DoD News: News Briefing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace

DoD News: News Briefing with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace:


"Q And General Pace, what guidance do you have for your military commanders over there as to what to do if -- like when General Horst found this Interior Ministry jail?



GEN. PACE: It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it. As an example of how to do it if you don't see it happening but you're told about it is exactly what happened a couple weeks ago. There's a report from an Iraqi to a U.S. commander that there was possibility of inhumane treatment in a particular facility. That U.S. commander got together with his Iraqi counterparts. They went together to the facility, found what they found, reported it to the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government has taken ownership of that problem and is investigating it. So they did exactly what they should have done.



SEC. RUMSFELD: But I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it.



GEN. PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it."

James Watson does not beat around the bush

In Why Darwin's still a scientific hotshot, James Watson, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, lays out the argument for evolution and then lays it on the line:

"Today, there is a concerted effort by some religion-dominated scientists to treat evolution as a theory, as though that in some way diminishes its authority and power as an explanation of how the world works. Fortunately, the courts are exercising their wisdom and rejecting arguments of equal time for creationist beliefs in schools. We can only hope that a time will soon come when rational, skeptical thought renders the creationists' stories as what they are — myths.

"One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

"Let us not beat about the bush — the common assumption that evolution through natural selection is a "theory" in the same way as string theory is a theory is wrong. Evolution is a law (with several components) that is as well substantiated as any other natural law, whether the law of gravity, the laws of motion or Avogadro's law. Evolution is a fact, disputed only by those who choose to ignore the evidence, put their common sense on hold and believe instead that unchanging knowledge and wisdom can be reached only by revelation."

Liberal National Greatness

What Katrina as exposed for the comfortable is the whole underside of 30 years of destroying the social fabric embodied by government. Shared success, shared sacrifice and shared commitment to the greater good.

Gone.

Two good pieces, an angry one:

Robert Scheer: "Rotten Fruit of the Reagan Revolution"

And a thoughtful one:

New Republic Online: American Idle

John Danforth: Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers

Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers - New York Times:

"But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.

"When, on television, we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube.

"When we see an opportunity to save our neighbors' lives through stem cell research, we believe that it is our duty to pursue that research, and to oppose legislation that would impede us from doing so.

"We think that efforts to haul references of God into the public square, into schools and courthouses, are far more apt to divide Americans than to advance faith.

"Following a Lord who reached out in compassion to all human beings, we oppose amending the Constitution in a way that would humiliate homosexuals.

"For us, living the Love Commandment may be at odds with efforts to encapsulate Christianity in a political agenda. We strongly support the separation of church and state, both because that principle is essential to holding together a diverse country, and because the policies of the state always fall short of the demands of faith. Aware that even our most passionate ventures into politics are efforts to carry the treasure of religion in the earthen vessel of government, we proceed in a spirit of humility lacking in our conservative colleagues. ..."

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant - Weekend Review - Times Online: "Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant"


"As the Religious Right tries to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas, Richard Dawkins speaks up for scientific logic


"Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.

"Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.

"It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it. ..."

Hitchens: Why I'm rooting against the Religious Right

OpinionJournal - Extra:

"I hope and believe that, by identifying itself with 'faith' in general and the Ten Commandments in particular, a runaway element in the Republican leadership has made a career-ending mistake. In support of this, let me quote two authorities:

• The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100%. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. . . . Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some god-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.'
  
• 'Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother.' And he said, 'All these have I kept from my youth up.' Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, 'Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.'

The first citation is from Barry Goldwater, moral founder of the Reagan revolution, who, when I interviewed him on his retirement from the Senate, vowed to 'kick Jerry Falwell in the ass.'

The second citation is from Luke 18:20-22. ...."

OpinionJournal: When Numbers Solve a Mystery

OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts:

"Back in 1999, Mr. Levitt was trying to figure out why crime rates had fallen so dramatically in the previous decade. He was struck by the fact that crime began falling nationwide just 18 years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion. He was struck harder by the fact that in five states crime began falling three years earlier than it did everywhere else. These were exactly the five states that had legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade.

"Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt. ..."

Scientific American.com: Okay, We Give Up -- We feel so ashamed

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Okay, We Give Up -- We feel so ashamed:

"There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

"In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence. ..."

Just when you think you've read it all

From a very professional looking Web site comes Did a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? What about the iridium layer?

The extinction of the dinosaurs is one of the greatest mysteries of secular science. It would not be if people believed the true eye-witness account of Earth’s history recorded in the Bible. This reveals that:

• Land animals (this includes dinosaurs) and man were created on Day 6 about 6,000 years ago—so dinosaurs lived at the same time as people.
• Adam sinned and brought death, disease and bloodshed into the world. Before then, no dinosaur could have died.
• A global Flood occurred about 1,656 years later, wiping out all land animals that breathe though nostrils (that weren’t on the Ark). Thus billions of animals were buried quickly and formed fossils. This is when most dinosaur fossils formed.

One More 'Moral Value': Fighting Poverty

The New York Times > Washington > One More 'Moral Value': Fighting Poverty:

"In Chicago last weekend, Dr. Frenchak joined a gathering of 20 Christians, mostly evangelicals, to produce a book defining moral values to include a focus on poverty. At the meeting, one man held up a Bible from which he had cut every verse that addressed poverty. 'There was hardly anything left,' Dr. Frenchak said. 'He said, 'I challenge anyone in the room to take their Bible and cut out every verse about abortion or gay marriage, and we'll compare Bibles.' '"

GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut

GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut (washingtonpost.com): "Since the election, the e-mails from readers have poured into my mailbox. The common theme from conservatives has been that Nov. 2 was a triumph of values -- embodied by the GOP heartland over the heathens of the coastal elite.

