly has nothing to do with Kerry.

They have made their strategy clear: If they lose they will sue, and haul the electoral process into courtrooms across the country so activist liberal judges can undermine the will of the people.

The American people should be confident that legitimate voters casting legitimate votes determine the outcome of this election.

Compare the above FUD-like allegations of fraud to reality.

Find Your Polling Place Online

With a plethora of court decisions around the country stating that votes cast at the wrong poling place won't be counted, this is a great thing to be doing:

My name is Keith Kritselis, and I have a website that I am trying to publicize.

Http://www.mypollingsite.com

The website's goal is to help voters find their polling place. Our database of online poll locators has been slowly growing. We now can get 63% of the US population the exact location of their polling site in 4 clicks or less. For the other 37% we provide a local phone number where they can call to get the information they need. This service is free to the public, it has no political affiliation or agenda, and I truly believe that civic participation is the key to a responsive government. This is a small 1 man operation with no marketing dollars. Anything you can do to help get the word out would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

Keith Kritselis

Vote Watch 2004

Vote2004.eRiposte.Com is your one-stop-shopping site for news about vote/election fraud, vote suppression, voting irregularities, and voter intimidation in this election.

Lots (far too much for comfort) stuff here…

The site is well-organized: you can view news chronologically, or by red/swing/blue states or by state. Here, for example, is the Florida electoral vote fraud and suppression page.

Which Ad is More Effective?

Everyone is talking about the new GWB ad Wolves although I can't see what all the fuss is about myself. Maybe it works better on a bigger screen? Perhaps I'm totally blind, but Brooke's Story: He Just Doesn't Get It seems waaay more effective to me.

Saturday is 'Suprise Day'?

Here's a story you won't see in your newspaper. Pandagon speculates in Just A Day Off In Crawford:

Just A Day Off In Crawford: Bush is going to be taking a day of rest in Crawford on Saturday? With the election 10 fingers and two toes away? I mean, I know we're stupid, but exactly how dumb do they think we are? So what's the surprise gonna be, folks? Bush going to fight a lion? Going to personally snap a drugged Osama bin-laden's neck in an arena duel, a la Gladiator? Parachute into Iraq? In the end, it all goes back to something Jon Stewart said:

I don't think Bush is stupid. I think we're stupid, because otherwise he wouldn't talk to us the way he does.

That's the operative dynamic of this election, a healthy disrespect for the wisdom and judgment of the American people. And to that, all I can say is Digby's right, we need to convince the press of our intelligence before Bush snaps on the flightsuit, tapes down the codpiece, and slingshots into a warzone.

Update: Well, you may see it in your online newspaper.

First 527 Mailer of the Season

Got my first piece of 527 propaganda in the mail today, from an outfit that calls itself All Children Matter. It seems to be an outfit that supports state subsidies to privatize schools, be it vouchers, charter schools, or tax credits, bankrolled by a former President of Alticor Inc. — parent corporation of Amway.

Schooling being a traditionally state and local issue, the mailing exhorts me to vote for G.W. Bush for President, because, er, why exactly? Bush “believes that education is the key to opportunity”? Is there anyone who doesn't?

Or am I supposed to believe that Kerry “opposes equal opportunity in education”? Because he opposes tax credits for private schooling? Which by definition only go to those who pay taxes? Which means that there would be no benefit for poor people, and less money raised to pay for public schools, which puts the lie to “equal opportunity in education”.

It's actually a surprisingly ineffective mailer, notable only for what must be the single most unflattering picture of Kerry I've ever seen, making him look like a survivor in a disaster movie.

The version of my name on the flyer suggests they may have sent it to people who subscribe to the Economist rather than to everyone in the area. In case anyone cares, I've put up a pdf of both sides of the glossy thing: Side one and side two (cropped to cut off my address, not that you couldn't find it online in about three seconds if you really wanted to).

Word Frequency Counts Reveal a Major Problem

Pandagon reports in Terrorist Who?:

Did a quick term count in yesterday's “major” speech on terrorism. The results, amazingly, are even more ridiculous than I expected:

• Frequency of John Kerry (with the terms “Senator”, “Senator Kerry”, or “my opponent”): 41
• Frequency of “Saddam Hussein”: 4
• Frequency of “Al Qaeda”: 1
• Frequency of “Osama bin-Laden” or “bin-Laden”: 0

Assuming this was, as stated, a speech on terrorism, it seems quite clear that George W. Bush believes the main terrorist threat facing our country is John Kerry.

He probably does at that.

Visualize Winning

Needlenose says, Visualize Winning.

It's good advice for the next two tense weeks.

ROFL

Talk about two cultures divided by a common language. Wonkette channels the Guardian's followup to its letter-writing campaign directed to Clark County, Ohio in So Long and Thanks for All the Castles:

Americans respond to the Guardian's call for Britons to lobby Ohio voters against Bush. Mostly, they are not pleased, though some are more polite than others:

I used to visit the UK every year. I love the history and culture of your country. But after I heard about your campaign to influence our elections, I've decided that neither myself, nor my family will ever visit again. I'm offended by your campaign and because of it, I'm remembering more of the negative aspects I've seen in the UK than the positive ones. Though I still love the castles!

Versus, say:

Who in the hell do you think you are??? Well, I'll tell you, you're a bunch of meddling socialist pricks! Stay the hell out of our country and politics. And another thing, John Kerry is a worthless lying sack of crap so it doesn't surprise me that a socialist rag like yours would back him. I hope your cynical ploy blows up in your cowardly faces, you bunch of mealy-mouthed morons!

Our take: Yeah! Imagine that! A foreign power trying to, you know, assert control over a sovereign nation by writing letters. Why don't they just hand-pick a ruling coalition like a real empire would? Pussies.

Dear Limey assholes [Guardian]

Speak Truth, Lose Job

Not an unusual circumstance in the working world: speak the truth, criticize the boss, lose your job. Somewhat odder when the job is allegedly journalism.

Sinclair DC News Bureau Chief Fired After Publicly Criticizing Management on Kerry Special.

But it's not about journalism, is it?

Voter Suppression Attempt in Philly

Philadelphia Daily News, GOP fails in effort to move polls:

REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES working to re-elect President Bush submitted last-minute requests in Philadelphia on Friday to relocate 63 polling places.

Bush's Pennsylvania campaign staff filed the requests, using the names of two Republicans running for the U.S. Congress and seven Republican ward leaders.

Of the 63 requests for changes, 53 are in political divisions where the population of white voters is less than 10 percent. …

Bob Lee, voter registration administrator for the City Commission, said the requests appear to be “discriminatory” and were filed too late to be eligible for a hearing on Wednesday.

“They're trying to suppress the vote,” Lee said of Republicans. …

Lee, who has worked for the commission for 21 years, said he became suspicious of the requests because of the last-minute timing, the unusually high number and the locations. …

Requests are sent to hearings before the City Commission after public notices are posted for five days at the polling place, the proposed new polling place and three other places in the division.

Lee said the City Commission on Wednesday will hold its last hearing on polling place changes before the Nov. 2 election.

Since the requests came in on Friday afternoon, he said, there is not time for the public notices.

Then, the understatement of the week,

The requests could potentially confuse voters. The city has already ordered postcards mailed to 1.1 million registered voters before Election Day, directing them to polling places.

Which is of course the whole point. Undoubtedly, Philadelphia is not the only place this will happen. And in Florida, if you vote in the wrong place, your vote will not be counted (FWIW, the court reached the only possible conclusion given the wording of the state legislation).

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the Justice Department has just moved to block a Democratic lawsuit challenging a similar rule blocking the counting of 'provisional ballots' when a registered voter appears at the wrong precinct.

Why can't we allow people to vote in Post Offices or something? And why, in this computerized age, is it necessary to force people to vote in a given precinct?

Strange, Sad Priorities

The Carpetbagger Report: The media has its priorities; are they yours?

Words devoted to the Mary Cheney “story” in the Washington Post over the past three days: 1,099

Words devoted in the Washington Post over the past three days to the fact that the president's top political aide testified before a federal grand jury on Friday as part of an ongoing criminal investigation of the Bush White House: 438

The New York Times' ratio was even worse. The manufactured Mary Cheney flap has generated 3,074 words since Saturday (from two news items and two op-eds) in the paper of record; Rove's testimony's received 813 words.

Meet the Press, meanwhile, devoted 1,055 words to Mary Cheney yesterday; Rove's grand jury testimony wasn't mentioned at all.

The Washington Post even polled on the Mary Cheney “story” on Friday (64% said Kerry's comment was “inappropriate”). There were no questions in the poll about the ongoing criminal investigation of the White House.

I'd like to see a poll about whether Bush saying he never said he didn't care about Osama was “inappropriate”. No. How about a poll asking if invading Iraq with no plans at all for winning the peace was “inappropriate”?

Creeping Putinization of America, Part 2

Putin urges voters to back Bush. Actually the strangest part of this story isn't that Putin supports a fellow Putinizer, but rather the reasons given for that support.

Putin claims to oppose the Iraq war, but to think that the 'terrorist attacks' against US forces “are aimed at preventing the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush and that a Bush defeat 'could lead to the spread of terrorism to other parts of the world.'”

In other words, if you were to substitute “US” for “Bush” in that statetment, Putin's postiion on Iraq is much more like Kerry's than like Bush's: it was a mistake to go in, but now that we're there a pullout would be an error too.

The 'Creeping Putinization of American Life'

Fellow member of the reality-based community Matthew Yglesias looks into the abyss that he brilliantly labels the 'Putanization of Amercian life'. It's ugly down there.

Matthew Yglesias: Threats

Christopher Hitchens, in one of the few insightful things he's said about the war on terrorism, took the chance in his final Nation column to criticize those on the left “who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” At the time, I thought it was a very sharp remark. I never supported Bush and always hoped he would lose in 2004 since I thought his policies were misguided, but many people seemed to me at the time to have lost all sense of perspective about who the really threatening enemies were. Suskind's article along with other pieces of evidence of what one might call the creeping Putinization of American life (the Sinclair incident, the threatening letter to Rock The Vote, the specter of the top official in the House of Representatives making totally baseless charges of criminal conduct against a major financier of the political opposition [shades of Mikhail Khodorovsky], the increasing evidence that the 'terror alert' system is nothing more than a political prop, the 'torture memo' asserting that the president is above the law, the imposition of rigid discipline on the congress, the abuse of the conference committee procedure, the ability of the administration to lie to congress without penalty, the exclusion of non-supporters from Bush's public appearances, etc.) are beginning to make me think this assessment may have been misguided. Terrorist forces operating in and around Chechnya have done some horrible things — I was in Moscow for the big apartment bombings — but ultimately the most harmful thing they have done was to enable Putin to tighten his grip on power.

Update: For an example of how common culture produces similar responses, see this post by Kevin Drum on the same Yglesias text, using the same “abyss” metaphor for its headline!

New Polling Thread

The great Electoral Vote Predictions Blog summarizes today's top polling news including this story which I think is the only piece of signal amidst the week's polling noise:

Frank Luntz, the top Republican pollster wrote in the Financial Times: “Step by step, debate-by-debate, John Kerry has addressed and removed many remaining doubts among uncommitted voters. My own polling research after each debate suggests a rather bleak outlook for the Bush candidacy: many who still claim to be 'undecided' are in fact leaning to Mr. Kerry and are about ready to commit.” In a world where the spinmeisters constantly claim that their horse can not only walk on water, but also trot and gallop on it, having a top GOP strategist with access to real data say his horse is sinking fast is ominous for the Bush campaign. Read the whole story here.

Where Is Mary Cheney?

Seriously now. What relevance does the attitude of uber-partisans Dick and Lynn Cheney about Kerry's debate mention of their adult daughter have?

Can't she speak for herself? After all, she's working on her father's campaign. Or is the GOP ban on Mary Cheney camera-presence still in effect?

Where is Mary Cheney?

Bulge Watch ('My What a Lot of Tinfoil Under Your Jacket Sir,' Edition)

My brother's column today gets into the Bush bulge watch thing:

Salon is featuring a photo today that would appear to show Vanessa Kerry staring at Bush's bulge last night.

The bulge in question is what — again — looks like a rectangular object on Bush's back, under his suit. Here's the original photo.

Mike Allen wrote in The Washington Post last weekend that Bush's aides have “tried to laugh off the controversy.”

Dave Lindorff wrote in Salon yesterday that “speculation continues to run wild” about the bulge, and that the White House's half-hearted explanations don't seem to wash.

A new poll from the Economist finds that of those who had seen a picture of the bulge, 49 percent said they think it's caused by “a radio receiver so that his team could communicate with him during the debate;” 18 percent think it's a fold in the suit; 13 percent something else; 20 percent don't know.

Tim Grieve writes in Salon that Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman was repeatedly asked about the bulge yesterday, and finally said: “The president is an alien. You heard it here first. The president is an alien. That's your quote of the day. He has been getting information from Mars. The shock of the debate will be the president's alien past will be exposed, which is why that box is there.”

The problem with this story, as preposterous as it may sound to some, is that it risks perpetuating an image of Bush as a puppet. I think a lot of us are waiting for a definitive answer.

Someone should really ask Vernon Jordan who suggested the prohibition on photographing candidates from behind during the pre-debate negotiations and what reason if any was given. Because it's that condition, said to have been demanded by the Bush negotiators, that gives this story what legs it has. That and the consistent strangenss of the shape of the bulge. Oh yes, and the absence of a physical this year.

So, the three main things are the attempt to stop the photos, the consistent strangeness of the shape and Bush's decision to forgoe a physical before the election. Oh yes, and Bush's odd behavior during the debates.

So, the four main things that give this story its legs are the attempt to stop the photos, the consistent strangeness of the shape, the lack of a physical this Oh yes, and Bush's odd behavior during the debates. Oh yes, and also the fact that tin foil can be fun.

But no one expected the aliens to admit complicity in rigging the election for their puppet until the planet was almost unsuitable for human life due to global warming—which, combined with increased carbon dioxide and radioactivity will make it a perfect breeding grounds for

Ack. help. im beighalew2332o5 2432`72 fcds

3rd Debate 1st Thoughts

The questions were limp. Ever hear of the environment? John Ashcroft?

If Bush could have bottled his best ten minutes he would have defeated Kerry's worst. But it's a 90 minute event. And Kerry stumbled only once that I caught (I think the Congressional Black Caucus has been in the White House¹). Bush stumbled often, looking lost. That smirk crept back. And he got caught out badly on jobs, on how students are losing their lunches. Kerry had several zingers, on jobs, minimum wage, health care. For example, the line about telling union workers that he can't stop all outsourcing is pretty obvious but it will play well.

Bush at his best was better than in the previous debates—notably in pointing up Kerry's opposition to the First Gulf War authorization; but for the middle part of the debate he looked alternately lost, scared, smirky. It was odd. The line about not trusting the press oh never mind was not just unpresidential, it was strange. Bush ducked the Roe v. Wade question, and it showed. That helps with the base, but I don't think it helps with the nation as a whole. Kerry also nailed the guns question after Bush said he ducked supporting the assault weapons ban because he didn't think it would pass—Kerry said that was a failure of leadership, and he could do what Clinton did: pass the bill with the help of law enforcement officers who support it.

In my view, Bush was better than before — but so was Kerry. He looked like a President, and I think he actually inspired, yes John Kerry inspired, when he talked about fairness. Bush will have scored points talking about faith, but I'll take works please. [It's interesting that the candidates' debate reflects the fault line in US Protestantism regarding faith vs. works, the tension that famously destroyed the hegemony of the Puritan divines in Massachusetts shortly after the American Revolution. It's also interesting to hear Catholic Bostonian Kerry giving the salvation through works line, while it's unchurched Protestant Southerner Bush, the man whose works are not working, is in essence arguing for blind faith. Sociologists of religion will be quoting this stuff for years.]

But it doesn't matter what I think, what matters is what the country thought.

[Update 10/14: Insta-polls say Kerry won big. ]

---

¹ [Update 10/14] Well, yes and no. See the details at The Carpetbagger Report

First Lie Spotted Two Minutes In

The brought out the genial bush for the start of the debate… Kerry stuck to the talking points. I think playing the same tape three times is boring.

I'm not going to try to live blog this, but I can't help noting that it was only 2 minutes and we had our first lie: Bush denied he had ever said he wasn't worried about Osama bin Laden.

Not true

President Bush said Tuesday in West Virginia that he is not worried about finding Osama bin Laden as he cannot hide from the U.S. forces forever.

snip
“There are only so many caves he (bin Laden) can hide in,” said Bush in arrival remarks at Yeager Airport in Charleston, W.Va. The United States, he said, is winning the war on terrorism, even if the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks is still at large.

“He's the one who needs to be worried. But I want to assure you the objective is not bin Laden. We'll get bin Laden. “We want him dead or alive … but we are not too worried about him. … He is the one who needs to be worried,” Bush said.

Update: Kevin Drum has a better quote:

I don’t know where he is. Nor — you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you. I….I truly am not that concerned about him.

Free Download of Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry

Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry is available for free download. Beware, though, as “The file is approximately 650 megabytes and should take about two to four hours to download through a cable modem or a fast DSL connection”

Takin' My Country Back

It's a catchy little country tune, Takin' My Country Back, but I don't expect to hear it on local radio somehow….

Tinfoil, Extra Chewy Edition

Someone sent me a link to a film contrasting the speaking style of GW Bush 10 years ago to today . It's a striking contrast. Nevertheless, I'm conflicted about this one.

[Update (10/12): The server hosting the film seems to be melting down under the strain of links from all over the word. The URL is http://www.blogitics.com/footage/BushTenYrs4MB.mov, and I find that if I try it several times I get “not found” and other errors but eventually it works….]

On the one hand, I think that suggesting that a candidate is suffering from pre-senile dementia is a low blow. Too low.

On the other hand, the Bush campaign has left open the door to this sort of speculation, made it almost inevitable, by mysteriously cancelling Bush's annual physical. (I'm sure his doctor would make a house call to the Bush hacienda if asked to.) The example of Paul Tsongas, who suggested he was well when he was in fact not, ought to make us demand that our candidates level with us about their health.

On the gripping hand, if this film clip is representative (and I have no idea if they just took a particularly good moment or if the ten-year-old clip is what he was like), then Bush was vastly — I mean vastly — more articulate ten years ago than he is today, and if there's any chance that the cause for this striking deterioration is physical, as opposed to psychological, we have a right to know.

Brief Notes From AM Radio Land

I hit the wrong button the radio today while driving to get the kids and was transported to AM Radio Land. Let me tell you, it's different out there. On one station, the host spent ten minutes screaming at the top of his lungs about how Kerry insulted the nation during the second debate when he looked around and said that no one in the audience looked like they were earning over $200,000 per year. “He called you losers!!!” the guy kept shouting, “He said you are all losers!!!” over and over and over again. (Is everyone who makes under $200,000 a “loser” in AM Radioland?)