"Typical of the comments was this one from Arizona: 'I do think the Democrat Party is identified -- justifiably -- with much of the vulgarization so prominently displayed by many celebrities, particularly those in the entertainment industry. Hey, we pick our friends.'

"... In my recent Yahoo Political Players interview with Tucker Carlson, the conservative writer and CNN Crossfire co-host asserted that the red/blue divide is rooted in the dismay many Americans perceive in the vast social and cultural changes happening in the country and the fact that the masses of people in middle America blame a distant, coastal elite for fostering those changes.

" 'The people who run the Republican Party are elites just like any other elite, and they don't share the same cultural concerns as the center of the country,' said Carlson. 'They don't -- they're all pro-choice on abortion, they're all pro-gay rights, they're all thrice married, you know what I mean? And they summer in the Hamptons, too. And so they don't have anything in common, that's true, with evangelicals who make up the bulk of their party.' ..."

Reality Based?

The New York Times > Washington > Bush Honors 3 Ex-Officials Instrumental to Iraq Policy: "WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom today to three men who he said had 'made our country more secure and advanced the cause of human liberty': Gen. Tommy R. Franks, George J. Tenet and L. Paul Bremer III."

We have to reach out to these fine people!

Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds (washingtonpost.com):

"TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- On that long-ago day of Alabama's great shame, Gov. George C. Wallace (D) stood in a schoolhouse door and declared that his state's constitution forbade black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.

"He was correct.

"If Wallace could be brought back to life today to reprise his 1963 moment of infamy outside Foster Auditorium, he would still be correct. Alabama voters made sure of that Nov. 2, refusing to approve a constitutional amendment to erase segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for 'white and colored children' and to eliminate references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks. "

Does James Dobson know this?

Guardian Unlimited | Natural defences:

"It all started last year when the US assistant secretary for defence and other senior officials within the Pentagon read In the Blink of an Eye, a book I wrote on the Cambrian explosion. It triggered a series of meetings in Washington and Britain, involving all manner of political and military figureheads, as well as defence analysts, computer programmers, tacticians and statisticians. Their hope was to see what a knowledge of evolution could do for national security. They emerged with a plan to create an extraordinary piece of software. Dubbed the 'Cambrian program', it will take perhaps the broadest overview of the world's social and defence systems, and use evolutionary theory to predict possible threats and outcomes. I and a team of experts at the MoD's defence science and technology laboratory have already begun work on the program in Britain, and a similar consortium is planned at the Pentagon under Tony Tether of the Defence advanced research projects agency (Darpa)."

Bertrand Russell

Elizabeth has been listening to me spouting for weeks. She finally suggested that I read Bertrand Russell (and was shocked that I never had).

This quote is famous: "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

I am in the middle of "Why I Am Not a Christian," which I could not agree with more ....

Hmmm...

The New York Times > Opinion > A Farewell to Dan Rathe):

"To the Editor:

"When I consider the disparate fates of Dan Rather, who broadcast a news story based on documents later discredited and who admitted his mistake, and of President Bush, who initiated a war on the strength of documents also later discredited but who has fought disclosure of the facts and never admitted his mistakes, I'm dismayed that we hold our leaders to standards so much lower than those for our journalists.

"Kevin McNamara
"Houston, Nov. 24, 2004"

"God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

1997 Gallup poll:

Group of adults	God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.	Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation.	Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process.
Everyone	44%	39%	10%

BELIEFS OF THE U.S. PUBLIC ABOUT EVOLUTION: "The Gallup Organizations periodically asks the American public about their beliefs on evolution and creation. They have conducted a poll of U.S. adults in 1982, 1991, 1993 and 1997. By keeping their wording identical, each year's results are comparable to the others."

More Lincoln

Cited in Intolerance Is Not a 'Value' in today's Washington Post: "'Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,' Lincoln wrote in the years leading up to the Civil War. 'As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.' "

He wrote that to Joshua Speed. I have been meaning to do a little study on the Know-Nothings since the campaign heated up.

The Urban Archipelago, It's the Cities, Stupid

The Urban Archipelago, It's the Cities, Stupid., by The Editors of The Stranger (11/11/04):

"It's the Cities, Stupid.

"There are two maps on this page.

"The one at the top should be familiar. It's one of those red-state/blue-state maps that have been tormenting Democrats, liberals, and progressives since November of 2000. Over the 36 days that George W. Bush and Al Gore fought for the White House in Florida, 'red' and 'blue' became metaphors for America's divided electorate. Red vs. Blue--Democrat vs. Republican; liberal vs. conservative; pro-life vs. pro-choice; gun-huggers vs. gun-haters; gay-huggers vs. gay-haters. "

Whose values, cont'd

Reading Lincoln tonight, came across this in a letter to Thurlow Weed, who had apparently complimented Lincoln on his second Inaugural address: "Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

Our new attorney general

From an Atlantic Magazine article in 2003: "A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

"The case of Terry Washington was typical. Gonzales devoted nearly a third of his three-page report on Washington to the gruesome details of the crime. He informed Bush that the victim, Beatrice Huling, was a twenty-nine-year-old restaurant manager, and wrote, 'An autopsy determined she suffered 85 stab wounds, seven of which were fatal, and was eviscerated.' But the summary refers only fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal--his limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas--and presents it as part of a discussion of 'conflicting information' about the condemned man's childhood. (The page containing this discussion is missing from the copy of the summary signed by Bush, raising the possibility that he never actually saw it before authorizing Washington's execution.) Most important, Gonzales failed to mention that Washington's mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence. (Washington did not testify at his trial or his sentencing.)

"Gonzales's lack of attention to Washington's mental retardation is particularly surprising because demand was growing nationwide to ban executions of ththe retarded, and because the most highly publicized case of a retarded defendant, that of Johnny Paul Penry, was even then playing itself out in Texas courts. The miscarriages in the Washington case were also precisely the kind of thing Bush claimed to want to be told about. "I don't believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own," he wrote in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep (1999), "unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair." Such information had indeed come to light in Washington's case, yet Gonzales's memorandum did not tell Bush about it.

"Not only did Gonzales ignore Washington's mental limitations, but he didn't mention that Washington's trial lawyer had failed to enlist a mental-health expert to testify on Washington's behalf (although he was entitled to one under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling), which in a death-penalty case clearly suggests ineffective counsel. Nor did he mention that ineffective counsel and mental retardation were in fact the central issues raised in the thirty-page clemency petition. Gonzales noted only that the petition had been rejected by the Board of Pardons and Paroles, a body that one federal judge condemned in 1998 for its tendency to rule on clemency appeals without any investigation or discussion among its members.

"Gonzales declined to be interviewed for this story, but during the 2000 presidential campaign I asked him if Bush ever read the clemency petitions of death-row inmates, and he equivocated. 'I wouldn't say that was done in every case,' he told me. 'But if we felt there was something he should look at specifically—yes, he did look from time to time at what had been filed.' "

This is (likely) an illegal full-text copy of the password protected original on the Atlantic's site on a conservative blog. The comments afterward are interesting ...

Great Maps

Get the red out

"For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do."

Orwellian statement of the day, from Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo, responding to the terrorism case that a judge threw out, ruling that the Geneva Conventions applied: "'By conferring protected legal status under the Geneva Conventions on members of Al Qaeda, the judge has put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war.' "

I'm not conferring any moral status on these Jihadist barbarians, but the image the Corallo conjures for me is of men in bright red coats, standing dutifully in a line, being picked off by the wily revolutionary guerillas of the colonies. Which, as we were all taught in elementary school, was a brilliant use of asymmetric warfare to confound superior forces. ...

As if there could be 'legitimate' methods of waging war. "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

Corallo is a vicious partisan who, according to CBS, helped convince his former boss, House Speaker Bob Livingston, that he had to pursue the Clinton impeachment because "we have a rapist in the White House."

Here we go!

War: Going poorly
Allies: Abandoning us
Osama: Still filming infomercials
Budget: Deficits threaten dollar and threaten markets for our debt
Priority: Stopping gay marriage

The New York Times > Bush to Seek Gay-Marriage Ban in Second Term, Top Aide Says: " 'If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal, and the ideal
is that marriage ought to be, and should be, a union of a man and a woman,' Bush political aide Karl Rove told 'Fox News Sunday.'
Rove said Bush would 'absolutely' push the Republican-controlled Congress for a constitutional amendment, which he said was needed to avert the aims of 'activist judges' who would permit gay marriages."

Maine's Susan Collins, on "Face the Nation," tries to stem the tide: "The states are perfectly able to handle this important issue on their own."

Bible Values

Slavery: AOK | New Testament, too

Adulterers: Death penalty | Unless she was a slave

Curse Mom or Dad: Death

Rope a doped

There's a scene in "When We Were Kings," the great documentary about the Ali-Foreman fight, in which you see the imposing Foreman working hard on cutting off the ring in preparation for the dancing Ali. The strategy was to keep Ali in one-third of the ring, and let the two-thirds majority of the ring serve as Foreman's partner. And after watching Foreman crush the heavy bag, it seemed like a good strategy.

Except Ali had a different idea. He stayed right where he was. He took Foreman's best shots. And instead of playing into Foreman's strategy, it played into Ali's. After Foreman gave all he had to give, Ali, battered but not at all out, knocked him out.

We got rope-a-doped last Tuesday.

Amen

Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes."

My feelings exactly...

My wife is already channeling her alarm at the situation we find ourselves in by doing things... She stood with the Women in Black Friday in Portland (and will write about it in her column for The Forecaster next week). She bought MoveOn's "50 Ways to Love Your Country" to make sure her next steps are the most effective things she can do with her talents. Etc.

Me, I send raging, grasping emails to friends as I try to sort out what is going on in this country. I have thought about the impact of religion on our culture and values, and about the new litmus test of wearing your spiritual beliefs on your sleeve.

Occasionally, I consider trying to put these complex feelings down on paper and see if I can get it published somewhere. Then someone says exactly what I would say, only much, much better.

Michael Kinsley today in the Washington Post, Am I Blue?:

"So, yes, okay, fine. I'm a terrible person -- barely a person at all, really, and certainly not a real American -- because I voted for the losing candidate on Tuesday. If you insist -- and you do -- I will rethink my fundamental beliefs from scratch because they are shared by only 47 percent of the electorate.

And please let me, or any other liberal, know if there is anything else we can do to abase ourselves. Abandon our core values? Pander to yours? Not a problem. Happy to do it. Anything, anything at all, to stop this shower of helpful advice.

There's just one little request I have. If it's not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don't mind, that is.) It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values -- as deplorable as I'm sure they are -- don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same gender, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?"