Three stations to the right, there's a female evangelist saying that many people have asked her if the storms lashing Florida might be some chastisement that G-d has aimed at Florida. No, of course not, she replies, these storms come from the Enemy and are part of a plot to distract people into caring too much about daily life, and ignoring the really important thing we must all do. And what is that? Why, we must elect the right people to office come November 2: “G-dly people, not liberals.”

I am not making this up.

Today's Movie

This or that?

Moving Essay at Escapable Logic

I commend to you a moving essay by Britt Blaser at Escapable Logic.

I don't know if I agree that “At our nation's birth, most voters were smarter, tougher, better educated and more patriotic than you and me” — that's edging a little in the Straussian direction for my taste — but it's a fine, heartfelt essay about war, heroics, politics, and the next election nonetheless.

Brad DeLong Presents...Last Week in Shrillblog

Brad DeLong summarizes the first week in October over at the Shrillblog.

It's not pretty, all that shrillness in one place. What happens if it escapes?

Kevin Drum Says Last's Night's Big Lie Was About the Economy

Kevin Drum argues convincingly that during the debate Bush uttered “one of the great whoppers of all time” regarding the economy when he said that “Non-homeland, non-defense discretionary spending was raising at 15 percent a year when I got into office. And today it's less than 1 percent, because we're working together to try to bring this deficit under control.”

No such thing:

Outside of the personal fantasyland Bush seems to inhabit, the truth is simple: spending of all kinds has skyrocketed under his administration and the Republican Congress. They've increased spending twice as fast as Clinton, three times as fast as Bush 1, and four times as fast as Carter. And remember: this doesn't include defense spending, entitlement spending, or homeland security. 9/11 and Medicare have nothing to do with it.

See the whole post, and the great chart, for all the details.

"Dred Scott" is Code for "Roe v. Wade"?

One of GW Bush's odder remarks last night was that he would appoint Supreme Court Justices who opposed Dred Scott. At the time it seemed an unfortuanate attempt to pick an uncontroversial example (even the hard right is against slavery) but, no, it seems it may have been code to the base.

For details, see Paperwight's Fair Shot: Dred Scott = Roe v. Wade. (via Kevin Drum)

2nd Presidential Debate, Reax Roundup

• Good Kerry-won poll numbers
• Hullabaloo sees America's ex-husband
• Balkin explains why Bush's reference to the Dred Scott case is incoherent
• Literary cautionary tale
• Criticism of Bush's wooden performance
• Matthew Yglesias tries on tin foil hat for size. Brad DeLong eyes one too
• MaxSpeak says Bush is as angry as Howard Dean — but of course won't get the same media treatment (running the anger clip 50 times a day for a week). First Draft says Somewhere, Howard Dean is laughing. Angry Bear sees an Angry Bush (takes one to know one?). Wolcott would like less yelling.
• Robert's thoughts are less random than the NYT editorial board

Bonus item:

• Get mad and get even!

2nd Presidential Debate, 1st Impressions

What a weird event. The only thing clear is that the citizen questioners won. They are much better than the moderators.

As between the candidates, Bush did not self-destruct like in the first debate, but at the price of some strange behavior, notably a very blank expression when he was sitting down and a very odd speaking style for the first hour — shouting, almost ranting. His demeanor in the last half-hour was much better than in the first hour.

The Big Lie made its appearance early and often, as Bush claimed that yesterday’s report by the chief United States weapons inspector for Iraq (the Duelfer Report) somehow vindicated the decision to attack. There basically isn’t a shred of truth to that description of a thousand-page report most voters will never read. If anything, the report showed that the UN sanctions were working better than anyone suspected. And, if there is any justice, Bush's claim that he isn't blocking drug re-importation will come back to haunt him. He did much better in the last 30 minutes, even told what counts as a good joke about timber under the circumstances. [Although fact checking reveals that Kerry was right and Bush wrong on the facts as to Bush's $84 in timber income making him a “small business”.] But Bush flubbed the Patriot Act question badly by patronizing the questioner. And he cratered again when asked if he could identify three mistakes he's made in the last 3.5 years. He couldn't bring himself to come up with even one specific example.

Kerry was forceful, although I find some of his canned speeches a bit robotic, and if I were drinking every time he said he had a Plan I would be blotto if not hospitalized. He started strong (“The military's job is to win the war; the president's job is to win the peace”; slamming Bush on the deficit) but as the night wore on he stumbled a few times, albeit more in style than substance, notably on the stem cell question where he seemed to be fumbling for words. Other than on the abortion issue, Kerry smashed Bush both on Iraq and domestic issues. Even on the abortion issue, Kerry did well in his rebuttal on explaining why parental notification and 'partial birth' abortion were more complex questions than Bush lets on, the only time on that subject when Kerry didn't look uncomfortable.

In general, Kerry looked tired by the end, Bush looked better at the end than the start (when he looked awful). Kerry had better get more rest the day before the third debate. Even so, he won significantly on points — but not by a knockout until and unless the fact checkers hit the Big Lie issue squarely.

But within the four corners of the TV screen (or, in my case, Real Video feed) Bush did better than the first time. Bush looked substantially less stupid, albeit every bit as pig-headed. Some people see that as resolve. Others see it as denial of reality. Kerry's domination on substance was perhaps insufficient to shake the faith of Bush supporters not already scared away from him.

And a lot depends on the factcheckers: if they do as good a job as they did for the first two debates, that should help Kerry substantially.

Wonkette's Expectations Are So Low...

Wonkette accepts the NYT's offer to craft a question for GW Bush:

Questions for Bush: Personal experience can often change political opinions. So, just hypothetically: Let's say your vice president's daughter was gay … Oh, wait. Umm … What if you were responsible for the biggest deficit in American history - oh, ha. O.K.: Let's say you invaded a country based on faulty intelligence … Er, oops … No, we got it: How did “The Pet Goat” end, anyway?

Can't. Resist. Low. Humor. “Wonkette Expectation Is So Low, It's Below the Belt”

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (I)

We live less than a block from campus, only a few blocks from where the first presidential debate was held. So the day before the debate we decided we needed a Kerry-Edwards yard sign. In an earlier post I described how I found the local Kerry-Edwards office. I went there the morning of the debate, and they gave me a yard sign, with the metal mount, saying it was just about the last one, they were going fast. We installed it as soon as we got home. That afternoon, returning from collecting the kids, I saw our neighbor from across the street, whom I'll call Ms. 'Morales'.

I should explain about the 'Morales' family. Viewed from across the street, they seem to be your typical Coral Gables residents—a very successful Cuban-American couple, a few years older than us, one college-age son. Mr. Morales is an accountant, she's a not-quite-full-time Realtor.

(I will never forget one of my first encounters with Mr. Morales back in 1992. Having just arrived from London, we moved into our house a few days after Hurricane Andrew, at a time when there was no electricity anywhere in the neighborhood, roads were impassible due to trees down, and everything was in confusion. Our house was basically untouched, but theirs sustained severe damage. Despite this, we were more disoriented than they, in part because we were not used to the heat and humidity, had no clue where anything was, no emergency supplies, not even a candle or flashlight to unpack by when it got cool enough at night to actually move.

Despite their own serious damage, the Moraleses made every effort to be helpful. When the radio started warning about not leaving damaged houses unattended due to the danger of looters, Mr. Morales come over to comfort us. We had nothing to worry about, he said. He had an arsenal in his house, and was keeping watch on things. Any looter came by he was going to shoot him. The idea of an amateur, armed with an arsenal, poised for looters across the street scared me much more than the remote prospect of the looters themselves, though I understood that Mr. Morales meant his remarks to be friendly.)

So anyway, Ms. Morales made polite conversation about the construction on our house (which proceeds, but not fast enough). Then she came to the point. “I noticed you have a new sign on your lawn.” Uh-oh, thought I. She sees it all day out of her window. This isn't going to be good.

Then she floored me: “Where can I get one?”

It seems the Moraleses, perhaps because of the college (ie draft!) age child, are now virulently anti-Bush. They voted for him in 2000, and boy are they sorry. She is angry about the war in Iraq, Ms. Morales told me—and she looked the way I feel, shaking with anger. And they're angry about the new rules that restrict travel to Cuba, and limit helping any but the closest relatives still there. They're very very anti-Bush; they're voting Kerry.

Of such things are victories made.

(This is the first of at least three stories I plant to tell over the next few days about my Kerry-Edwards sign.)

Next: Someone steals my sign two days after I put it up.

Short Dick Cheney

There's nothing in John Kerry's life since he volunteered for combat in Vietnam and won five medals while I collected five deferrments that would suggest he is anywhere as tough against America's adversaries as I am.

Actually, the offical transcript hardly needs improvement: “there isn't anything in John Kerry's background — oh, for the last 30 years — that gives you any reason to believe that he would, in fact, be tough in terms of prosecuting the war on terror.”

Kerry's Big Mo?

New poll results look much better for Kerry:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry gained ground at President George W. Bush's expense in polls taken in Florida, New Jersey, Iowa, New Mexico and New Hampshire after last week's presidential debate.

Kerry has a 2 percentage point edge in Florida and the candidates are tied in New Hampshire, two states that were among those Bush won in 2000, according to the American Research Group.

In New Mexico and New Jersey, Kerry leads by 3 percentage points, within the error margin, according to polls. Bush and Kerry are tied in Iowa. The three states backed the Democratic nominee in 2000.

“Independent voters, who shifted to Bush from Kerry beginning just prior to the Republican convention, seem to be shifting back to Kerry, and that trend has intensified in the days following the first debate,'' American Research Group President Dick Bennett said in an e-mail.

One's tempted to say this is the start of major Kerry “momentum.” Trouble is, I have come to mistrust all the polls. In order to believe one, I'd need to know lots more, starting with what percentage of the electorate they think will vote, and how that number compares to 2000. I think that turnout, at least in the 'swing' states, will be substantially greater than four years ago, especially among the younger voters. Is this reflected in their models?

Then again, I suspect that exit polls got the Florida vote right (showing a Gore win), and the actual count got it wrong — in substantial part due to the “butterfly ballot” people who were polled but not properly counted. But with exit polls we don't have any doubt about who the 'likely voters' might be, so the sampling problem is easier.

Veep Debate--Second Impressions

Could it be that there is hope for the Republic?

Yesterday I suggested that what people thought of the foreign policy part of the debate would depend a great deal on whether they had the facts to detect Cheney's artfully delivered deadpan mendacity. Today the media — both blogs and traditional sources — went into high fact-check mode. Summaries at Needlenose and White House Briefing.

Cheney's best zinger was the he went to the Senate to preside over it most every Tuesday and yet he'd never met Edwards before the debate. Both parts are a lie: Cheney's Senate presiding record is rather limited, and Cheney is on archival TV footage sitting next to Edwards at a dinner three years ago. (The Democrats put out a nice video about it.) And the part about Edwards's hometown paper was not real accurate either…

I think the major print and network media willingness to fact-check all of a sudden (where have they been for the past three years?) is largely due to pressure via blogs, which has served as a counter-weight to the right-wing domination of cable TV and AM radio, those modern yahoos who treat questioning the Maximum Leader as a form of treason. Now we have sane people noting that letting the Leader and Assistant Leader (however we sort the roles) lie with impunity is itself perhaps not the essence of patriotism.

Brad DeLong thinks that Cheney lying about the small stuff is major:

I believe that Cheney's loss to Edwards will, by this weekend, be seen as even greater in magnitude than Bush's loss to Kerry last Thursday. This is just too good a story not to dominate public memory.

In the future, when people talk about most devastating moments in vice presidential debates, they will not talk about Lloyd Bentsen's riposte to Dan Quayle's claim to be the second coming of JFK; they will talk about Dick Cheney's forgetting that he had ever seen John Edwards before.

In other words, the conventional wisdom is hardening that Cheney has committed a gaffe—one of those silly small things that the press pounces on and turns into a mountain when it (1) thinks the small thing is sympathetic magic for a big important thing (2) that the press believes to be true, but (3) doesn't have the guts to say directly.

Trial by gaffe is a nutty way to pick the government of the world's greatest superpower. But it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Update: Digby points to Just My 2 where you will find some very high-ranking Republicans who have gone on record in the strongest and most definite terms that even minor mis-statements in a Presidential debate (even something as small as where and when you were with a public official) indicate something profound and troubling about a candidate.

Veep Debate--First Impressions

Cheney would be one of the most effective TV presences — because of, not despite, his lies — were it not for his irrepressible mean streak. Whether people think he won or lost may well turn on their response to the meanness factor. TV does not like mean.

If you insist on substance, Cheney did almost as good a job as could be done to make the administration look good on foreign policy. Edwards as much as said, 'who you gonna believe: this guy or your eyes?' It's a good argument, but there were others he could have used too. If you were not aware of the facts Cheney was distorting, you might well have thought he won the foreign affairs part, although not by much; if you knew the subtext, then Edwards won on foreign affairs, but didn't do so as effectively as he might have. I think Edwards's stock may rise if people fact check the debate thoroughly, as I think Edwards missed openings to nail Cheney mis-statements.

Conversely, Edwards simply crucified Cheney on domestic issues. Wasn't even close.

Update (10/6): A quickie CBS poll “of 178 uncommitted voters found that 41 percent said Edwards won the debate, versus 28 percent who said Cheney won. Thirty-one percent said it was a tie.” One more time and it's over…..

Fighting Back Against the Manipulation of Fear

This is an awfully good short political video: Keeping America Scared.

It pushes back against one of the Bush administration's most effective and improper tactics. For, instead of taking the FDR line ('nothing to fear but fear itself'), Bush and his crew have stoked the fires of fear (mixed in with what we used to call 'waving the bloody shirt') for political gain.

The video not only shows an affable Bush and a creepy Cheney doing it, but also shows Rudy Guilliani trying too hard and overdoing it, and Laura Bush's ability to say anything and make it sound OK. There's also a brief (don't blink) but very chilling cameo by Hollywood box-office star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Like any piece of politcal argument that takes quotes out of context, there is a way in which this video could be called unfair. But the sheer volume of the repetition it exposes, and the setting in which it happened, shows, I think, that this retaliation is not in fact below the belt.

What I Missed

The DNC has kindly provided a highlights video called “Faces of Frustration” to show what I missed by not watching the split-screen TV version of the debate. It's quite something.

Kerry Won Big

Listening to the excerpts of the debate on the radio this morning, I realize Kerry won big. The soundbites are (1) Kerry saying he made a mistake speaking about the war, but Bush made a mistake invading, which is worse? and (2) Bush sounding amazingly lost and hesitant, then petulant, after being called on his sly suggestion that the Iraq invasion was retaliation for 9/11. His “I know OBL attacked us” sounds like a five year old in the playground trying unsuccessfully to deflect teacher's ire.

According to the utterly unbiased Kerry-Edwards web page, the instapolls confirm that Kerry won big.

Here are the poll stats copied from the K-E web page

CNN / GALLUP POLL ON WHO WON DEBATE

Kerry: 53
Bush: 37

CBS POLL ON WHO WON DEBATE:

Kerry: 44
Bush: 26
Tie: 30

ABC POLL ON WHO WON DEBATE:

Kerry: 45
Bush 36:
Tie: 17

What the K-E page doesn't address is whether this win changed any minds.

For the first time in about two years, I agree with NPR's Juan Williams, who said this morning that it takes a few days of seeing the clips repeated on TV and radio before people make up their minds.

But if they keep playing the soundbites I heard this morning, it can only be good for Kerry…

Debate Highs and Lows

Kerry's worst mistakes: (1) a slip on a “global test” for preemptive war. While he meant that any war must be something we can justify to the world. It will be twisted to mean he'll demand approval from the black-helicopter-UN before sneezing. (2) Somewhat robotic repetition of some of the same talking points.

Bush's worst mistakes: (1) inarticulate, bad body language, sounded flustered by unexpected questions; (2) didn't seem to have a full command of the facts

Kerry's best moves: Great delivery: strong and dignified and articulate (when not repeating himself). Hit key points he had to hit

Bush's best move — suggesting that Kerry's claim the attack on Iraq was wrong doesn't square with his expressed desire to “win” now. (Despite Kerry's later reference to the Pottery Barn theory, which was not a great corrective.)

Things that await the spin: Korea 2-party or 6-party talks? Bush's set-piece about meeting a war widow.

Prediction: The anti-Kerry soundbites will be all the same they were before — why let facts get in the way.

But I mostly heard this on the radio. Did it look different on TV?

Debate Thread

First lie: Bush claims that “people know where I stand”; compare Daily Kos: Bush Supporters Clueless about Bush's Policies

Bush's best moment: pointing out the contradiction between Kerry saying the invasion was a mistake and saying he will win it with foreign help.

Fact check: How many countries have how many troops in Iraq? See this BBC account

Numbers fluctuate as troops are rotated in and out of the country. On 19 July 2004 there were about 133,000 foreign troops in Iraq, of whom about 112,000 were American.

Any major engagement with insurgents is run by US forces, except in the south-east, where British forces take the lead.

Bush's claim that there are 30 or so countries represented among coalition troops is technically correct. But for almost all the contributions are, according to the BBC, negligible:

Coalition troops in Iraq

More than 30 countries have contributed troops to the multinational forces in Iraq.

The US is overwhelmingly the biggest foreign contributor, followed by the UK, Italy and Poland.

Numbers fluctuate as troops are rotated in and out of the country. On 19 July 2004 there were about 133,000 foreign troops in Iraq, of whom about 112,000 were American.

Any major engagement with insurgents is run by US forces, except in the south-east, where British forces take the lead.

Baghdad Area of Operations:
About 30,000 foreign soldiers, most from the US 1st Cavalry Division. There are 32 Estonians in the Abu Ghraib district of the city.

Iraqi troops began patrols in Baghdad on 28 June, in co-ordination with the multinational forces.

Baghdad is also the location of the multinational force headquarters.

Multinational Brigade North (also known as Task Force Olympia):
About 20,000 soldiers, of whom 11,500 are Iraqi security forces (national guard, border patrol and army).

The remaining 8,500 are nearly all American (mostly Third Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division). There is also an Albanian commando company.

In August 2004, South Korea is due to start deploying 3,000 new troops in Irbil. Most of the 700 South Koreans already in the country have been based in the south-east, but about half are now, reportedly, being redeployed to Irbil.

(Sources: Multinational Brigade North; Globalsecurity.org)

North-Central Area of Operations:
The US 1st Infantry is augmented by contingents from:
Georgia (150)
Latvia (about 40)
Moldova (30)
Macedonia (30)

Western Area of Operations:
The US 1st Marine Division is augmented by contingents from:
Azerbaijan (150)
Tonga (45)

Multinational Division Centre-South:
Poland (2,350)
Ukraine (1,550)
Thailand (450)
Bulgaria (420)
Hungary (290)
Romania (200)
Mongolia (140
Latvia (110)
Slovakia (110)
Lithuania (50)

Dan Tries Distributed Fact-Checking

My brother wants to harness blogs and their readers to do some distributed fact-checking of tonight's debate.

Let the Fact Checking Begin! And here's another way to make sure that the substance of Bush and Kerry's comments are fully and quickly assessed.

Some key political bloggers, who have so effectively proven their ability to hold the press accountable, will tonight be posting their own debate fact-checks — and will be asking their readers to find and document substantively incorrect statements by the candidates, as well.

I've already talked to several bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum and they're on board. I urge others in the blogging community to join in the experiment. Just make sure you e-mail me at froomkin@washingtonpost.com so I know you're out there.

In tomorrow's column, I'll link to the bloggers who are actively fact-checking and I'll try to highlight some of the best and best-documented posts.

Let's help out! (Although I suspect it would need to be a really excellent gotcha! to get through the Post's anti-nepotism firewall.)

More Top 10 Lists

CBS News: Bush's Top Ten Flip-Flops. My favorite:

During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush argued against nation building and foreign military entanglements. In the second presidential debate, he said: “I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'”

The United States is currently involved in nation building in Iraq on a scale unseen since the years immediately following World War II.

During the 2000 election, Mr. Bush called for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from the NATO peacekeeping mission in the Balkans. His administration now cites such missions as an example of how America must “stay the course.”

[I think this one is actually a double-flip-flop since we're now abandoning nation-building in Iraq.]

NPR: Top 10 Secrets They Don't Want You to Know About the Debates, including,

(7.) The secretly negotiated debate contract bars Kerry and Bush from any and all other debates for the entire campaign.

CBS News: Kerry's Top Ten Flip-Flops. Most pandering and damning,

In October 2003, Kerry said Israel’s unilateral construction of a security fence was “a barrier to peace.”

“I know how disheartened Palestinians are by the decision to build the barrier off the Green Line,” he told the Arab American Institute National Leadership Conference. “We don't need another barrier to peace. Provocative and counterproductive measures only harm Israelis.”

But less than a year later, in February 2004, he reversed himself, calling the fence “a legitimate act of self-defense,” and saying “President Bush is rightly discussing with Israel the exact route of the fence to minimize the hardship it causes innocent Palestinians.”

Something Good Comes Out of Crawford, TX

Crawford, TX, GW Bush's “hometown,” i.e. the place where Bush's palatial family estate is located, has its own local newspaper, The Lone Star Iconoclast.

And it has something to say: Editorial, Opinion of the Publishers.

Read it.

Will My Vote Count?

I live in the ur-swing state. I'd like my vote to count. I'll be voting on an electronic voting machine with no paper trail. I don't trust it. Not at all. (Here's one more reason I don't trust the machines in use in my precinct.)

The most amazing thing about this to me as a person clinging to an increasingly sorely tested belief in the rule of law, is that the plain, plain, plain meaning of the relevant florida statute says that a machine with no backup records is illegal. Florida law demands the ability to do recounts in close elections. This theory is about to be tested in court — at last.

Here's part of the Herald's story.

Florida's election system, ridiculed and maligned during the 2000 presidential election and then rebuilt with new technology, was thrown into chaos again Monday with five weeks to go before Election Day.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta reversed a lower-court judge and ordered him to hear a lawsuit that demands voters be given paper receipts when they use touch-screen voting machines so there is a paper trail in a close election.

The court's decision is vindication for U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, the Palm Beach County Democrat who filed the lawsuit, and a potential nightmare for election officials in the 15 counties that use the ATM-style equipment, including Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.

It also throws an unwelcome light once again on Florida, which was assailed Monday by former President Jimmy Carter, who said a repetition of problems from 2000 “seems likely in Florida.''

Regardless of whether Wexler wins his lawsuit in court, state officials said Monday that they will now draw up an emergency rule requiring touch-screen counties to do manual recounts in close elections — a startling turnaround, because the state fought for months to bar such recounts.

(emphasis added) Problem: how do you do a manual recount where there's no record???

Critics of touch-screen technology are alarmed that there may be no way to know if a machine malfunctioned during a close election.

State law requires recounts when elections are decided by a razor-thin margin. If the difference in vote totals between candidates after the first automatic recount is less than one-quarter of 1 percent, election officials are required to do a manual, or hand, recount of all overvotes and undervotes. Overvotes are votes for more than one candidate in a race; undervotes are no votes at all in a particular race.

But the state elections division has argued that manual recounts aren't needed for touch-screen machines because they are incapable of recording overvotes. State officials even issued a rule prohibiting counties from doing manual recounts — a rule the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups successfully challenged in court last month.

The law suit raises that issue, but I can't imagine how some new rule relying on this technology can address it.

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood called the ruling ''procedural'' but acknowledged that the state now plans a new rule in time for the Nov. 2 elections spelling out how to do manual recounts in touch-screen counties. How recounts would be done hasn't been decided, spokeswoman Jenny Nash said.

She said state officials were interested in doing what “we feel will best serve Florida. We are concerned with finality and not continued litigation.''

But the state's solution does not at this time include paper receipts, because Florida hasn't certified any printers that can legally be used with touch-screen machines.

And I predict there is no way it can in time for the election. Unless they scrap the machines, which is pretty unlikely.

Jon Stewart For Debate Moderator

Works for me: Jon Stewart For Debate Moderator.

MIA: Facts

Things must be bad when even Howard Kurtz notices you are making stuff up:

Missing: 983,000 Tax Pages: Looks as though President Bush is due for an audit of his tax code facts. “The tax code is a complicated mess,” he said in Bangor, Maine, on Thursday. “You realize, it's a million pages long.” Most Americans probably did not realize it was that long, because it is not. It is, in fact, 17,000 pages long, according to such experts as the conservative Heritage Foundation and Rep. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).

Update: As the an commentator noted, this was by Dana Milbank, who's about as good as it gets at the Post. I hate to think what these proofs I'm working will look like when they are printed.

Elizabeth Edwards Is Wonderful

One of the reasons I ended up being a John Edwards fan was Elizabeth Edwards. I figured anyone who she would marry had to be OK. Here's more evidence for the proposition that she's great: Elizabeth Edwards reads Daily Kos. She also contributes to the Kerry-Edwards blog.

Who the Terrorists Want to Win, and Why

Even prior to his recent Satanic endorsement, GW Bush picked up plaudits of a sort from the next-most-evil source: active terrorists, in this case the group that is thought to be responsible for the Madrid train bombings:

The statement tells Americans that Abu Hafs al-Masri supports the re-election of President George W. Bush. "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," it said. Addressing Bush, it said: "We know that a heavyweight operation would destroy your government, and this is what we don't want. We are not going to find a bigger idiot than you."

Source: International Herald Tribune (Mar. 18, 2004). Spotted via Needlenose.

Just Don't Mention the War

Something else with which to stoke your outrage — how the Bush/RNC slime machine is trying to suggest that anyone who suggests the Boy Emperor's Iraq campaign may be having a wardrobe malfunction is unpatriotic, or maybe even treasonous.

Slime

The New York Times: Republicans Admit Mailing Campaign Literature Saying Liberals Will Ban the Bible.

As Mark A.R. Kleiman says, “If voters fail to become enraged at this sort of slime-mongering, Republicans may be emboldened to repeat it.”

Beware of outrage fatigue. Very very dangerous this time of year.

(On the other hand, there is a cheerful aspect to this. The more desperate and crazy the slime, the better the Democrats must be doing or why would the RNC/Bush crowd bother?)

Election Snapshots

Lots happening.

• Stirling Newberry describes the campaigns' master plans and fears as we enter the home stretch:

  Television rules the day from here on in, it is about, not the doers, the thinkers the talkers - but the watchers. And in recent days those watchers are breaking hard away from Bush, because his message of “Iraq is alright” is not matching what they see from their own lives. In the next few days the mood of the media will also be important - do they stand by their man? Or do they begin to come over to the idea that kicking Bush can play - and that CBS wasn't wrong, just a little to early in shorting Bush with their memo story?

  Bush's reliance on Iraq says he knows that the economy, and even terror are losing messages. Which means he knows he has lost. Kerry pulling back means he knows he is losing.

  Who loses this one first? That is, who says something that can be played and replayed by the media as a sign of being “out of touch”. For those that have counseled aggression, instead there will be conservation - avoiding of any word that can be taken out of context. Both candidates will speak like movie reviews - even one word can kill them, so every word will ooze message. If they attack, they will pan, if they pander, they will gop on the praise in globs and blobs.

  The serious people have made up their mind about this election, now comes the sideshow version of the campaign, where both candidates become caricatures, not from the media, but by and for the media.

• Rebecca Danner checks in from a stint at a campaign phone bank.

  I dreaded the idea of phone banking and only reluctantly signed up but, to my surprise, it ended up being a lot of fun and I really feel like it makes a difference. When I told people about it the next day, I found that most of them had the same reservations and questions that I had going into it so I thought I’d write up a quick FAQ to encourage everyone out there to give it a try.

• Randy Paul chortles over the fissures appearing in the previously monolithic South Florida Cuban vote.
• Robert Sam Anson displays boundless cynicism about the campaign press corps.

Fearful Asymmetry

Outlet Radio via Daily Kos

Dan Rather, CBS News Anchor

1. given documents he thought were true
2. failed to thoroughly investigate the facts
3. reported documents to the American people as true to make his case
4. when confronted with the facts, apologized and launched an investigation
5. number of Americans dead: 0
6. should be fired as CBS News Anchor

George W. Bush, President of the United States

1. given documents he thought were true
2. failed to thoroughly investigate the facts
3. reported documents to the American people as true to make his case
4. when confronted with the facts, continued to report untruth and stonewalled an investigation
5. number of Americans dead: 1100
6. should be given four more years as President of the United States

RNC Internal Tracking Polls Show Big Kerry Bounce

How do I know Kerry is surging in the RNC's overnight polls? Easy: TalkLeft: Unnamed Officials Warn of 'Spectacular' Al Qaeda Attack in U.S.

Must be yesterday's speech.

The Crapshoot

Newsweek reports the soundbite du jour: Kerry's New Call to Arms. Seems Kerry will now roll the dice and make Iraq the main issue.

This is a sensible, but high-stakes strategy. On the merits it's Kerry's best issue: while people still don't agree on the merits of the attack, everyone honest agrees Bush's post-invasion plan was to collect garlands from the happy natives. It sure didn't work out that way.

While some will say Kerry has adopted this tactic now out of desperation, and who knows they might be right, the fact is that there was no sensible way Kerry could have done it any sooner. Facts on the ground were too fluid, and there was the danger that something might work out right. Now that danger seems attenuated.

A different danger for Kerry remains: that the Bush admin will lean on Pakistan to scoop up 'Osama bin forgotten' sometime during the next four weeks. That would — very unfairly but very effectively — take a good chunk of the wind out of Kerry's sails.

So it's a good strategy, a timely strategy, but still something of a risky strategy. That's in a way good too: any challenger who doesn't take risks usually loses, and there haven't been any risks taken since Kerry mortgaged his house to pay for Iowa.

Hmmm. That risk worked out OK, didn't it?

If the Left Blogs Were as On-Message As the Right Blogs...

If the left-leaning blogs were as on-message as the right-leaning blogs, in the next few days you would be hearing a vast echo-chamber effect from this Gadflyer post, about GW Bush, Girlie Man.

By next weekend, you would hear questions based on it on your TV pundit shows.

A few days after this, the obvious wimpish implications of draft-dodging, cheerleading at Yale, and question-dodging would be standard watercooler stuff.

But in fact, Democrats are not organized (pace Will Rodgers), they fail to understand that if you repeat something often enough it becomes taken as true, and they don't own TV networks.

So it probably won't happen.

Even though, oddly enough (and the implications drawn from male cheerleading excepted), I'm in broad agreement with the Gadflyer article's basic thesis: Bush is frit. That's why, for example, he won't face questions from a representative public. That's why he's running away from the second debate, where he might have to face real, unscripted, people rather than the milquetoasts we have for journalists.

More tellingly, that's why we have this idiotic color-coding system for terror warnings that never goes down. Bush & Co. are terrified that they'll get blamed for being asleep at the switch again for the next terror attack, having been asleep at the switches for 9/11. As a result, rather than take the stiff upper lip approach used by the British government in light of IRA terror — an attitude in which the whole country more or less shrugged off the constant bombs, our government here in the US encourages public panic. The fact that 'security theater' and other silly and expensive actions which don't do much good are constant victories for the terrorists is less important than the paramount need felt by a certain type of moral cowards: the need to avoid blame at all costs.

John Kerry got near the edge of this with his speech recently about the pass-the-buck administration, the excuse presidency: never wrong, never responsible, never to blame, but it's really deeper than that.

OK. Now I probably deserve my induction into the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill.

Navy Won't Investigate Kerry Medals

Boy, the Telegraph sure screwed up its report on this one:

Reuters.com: The U.S. Navy has rejected a legal watchdog group's request to open an investigation into military awards given to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry during the Vietnam War, saying his medals were properly approved.

“Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart medals indicates the awards approval process was properly followed,” the Navy's inspector general, Vice Admiral Ronald Route, said in a memo written to Navy Secretary Gordon England.

“In particular, the senior officers who awarded the medals were properly delegated authority to do so. In addition we found that they correctly followed the procedures in place at the time for approving these awards.”

In rejecting the request for an investigation made by Judicial Watch last month, Route said that “conducting any additional review regarding events that took place over thirty years ago would not be productive.”

That's for sure.

Update: More of the same from AP.

Hold Them Accountable

Yes!

Compare and Contrast

Let's assume that CBS got snookered and publicized fake documents which basically say true things about LT. Bush missing medical exams he should have taken and the mysterious holes in his records. Is this not-as-bad-as/the same as/worse than all the media which accurately repeated the falsehoods peddled by the Swift Boat people?

Nader Florida Ballot Case Update

Amazingly, the Miami Herald doesn't think it merits the front page, but it has an article about Jeb & Co. putting Nader back on the ballot (registration required). The article doesn't add much to the Reuters story.

As the Herald tells it, the state's ruling applies to all ballots not just the foreign absentees, at least in theory, but everyone understands that the courts will have time to rule before it has practical application outside the foreign absentees.

The Herald does not give a definitive answer on the critical timing question: whether a ruling was needed NOW to get the foreign absentees printed in time. The article does quote Miami-Dade election officials as saying the next court hearing would have given them enough time, but also Glenda Hood's claim that other counties have more ballots to print:

A spokesman for Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan said her department is under no time crunch to print the ballots, but Hood said that's not the case in counties with large numbers of military voters who are overseas.

And [Jeb] Bush said that if the court's ruling is ultimately upheld, it's easier for the state to remove Nader's name from the general election ballot, even if it's included on the overseas ballots that federal law requires be postmarked by Saturday.

One thing was certain Monday: Florida's highest court will enter the fray. The Supreme Court said in an order Monday night that the case involves “matters of great public importance.”

The Florida Court of Appeals is set to have a hearing tomorrow. The Florida Supreme Court has not yet set a hearing date. [UPDATE: But it has set an accelerated briefing schedule, see Abstract Appeal for all the juicy details.]

My initial gut feeling is that this action will backfire: courts don't like to have their jurisdiction challenged, so this is like poking a stick in the eye of the Florida Supreme Court.

But here's an alternate hypothesis, one whose plausibility turns on Jeb Bush/Karl Rove being even smarter than I think they probably are: Nader has hired Ken Sukhia, a smart GOP lawyer to represent him. Suppose Sukhia concluded that Nader's case is doomed in the Florida courts as the law and the facts are against him. Could the strategy be to try to goad the Florida courts into some rushed and intemperate ruling which can then be appealed to the friendly US Supreme Court, with the suggestion that those nuts in Florida are at it again? (In fact we have a pretty high-quaility state Supreme Court.)

Do Florida Democrats Have a Death Wish? No, It Only Looks Like It

After the fiasco of the 2000 election, in which the Republicans claimed that all they were demanding was punctilious compliance with formal rules, you might think that the apparent failure of the GOP to file its ballot papers on time (combined with a Republican official turning a blind eye to the error!) in Florida presented a golden opportunity to the Democrats.

Oddly, that's not what leading state Democrats seem to think: Decision2004: Did Bush camp err on ballot papers?:

Florida Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox said he knew the president's certificate of nomination did not reach the state until Sept. 2, but he said he decided not to make an issue of it.

“To keep an incumbent president off the ballot in a swing state the size of Florida because of a technicality, I just don't think would be right,” Maddox said.

Why not seize the opportunity to beat up the GOP a little and stoke memories of the 2000 elections?

One reason might be that the state Democrats are, by and large, cowed.

Another reason might be that the GOP controls both houses of the state legislature and the Governorship. So they would simply call a special session and change the rule. Which I think would be fully legal. Then they'd stoke their base.

Once you look at it that way, it's a tougher call. But I'd take the chance anyway if it were up to me. A mistake of this type fits the 'Bush incompetence' meme (and the hypocrisy meme) that the Democrats should be pushing at every chance they get. Just imagine that the shoe were on the other foot and ask yourself if Karl Rove would sue?

The Democratic move would be most plausible if there were other people with standing to raise the issue. But answering that question requires a much greater understanding of Florida election law than I command. All I can do is shoot off a couple emails to people who might know….

Angry Bear is Very Angry

[UPDATE: Angry Bear has nothing on Mad Magazine (via Atrios)]

Angry Bear — one of my favorite online economists — sets out his vision of what the Democratic ad campaign would be like if it fought fire with fire:

“what would total political war against Bush look like?
Here's a start:”

• A commercial juxtaposing the President reading from My Pet Goat with the towers burning. Voiceover: “While America was under attack, here's what your president was doing.” End with headlines describing the President spending 9/11 hiding out in air bases and locations other than DC. For good measure, add that “Osama bin Laden remains at large.”
  
  
• A commercial about Bush's failure to serve. Start with this quote from The Dallas Morning News, Feb. 25, 1990:
  

  “I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.”

  Then cut to Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett alleging that he witnessed Bush's National Guard records being scrubbed, and point out that Bush has never accounted for his whereabouts during 1972 and 1973, nor why he stopped flying. Then end with Linda Allison:
  

  Before there was Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family's political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George H.W. Bush phoned his friend and asked a favor: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W. Bush?
  
  “The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing,” Allison's widow, Linda, told me. “And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal.”
  
  … Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: “Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way.”
  

• And as long as unfounded and unsupported attacks are fair game, don't forget the Bush Abortion story. There's no evidence, but hey, the Swift Boat Veterans not only lack evidence, their story contradicts all available documentary evidence! And don't forget Clinton's love-child!