More evidence that we are safe from the Emerging Theocracy

Writes Alan Abramowitz in DonkeyRising:

"[T]he evidence from the 2000 and 2004 national exit polls does not support this theory. First, there was almost no difference in reported frequency of church attendance between the voters in 2000 and the voters in 2004. Among voters in the 2000 election, 14 percent reported attending church services more than weekly, 28 percent reported attending every week, 14 percent reported attending a few times a month, 28 percent reported attending a few times a year, and 14 percent reported never attending services. Among voters in the 2004 election, 16 percent reported attending services more than weekly, 26 percent reported attending every week, 14 percent reported attending a few times a month, 28 percent reported attending a few times a year, and 15 percent reported never attending services. While the percentage attending more than weekly rose by 2 points, the percentage attending every week dropped by 2 points and the percentage never attending rose by 1 point.

"More importantly, between 2000 and 2004, President Bush's largest gains occurred among less religious voters, not among more religious voters. Among those attending services more than weekly and those attending every week, support for Bush rose by 1 percent, from 63 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2004. However, among those attending services a few times a month, support for Bush rose by 4 points, from 46 percent to 50 percent, among those attending only a few times a year, support for Bush rose by 3 points, from 42 percent to 45 percent, and among those never attending services, support for Bush rose by 4 points, from 32 percent to 36 percent.

"Bottom line: the President made gains across the board among voters, regardless of their degree of religious commitment but he made his largest gains among less religious voters."

Proportional Electoral Map

As Usual, the Conventional Wisdom is Wrong

Voter turnout: no big deal.
Alan Abramowitz writes in Donkey Rising: "According to an October 24, 2004 press release from the U.S. Census Bureau, the current estimate of the voting age population of the United States is 217.8 million. Thus far, approximately 116 million votes have been tallied in the 2004 presidential election. That amounts to 53.3 percent of the current U.S. voting age population." When all the votes are counted, it may hit 120 million. When you count the nine percent of non-citizens who make up "voting age population," it may get to 58-60 percent. Very high, "but not nearly as high as the 1960s."

Young people don't vote.
The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement reports that 4.6 million more young people voted than in 2000, up 9.3 points. In ten battleground states, turnout was 64 percent, up 13 percentage points.

It's Terrorism, stupid.
A lot of people are looking at the numbers more closely and discounting the impact of "Jesusland." Slate is among those who say that the crazy "Christian" vote was strong in crazy "Christian" areas, but that their issues did not swing states that weren't going that way anyway. It was terrorism that swung the election for Bush.

So now we are back to the old argument: Is Bush making us less safe through his wreckless invasion of Iraq, or is his "kill 'em one at a time" approach the tough action that is needed?

Since we know that Bush supporters are either stupid or willfully suspending disbelief, there is little hope of convincing them that their approach to the rest of the world is making things worse - that's one of those pesky "nuances" that anyone with as many nukes as we have does not need to contemplate. But somehow realizing (remembering) that we are stupid is less dispiriting than discovering we are religious tyrants.

Eight out of Ten ain't bad

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

He's clean on this one.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

"Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) said yesterday that President Bush's aides had applied a double standard by using flag-draped remains in a campaign commercial and then suppressing photos of military caskets returning from Iraq. One of the Bush campaign's first ads included a fleeting shot of firefighters carrying remains through the World Trade Center rubble."

3. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

"I trust that God speaks through me," George W. Bush told Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., July 9, 2004.

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

"U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a renewed assault Sunday [August 15, 2004] on Shiite Muslim militiamen in the southern holy city of Najaf in a risky campaign that was marred from the onset by an outcry from Iraqi politicians and the desertion of dozens of Iraqi troops who refused to fight their countrymen."

5. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

"You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to," Bush said about whether he asked George H.W. Bush for advice about whether to attack Iraq..

6. Thou shalt not kill.

A minumum of 14,238 civilians killed during the military intervention in Iraq, as of November 5.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Ok, so that's Clinton's commandment.

8. Thou shalt not steal.

"Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Too numerous to count. However this one was especially cynical:

"He said that America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves. That's what he said. Think about this. Sen. Kerry's approach to foreign policy would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions."

What Kerry said, in front of Bush, God and Karl Rove, was

"No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you've got to do in a way that passes the test—that passes the global test—where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

Of course, George Bush's outrageous lies during the campaign were dwarfed by those of his toadies, The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which may have been one of the low points in modern campaign history. May God forgive them their egregious sins.

10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

Two words: Iraqi oil.

I'm in!!

You've got to score 67 or higher to be considered for permanent residency in Canada right now. I scored a 72 (wife's master's degree puts me safely above the line!), but I have a feeling that number will be rising.

CIC Canada | Skilled Workers: Will You Qualify as a Skilled Worker?

"The Canadian immigration Web site had 179,000 visitors Wednesday—six times its usual traffic—the vast majority of which came from the United States," write Dalia and Alex Lithwick in Slate.

Moderate Republicans have not yet received the message Arlen got: Butt out

From Guardian Unlimited's Religious right relishes chance to push agenda:

"But a leading moderate Republican told the Guardian yesterday the tactic could prove self-destructive if pushed further. 'If Bush deliberately or inadvertently appoints enough judges to overturn Roe v Wade, the worst-case scenario is that it's the beginning of the end of the Republican party,' said Jennifer Blei Stockman, co-chair of the Republican Majority for Choice. 'It wouldn't be long before the outrage would spill into the voting booth, and it would only be a matter of time before the Democratic party ascends to power that will last for a long time.'