• And don't forget that Bush won't say when he stopped using cocaine. Sure, this is nearly on the level of “When did you stop beating your wife?”, but that's where this campaign is heading. Perhaps more accurately, that's where the Bush side of this campaign already is. This would surely be less egregious than Falwell and Robertson pushing the Clinton Chronicles video, complete with tales of Clinton running a drug ring out of the Mena, Arkansas airport.
  
  
• I'm not sure whether it would resonate, but there's also fodder in the fairly well-documented story of Bush's string of business failures, complete with bailouts by friends of his father, throughout the 1980s.
  
  
• Bring back Henry and Louise to talk about eating dog food after their Medicare premiums increase 17%. (Since this is true, documented, and contemporary, it may not even count as negative.)

Navy Has Not Yet Decided on Kerry Medal Inquiry

I recently blogged the UK Telegraph's claim that the Navy was going to investigate Sen. Kerry's medals based on a preposterous demand by Judicial Watch. I expressed some doubt about that report, and according to Squeaks from the Squirrel Cage - A cube with a view, that doubt was justified. In fact, says he, Stars and Strripes reports that the Navy has not decided anything at all on the subject.

GW Bush Revealed!

The Poor Man: Kitty Kelley's Shocking Revelations has the goods:

Everybody is talking about Kitty Kelley's new book “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty”. The scandal-hungry press is already salivating over rumors that the book will reveal George W. Bush's use of cocaine through the 1980's, the true story of his time in the National Guard, and the shocking details of the illegal abortion he procured for an ex-girlfriend. But the press doesn't know the half of it! I have obtained an advance copy of the book, and will now share the even more shocking revelations contained within!

Must be seen to be believed. And even then, it's hard to believe.

Is George W. Bush Accountable for Any of This?

• 1000 US soldiers dead, thousands wounded, let's not forget the civilians either
• TPM notes a strange coincidence from the Dept. of Fear and Distraction,
• Warblogging.com on VP Cheney's disgusting statement today, baldly saying vote for us or the terrorists attack in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.

More on that Sleazy 527

Campaign Extra! has the skinny on the founder of MoveOnForAmerica.org, the group I recently suggested had some trademark problems. It's not pretty.

Campaign Extra! is by Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News—who looks like he must be a reporter from the old school, where they still check stuff out.

Miami, OH But Not Miami, FL?!?

How come they have Miami, Ohio, but not Miami, FL involved in the Baobabs project?

Wanted: Tough Questions for the Presidential Debates

My brother wears a second hat at NiemanWatchdog.org, besides his Washington Post gig. Here's Nieman's request for tough debate questions

The Internet can make the presidential debates better. NiemanWatchdog.org will make it happen. Starting this week, NiemanWatchdog.org is soliciting tough, incisive questions that President Bush and Senator Kerry should be asked at the upcoming presidential debates.

The Niemanwatchdog.org Web site is a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The site's primary mission is to encourage watchdog reporting by drawing on authorities in various fields to suggest questions the press should ask.

For its presidential debate project, NiemanWatchdog.org is accepting submissions from experts and amateurs alike. The editors of the site will also be scouring blogs and other Web sites, looking for questions being posed there.

“This is no time for softballs,” said NiemanWatchdog.org deputy editor Dan Froomkin. “We believe that the collective wisdom of the Internet community can generate some superbly pointed questions that will oblige the candidates to provide the kinds of answers the public deserves.”

Several days before each presidential debate, NiemanWatchdog.org will select what its editors think are the best questions for each candidate, and will announce the winners on the Web site — as well as in a press release to major media organizations.

Internet users are encouraged to post their questions, or questions they've seen elsewhere on the Web, directly onto the NiemanWatchdog.org Web site, at http://www.niemanwatchdog.org. They can also e-mail them to editor@niemanwatchdog.org, along with their names, hometown, and affiliation if relevant.

Pity there's no way to have people vote on questions and then make the moderators ask the most popular ones. (Yes, yes, we'd have to prevent people voting more than once, and yes, yes, that's a complex problem.)

Cute as a Button

I don't know if this is a real button or just a virtual one, but I think it's pretty cute:

(Spotted at MyDD).

Moveoneforamerica.org -- Trademark Infringers

The latest slime group to come my attention is a 527 that calls itself moveonforamerica.org. They have a web page which promotes two commercials they claim to want to run on TV. They are both rather badly done in terms of production values, and both are race-baiting: one tries to Willy Horton Zerry — it even uses Willy Horton's picture — only trouble is, the guy they accuse Kerry of springing from jail appears to have been innocent of the crime Kerry got him off for. The other ad is all about equating Kerry and Al Sharpton.

Regardless of the lack of taste and ethics in their campaign tactics, these movenonforamerica.org guys seem ripe for a trademark lawsuit. Indeed, many business people consider cybersquatting and trademark infringement to be a form of theft or fraud, so we should expect the business community to condemn this organization (but don't hold your breath…).

Moveon.org has a federally registered trademark for,

Association services, namely a grassroots organization that promotes public awareness and participation regarding policy and legislative issues and leadership positions at community, local, state and national levels, that distributes newsletters, e-mail, faxes, and other written communications, makes phone calls, contacts news agencies, and places mass media advertising to promote public awareness of the status of policies, and legislation, and encourages members to take action through lobbying and other means to help shape public policy, legislation and leadership positions; and providing information to members and the public at large regarding issues relating to policies, legislation and leadership positions at community, local, state and national levels. FIRST USE: 20010900. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20010900

The “moveonforamerica.org” name is being used in the same sector — indeed, clearly imitates moveon.org's tactic of putting commericals online before going to TV — and is almost certain to be found to be likely to cause confusion, deception or mistake. Were moveon.org to decide to sue, at the very least the moveonforamerica.org guys are likely to be found guilty of trademark infringement, which requires only a showing of “likelihood of confusion”.. I imagine that if it chooses to, moveon.org could get a federal injunction against their use of the name. It could probably also yank the domain name either in federal court or via the ICANN UDRP quasi-arbitration procedure for domain name disputes.

There are important and substantial First Amendment protections for political speech that trump the trademark statute. These include a right to parody, and a right to refer to an organization you are criticizing by its own name (“nominative fair use”). But none apply to attempts to create a confusingly similar name for yourself in the hope of confusing the public.

UK Telegraph Reports Bush Admin Makes Next Move in Dirty Campaign?

According to the UK's Daily Telegraph — not the world's most reliable news source for US news, and a good place for right-wing planted stories — the Bush Pentagon has ordered an official investigation into the awards of the Democratic senator's five Vietnam War decorations. This despite the total implosion of the credibility of his accusers.

The request for an investigation originates from Judicial Watch. Their website does not confirm the story, saying only that the “Inspector General (“IG”) of the Department of Defense has informed the Secretary of the Navy” of his receipt of their complaint. And indeed the letter reproduced on Judicial Watch's site is nothing more than a receipt (.pdf).

A quick look at the complaint suggests it's pretty silly, and based largely on the Swift Boat Vets testimony that is now thoroughly discredited. The two main charges are (1) O'Neill's book says Kerry's medals are frauds and the various discredited swift boat vets (e.g. the doctor who didn't actually treat him) agree; and (2) [brace yourself:]

Dishonorable and possibly unlawful actions by Senator Kerry during the early 1970s – actions that manifestly benefited a foreign power with which the U.S. was at war – are so grievously damaging to the dignity, honor and traditions of the U.S. Navy and the American republic that the Secretary of the Navy may be compelled to revoke Senator Kerry’s awards.

And did I mention (3), (4) and (5): “dereliction of duty; misuse and abuse of U.S. government equipment and property; war crimes”?

In other words, Judicial Watch thinks stay-at-home Bush's Navy should revoke Kerry's award in the middle of a Presidential campaign — for opposing the Vietnam war and testifying to Congress! You can't make this stuff up.

While the Judicial Watch complaint and the Navy's receipt of it are verified, there is at this moment no confirmation of the Telegraph's account of the opening an actual investigation either on CNN, the NYT or Washington Post web sites, so I have some doubts the Telegraph report is true. The version running in the Chicago-Sun Times is much less detailed and also more credible and consistent with Judicial Watch's website—but might also have been filed earlier than the Telegraph's report.

But, no, I can't believe it — the statute of limitations must have passed for any offense imaginable, and hence the Navy would have no grounds for an investigation even if it thought Kerry was on LSD the whole time. I just won't believe this until it's confirmed elsewhere.

Meanwhile, to coin a phrase, I report, you decide. Below, excerpts from the Telegraph's report and then the Sun-Times's, and a little more about Judicial Watch's latest odd allegations:

UK Telegraph

the Pentagon has ordered an official investigation into the awards of the Democratic senator's five Vietnam War decorations.

…

The highly unusual inquiry is to be carried out by the inspector-general's office of the United States navy, for which Sen Kerry served as a Swift Boat captain for four months in 1968, making two tours of duty.

He was wounded in action and subsequently awarded three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. But for the past month, the exact details of Mr Kerry's military service in Vietnam have become shrouded in a controversy that the navy has now decided warrants a full-blown search for the truth.

…

Last week, the Kerry campaign attempted to leave the Vietnam debate behind, as signs appeared that the controversy was damaging Mr Kerry's standing in the polls. But to the consternation of campaign strategists, the US navy has now agreed to a request by Judicial Watch, a bi-partisan lobby group, for a full inquiry. Judicial Watch is calling for the Navy to report before the elections, but Navy officials are so far refusing to give any timetable for the inquiry.

In an August letter to the Pentagon, the group's president, Tom Fitton, requested an investigation into the “determination and final disposition of the awards granted to Lieutenant (junior grade) John Forbes Kerry, US Naval Reserve”, in response to the Swift Boat Veterans' allegations.

A navy spokesman confirmed on Friday that the inspector-general's office at the Pentagon had authorised the inquiry. “It is the responsibility of all personnel to correct errors in official records,” said the spokesman. Another official said privately: “There's a feeling that it's time to deal with this thoroughly, once and for all.”

Among other records to be examined is a citation of Mr Kerry for bravery that was apparently signed by the former Navy Secretary, John Lehman, and contributed to the award of his silver star. The glowing citation states: “By his brave actions, bold initiative and unwavering devotion to duty, Lt Kerry reflected great credit on himself.” But Mr Lehman denies all knowledge of the commendation. “It's a total mystery to me,” he said last week. “I never saw it, I never signed it and I never approved it.” The inquiry will also investigate other reports and citations leading to the award of Mr Kerry's medals.

On Friday, Mr Lehman endorsed the investigation of Mr Kerry's awards, saying that the relevant navy records needed to be “thoroughly researched and the facts established”. Mr Fitton said: “We hope this is the beginning of an actual investigation of the legitimacy of Sen Kerry's awards by the navy and the Pentagon.”

In an angry statement from the Kerry campaign headquarters, Michael Meehan, Mr Kerry's senior adviser, condemned the navy probe as an expensive waste of the Pentagon's resources.

“The facts are clear,” said Mr Meehan. “The navy awarded John Kerry the Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V and three Purple Hearts. This is a waste of taxpayers' dollars and the Pentagon's time, especially during wartime.”

The Chicago-Sun Times version reports on the fact of Judicial Watch's allegations but just says that the Navy has received them and that “no investigator has been assigned at this time”.

The Defense Department's inspector general informed the Navy secretary Thursday of a complaint by a conservative legal watchdog group that requests an investigation into Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's military service.

Gary Comerford, a spokesman for the inspector general's office, said that “if a complaint looks like a potential violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, we refer it to the branch of service in which the violation was alleged to have occurred. We don't make a determination. It is up to the service department that has the records.”

According to the complaint, filed Aug. 18 by Judicial Watch, “The, as yet, unresolved allegations include: false official reports and statements; dishonorable conduct; aiding the enemy; dereliction of duty; misuse and abuse of U.S. government equipment and property; war crimes; and multiple violations of U.S. Navy regulations and directives, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and U.S. Code.”

While the inspector general and the Defense Department services have the responsibility for investigating charges under the code of military justice, in the event they have reason to believe they have identified possible violations of the U.S. civil or criminal law, they are required to refer them for investigation to the U.S. attorney general's office.

If the Department of the Navy determines after a review of documents that it is warranted, an investigator is assigned by the naval inspector general to examine the validity of the charges.

A spokesman for the Navy said that no investigator has been assigned at this time.

At this writing Judicial Watch's website glosses over the actual text of the complaint that I summarized above and instead flogs this additional issue, not part of its actual filing to the Navy:

On Tuesday, August 31, 2004, Judicial Watch called upon Senator Kerry to remove the Silver Star citation from his political campaign Internet site pending a review of the granting of the award by the U.S. Navy. Senator Kerry’s political Internet site displays a document listing a “Silver Star with Combat 'V.'” The Combat “V” device is never awarded with the nation’s third highest award for heroism. A U.S. Navy spokesperson has reportedly stated: “The Navy has never issued a 'Combat V' to anyone for a Silver Star.” Additionally, former Navy Secretary John Lehman was quoted with respect to the Silver Star citation as saying: “It is a total mystery to me. I never saw it. I never signed it. I never approved it. And the additional language it contains was not written by me.”

At least it's a new slur. Oh, wait. It's not new.

The Press Has a Pulse! AP Does Fact-Checking!

AP, which runs everywhere, did a little fact-checking of Bush's acceptance speech:

Bush Leaves Out Complex Facts in Speech: President Bush's boast of a 30-member-strong coalition in Iraq masked the reality that the United States is bearing the overwhelming share of costs, in lives and troop commitments. And in claiming to have routed most al-Qaida leaders, he did not mention that the big one got away.

Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night brought the nation a collection of facts that told only part of the story, hardly unusual for this most political of occasions.

He took some license in telling Americans that Democratic opponent John Kerry “is running on a platform of increasing taxes.”

Kerry would, in fact, raise taxes on the richest 2 percent of Americans as part of a plan to keep the Bush tax cuts for everyone else and even cut some of them more. That's not exactly a tax-increase platform.

And on education, Bush voiced an inherent contradiction, dating back to his 2000 campaign, in stating his stout support for local control of education, yet promising to toughen federal standards that override local decision-making.

“We are insisting on accountability, empowering parents and teachers, and making sure that local people are in charge of their schools,” he said, on one hand. Yet, “we will require a rigorous exam before graduation.”

…

Bush aggressively defended progress in Afghanistan, too. “Today, the government of a free Afghanistan is fighting terror, Pakistan is capturing terrorist leaders … and more than three-quarters of al-Qaida's key members and associates have been detained or killed. We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer.”

Nowhere did Bush mention Osama bin Laden, nor did he account for the replacement of killed and captured al al-Qaida leaders by others.

Bush's address wasn't the only one this week that glossed over some realities.

Vice President Dick Cheney, trying to make Kerry look wobbly on defense, implied in his speech that Kerry would wait until the United States is hit by a foe before hitting back. “He declared at the Democratic convention that he will forcefully defend America after we have been attacked,” Cheney said.

New York Gov. George Pataki echoed Cheney's line of criticism Thursday night.

Kerry said in his convention speech, “Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response.” But he also spoke of pre-emptive action in that address, saying a threat that is “real and imminent” is also a justification for war.

In his keynote address, Sen. Zell Miller attacked Kerry for Senate votes against the Navy F-14D Tomcat fighter and the B-2 bomber the heart of his case that the Democrat has stood against essential weapons systems.

He ignored the fact that Cheney, as defense secretary, canceled the F-14 and submitted a budget scaling back production of the B-2.

Miller also said Kerry has made it clear he “would use military force only if approved by the U.N.,” a stretch of Kerry's position. Kerry told his convention “I will never hesitate to use force when it is required” and “I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security.”

It's fun to see, no doubt for the first time ever, the words “Bush” and “complex facts” in the same headline…

Comedy Central's 'Daily Show' Invites Bush for a Chat

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, perhaps because print ads don't appear in the online edition, so at the risk of chewing through a lot of bandwidth here is the quarter-page ad that Comedy Central's Daily Show (the faux news show which does a better job of the news than most serious media) took out in yesterday's New York Times—on the op-ed page.

It's pretty funny.

Update: While you are at it, have a look at this Daily Show 'preview' of the GW Bush convention promotional video. It would be funny if it were not so accurate. If comedy is not yet the only way to speak truth to power, it must surely be the most effective means.

Update2: The New York Post, of all places, reports that:

THE mischievous magnets produced by Comedy Central's “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” have created a sticky situation for the RNC. The “Make Your Own Headlines With the Daily Show Newsmaker” kits were banned from RNC gift bags because they included words like “tranvestite,” “goat,” “dances” and “dumb” as well as “Dubya,” “Rumsfeld” and “Cheney.” The RNC apparently feared the magnets could be used to poke fun at GOP leaders. Comedy Central produced more than 13,000 kits, which they still want to distribute this week. “We were surprised with the RNC's lack of humor,” said a Comedy Central spokeswoman.

'course that was before Zell Miller spoke…

Meme Time

William Saletan in Slate:

But the important thing isn't the falsity of the charges, which Republicans continue to repeat despite press reports debunking them. The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.

In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.

Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled tonight against Bush's critics.

Are you prepared to become one of those countries?

Personally, I'm waiting for the Democrats to start calling the Republican convention a “hate fest”.[¹] But I also don't think the uncharacteristically venomous reactions of usually sober bloggers like Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglasias are all that helpful. I prefer the more nuanced approach of Michael Bérubé.

Update: Yglesias replies (generically):

So a few of the posts I've written lately have been criticized from one quarter or another as “unhelpful.” Either they're too shrill, too elitist, or too whatever. That's all probably true, but to raise a point I've made before, even though I would like to see John Kerry win the election, I'm not employed by the Kerry campaign, nor is the purpose of this site to help Kerry win the election. The purpose of this site is to say what I honestly think about stuff. I'm not going to go all Kausy and become obsessed with random piddling critique's of Johnny K., but if my work sounds elitist that's because I'm an elitist, and that's just the way it goes.

Hmm. The post I picked on said, in full, “Could Liddy Dole have written a speech more calculated to make me despise her? No, she couldn't.” I guess that is elitist in one sense of that word, but not in any sense I would brag about myself.

Note that my original point was that usually Ygelesias is a good read. But he kind of lost it, amidst writing about chasing women in NY. Get him a girlfriend, he'll be fine again.

¹ [Update2: Well, that didn't take very long, did it?]

Geekiest Protest Sign of the Year

Geekiest protest sign (via the great BoingBoing)

The First Robin of (Political) Spring

This editorial, McCollum for GOP, in which the St. Petersburg Times withdraws its endorsement of somewhat moderate former U.S. Housing Secretary Mel Martinez in the Republican Senatorial primary and instead endorses right-wing almost-loon former U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum has the potential to be a watershed moment.