"In pandering to evangelical conservatives, Ms Stockman said, Republican strategists had 'been feeding a monster who now has the party by its tail'. At least 75% of Bush voters do not consider themselves evangelicals, she said. 'The keynote speakers at the Republican convention were all 'pro-choice' moderates, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Rudy Giuliani to [New York governor] George Pataki. Was that just a masquerade or was something of substance communicated?' "

It could be worse - you could be a citizen of Iraq

Warplane Strafes a School in New Jersey:

"It sounded like somebody running across the roof of the elementary school in a New Jersey township Wednesday night, said the cleaning woman who called the police. No prowler was found. But yesterday, what had seemed a minor item in a police blotter touched off state and federal military investigations after it was disclosed that an F-16 warplane had strafed the school with cannon fire.

"The Air National Guard warplane, flying a night training mission out of Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, fired a burst of 27 rounds from its 20-millimeter cannon shortly before 10:15 p.m. as it streaked over Little Egg Harbor Township, 20 miles north of Atlantic City, New Jersey military officials said last night.

"Col. Brian Webster, commander of the 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard, said that the pilot, who was not identified, fired the cannon inadvertently just as he turned into a dive to strafe a target at the Warren Grove firing range in Ocean County, a sprawling military reservation in the Pine Barrens that has been used for bombing and strafing practice since World War II.

"The pilot was to have fired the half-second burst of shells well into the dive, at about 5,000 feet, the colonel said, but instead the cannon went off at an altitude of 7,000 feet, and at least eight of the bullets - non-explosive lead slugs more than 2 inches long - crashed through the roof of Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School, three miles south of the target range. No one was hurt, and the damage was minor."

The Stern and Sad Truth Spoken ...

Josh Marshall points out that we will be living in a parliamentary democracy: Bush controls the government and party discipline will be swift and severe. He cites Arlen Specter's effusive apology for suggesting that he would be watching judicial appointments closely as an example of what we will see in coming years. Arlen got the word: Play ball or be even less relevant that Congress already is.

He writes: "And that means approaching most legislative battles not with an eye toward preventing passage or significantly altering legislation, but placing alternatives on the table that the party will be able use as contrasts to frame the next two elections. In other words, their only remaining viable alternative is to be an actual party of opposition."

For a lesson in this, see Newt Gingrich, ca. 1993.

Canada 2.0

Secession has actually crossed my mind. I'm not prepared to "reach out" to Red America (which as near as I can tell requires loathing my (gay) neighbor, shooting something and speaking with Jesus at least four times daily), so why not start a movement to split.

Of course George Bush controls one hell of an arsenal, and we know he'd rather use that than powers of persuasion to solve a tough problem. We need to enlist another country's help. Mena Trott (one of the people behind TypePad, which has fueled the blogging revolution) writes in Canada 2.0: "You'll be hearing a lot of 'I'm moving to...' the next couple days. Well, I'm not moving anywhere. I'm staying put. The borders? Well, that's another story."

That French villa that was looking pretty good ...

Electing to Leave (Harpers.org):

"So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options.

"Renouncing your citizenship

"Given how much the United States as a nation professes to value freedom, your freedom to opt out of the nation itself is surprisingly limited. "

He doesn't speak for us

At the bottom of Robert Wright's nice piece in Slate, Why Americans Hate Democrats: A Dialogue - Moralize, liberally, he writes: "P.S.: I suspect liberal bloggers may organize multicity demonstrations on Inauguration Day. If so, my advice is to make the demonstrations thematically simple and hence broadly inclusive. The basic message, chanted again and again, should be along the lines of: 'He doesn't speak for us.' That's something lots of us can agree on, and something the world should hear. "

I for one would be thrilled to be a part of something like that. Not one of those anti-Globalization extreme-a-thons, but something more along the lines of the Women In Black (one of which is held at noon to 1 p.m. every Friday at the lobsterman statue on Middle and Temple, and which my wife plans to join tomorrow) would be great. Sane. Measured. Firm.

Whose values?

Anti-tax
Red States gorge at the trough.
The Tax Foundation's winners

Federal money received for each $1 sent in taxes:

1. D.C. ($6.17)
2. North Dakota ($2.03)
3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)

Family values
The highest divorce rates are in the Bible Belt
Selected divorce rates in the United States:
Lowest divorce rate in the United States: Massachusetts 2.4/1,000
Texas: 4.1/1,000

From the Boston Globe a few days ago: "The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that 'the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.'

"The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.

"By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. "

Hard work
Blue state states dominate the more productive half of the Gross State Product per head rankings.

Gross State Product/Head

1 District of Columbia $99,133 2 Delaware $45,328 3 Connecticut $43,470 4 Alaska $40,482 5 Massachusetts $38,951 6 New York $38,876 7 New Jersey $38,761 8 Nevada $36,562 9 Colorado $35,306 10 Illinois $35,049 11 New Hampshire $34,580 12 California $34,247 13 Minnesota $34,175 14 Wyoming $34,055 15 Washington $33,514 16 Virginia $33,368 17 Georgia $33,224 18 Hawaii $33,001 19 Texas $32,456 20 Maryland $31,801 21 Oregon $31,360 22 North Carolina $31,145 23 Nebraska $30,906 24 Ohio $30,749 25 Rhode Island $30,636 26 Pennsylvania $30,221

Source: Demographia

The End of Enlightenment

Difficult times ahead. The realization that the president was elected by virtue of his "moral values" is a shock to the system.

His supporters believe that Saddam had WMD and that Saddam collaborated with Al Qaeda. Now comes the news that they believe that gay marriage and abortion are graver threats than Islamic Jihad, a job or a budget that threatens our economic security.

More than 80 percent of the people in the city that Al Qaeda attacked voted for John Kerry. In the "heartland" they are more concerned that their neighbors may be Bruce and Will and their exquisitely cultivated garden than that their sons are being sent off to fight Osama and Mohammed.

Fortunately, there are professionals out there who can write it better than I can.

First, the rational view from Garry Wills in The New York Times >The Day the Enlightenment Went Out: "Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution. This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier)."

The slightly more emotional view from Thomas L. Friedman in Two Nations Under God: "At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly that happened because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly because Mr. Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president. I felt as if I registered to vote, but when I showed up the Constitutional Convention broke out."

The Neocons are already busily rewriting the history of the Enlightenment. Gertrude Himmelfarb's interesting "The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments" begins to paint it as more of a religious movement in Britain and America than it was in France. That religious aspect made it more humane, tolerant and practical.

I was prepared to accept that before yesterday morning. Now I feel that the enlightened are the tolerated. we may soon be fighting for equal time for evolution in our public schools.

I need Dr. Thompson to weigh in. He took the optimistic view Tuesday.

Count Everyone's Vote

It looks bad for those of us the red states presume want to promote promiscuity and deviance, use drugs and avoid work, but there is one thing I hope our Godless leaders do in the days ahead: Frame the debate.

We are only insisting that everyone's vote is counted. This ain't a football game and it ain't over when the clock runs out. This is baseball. It ain't over until the last out.

I know that there's two outs in the ninth, nobody on base, we're looking at an 0-2 count and we're down about 22 runs.

But it ain't over until everyone's vote is counted.

Exit polls: 7:28 EST

Updated Late Afternoon Numbers - Mucho flattering to Kerry; plus Nader makes an appearance. By Jack�Shafer:
"Florida
Kerry 51
Bush 49

Ohio
Kerry 51
Bush 49

Michigan
Kerry 52
Bush 46
Nader 1

Pennsylvania
Kerry 53
Bush 46

Iowa
Kerry 50
Bush 49

Wisconsin
Kerry 51
Bush 48
Nader 1

Minnesota
Kerry 52
Bush 46
Nader 2

New Hampshire
Kerry 54
Bush 44
Nader 1

New Mexico
Kerry 50
Bush 48
Nader 1

Colorado
Kerry 49
Bush 50
Nader 1

Arkansas
Kerry 45
Bush 54
Nader 1

Missouri
Kerry 47
Bush 52

New York
Kerry 62
Bush 36
Nader 2

Nevada
Kerry 49
Bush 48
Nader 1

New Jersey
Kerry 54
Bush 44
Nader 1

West Virginia
Kerry 45
Bush 54
Nader 1"

Turnout predictions

I never believe the conventional wisdom, so I will be eager to see what turnout approaches. (The BBC announcer on NPR just said that despite all anecdotal evidence, there is no real evidence yet that turnout is higher.)

Kentucky has a very cool Web site that is showing the results for the Jim Bunning senate race in real time.

It shows the total number of registered voters, the total number of precincts reporting and the total number of votes cast.

Calculating a simple proportion at 7:30:

45.9 % precincts reporting
26.2 % registered voters voted

= 57.1% turnout.

Not bad for a non-battleground state (although they have to be in some of Ohio's media market, so there must have been some collateral damage.)

Interestingly, the turnout rate has improved as the night goes on, and Daniel Mongiardo's lead has dropped as the turnout rate has increased.

Don't discount the ability of Republicans to get out the vote.

electionresults.ky.gov - U.S. SENATE Results

6 p.m. exits, reported on Kos

Daily Kos: 6 p.m. Exits:
"Kerry Bush
PA 53 46
FL 51 49
NC 48 52
OH 51 49
MO 46 54
AK 47 53
MI 51 47
NM 50 49
LA 43 56
CO 48 51
AZ 45 55
MN 54 44
WI 52 47
IA 49 49 "

Zogby calls it for Kerry at 5 pm

Zogby says Kerry, 311-213

Dead men

Republicans like to raise the specter of dead people voting. For some reason, they seem to think it happens in predominately black precincts.

If you wanted to register dead people, I might suggest the names Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

Oberlin Votes: "Ohio Registration Drive Counters Accusation of Voter Fraud

"OBERLIN, Ohio, Nov. 1 - Oberlin Votes, a non-partisan voter registration effort, has evidence disproving allegations of fraud made by Robert Rousseau, Lorain County Republican Party Chairman, and member of the Lorain County Board of Elections.

"Juanita Smith, who was declared to be a dead registrant, is very much alive. Last week an Ohio newspaper reported that 'Juanita Smith died more than four years ago, but somehow a voter registration card with her name on it showed up at the Lorain County Board of Elections office this year.' (Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, 10/23/2004 Link 1, below) However, Ms. Smith is quite well. 'When I read that article saying I was dead,' Ms. Smith recounted, 'I said to myself, 'I'd better go find my voter card.' ' Smith, who is the secretary at a local church, has been registered to vote since 1978. "

Prediction

I'm big on jinxes, so I hesitate to post this. But here it goes:

I've been following the state polls somewhat obsessively. Kerry's had some momentum, but it seems to have slowed right as he draws even (in the national numbers) in the last day or so.