Yes, it's the first blowback from the Swift Boat affair:

The Times is not willing to be associated with bigotry. As a result, we are taking the almost unprecedented step of rescinding our recommendation of Martinez.

We take our political recommendations seriously. Taking back a recommendation is an even more serious action, and we do so with regret, and some embarrassment. However, failing to act in response to Martinez's cynical attacks would risk damaging the trust we have worked to build with readers over the course of hundreds of election campaigns.

No matter what else Martinez may accomplish in public life, his reputation will be forever tainted by his campaign's nasty and ludicrous slurs of McCollum in the final days of this race. The slurs culminated with Martinez campaign advertisements that label McCollum - one of the most conservative moralists in Washington during his 20 years as a U.S. representative - “the new darling of the homosexual extremists” because he once favored a hate crime law that had bipartisan support. A few days earlier, the Martinez campaign arranged a conference call with reporters in which a group of right-wing Martinez supporters labeled McCollum “antifamily.” Why? Because McCollum supports expanded stem cell research to find cures for deadly diseases - a position that is identical to those of Nancy Reagan, Connie Mack and many other prominent Republicans.

That's right: slurs are now out of fashion!

We don't think Martinez really believes the slurs his campaign has directed at McCollum. Instead, he is an ambitious politician who has resorted to unprincipled tactics to get elected. Unfortunately, dirty campaigns often succeed, and Martinez is betting this one will, too.

If Martinez does win Tuesday's primary, he will begin trying to move back toward the center to appeal to all Florida voters, and not just to Republican activists. But the slime from these attacks on McCollum will keep trailing Martinez like something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. The Times now recommends McCollum to Republican voters in Tuesday's primary. At this point, McCollum is a better choice for Republicans who care about producing their strongest ticket for November. He also is a better choice for Republicans who care about the soul of their party.

Brad would probably call this “When Growups Attack”…

Spot the Spoof

Via Steve Gillard, RNC warns convention delegates that Prostitutes with AIDS to seduce Republican visitors:

NEXT WEEK, people who hate Republicans plan to release swarms of mice in New York City to terrorize delegates to the National Republican Convention.

Republican-haters plan on dressing up as RNC volunteers, and giving false directions to little blue hair ladies from Kansas, sending them into the sectors of New York City that are unfit for human habitation.

They plan on throwing pies and Lord knows what else at Republican visitors to the city. Prostitutes with AIDS plan to seduce Republican visitors, and discourage the use of condoms …

Via Kevin Hayden, Swift Yacht Vets for Bush:

George W. Bush has never stood down from a challenge, especially where his comrades are concerned. My twin brother Cornell, George, and I were tearing up the bay when a patrol boat started chasing us. Cornell wanted to try to out-run them with the new engine we had just put in, but Georgie said, 'No, we gotta face the music, boys.' Cornell stopped the boat and one of the officers boarded the Tricky Wendell. Georgie calmly welcomed the officer aboard, and stated he was Congressman Bush's son. The officer tipped his cap and wished us a good day. When faced with running away or staying and fighting, Georgie never flinched. …

This Is Worse Than Not Tipping

I noted previously the charges that GW Bush never tipped.

But this charge about the Veep is worse, even if it's an accident.

The Swing States Are Blue

Fun online tool proveded by the Wall Street Journal that lets you see a map reflecting the latest polls. Note that this latest map is however misleading as it's pre-Swift-boat, and also isn't adjusted for turnout, which will be affected by things like anti-gay ballot amendments.

Let's Sink The Swift Boat Smear for Good, Shall We?

By smearing Kerry via the Swift Boat front group the Bush camp wins tactical advantages no matter what happens. Even as the various bizzarro allegations by not-so-Swifties are being systematically proved to be a complete tissue of lies and are even turning off at least one high-profile media supporter, the whole flap is making Kerry spend money on a counter-ad — a very good ad but it's still money, and distracting people from stuff that matters.

[Update: How could I forget to link to swiftvets.eriposte.com, the comprehensive fact-compiling and checking site on Kerry & Vietnam!?!] [Update 2: this devastating letter from another swift boat eyewitness puts yet another nail in a well-nailed coffin.]

(Oh yes, even the Xmas in Cambodia mis-speak has a very rational explanation.)

It remains to be seen whether Bush/Cheney's tactical gains can be overcome by a strategic loss — which happens only if Kerry/Edwards can put the albatros of dirty pool around the Bush/Cheney necks.

Eh?

From the mind-boggles dept:

Bush Promises to Offer Detailed Plans at Convention: Mr. Bush's advisers said they were girding for the most extensive street demonstrations at any political convention since the Democrats nominated Hubert H. Humphrey in Chicago in 1968. But in contrast to that convention, which was severely undermined by televised displays of street rioting, Republicans said they would seek to turn any disruptions to their advantage, by portraying protests by even independent activists as Democratic-sanctioned displays of disrespect for a sitting president.

That would be the same respect the GOP always showed to President Clinton?

Bumper Sticker Spotted

Bumper Sticker spotted in the parking lot at Publix (our local supermarket):

In big letters “10 out of 10 Terrorists”, and in the second line, slightly smaller “Support Anyone But Bush”.

Which is really odd, as the evidence is nearly irrefutable that GW Bush is exactly what nutcases like Bin Laden really want: a Western leader who wears his Christianity on his sleeve, who invades a Muslim nation on trumped-up claims, and settles in for de facto occupation. The perfect foil to radicalize a generation. Bonus points for long-time family friendship with the Saudi monarchy, whom bin Laden also would oppose but for their financial support.

How to attempt to educate the displayer of such a sticker? Our suburban society offers no forum that I know of in which any discussion can take place.

TPM's Psychological Insight

I almost never link to Talking Points Memo on the theory that everyone reads it anyway. But today Joshua Micah Marshall has outdone himself.

I think this explains a lot.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone's lack or toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can't or won't defend themselves certainly isn't someone you can depend upon to defend you.

Demonstrating Kerry's unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he's made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person's supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who's receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.

This is certainly what Bush's father did to Michael Dukakis and, sadly, it is what Bush himself did, to a great degree, to Al Gore.

In other ways, Bush's bully-boy campaign tactics play to the his strengths, albeit unstated and unlovely ones. Many of the polls of the president have shown that while people don't necessarily agree with the specific policies he's pursued abroad many also intuitively believe that there's no one who will hit back harder. There's some of that 'he may be a son-of-a-bitch but he's our son-of-a-bitch' quality to the president's support on national security issues.

This meta-message behind the president's attacks on Kerry's war record is more consequential than many believe. So hitting back hard was critical on many levels

This nails, better than anything I've seen elsewhere, why some people you might expect to know better support GWB. Given this, it also explains how Kerry must combat it — despite the conventional wisdom concerning mud-wrestling with pigs.

Abu Aardvark Reads the Arabic Press

Abu Aardvark: Bin Laden located? don't know why I'm not seeing this reported or discussed anywhere, but much of the Arab press is reporting that, according to the Interior Minister, Pakistan has narrowed down bin Laden's location to a specific point along the Pakistan-Afghan border. For Arabic speakers, here's the story on al Arabiya. Maybe it's not being reported because it isn't true… I dunno. Most of the stories coming up on Google News are of the “bin Laden trail still cold” variety. But I'm seeing it in the Arab media and not in the English, so thought I'd pass it on.

Hey, I just had a crazy thought. Wouldn't it be just wild if they managed to catch bin Laden just in time for the Republican convention? Or, even wilder, a few weeks before the election? Wow, that would just be crazy good luck for Bush. Crazy!

It would be nice to see a newspaper look into this, wouldn't it?

What He Said

Joho the Blog: W doesn't tip—The ultimate trivialization of democracy or telling character detail? You be the judge. (And, yes, by running the link to this video, I am definitely having it both ways. Feels good.)

My view? Like the old joke goes, some of my friends are for it, some of my friends are against it, and I stand with my friends.

What Krugman Left Out

Paul Krugman (where's that Pulitzer?) has a typically savvy column today, on Saving the Vote:

Everyone knows it, but not many politicians or mainstream journalists are willing to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.

When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts.

How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida - where recent polls give John Kerry the lead - once again swings the election to George Bush.

Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.

As Krugman notes, once one combines the voting machine issues with Governor Jeb Bush's attempts to disenfranchise (via the manipulated 'felons' list) and intimidate Black voters (a traditional Republican pastime here), a close pro-Bush Florida outcome will inevitably be subject to doubt. Krugman proposes that voters be given paper ballots on request to create a paper trail.

That seems very reasonable, except for one thing. I'm actually more worried by something Krugman left out: old fashioned absentee ballot stuffing. We have a lot of that down here in Florida, and we catch a few of the perps every election. Or rather, we used to catch them. Now that the Jeb Bush and the Republican legislature have abolished the witness requirement for absentee ballots, there's no longer going to be any way to tell if one person is responsible for a suspiciously large number of votes —so it's going to be open season on ballot fraud. And the more that people turn to paper in fear of electronic voting the more that 'noise' will camouflage the work of the ballot-stuffers…

Whoa

All of a sudden, the conventional wisdom is talking Bush loses and the edgy folk are talking Kerry landslide. Even Howard Kurtz is hedging his bets.

This is a common euphoric moment between the challenger's convention and the incumbent's. It's the bounce, stupid. Remember how Gore was way up in the polls at this point four years ago?

I still think the fundamentals are there for Kerry to pull it out, maybe by a lot, but this euphoria is way premature. First, it's highly likely that the Republican convention will produce a Bush bounce (do I hear anyone predicting the 15% the Bushies predicted for Kerry?). Republicans are good at TV events, and they are working hard to put their more sensible, moderate wing front and center while keeping the frightening types in the closet.

If the post-convention bounce is likely, the next thing is a dead cert: there is one absolute constant in the Bush family M.O. when threatened electorally—go deeply negative, ideally via surrogates. I first saw this in action in the Republican Presidential primary in Connecticut in 1980, when for a time it looked as John Anderson might carry one of GHW Bush's several home states. All of a sudden anonymous fliers, mass telephone calls, and ads on small radio stations blanketed the state making false allegations against Anderson such as that he wanted to eliminate social security. And all of a sudden GHWB's poll number bottomed out.

Indeed, it looks to me as if the smear campaign is already well under way. If the Kerry people know how to respond to this beyond posing with generals and other veterans (which is good, but not enough), they've yet to demonstrate it. It's always possible the voters will rise above this sort of smear, or that the press will treat it sufficiently critically to defang it, but 'hope is not a strategy'.

Billionaires for Bush to Luxuriate in Publicity

Phil T. Rich, chief spokesman of Billionaires for Bush, has outlined an opulent set of plans for the coming weeks. Full details (from his email) below.

www.BillionairesForBush.com

Far flung colleagues of inordinate wealth! Our hour has come. The battle is upon us. The streets of New York await! Join Billionaires for Bush at the Republican National Convention for…

$ THE MILLION BILLIONAIRE MARCH
$ Croquet in the Park
$ Vigil for Corporate Welfare
$ Taunting of the Unemployed
$ Coronation Ball for George Bush
$ and more…

MILLION BILLIONAIRE MARCH

New York City, Sunday, August 29, on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

We will gather in front of the Plaza Hotel at 12 noon. With the flags of all our state and chapter delegations fluttering in the wind, our decal-decked limo, freshly returned from it's “Get On The Limo” tour through the Midwest battleground states, will arrive to a hero's welcome. The muscular sounds of the “Let Other People Go Hungry” March Band will resound through the air, and we will set off towards Madison Square Garden to thank President Bush for all he has done for the corporate elite, firing champagne corks at any throngs of scruffy middle-class protesters we meet along the way.

If you plan to attend the Million Billionaire March, sign up here:
www.billionairesforbush.com/march/index.pl

Formal attire is required. For fashion tips, see:
www.billionairesforbush.com/diy_v1_ch1.php#attire

Join us also at the many other events we have planned for the RNC. See the full calendar below.

Visit www.billionairesforbush.com/rnc or call the B4B hotline at 1-216-803-0990 for the latest info.

If you'd like to travel to New York for the Million Billionaire March and need lodging, or if you live in the New York area and have room for another Billionaire in your mansion, or for general inquiries, contact Jen Trivication jen@billionairesforbush.com.

FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS —————————————————————————
See www.billionairesforbush.com/rnc

We need volunteers and creative help for all of these events. If you're interested, e-mail rnc@billionairesforbush.com. Join the fun!

BILLIONAIRE CROQUET IN THE PARK
August 29, Sunday, 10am, Central Park (specific location TBA)
In very hush-hush behind the scenes negotiations Billionaires for Bush convinced the NYPD to bar hundreds of thousands of anti-Bush protesters from Central Park's Great Lawn, so that our members could honor a previously scheduled game of croquet. This is the first step in the Billionaires' “Get off the Grass” campaign to privatize Central Park.

MILLION BILLIONAIRE MARCH
August 29, Sunday, 12 noon, in front of the Plaza Hotel (SW corner 59th St. & 5th Ave.)
Billionaires for Bush from all across America - from Beverly Hills to Grosse Pointe to Wall Street - will converge on the streets of New York for a massive “Million Billionaire March” to celebrate President Bush's favoritism towards the corporate elite. Dressed in tuxedoes and evening gowns, marchers will gather in front of the Plaza Hotel at 12 noon and proceed towards Madison Square Garden, firing champagne corks at any throngs of scruffy middle-class protesters they meet along the way. Limo and marching band to accompany; formal attire required.

BILLIONAIRES ON BROADWAY
August 29, Sunday, 4:30pm, Theater District
The Billionaires for Bush will welcome Republican delegates to New York's theater district on their first night on the town.

VIGIL FOR CORPORATE WELFARE
August 30, Monday, 2pm, Union Square & again at 4pm, United Nations
Billionaires for Bush will hold a series of vigils to bear happy witness to the no-bid contracts, tax-abatements, corporate subsidies, and public property give-away's that the Bush administration has bestowed upon them over the last four years.

BILLIONAIRE FLASHMOBS!
August 31, Tuesday, all day, details TBA last-minute on the B4B Hotline 1-216-803-0990 and at www.billionairesforbush.com/rnc
Ruly bands of Billionaires will roam the streets of New York, stopping for three-martini lunches, spontaneous outbursts of ballroom dancing and en-masse shining of shoes.

TAUNTING OF THE UNEMPLOYED
September 1, Wednesday, 8am, “The Line” from Wall Street, up Broadway to 34th St.
Roving squads of Billionaires for Bush will taunt the worlds longest line of unemployed workers, with epithets like “Get a job!” and “It's your own fault!” while other Billionaires let them eat cake.

CORONATION BALL
September 1, Wednesday, 9pm to 4am, The Frying Pan, Pier 63
On the eve of the nomination, Billionaires for Bush invites all supporters to join them for this most anticipated RNC party - a billionaire ball extravaganza to re-appoint George Bush. Formal attire required. Yachts will be docked nearby. Line-up TBA. 21+ Sliding scale from $15 to $1,000,000.

Billionaires for Bush is a do-it-yourself street theater and media campaign using humor to show how the Bush administration has favored the corporate elite at the expense of everyday Americans. Billionaires for Bush is organized as an independent 527 committee, with headquarters in NYC and over 70 chapters nationwide. For more information, please visit www.BillionairesForBush.com.

This would be fun to watch.

The New Big Lie is Made Up of Dozens of Little Lies

First Draft collates lies told by GW & Laura Bush on one single TV program. There was a time when our newspapers would have treated this as at least an interesting matter, and possibly a serious one. That was the past. I don't expect to read about this in the papers tommorow, do you?

Update: Actually, I should mention that there is one news source that caught at least one of these things earlier today — see this column by one Dan Froomkin, noting that the same Bush now touting the 9/11 commission had previously opposed it. But even if family counts, and even if he works for washingtonpost.com, that's still not print journalism.

Move On's Lastest. Wow.

I think the lastest MoveOn ad featuring former US Marine Lee Buttrill is superb in terms of content and effectiveness. But I'm somewhat concerned about the way the ad skirts the campaign finance laws. As I understand it — and I'm in no way an expert — the ads can't endorse a candidate, although they can talk about them.

If that's the rule, this ad comes very close to the line. Rather than say “Vote for Kerry” the ad no doubt accurately indentifies the speaker as “Voting for Kerry”.

If the statement is accurate, it's just descriptive. So perhaps technically it's not an endorsement and thus within the letter of the law, maybe brilliantly so. But it can't be consistent with the spirit of the campaign finance rules.

PS. There are a lot of good runner-ups on the MoveOn page, although I'm especially partial to Kenneth Berg

Why Is The Daily Howler Unusual?

The Daily Howler is almost always at least good. Today, though, the Daily Howler is great: Brit admits that Bush is 'stretching.' But at the great Times, he's just “shrewd”.

Bob Somerby's discussion of Kerry's comments about his Vietnam service, and about Kerry's views on Iraq are so much more straightforward than most of what one sees elsewhere that one wonders what part of the Unthinking Depths inhibit many parts of the major media.

Yet, what Bob Somerby does isn't really rocket science. It's called “basic research”, and “reading”, and “spotting the obvious”. So here's the mystery: why is this sort of relatively simple exposition so rare? And why when it happens is the rest of the world so resistant to it?

An Effective Ad

I have no idea if the women I had lunch with today are representative of anything, but they were not part of the University and they thought that this ad was very effective and described it to me in some detail. Having now found it on the Internet, I'm surprised — it seems a little heavy-handed to me. But based on this unscientific sample, one target audience seems to love it…

Attacks on Kerry's Vietnam Service Debunked

It's pretty sad that this should even be necessary, but eRiposte Media: Liars and Haters Inc. offers a very thorough debunking of various implausible accusations about Kerry's second tour of duty in Vietnam.

Roll The Tape

It sounded pretty bad in the newspaper, but it sounds even worse on tape. Majority Report Radio has a rare tape of GW Bush attempting to answer an unscripted question by a member of the Minority Journalists association, who I'd wager is not a member of the White House Poodle Press Corps.

Next week, GW Bush explains federalism as when you are federal?

Miserable Failure

American Progress Action Fund has a list of broken Bush promises. It is a long list, although I'm not sure how much longer it is than a comparable list might have been after, say, Clinton's first term. Or Reagan's.

The difference between this administration and Clinton's, of course, is that Clinton did a lot of other things right: he managed the economy well; he lowered the deficit rather than increasing it; the tried faithfully to make peace in the mid-east; and he faced a hostile congress dominated by Republicans. (I imagine some conservatives would say something similar about the first Reagan administration.)

In contrast, in addition to his well-known economic and foreign-policy failures, Bush has no substantial domestic policy successes to brag about (except tax cuts if you are wealthy), despite having a solidly Republican Congress.