Here's my prediction: I think the difference will be large enough tomorrow that we won't have a drawn-out fight about who won. That sliver of undecideds will break one way, and all the close states will tumble in that candidate's direction, making for a sizable electoral college victory.

There is considerable history that suggests undecideds break for the challenger. I'm not sure if I'm buying that this year. It may be that people who think that W. has screwed just about everything up (budget, Iraq) but think he's stronger on terror (as most do) fall in line with him, despite their objections to every other aspect of his presidency. (Listening to WBZ coming back from Boston yesterday, Bush owned all the commercial air time and every spot - every one - was a variation on the theme "terrorists will kill you if you don't vote Bush." That's the only area where he has a clear polling advantage over Kerry, and he is hitting it hard.)

There is considerable polling data in this election that shows that independents - whom Gore lost despite his slight victory in total votes - are strongly for Kerry. I believe in nearly every election, the winner has caried the Independents. (Don't have a cite handy for that, though - could be wrong.)

There is some evidence that more Republicans are "staying home" and sticking with their candidate than Democrats (even though overwhelming majorities of both parties are backing their guy), but Dems typically comprise about 4% more of the electorate than Republicans. This is also offset by the plurality Kerry seems to have among independents.

Because Republicans have been the minority party (in sheer numbers) for a lot longer, they are far better at identifying their supporters and turning them out. Thus, I hold no great hope that the massive GOTV efforts by the liberal 527s will make the biggest difference. However, most peripheral voters (or "ringers" as one Ohio GOP muckamuck referred to them) identify with Democrats. So if the 527s are as good as the GOP, that's a net plus for Dems.

Looks like rain in Florida (although mainly in the panhandle, GOP turf) and all of Ohio today. Lower turnout favors Republicans. However, lots of buzz in the black social networks about the voter registration challenges in inner cities in Ohio and elsewhere, and regardless of whether they are justified, that could motivate black voters to do whatever they can to get counted. The NAACP announcing a few days ago that the IRS is investigating it doesn't hurt. (Stories of folks waiting five hours in the sun to vote early in Florida anecdotally suggest a strong motivation.)

Most polls show that Kerry is leading among early voters, but there is no telling whether that indicates anything about the trend for the electorate as a whole, or even about the GOTV efforts of either side.

Assuming both sides do a good job of getting out their voters, it's going to be the way those undecideds break that makes the difference tomorrow.

Based on the latest tracking poll, Fox's, which uses the last two days rather than the other major tracker's previous three days, and which shows a 48-45 Kerry edge (up from 47-45 yesterday), I'll say that that poll suggests the undecideds are breaking in their historic pattern - toward the challenger - and that that pattern will be followed in the close states. Kerry takes Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania but drops Wisconsin. Roughly 290-300 electoral votes, with the over/under depending on what happens in NH and HI.

Further, Republicans hold a narrow edge in the Senate as Bunning barely teeters across the line, maintain a safe majority in the House, and the attempt to crush Kerry like a bug immediately begins ...

Family values

Boston Globe / Walking the walk on family values:

"By William V. D'Antonio | October 31, 2004

"PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference to 'Massachusetts liberals' as if they were referring to people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time to do some research on these people, and here is what I found.

"The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.

"But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates."

Walking the dog

Took the dog for a walk tonight. Found myself drawn toward our polling place for tomorrow, about a half mile away. Hoping to get down there with the kid tomorrow morning, but she won't be able to take the long wait and wouldn't make it to school on time anyway. Mainers turn out to vote.

There's a sign up already warning party workers about cell phones or pagers in the polling place. Just standing there sent a chill, and my eyes even welled a bit. I don't vote early. Standing in line with your neighbors is part of the ritual. My vote counts the same as theirs. Or Bill Gates'.

Just as I'm standing outside the entrance in the darkness, "No Surrender" comes on the iPod. Now that's not a total coincidence - I've been listening a lot lately to the version from Live/1975-85, the one that sounds the way Bruce played it in Madison the other day.

As I walked back home, along the Mill Cove in Portland Harbor, my mind wandered back to the days after 9/11, when the Coast Guard was a constant presence in the water and the police cars prowled the waterline. The song that was playing in my head then was one that Dean Stephen Foote selected for the noon service at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke on Friday, September 14: God of Grace and God of Glory.

God of grace and God of glory,
On Thy people pour Thy power.
Crown Thine ancient church’s story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour,
For the facing of this hour.

Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,
Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
From the fears that long have bound us,
Free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the living of these days,
For the living of these days.

Cure Thy children’s warring madness,
Bend our pride to Thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.

Set our feet on lofty places,
Gird our lives that they may be,
Armored with all Christ-like graces,
In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
That we fail not man nor Thee,
That we fail not man nor Thee.

Save us from weak resignation,
To the evils we deplore.
Let the search for Thy salvation,
Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee Whom we adore,
Serving Thee Whom we adore.

I snapped out of that reverie when Bruce kicked in again, this time with The Promised Land:

I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start

The dogs on Main Street howl
'cause they understand
If I could wrench one moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land

Moral eqivalence

Wearing the wrong t-shirt at a political rally? Pertinent quotes from ABC News: Campaigns Rally Against Wrong T-Shirts:

Bushie: "Hey folks, it's a private event," he said. "Can you find your way to the nearest exit? Maybe some law enforcement can help?"

Kerryite: "We hold the right to remove you, but other than that, enjoy and hopefully at the end of the event you'll want to wear a Kerry T-shirt," he said.