Hypothesis: It's Still A Free Country

Thanks to Beth Novak for pointing me to the NYCLU site on Protecting Protest:

Protecting Protest is a campaign of the New York Civil Liberties Union to ensure that protest can take place safely and legally during the Republican National Convention this August. We're defending civil liberties from a storefront near Madison Square Garden, in the courts by challenging NYPD demonstration control tactics, at City Hall, and on the streets.

The Republican national convention and the protests it inpires seem like a decent field test of the hypothesis that it's still a free country. I am mildly confident that thanks to the the work of the NYCLU and other groups like it, we will again fail to invalidate this hypothesis.

Electoral Vote Predictions Mapped

The Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 is a classy web based chart that maps the latest poll results onto an elecoral map. It even has an RSS feed.

And then there's the interesting commentary, e.g.,

The featured poll today is a special poll of New Mexico commissioned by Libertarian party candidate Michael Badnarik and conducted by Scott Rasmussen on Aug. 4. The result is Kerry 50%, Bush 43%, Badnarik 5%, a surprisingly strong showing by him. If pollsters regularly asked Kerry/Bush/Badnarik instead of Kerry/Bush/Nader, Badnarik might do better. That might actually affect the election since Nader sucks votes almost entirely from Kerry whereas Badnarik is much more of an equal-opportunity gadfly drawing from both sides. Could the questions asked by the pollsters actually change the election results? Time for a Ph.D. thesis on Heisenberg's principle (“observing the system changes the system”) as applied to politics. No change in the electoral college as New Mexico was already leaning to Kerry, only now the lead is a bit more solid.

Lastest Poll Shows Kerry Lead in Florida

According to this Bloomberg.com story, Kerry's Lead Over Bush Widens in New Hampshire, Florida Polls. (Spotted via First Draft, an interesting-looking new blog).

Update: Then again, Flablog points to this poll showing a tie. (The ARG poll was taken Aug 3-5; the Strategic Vision poll was taken Aug 2-4.)

Why Isn't This A Public Record?

United Press International: Florida's RNC delegation a secret:

Florida Republicans refused to release the names of the state's delegates to the national convention in New York later this month, citing privacy concerns.

“Some delegates are not comfortable speaking and don't want their information given out, and we've honored their requests. Our priority is putting the interests and welfare of our delegates first,” Florida party spokesman Joseph Agostini told the Miami Herald.

Reporters and editors were provided with contact information weeks in advance for Florida's delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Boston last month, including photos of some of the more high-profile delegates. Most other state Republican delegations are providing contact information as well.

I can't understand why the identity of the delegates — the result of a state-sponsored, public electoral process — is not a public record.

And it certainly makes visible the mockery of the idea that “delegates” are in some way representative of anyone but themselves.

Freudian Slip?

IS this the ultimate Freudian slip? Bush Insists His Administration Seeking 'new Ways to Harm Our Country':

Bush Insists His Administration Seeking 'new Ways to Harm Our Country'
The Associated Press
Published: Aug 5, 2004

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush offered up a new entry for his catalog of “Bushisms” on Thursday, declaring that his administration will “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people.”

Bush misspoke as he delivered a speech at the signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill.

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

No one in Bush's audience of military brass or Pentagon chiefs reacted

A Week Is A Long Time In Politics

This is a bad week for politics, and a good week to have guest blogger George Mundstock doing the heavy lifting. Out there Kerry is all but saying he has a secret plan to end the war in Iraq, by saying he knows what to do in Iraq without explaining. Meanwhile GW is going to Ohio and telling the unemployed that he feels their pain.

So far the outrage of the week is the suspiciously timed release of a terror threat cum NY-area alert, based on ancient information — coupled with the demonization of anyone who dares to question it. Yes indeed, there have been some amazingly well timed coincidences. Funny how that works.

But I'm on a wireless connection where a dozen of us share a 56k telephone connection, so don't expect much posting this week.

Update: The Washington Post story on the arbitrary release of a warning based on aged data is clearer than the NYT version, which runs away from the political angle…although even the Post is more circumspect than the bloggers.

Election Polls and Predictions

Those of you still commenting on the old Zogby thread may be interested in Zogby's latest poll.

Meanwhile here's a simple-minded way to think about the election. There must be something wrong with it, but I can't see what it is.

The last election was a statistical tie electorally, and Gore's on the popular vote by a substantial margin. Many key states were very close.

Today's electorate can be divided into three groups:
1. People who voted for Gore in 2000.
2. People who voted for Bush in 2000.
3. People who didn't vote in 2000.

Unless they are dead, all of Gore's voters will vote for Kerry. The counter-argument would be that some marginal Gore voters will 'rally round the flag' and 'vote for the Commander in Chief'. An alternate version says that “security moms” (aka soccer moms worried about terror) will vote for Bush because it makes them feel safer. I don't buy either of these arguments.

I think it's also clear that Bush has held most but by no means all of his vote.

Zogby's latest suggests that new (young) voters are breaking for Kerry. (“among young voters – 18-29 year olds – a group Al Gore only won by 2 points in 2000, Kerry is winning in a landslide, 53% to 33%.”)

Of course turnout and regional factors matter. Some pervious voters in the first two groups may stay home. But is it credible to think that the GOP will manage turnout sufficiently well to overcome what seems a real deficit? Won't more Republicans than Democrats stay home if they are unenthused with their party's candidate?

So, barring the October Surprise, it's Kerry by a landslide.

Like I say, it can't be that simple, can it?

Convention Foolishness

I was not at all happy to see Rev. Al Sharpton who—despite his recent rash of semi-statesmanlike conduct—has a history of demagoguery, being treated seriously this week. Not only did the Democrats give him speaking time, but CNN used him extensively as a regular commentator.

Now comes news that the GOP may have found someone even worse than Sharpton to put front and center in their convention! The Carpetbagger Report says that it seems the GOP may ask Falwell to give an invocation.

I admit that I used to have a soft spot for Falwell. He used racially mixed audiences in his show. He seemed cleaner than, say, the Bakers. And he took a vacation from politics to concentrate on religion when all the TV preachers were getting indicted. (Yes, 1989 was a convenient time to leave the TV evangelism/politics thing, the bloom was off the rose, but his claim that he felt a need to concentrate on spiritual issues was nonetheless plausible.) He seemed horribly wrong, but sincere, and up to a point I like sincere better than apathetic.

But then he lost it. First he endorsed felon Oliver North for Senate. Then in the late '90s he got back into politics. (According to this summary I learn he'd never 'left' as much as I thought anyway.)

Then Falwell attacked Tinky Winky, one of the Teletubbies (a UK children's show), claiming the character was a gay icon (he, gasp, carries a red purse in some episodes).

Then Falwell really went too far, saying, a few days after the 9/11 attacks:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'”

Yes, Falwell later offered a non-apology apology, but even so, could the GOP really put this man on stage in New York?

P.S. Please don't say 'oh, it's just an invocation, not a political statement'. In some ways, that's worse: this is a man whose theology is that all non-Christians (as he defines that term i.e. including Catholics, Muslims, Jews, atheists) not to mention gay people are damned. And whose theology argues that the state's toleration of non-Christians (as he defines it) is not only wrong, but invites divine retribution.

The Center for American Progress Leaves No Spin Unturned

The Center for American Progress leaves no stone unturned. Witness the full text of the mass email I got from them today:

“The First Family…does not snack…They are very good at respecting meal time hours and do not eat between meals…there is no snacking…”

- White House Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier, Whitehouse.gov, 7/27/04

VERSUS

“President Bush fainted for a brief time Sunday in the residence of the White House while eating a pretzel and watching a professional football game on television.”

- CNN, 1/14/02

(Of course maybe that's why they don't snack anymore?)

More seriously, it's this sort of 'war room' response—especially on the serious stuff—that wins elections nowadays.

Best Insight on Kerry Speech

The most original insight I've encountered on Kerry's speech was something I heard in the car this morning, one of the commentators on the Diane Rehm show, who said that Kerry's speech was set up to portray him as a sort of national daddy, the steady calm presence presiding over a bunch of smaller, noisier figures. This plays to his strengths, and even harnesses his physical size, as he towered over John Edwards.

It's an interesting thought. Alas, I have no idea who was speaking, whether it was James Fallows, Stephen Hayes, or Frank Sesno. I doubt it was Hayes, though.

Ducking Iraq?

Matthew Yglesias raps Kerry's speech because it doesn't describe an Iraq strategy. This has to be the most unfair critique I ever heard of.

1. Bush has not mapped an exit strategy.

2. Events are very fluid. Any statement now is likely to be overtaken by events, resulting in charges of shifting position if the postion needs to shift.

3. Kerry's strategy is known to be the 'pottery barn' view of once you are in you are sort of stuck, but he'd like to internationalize the foreign presence. At this point there is little he could reasonably add. If you need more, read Juan Cole.

Cuban-Born Miami Bishop Warns that Bush Request for Church Membership Resembles Castro's

Here is something I certainly never expected to see. A Miami Bishop, born in Cuba, has said President Bush reminds him of Castro. OK, he's an Episcopalian Bishop, not a Catholic, but still…

Here's what the Miami Herald reported (reg. req.),

As the Bush-Cheney campaign mounts an offensive to solidify a religious base for the November election, the Episcopal bishop of Southeast Florida has joined a chorus of religious leaders denouncing the campaign's plan to obtain church directories for electioneering purposes.

To Bishop Leo Frade, the Bush-Cheney strategy violates the separation of church and state.

“Handing over names for partisan politics to any party would be an infraction of our tax-exempt status as a religious institution,'' said Frade, who heads 82 Episcopal churches in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Monroe and Martin counties.

Frade, who was born in Cuba and came to the United States in 1960 as a college student, went further in a July 2 diocesan letter.

“I'm alarmed by any suggestion of providing the names of church members to any particular political group,'' he wrote. “I saw this request made by Fidel Castro at the beginning of his regime, and his persecution of churches that refused.''

The Herald reprints the GOP instructions to churches, or church members, here. (It also reports the interesting GOP claim that what the GOP is doing to evangelical churches is just like what Democrats have done for years in black churches. Is that true? Have Democrats ever been that organized?)

Incidentally in other Florida-Cuban news, it turns out that Bush's allegations about Cuba being a sex-tourism haven may be several years out of date (at least, that's what the Cubans claim, and there's some evidence to support it) and that Bush's picked GOP Senate candidate, Mel Martinez, is getting some south Florida flack for suggesting that some Cuban refugees are economic refugees, not entitled to political asylum.

California Dreams. Not Pretty Ones.

Here's the problem. I don't think Wayne Madsen is a nut. I’ve met Wayne a few times over the years at privacy-oriented events. He’s sometimes rumpled, often a little intense, has a spook-like love for conspiracy theory (forgivable since he is a sometime spook himself). He’s definitely out there on the fringe where left meets right, and we’re not always on the same page politically, but I have found him to be very well informed.

So what to make of his latest effort, Terrorism and the Election: California is the Target!? Wayne, like the best intelligence analysts, has an eye for a threat model. But to take this one seriously, well, the cynicism being alleged is immense…

Here’s the scenario we must be all be prepared for:

If the pre-election internal tracking polls and public opinion polls show the Kerry-Edwards ticket leading in key battleground states, the Bush team will begin to implement their plan to announce an imminent terrorist alert for the West Coast for November 2 sometime during the mid afternoon Pacific Standard Time. At 2:00 PST, the polls in Kentucky and Indiana will be one hour from closing (5:00 PM EST – the polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST). Exit polls in both states will be known to the Bush people by that time and if Kentucky (not likely Indiana) looks too close to call or leaning to Kerry-Edwards, the California plan will be implemented. A Bush problem in Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST would mean that problems could be expected in neighboring states and that plans to declare a state of emergency in California would begin in earnest at 3:00 PM PST.

The U.S. Northern Command, which has military jurisdiction over the United States, will, along with the Department of Homeland Security and Schwarzenegger’s police and homeland security officials in Sacramento, declare an “imminent” terrorist threat – a RED ALERT — affecting California’s major urban areas.

Although the polls in California will not be closed as a result of the declaration, the panic that sets in and the early rush hour will clog major traffic arteries and change the plans of many voters to cast their ballot after work.

That terrorist emergency declaration could be made around 5:00 PM PST and with only three hours left for voting throughout the state, a number of working class voters in urban centers will either be caught up in California’s infamous freeway traffic and be too late to get to their polling places or be more concerned about their families and avoid voting altogether.

In most cases I'd dismiss this as 200 proof tinfoil hat stuff and forget it. But I know this guy. Yes, he's over-alarmist sometimes. But sometimes he's right. And he's talking about the guys with the very suspiciously timed press conferences announcing vague terrorist threats.

Even so, can't helping thinking that at least here in Florida we have more to worry about old-fashioned, low-tech means of stuffing the ballot box now that Jeb Bush has forced through a law that allows unlimited unwitnessed absentee ballots.

(Note: If Marsden is too much for you, try fiore, which is sorta the same idea, but funny.)

Bounce?

Compare and contrast: Will Lester, AP, Kerry's choice of Edwards received favorably by public, but doesn't change the race and Newseek's latest poll showing Kerry 51%, Bush 45% (Kerry 47%, Bush 43%, Nader 3% in a 3-way race).

Of course these are not necessarily inconsistent: Kerry's bounce could be independent of Edwards.

Talking Points Can Go Stale Very Quickly

For a good laugh, compare today's effort by William Safire, Body Politic Will Reject 'Charisma Transplant', in which he attacks Kerry's choice of Edwards as safe, instead of making the courageous choice of picking that nice, boring Mr. Gephardt (whom of course the Republicans had been salivating about attacking). Apparently Cheney was a “pick of confidence” because he balanced Bush's incapacities on foreign policy. Kerry not having policy incapacities, he foolishly selects someone exciting, who helps him win an election. What a boring loser.

Now look at E.J. Dionne's column on why Edwards is The Right Choice and the Gep would have been a mistake:

Republicans were in a foul mood because Kerry's choice of Edwards as his running mate muddied up all the story lines they were itching to trot out. To understand why Edwards was the best choice for Kerry, consider what the Republicans (and, yes, the media) would have said if the nod had gone instead to Rep. Richard Gephardt, the clear runner-up in the vice presidential stakes.

Kerry would have been described as “insecure” at the prospect of standing next to the “charismatic” and “populist” Edwards. Fearing being “upstaged” by the equally ambitious Edwards, Kerry would have been accused of making the “obvious,” “uninspired” and “comfortable” choice. Gephardt's experience would have been trotted out to turn him into the “tired” face of the “old” Democratic Party. It would also have been said that Kerry, the “elitist Massachusetts liberal,” had “written off” the South and rural America.

Could it be that Safire had the Gep column all written, and then just reused as much as he could?

The Dionne column is full of good stuff, including this jem:

When you hear Republicans disparage Sen. John Edwards's lack of experience, remember the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch, spoken to George W. Bush at a debate on Dec. 6, 1999.

“You've been a great governor,” Hatch declared of his rival for the Republican presidential nomination. “My only problem with you, governor, is that you've only had four and going into your fifth year of governorship… . Frankly, I really believe that you need more experience before you become president of the United States. That's why I'm thinking of you as a vice presidential candidate.”

Which is exactly what Edwards was chosen for yesterday.

Presidential Timber

Among all the political qualities needed for a Vice-Presidential nominee (does he balance the ticket? carry a key state? have no skeletons?), one thing that gets mentioned insufficiently often is whether the candidate has the qualities that might make a good President. Veeps frequently end up either stepping in for the boss, or running on their own, so it matters to the country that they be of Presidential caliber.

History is littered with examples of candidates, and elected Veeps, who conspicuously lacked this quality: Sipro Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle Quail would surely be consensus choices. Many might argue Cheney belongs in this group, albeit for very different reasons.

Ex ante prediction about who will be a good President is a very imperfect science. On the day he was elected Vice-President there would have been something of a consensus that Truman lacked the necessary qualities (“to err is Truman” went the slogan), and yet Truman, flawed as he was, looks better and better in hindsight.

What I like best about John Edwards is that I think he has the making of a great President. He's a little green, especially about foreign policy, and a little too protectionist on trade, but a good eight years as veep could season him to perfection.

In picking Edwards, Kerry has put statesmanship over personal friendship (with Gephardt). He's also shown an ability to manage the media (whipping them into a frenzy for weeks), and to keep a secret. That looks Presidential right now.

Update: This New York Post 'Exclusive' is pretty funny.

The Barometer

Michael Moore's movie is a box office smash: The Political 'Fahrenheit' Sets Record at Box Office. Preaching to the choir, or a signal about the election?

More on Compromise, Elections, and the Lessons of Clinton

The Decembrist: The Many Presidencies of Bill Clinton contains further thoughts on my tactical disagreement with Brad DeLong.

There are many points, but the most interesting of all is this one:

I agree that I don't want to concede all of this in July of the election year. That's why making McCain the VP probably wouldn't have made sense. A candidate cannot put forth a persuasive agenda for renewal and simultaneously acknowledge how much of it he will have to compromise on. But, by the same token, I want to avoid the cycle of disappointment when Kerry faces the recognition that his power to implement an agenda depends on his finding a working relationship with Congress.

To which I replied in the comments,

As for the danger of raising expectations, there is simply no choice. You don't get elected dogcatcher by beeing gloomy and without offering a vision that makes people hopeful.

It's no accident that he word the Bush campaign most uses about Kerry these days, even more than flip-flop, is “pessimistic”. I bet the focus groups tested wild in favor of “optimism”—and it's so easy to claim that any suggestion that the administration is incompetent and things are going badly as “pessimism”. The reporters write it right down…

Why Brad DeLong is Not a Political Scientist

Brad DeLong has been doing a very very good line in posts directed at “Republican Grownups”. Although something of an endangered species, recent events prove that they are not in fact mythical beasts.

But Brad's latest, It's Not too Late for the Grownup Republicans demonstrates why, while he's a great economist, he'd be miscast as a political scientist:

It's not too late for the grownup Republicans to act. There's still time for the House and Senate Republican caucuses to go to Bush and force his and Cheney's resignations. Then Hastert and Stevens can decline the job, and the presidential succession passes to Colin Powell.

This then gets us a president who:

1. is a Republican.
2. certainly does not have a smaller chance of winning in November than George W. Bush.
3. would in all probability be good at the job.

It's what would have already happened to any political leader in a parliamentary system. It's what the grownup Republicans owe the country. And it may well be to the partisan political advantage of the Republican Party to close down the current Clown Show as quickly as possible.

On the one hand, yes, this would be an optimal solution for the nation, and probably for the Republicans (if you believe as I do that they look increasingly doooooooooooomed in the next election…although 'a week is a long time in politics' and the election is not next week).

On the other hand, while Brad's plan is good for the nation, it is so Not Going To Happen.

1. W is not a listening kind of guy. Any grownup who gets an audience with him will get the Wrath of W, not an attentive audience. And the Bush clan remembers its grudges.

2. Even if W goes, and even if Cheney passes up the chance to have the trappings of power as well as its reality, the chances that the hyper-ideological duo of Hastert and Stevens would (a) swallow all their personal ambition and (b) step aside for Traitor Powell (as they must surely see him) is so small we need a new number to describe it.

Of course, Brad knows this, so I suppose he's mostly jesting (and the part that isn't jest is wishful thinking), and by so doing demonstrating what a bind the dwindling band of mostly elderly Republican grownups find themselves in. Their choices are to sit back and do nothing, which is nearly criminal, or to commit party treason for which they will never be forgiven in their lifetimes.

Where are the Republican grownups? Mostly still in hiding.

PS. Why do I say this post shows why Brad isn't a political scientist? Because he bows in the direction of a parliamentary system. In fact, Parliamentary systems are like Republican-dominated government all the time. No checks and balances even on the good days. Yes, they can depose the irrational leader (e.g. the takedown of Thatcher). But that actually takes a very long time to happen. And parties in those systems often run awful leaders in elections (Michael Foot, William Hague, for example).

Meanwhile, the party majority votes in lockstep for fear of loss of preferment (poll tax!). No thanks.

UPDATE: Drezner has ideas, but they won't lead to results either…

Movies as a Campaign Finance Law End-Run

Daily Kos says,

Farenheit 9/11 will one day be the subject of a thousands acedmic papers, especially if Kerry wins the White House. The movie's first trailer is already the most effective anti-Bush commercial ever made.

Of course, that trailer won't be shown on TV. It's a 2-minute piece designed for movie theaters, not television (though it'll bear watching whether theaters show the trailer). The real fireworks will hit, I'm sure, when this movie's ad campaign hits television.

Done right (and I do trust Moore to do it right), those 30-second movie commercials, run nationally, could be some of the most effective political advertising of the season (without being, legally, political advertising). Watch stations try to block the ad, in the face of a concerted GOP effort to suppress its showing.

Meanwhile, Digby points to the trailer of The Hunting of the President, which I see as another example of the same phenomenon. This movie is apparently only showing in a few cities, but the DVD is promised to be out by election time.

Kos again:

If the movie has a measurable impact on the elections, watch the concept become a new CFR loophole. Say we have President Kerry in office. A bunch of rich Republicans (the “haves” and the “have mores” or, as Bush likes to call them, his “base”) make an anti-Kerry movie in 2008, and release it, oh, at about this time. Then they run $100 million in ads promoting the anti-Kerry bit, all outside the reach of campaign finance laws and the FEC.

A loophole it will be next to impossible to close.

What Do Republicans Like Best About Bush?

Last Halloween I asked,

How can it be that about half of the voters in this country tell pollsters that they are basically happy with an administration that lies like a rug? This is surely one of the central questions of the day.

Now comes Michael Bérubé, professor of literature and cultural studies, with a poll that is designed to address this still-burning (or at least spluttering) question.

Good blog, too.

Thoughts on the 2004 Presidential Election (3 Scenarios In Which Bush Wins)

Despite his low and shrinking standing in the polls, there are at least three¹ scenarios in which GW Bush could still win his first Presidential election.

But first, the good news.

It's been obvious for some time that if the election is based on any of the traditional fundamentals, Bush is toast. The big question mark counterbalancing this fact was Bush's apparent financial advantage (not to mention the subsidies that always flow with incumbency), especially if it allowed him to define his opponent. The relative failure of the recent $50+ million Bush ad campaign — leaving the field open for Kerry to use the convention in the traditional way, as his introduction to the American people — suggests that Bush's (diminishing) financial advantage is primarily good for stemming the wounds, holding the base, not for making gains with the independent/undecided.

Importantly, a segment of the press (only part — the big cable networks remain solidly owned by zealots) and a much larger segment of the Establishment have decided that Bush is dangerous to the increasingly Argentinian economy, to the US's hard power (the army is hurting), and now to its soft power (whatever claim it had to moral standing in the community of nations). That is not an atmosphere that leads to the press Gore-ing Kerry, and Kerry's too disciplined and experienced to make a serious error likely.

Indeed, one thing that impresses me about Kerry is his political discipline and toughness. He stayed the course in Iowa, when the pundits and the futures market had written him off. He laid low this last six weeks, raising vast — impressively vast — amounts of money, when the chattering classes were out there pushing him to do or say silly things. He had the self-discipline to lay low, let events take their course, let Bush self-destruct, and not look like he was piling on. Most importantly, his campaign seems to have learned important lessons from the Gore campaign — and not just the dangers of letting your opponents define you: Kerry has been playing nice with reporters on his campaign plane, spending social time with them; this matters too much. Kerry's new plane has an airborne reporters' bar — this can only be good. Most importantly, the campaign is working for the long haul, and worried about peaking too soon, right after the convention. That was one of Gore's mistakes, one that people forget—in part because his decline was so visibly helped by the media echo chamber's repeat of lies and distortions such as “Al Gore said he invented the Internet”..

OK, now the bad news.

Here are three scenarios in which Bush pulls it out.

1. Terror. The most likely of the three. Consider this CNN article headlining this evening:

Several U.S. officials said Tuesday that unnamed terrorists, possibly al Qaeda operatives, are in the United States and planning a “major attack” on U.S. soil this summer. Details on how to deal with the threat are expected to be released in the weekly FBI bulletin on Wednesday.

I don't have any idea how terrorism plays; it depends so much on what and when. It might be that the nation sees it as another sign of Bush incompetence. It might be seen as cause to rally round the incumbent, in the false but common equation of patriotism and (especially Republican) incumbency. There doesn't seem to me to be that much Kerry can do to innoculate himself from this, except to push the 'Bush isn't up to the job' meme. And that's really a job for the Vice Presidential candidate. But given that the Bush administration is one of the greatest terrorist recruiting tools ever invented, there's every chance that there will be one or more attacks, both because there are now so many armed people who loath us, and because the smartest Islamic extremists will understand that their prospects are much better with a polarizing and incompetent Bush administration than with any other, and may act in the hopes of aiding his re-election.

2. Idiocy. I rate the chance of this as very low, but it needs mentioning since people keep writing about it: Kerry picks an awful veep, like McCain or Nader, and turns off 5-10% of his vote. [The McCain meme helps Kerry in one way, as it suggests that independent minded Republicans are anti-Bush, even though McCain says he supports his party's leader. The Nader meme is less helpful; it may win a few wavering votes, but the number of people who think he'd be safe as President is small. I'll suggest below, however, that the McCain meme is ultimately harmful.]

3. Brilliance. In an effort to jump-start his candidacy, Bush dumps Cheney — perhaps popular with the faithful, but a growing liability with everyone else — and replaces him with someone else, ideally someone charismatic, maybe young, female or minority.

The case for dumping Cheney for “health reasons” is strong: his staff seems implicated in both the Plame and the Chalabi scandals, and both are very serious national security disasters. The Chalabi mess is more serious, but the Palme story is easier to explain, and the investigation has a decent chance of resulting in indictments before the election. The likelihood of this is between the first two, but it's very dangerous. [Moral of the story: Democrats should lay off Cheney until after the Republican convention.]

In addition to whatever loyalty he may feel to his boss, there are three reasons why Bush might be reluctant to dump Cheney, listed in increasing likelihood and importance. First, Cheney might not go quietly (very unlikely). Second, although changing veeps in mid-stream was once a fairly common practice, it hasn't happened since FDR picked Truman; the more recent precedent of McGovern dumping Eagleton is not encouraging. The electorate might see it as exciting or it might read it as desperate.

The hardest problem, however, might be finding a suitable candidate who would add excitement to the ticket and pull in votes. The Cabinet is pretty unimpressive. As Iraq tanks, Dr. Rice is suddenly off the list. Gen. Powell has been visibly disloyal recently. As for governors, the one most likely to help the ticket isn't eligible due to his foreign birth.

Thus we get to the nightmare scenario: Recall that four years ago GW Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” but governed as a Praetorian. Now the airwaves are thick with talk of how what the nation needs is a 'unity government' that 'crosses party lines' and 'unites'. So what if Bush were to decide again to steal his opponents' clothes…and pick a Democrat veep to demonstrate the ecumenicism of his policies?

He doesn't bring in any of the key battleground states, and he's not exactly charismatic, but Zell Miller is available.

---

[1] I toyed with adding a fourth scenario, “Buggout” in which the US hands “sovereignty” to the Iraqis on June 30. On July 1, they ask us to leave. On July 2, we start leaving. But I just can't see the Bush folks actually doing that.

Bush Campaign Lies Counter (With References)

This Diogenes Cynic guy says he has 53 Bush Campaign Lies — that's from the 2004 campaign, doesn't count the ones from 2000. (spotted via Talk Left)

Catholic Bishops Get Political

Two thoughtful, very very different, sets of thoughts inspired by the recent decision of certain Catholic Bishops to instruct their parishoners how to vote:

• Mirror of Justice, Bishops, Politics, and Excommunication
• TaxProf Blog, Will Catholic Church's Criticism of Kerry Jeopardize Tax Exemption?

Memo Reveals Flaws in South Flordia's New Voting Machines

Oh boy are we in trouble.

Count Crisis? Elections official warns of glitches that may scramble vote auditing. See also Ed Felton's summary of the key points. I'm pleased to report that UM Law's own Marnie Mahoney is deeply involved in the effort to try to solve the problem with the iVotronic machines. But from the sound of the news stories, local officials are working hard to pretend there's no problem.

The Countdown

Is It Over Yet?

Losing the Hinterland

Stuff like this tells you something.

MADISON, Wis. - Faced with a scarcity of letters praising the president, a newspaper in a Republican-leaning district appealed for pro-Bush letters, then backed off the request Tuesday amid complaints of blatant politics.

Last week in an editorial, The Post-Crescent said most of its letters had been coming from one side and asked readers “to help us 'balance' things out.”

“We've been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him,” the editorial said. “We're not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today's increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.”

On Tuesday, the newspaper located in Appleton, Wis., with a daily circulation of just over 56,000 ran a second editorial stepping back from the appeal.

…

The newspaper is located in a congressional district that Bush won handily in 2000, beating Gore, 52 percent to 43 percent.

Republicans Begin to Map Media Strategy for Democratic Convention

From Talking Points Memo:

There is chatter in Pakistani intelligence circles that the US has let the Pakistanis know that the optimal time for bagging 'high value' al Qaida suspects in the untamed Afghan-Pakistani border lands is the last ten days of July, 2004.

But of course.

Losing the Techie Vote

It's articles like this one which make me think Kerry is going to win, maybe, just maybe, win big.

O'Reilly Network: Wow. The world is getting strange [May. 08, 2004]

I'm working on my next java.net article and having problems focusing. Why? Well, Richard Monson-Haefel is publicly broadcasting that he's looking for a job (depressing news about the state of the computer industry), the EU is posed to do the software-patent shimmy (ditto), and (and this one boggles me) I just realized that I'm probably going to vote for John Kerry.

As to the latter— I think Don Park nailed it. I didn't think the war was a particularly good idea to start with, but I thought it could be justified. And I'm actually okay with the (so far) non-finding of weapons of mass destruction. And I think that, for better or worse, the US has to stay the course in Iraq. Leaving now, or in the near future, or before Iraq is a stable and functioning society again, would be a very bad decision.

But wow— invading Iraq wasn't a no-brainer when the decision was made, and in hindsight it looks like a very bad idea indeed. Moreover, the follow through in the post-Saddam era is a mess; ; a total failure of foresight and planning. The sort of thing that causes boards to fire CEOs, if you ask me.

And how very depressing to see the recent flood of pathetic commentaries along the lines of America: Not as bad as Saddam. It's hard for me to even respond to most of those articles because they're so deeply steeped in moral corruption (briefly: if you invade a country on humanitarian grounds, and a major part of the justification for this invasion was humanitarian, AND if you want to take the moral high ground when defending the invasion, and the defenders of the invasion did take the moral high ground, then saying “well, the other guys rape too” indicates an inner emptiness that boggles the mind).

All this is subject to revision, of course. I'm well aware that there is a lot of information that hasn't been shared with the public (and a lot of that was probably withheld for good reasons). And that the media has a tendency to over-report sensational news and thereby blow things out of proportion. And the last thing in the world I want to do is post yet another silly article linking rapes in Iraq to the patriot act.

But, from where I'm sitting (very faint voice) Kerry in 2004

The original is full of links, by the way. [corrected @ 5:43pm]

One of the links is to Don Park, expressing this very Confucian vision,

I know I'll get a lot of flack for this, but I am of the mind that Bush should resign as a sincere gesture of apology to the world and to Americans. Ultimately, he is responsible for the humiliation, rape and murder that occurred in Iraq by American soldiers and no mere words will make up for the damage the acts have caused.

Which I think is a bad idea: 1) Makes Cheney President in name as well as deed; 2) Allows the GOP to pick a new candidate since there's no chance they'll go with Cheney. Although the mechanics of that, given the delegates are all picked, would be sort of fun to watch…

I imagine the real Bush loyolaists would pick Jeb.

Abu Ghraib and the American Pshycho-Sexual Scandal Artery

Digby and Billmon are having a respectful and fascinating disagreement about how the Abu Ghraib scandal will play out. Will it expand to take in the other elements of what Sidney Blumenthal has dubbed the 'New Gulag'? Will the American appetite for a scalp be satisified with Rumsfeld's or will the scandal machine demand more? And are these the same or different questions?

First Blumenthal. Then Billmon. Then the sex.

Blumenthal writes (in the UK's Guardian),

It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo “enemy combatants”. Rumsfeld extended this system - “a legal black hole”, according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.

Private contractors, according to the Toguba report, gave orders to US soldiers to torture prisoners. Their presence in Iraq is a result of the Bush military strategy of invading with a relatively light force. The gap has been filled by private contractors, who are not subject to Iraqi law or the US military code of justice. Now, there are an estimated 20,000 of them on the ground in Iraq, a larger force than the British army.

It is not surprising that recent events in Iraq centre on these contractors: the four killed in Falluja, and Abu Ghraib's interrogators. Under the Bush legal doctrine, we create a system beyond law to defend the rule of law against terrorism; we defend democracy by inhibiting democracy. Law is there to constrain “evildoers”. Who doubts our love of freedom?

To which Billmon of the Whiskey Bar adds,

It appears the Army was worried about the kinds of things the Army is usually worried about - loss of control, lack of discipline and a breakdown in the chain of command - and was willing to dig into the shitpile of interrogation abuses to find out just bad things had become. And it eventually put the investigation in the hands of someone (Taguba) who was willing to trace the problems back to the original decision to try to turn Abu Ghraib into a Gimo-style intelligence factory.

The higher ups, on the other hand, appear to have realized fairly quickly that exposing the abuses at Abu Ghraib would draw global attention to the entire system - Gitmo, the prisons in Afghanistan, their entire kinder, gentler gulag archipelago. So it looks like they adopted a strategy of letting the CID investigations run their secret course, while allowing Taguba's report to sit on the bureaucratic shelf.

The photographic evidence, however, couldn't be controlled — the gang should have seen that from the start — and somebody (Taguba?) became so angry about the way the report was being buried that they leaked it to Sy Hersh. The stonewall crumbled.

…

And so we come to the central question: Can the cover up artists keep the focus exclusively on Abu Ghraib? Ironically, the flood of S&M porn shots now making their way onto the market tend to reinforce the media's fascination with the perverted antics at the prison, which ultimately works in favor of the coverup, if not Rumsfeld personally. The new gulag archipelago, like the old one, requires anonymity. Right now, the other islands in the chain still have it, and may get to keep it - unless, of course, there are some candid snapshots from Gitmo or Bagram or the CIA's mysterious “ghost” prisons floating around in unauthorized hands.

Even if such photos were to come to light, I'm not sure the mainstream media, much less the American public, can absorb much more than they already have. It's not easy to admit you live in a country that now owns and operates its own system of gulag camps - instead of contracting the entire job out to friendly despots, sight unseen, as in the good old days.

To which Digby says,

It's funny he brings this up, because I was just thinking the exact opposite.

I think it is precisely the nature of the evidence that makes the media and the American public interested in the story. They are inured to charges of lies or corruption —- violence and prurience are what moves them. I concluded long ago that the only scandal that really interests the American public is a sex scandal.

It is the S&M image of this one that is moving it, the pictures, the graphic kinkiness of it. That's what shocks and thrills the public, if only in a sickening, voyeuristic, train wreck sort of way.

This is a depressing if all-too-plausible account. I would like it to be wrong. It's been a while since I did retail politics, all of it before the Clinton era which I suppose may have altered the fundamentals, but my impression of the average voter is pretty good.

The ones I met were decent folk, just busy with their lives. They tended to be proud of their country, and I don't somehow think they will take this lying down. I think rather, that the most Republican of them will take it sitting down in the sense of this letter in today's New York Times:

I was a Republican yesterday, I am a Republican today, and I will probably be a Republican tomorrow. I am not a Democrat because I still hold to the philosophy that the Democrats are the tax-and-spend party.

But I must say that in November, I will stay home. George W. Bush and his crew are pathetic and, worse, inept. How can it be that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was not briefed on Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's Army report? Perhaps a little more gravitas from Mr. Rumsfeld would be in order.

Each new disclosure proves that the Iraq adventure is the biggest mistake since Vietnam. Will the United States ever learn?

Given the relatively polarized electorate and the fairly small number of undecided (who tend to go for challengers anyway if the economy is bad), this election was always going to be in large part about motivating the base. (Thus, the hype over gay marriage issue or today's prime time, “Judeo-Christians”-only White House Prayer Day Show; these things excite the base.)

There are exactly two ways I can see that Bush can dig himself out of this one.

First, the October Surprise scenario. One need not even ascribe nefarious acts to the Bush team for this to happen: the anger generated by Abu Ghraib revalations, and the others still to come, only makes the chances of a fanatical terroristic sequel to 9/11 that much more likely.

Second, to ramp up the vitriol against Kerry. This has been the Bush family m.o. for a generation, and was the strategy for this election from the start. If thee was a bottom below which they woudn't go, it just got lower.

And it's only May.

Kerry's New Ads

The right sort of Kerry TV Ads for early in the campaign. Not perhaps as good as “Morning Again in America” but not at all bad. Unless of course they get played so often (depending how you spend it, $25 million buys a lot of airtime) people start reaching for things to throw…

Is This Ad Effective?

Better Angels of our Nature: Notations argues that “The first great negative ad of this campaign has surfaced.” and provides links to the Windows Media Player version, and the Real Player version.

I don't claim to have my pulse on the finger of the American television-watching people, but is this ad really that good? Or shouldn't someone at least jazz it up a bit with visuals: the flight suit, for example? One of the stills of the flag-draped coffins that just got Tami Silicio—and her husband—fired?

More generally, does Kerry win by going negative or by going positive? The John Edwards campaign (and early Dean) suggests this is a year for positive. On the other hand, Edwards didn't win.

The Kerry Rally

We went to the Kerry rally on Sunday. We arrived about the time the seating was supposed to open, that is about an hour and quarter before Kerry was to speak. The line was already enormous, and it doubled at least while we were waiting. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors before being admitted to the outdoor seating/standing area, which took a very very long time and which made me sad and nostalgic for the days when politics was less paranoid.

We were among the last admitted to the roped-off area, and had a very obstructed view. Standing on a small stone wall, I could just see Kerry from the neck up.

Kerry spoke surprisingly well — especially given what I had heard about him as a lackluster stump speaker. He was by no means the best I ever heard, but he was good.

Kerry began by noting that after 9/11 Bush had an opportunity to unify the nation; instead he divided it. The speech had a little more pandering than I would ideally like — especially the trade stuff about his plan to stop subsidizing the export of jobs, and the lengthy list of promises to make college more affordable (which, if I heard it right, actually doesn't amount to that much per person unless the student spends two years in a domestic peace corps-like job either before or after college). It did have more detail and Senatorial reference to programs and such than you would find in the most classic stemwinder, but it never had so much detail that it got boring

The top applause lines were

• a number of lines about how Bush misled the nation and sent US soldiers off to die without revealing his real motives; [Update: I left out maybe the biggest applause line of this sort: “In America, we fight wars because we have to, not because we choose to.”]
• the pledge to increase energy independence via a push for alternative fuel sources so that foreign policy is no longer driven by Middle East oil [although even raising this to the 20% of consumption promised would only lessen not eliminate the US's imports];
• the promise to stop the lies and level with the public;
• a promise to provide some form of healthcare for the uninsured (here Kerry was almost disingenuous, making it sound like everyone would get the kind of care Senators get; but while saying that is what should happen, I think it's not what he actually promised);
• the promise to get an Attorney General who is nothing like John Ashcroft;
• “Within weeks of being inaugurated I will return to the U.N. and I will rejoin the community of nations.”

All these got a lot more applause than the trade stuff or even the college-costs stuff.

The crowd loved him. I left feeling more cheerful about the Democratic nominee then when I arrived, and the whole family clanked a little due to the several nice Kerry buttons we acquired.

Sen. Kerry to Speak on Campus this Sunday

University of Miami: College and Young Democrats are hosting a visit by Senator Kerry to the UM campus on Sunday. The efficient Kerry operation also sent me an email:

We invite you to rally with John Kerry on Sunday, April 18th, at the University of Miami.

John Kerry's college tour was a big success. The huge crowds brought a lot of energy and enthusiasm to the campaign. Let's keep the momentum going. There will be a tremendous amount of media at Sunday's rally — let's make Sunday's crowd the biggest yet.

Sunday, April 18th
University of Miami — The Rock
1306 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, Florida 33146

Doors open at 12:30 PM.

I think I'll take the kids…hope they don't yawn too much … not that we'll be in the center of anything…

Not Your Number One Draft Choice (Or, the 83rd percentile President)

Must-read DeLong, If You Said to Me, Name 25 Million People Who Would Maybe Be President… He Wouldn't Have Been in That Category (quoting an amazing interview with Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein). Brad then adds his comments:

Never yet has a grownup looked me in the eye and said, “George W. Bush is qualified to be President of the United States.” The most anyone has ever done is to say (around the time of the inauguration), “Look, Brad, he'll be Queen Elizabeth; Colin Powell will be Tony Blair and Paul O'Neill will be Gordon Brown. There are lots of Head-of-State things that George W. Bush will do really well, and the government will be in good hands.” But I don't think any grownup would say that or anything like that now.

Which just shows you that Berkeley is special. I suspect that many people in this community probably think Bush is just fine for the job. Some national religious leaders, after all, have said they think that his 5-4 election in the face of both contrary precedent and a contrary popular vote was a sign of divine providence. Others predict a divinely-ordained Bush victory in 2004. These views don't exist in a total vacuum.

I bet it's nice in Berkeley this time of year.

A note on calculation. There are at this writing about 293 million people in the US. So if you are the 25,000,001st most likely President, that still puts you in the 91st percentile. Top ten percent. Not so bad, surely?

But wait, I hear you say, we shouldn't count the children. Or maybe we shouldn't count anyone under 35 — the minimum age to be President. OK. Conveniently, in 2000 the median age in the US was 35.3, putting good ol' number 25,000,001 at the 82nd percentile or so. Top twenty percent. Not great, but still perhaps two standard deviations from the mean?

Myself, I'd estimate a much lower percentile.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has a very very funny related screenshot of a headline in the UK's Daily Mirror.

Holding up a Mirror to Faith in Politics

The Mirror of Justice has had an interesting series of posts debating the role of professions of faith and positions at odds with faith in Presidents and presidential candidates, the latest of which, by Rob Vischer, is More on Kerry as a “cynical nonbeliever”.

I Should Read Campaign Desk

My brother finds and links to a Campaign Desk report that says that CNN is taking the fall for the Letterman Yawning Boy fiasco in which they falsely reported that the White House claimed the tape was doctored.

In yesterday's coda to the Yawning Boy saga, I forgot to mention an illuminating report from Thomas Lang on the campaigndesk.org Web site on Friday.

Lang arguably gets to the bottom of the question of why CNN ever reported that the White House called to cast doubts on the accuracy of the yawning boy video. This has caused much huffing and puffing amongst administration critics.

Lang quotes CNN spokesman Matt Furman thusly: "When we aired the Letterman clip Tuesday morning a producer in the CNN White House unit called our national desk to raise an issue about the potential authenticity of the tape. That conversation was relayed among several people in the newsroom and by the time it made it to [news anchor] Daryn Kagan it had gone through several people in the news room and unfortunately [the on-air version] became 'The White House has said the tape is not authentic.'"

And speaking of yawning boy, reader Stephen Stackwick e-mailed me yesterday with this comment:

"Interesting that W. had time to scribble a note to Tyler but families of KIA servicemen get (duplicate) form letters."

Stackwick was referring to last Tuesday's Washington Post story by David Maraniss who told of one Iowa family who lost their son getting two identical form letters from Bush.

As a paid-up beliver in what the British call the 'Cock-up Theory of Life'--the belief that Murphy's Law explains much more variance than do Evil Conspiracy Theories, I guess I'm prepared to believe this, although it sure seems awful sloppy to have a procedure in place that lets errors like this go on the air.

The Economist's Wonderful Cover

The Economist almost never comes on Friday. It sometimes comes on Saturday. It often doesn't make it out here until Monday, leading me to grumble that they get better service in Cairo (they do). But this week's came today, and the cover is just perfect. My kids loved it too.

AP Suggests Bush is a Flip-Flopper

AP moved a story this afternoon that suggests GW Bush is a flip-flopper. Of course, they don't come right out and say so, and the story carries no byline (someone feeling endangered?), but it just begs to be in the papers as a little sidebar with the right headline.

President Bush's decision Tuesday to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reversed earlier White House insistence that she would only appear privately.

Some previous Bush reversals in the face of criticism:

_He argued a federal Department of Homeland Security wasn't needed, then devised a plan to create one.

_He resisted a commission to investigate Iraq (news - web sites) intelligence failures, but then relented.

_He also initially opposed the creation of the independent commission to examine if the 2001 attacks could have been prevented, before getting behind the idea under pressure from victims' families.

_He opposed, and then supported, a two-month extension of the commission's work, after the panel said protracted disputes over access to White House documents left too little time.

_He at first said any access to the president by the commission would be limited to just one hour but relaxed the limit earlier this month.

The Reign in Spain Did Not Talk Plain

For what little it's worth, almost all the early US commentary on the Spanish elections seem about 98% mistaken to me. As far as I can tell, the moral of the story has nothing to do with strength or weakness, appeasement or terror, and relatively little to do with the costs of being GW Bush's (or the US's) friend and ally. It even has relatively little to do, alas, with the political costs of entering precipitously into wars of choice.

No, the moral of the story is this: voters don't like to be lied to, and in politics the coverup often costs more than the crime. The Spanish voters decided, apparently correctly, that their government had lied to them when it blamed ETA, local terrorists, for an act of barbarism committed by al Qaeda, foreign terrorists.

Which means that the 2% of recent commentary I agree with is the part that says this is bad for Bush: as the Bush lies like a rug meme gathers steam (the latest outrage about muzzling Richard S. Foster, Medicare's favorite actuary — only reinforces it), the idea that the US voters will punish Bush for lying, like the Spanish voters punished José María Aznar will begin to take hold.

Update: Seems like someone agrees.

Update (2): More agreement.

The Veepstakes (Herein of McCain et al)

This John-McCain-might-like-to-be-Kerry's-veep meme is running around the internet. (E.g. The Blogging of the President: 2004). It's a nice spring fling of a concept but would be a Really Stupid choice.

Kerry's veep needs to have all of the following characteristics.

(Don't read anything into the order—they're all important.)

• Someone Kerry trusts—since at least the Carter administration, the modern Veep, even in pre Cheney-as-eminence-grise days, is much more than a spare part.

• Someone who won't have to swallow too many previous statements to toe the Kerry line.

• Not a Democratic Senator from a state with a Republican governor. With Colorado in play, there's actually a tiny chance of reclaiming the Senate, or at least getting a 50-50 tie. Not worth the risk of jeopardizing it. And the thinner the Republican margin, the harder to keep party discipline anyway. This is why Senator Nelson (D-Fl) would be a bad choice. Why let Jeb Bush appoint a Senator?

• Someone both Kerry and voters (and the press!) can trust to be President. This is the reason why McCain would not be a good choice. The man is a loose cannon. People who know him from close up, and many of the reporters who have covered him, think he's fundamentally flaky. Not in a brainwashed in Vietnam sort of a way. Just in an ordinary, can't quite rely on him to act reasonably sort of a way. In a Senator that's not a big problem; there's safety in numbers. In a President, that lack of steadiness is a potential disaster. For better or worse, the press decided Gary Hart wasn't steady and reliable, and look what happened to him.

• Someone not too identified with the Clintons (why feed the freepers too much red meat). This, and age (almost 70), eliminate Vernon Jordan (plus he resides in DC, which has no electoral value).

Then there are characteristics which are desirable rather than being essential.

• Someone who brings at least one state to the ticket. Certainly lets out Dean (so would other things). Probably lets out Edwards too. And also lets out Robert Rubin and Andrew Cuomo.

• All other things being equal, a fresh face is good. And a tired face, aka Richard Gephardt or even Sen. Graham, is very very bad.

• Executive branch experience is nice, rather than a ticket built of two legislators.

• A good war record, or other national security experience would be a plus (this obviously is part of what fuels the McCain balloonlet).

Who does this add up to? More Bill Richardson than Max Cleland, I think. Richardson may not have a military record, but he's been a Cabinet official, was US Ambassador to the UN, and is a successful Governor of a Western state. I'd add Jennifer Granholm but for the fact that having been born in Canada she's not eligible (this is why all good Democrats should support Senator Hatch's proposed constitutional amendment to allow the foreign-born to run for President; he thinks it will help Schwarzenegger, but it will actually help Granholm).

That said, Richardson is not without his negatives. But surely there must be other names out there better than McCain?

Parody or Travesty?

A link from Talking Points Memo took me to a website called “gop.com.” There one finds a “Research Briefing” entitled John Kerry: International Man Of Mystery III.

The document states:

• The only foreign government “on the record supporting John Kerry” is North Korea [The “record” of “support” consists of broadcasting his speeches on state radio … proves Kerry is a Commie, right?];

• “Former French Environment Minister Is Kerry’s First Cousin” [He's worse than a Commie — he's French!]

• Coldplay supports Kerry [Not entirely clear what this proves, but it must be awful].

Parody or travesty? You decide.

Bush Family Values

So you have a busy job, maybe a busy week. But you have a private jet, and are in charge of your own calendar. Couldn't you find a few hours to go to your own brother's wedding? Even if it's only his second marriage?

Not, it seems if you are G.W. Bush. The Miami Herald reports that The Neil Bush remarried Saturday — and although G.H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush attended, neither Jeb nor GW took the time to go.

The political calculation is obvious — Neil is the posterboy of sleaze what with his shady business deals, his messy divorce, and his notorious meetings with prostitutes paid for by his Asian business contacts — but even so, shouldn't politics take a back seat here?

The Herald ran this item on its gossip page. I predict the media gives this a lot less play than it gave, say, Jimmy Carter's relationship with his (also very dubious) brother.

Lincoln Forgot to Specify Percentages

The AP reports that Bush Seeks to Bolster Regular-Guy Image:

Until last month, President Bush hadn't been to a NASCAR race since he was governor of Texas and running for president. On Monday, he goes to a rodeo and livestock exhibition in Houston — again, for the first time since he was governor.

Clearly, Karl Rove is counting on the fact that when Abraham Lincoln made his famous remark, he neglected to specify percentages.

Poll: Florida Leans to Kerry

It seems that my intuition that the Florida is political ground zero was if anything pessimistic. Comes now the Miami Herlad to report on its latest poll finding: Florida voters leaning toward Kerry (by a little).

The whole poll is sort of interesting. The dismal Florida legislature, whose leadership in particular is inept, grasping, and transparently bent on self-aggrandizement, gets low ratings. Alas, the legislative districts are so thoroughly gerrymandered that almost every incumbent faces no meaningful chance of losing his/her seat.

Governor Jeb Bush, whose policies are actually out of step with a majority of the state's voters (e.g. he favors cutting school spending whatever the consequences, they favor spending what it takes for small classes) gets relatively high ratings. Go figure.

Republicans Start Opening Their Kerry Dirt File

Revealed: how 'war hero' Kerry tried to put off Vietnam military duty. Note the one-two-three punch here: First the suggestion that Kerry was just an uncessesful draft dodger; Second, the suggestion that his medals are somehow not real or significant; Third the quote from Lucianne Goldberg (yes, the one who betrayed Lewinsky), a nice way to try to tie Democrats to sleaze.

Why this item starts in a foreign paper is hard to figure…maybe because the UK's Telegraph, a very conservative paper, is most likely to report it uncritically?

Senator John Kerry … tried to defer his military service for a year, according to a newly rediscovered article in a Harvard University newspaper.

He wrote to his local recruitment board seeking permission to spend a further 12 months studying in Paris, after completing his degree course at Yale University in the mid-1960s. …

The Harvard Crimson newspaper followed a youthful Mr Kerry in Boston as he campaigned for Congress for the first time in 1970. In the course of a lengthy article, “John Kerry: A Navy Dove Runs for Congress”, published on February 18, the paper reported: “When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy.”

Samuel Goldhaber, the article's author who is now a cardiologist attached to the Harvard School of Medicine, spent 11 hours trailing Mr Kerry and still remembers that the subject of the Paris deferment came up during long conversations about Vietnam.

“I stand by my story,” he told The Telegraph. “It was a long time ago, and I was 19 at the time, so it is hard to remember every detail. But I do know this: at no point did Kerry contact either me or the Crimson to dispute anything I had written.”

Sen Kerry's campaign headquarters in Washington refused an opportunity to deny the report. Despite repeated telephone calls from The Telegraph, a spokesman refused to comment. Another Democrat official said merely: “In Vietnam, John Kerry proved his patriotism beyond question. Everyone knows that.”

A senior Republican strategist, who asked not to be named, said: “I've not heard this before. This undercuts Kerry's complaints about Bush and it continues to pose questions as to his credibility among ordinary Vietnam veterans.”

Note the mark of the true black arts professional: the word “continues”. There is nothing on which this builds, but the speaker has anonymously made a charge which can't be refuted, since it's vague, nor can it be used to question the speaker's credibility since it's provided anonymously.

He said it would fuel concerns over the way Sen Kerry made a name for himself by leading anti-war protests in Washington and Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s after he had completed his service in the US Navy, even while his former comrades continued to fight and die.

The nerve of the man! Trying to end the war so his comrades could come home! How dare he!

A newly-published biography of Sen Kerry by Douglas Brinkley, A Tour of Duty, makes no mention of the requested deferment or planned year in Paris. At the time, it was still unclear just how long America would remain in Vietnam, and it might have seemed that a year's deferral of service could render enlistment unnecessary.

According to the Democratic Party's version of Sen Kerry's military history, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Harvard through eagerness to do his duty, and sailed with the Navy for combat as soon as he graduated in 1966.

Sen Kerry won a gallantry medal for his service as a gunboat captain on the Mekong Delta, and was honorably discharged with three “purple heart” medals after sustaining three wounds. He has consistently presented himself as a leader who argued against the war only after fulfilling his duty in the field. Supporters argue that his war record makes him a more trustworthy leader than President Bush, who served sporadically in the National Guard at home.

A little partisan jab…

“This means that Kerry didn't jump into all that heroic service until he was pushed, and it is a very nice piece of information,” said Lucianne Goldberg, a prominent Republican campaigner.

And here's the final slur

Republican strategists for President Bush were already investigating Sen Kerry's record of three wounds sustained in Vietnam. “We find that he had only one day off sick - with three wounds? What exactly were these wounds?” she asked.

Florida: Politcal Ground Zero

My brother's White House Briefing reports today on a 'tidbit' that suggests pretty strongly that the Republicans see Flordia as critical to their re-election, and far from in the bag:

Jackie Calmes has this tidbit in the Wall Street Journal: “Florida's television stations are the big winners in Bush's first campaign advertising blitz, station figures show. The Bush-Cheney re-election committee bought more than $860,000 in that 2000 battleground state — more than double the next-biggest buys in Pennsylvania and Michigan.”

I do think Florida is up for grabs. In other words, I think it's safe to discount the results of this poll showing Bush waaay ahead in Flordia which so upset the Daily Kos team. Indeed, it seems likely that the Republicans' internal polls are not quite that rosy, or they wouldn't be spending the dollars.

I suppose that even if our upcoming primary isn't very meaningful, we will at least have the pleasure of being courted in the general election.

Another Argument for a Tivo?

Another reason I'm glad I don't have a TV set:

Bush Re-election Ads to Begin in March: President Bush's re-election campaign will begin running television commercials on March 4, even if the Democrats have not yet settled on a nominee, Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, said on Sunday.

…

Mr. Bush's campaign managers had expected to wait until the spring or summer before beginning a more active phase of the campaign. But the continuing attacks by Democrats on Mr. Bush's record, along with the president's drop behind Senators John Kerry and John Edwards in recent opinion polls, led them to change the plan.

Saying you are running scared is not the sign of an operation that is doing a good job of staying on message.