Some evangelicals leaving the farm

LA Times | Conflicted Evangelicals Could Cost Bush Votes: "BROOKFIELD, Wis. � With their ardent, Bible-based opposition to abortion and gay marriage, evangelical Christians are a key target of the massive Republican get-out-the-vote drive heading into next week's election. Party leaders consider conservative Christians to be as near a lock for President Bush as any group can be.

"But GOP strategists might want to have a chat with Tim Moore, an evangelical who teaches civics at a traditional Christian school near Milwaukee. He shares Bush's religious convictions, but says the president has lost his vote because of tax cuts for the wealthy and the administration's shifting rationales for invading Iraq.

"'There's no way I'm going for Bush. That much I know,' said Moore, 46. He remains undecided between Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and a third-party candidate."

No More Auction Block

From Talking Points Memo, a correspondent writes to Josh:

"At today’s early vote in the College Hill district of East Tampa -- a heavily democratic, 90% African American community — we had 879 voters wait an average of five hours to cast their vote. People were there until four hours after they closed (as long as they’re in line by 5, they can vote).

"Here’s what was so moving:

"We hardly lost anyone. People stood outside for an hour, in the blazing sun, then inside for another four hours as the line snaked around the library, slowly inching forward. It made Disneyland look like speed-walking. Some waited 6 hours. To cast one vote. And EVERYBODY felt that it was crucial, that their vote was important, and that they were important."

Brutal

George W. Bush : Mistaken

Brits investigating Halliburton bribery charges

Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | Cheney oil firm faces UK inquiry: "British authorities have opened a new front in the widening investigation into allegations of bribery at Halliburton, the American oil services business, while it was being run by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney.

"The Guardian has learned that the Serious Fraud Office has joined the international effort at the request of the US Department of Justice in Washington. French and Nigerian officials are already involved in the inquiry.
Halliburton has become a political liability for the Bush administration as the US prepares to vote in presidential elections next week."

Dr. Thompson weighs in

I've actually been reading Hunter's latest book, "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness", as a diversion in recent days, and his outrage is infectious.

He weighs in in Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004 in the latest Rolling Stone:

"Indeed. the numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election. The time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics. That's exactly what the debates did. John Kerry looked like a winner, and it energized his troops. Voting for Kerry is beginning to look like very serious fun for everybody except poor George, who now suddenly looks like a loser.

"That is fatal in a presidential election.

"I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional gambler, especially when I'm betting real money on the outcome. Contrary to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with five points as a recommended risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about forty-six percent, plus five points for owning the U.S. Supreme Court -- which seemed to equal fifty-one percent. Nobody really believed that, but George W. Bush moved into the White House anyway.

"It was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany. Karl Rove is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked, for a while, and it was sure as hell fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of oil, the whole world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal biphetamine and stay awake for eight or nine days in a row with his maps & his bombers & his dope-addled general staff."

Blacks and Bush

Bush's African-American support appears to have doubled, according to one poll, but most others show it to be right where it was in 2000. See The Emerging Democratic Majority WebLog - DonkeyRising for details:

"But how credible is their 18 percent figure? Not very, in my view. Or in the view of Cornell Belcher, a pollster who focuses on African-Americans, who, according to the Times story:
said his surveys in battleground states showed Mr. Bush in single digits. Nationally, Mr. Belcher said, he has found only 10 percent of blacks approve even 'somewhat' of Mr. Bush's job performance, while 89 percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

"So who's right? I think Belcher is. The overwhelming evidence from public polls is that Bush's support among blacks is running very close to where it was in 2000 and not even in shouting distance of the Joint Center's 18 percent figure. Consider these data ..."

What they say, what they do

This race is tight and it is still Bush's to lose, but the trends are not good for Bush and his actions show it.

• For weeks, he has been hammering away at Kerry personally. This is a sign that he has to wear Kerry's support down because he can't get his numbers any higher.
• He has left Ohio and he is staying out of New Hampshire.
• The news on Iraq - including things that are months old but have been suppressed, keeps coming out.

In "Is New Hampshire slipping to Kerry?" the Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant writes: "Truth be told, GOP politicians believe Bush is not his own best supporter down the stretch. The guy who campaigned four years ago as a uniter is clearly a divider this year, and in several of the most closely contested states he is being kept away because his appearances tend to gin up the local Democrats as much as they do Republicans. In the so-called Red states Bush carried in 2000 that he is most in danger of losing to Kerry -- New Hampshire, Ohio, and Nevada most prominently -- Bush's absences since the debates have been noteworthy. There are exceptions (Florida, above all), but the pattern has been clear, as witness recent forays into longshot and Kerry-leaning territories like New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

"Bush campaign officials believe his relentlessly negative advertising against Kerry as a terrorist coddler and weakling are much more effective than the man himself. Bush will be back one more time to rally the troops, but during the final persuasion period, he has been absent. The campaign also prefers surrogates, especially those who can soften Bush's ideological image.

"That was what was going on in this postcard-perfect New England town the other day when Laura Bush stopped by to be photographed inspecting the local pumpkins with daughter Jenna in Londonderry and hold minirallies. She spoke quietly and far more effectively than her husband does, about choices in the war on terror.

"The Democrats, however, had a more-than-matching spectacle of their own down the street. Actor Paul Newman showed up to support local environmentalists and others opposing via a lawsuit the operation of an incinerator that can burn used wood products containing lead. With his trademark baby blues a hat with an 'Old Guys Rule' logo, Newman declared that the largest lead-pollution emitter in the state is 'a microcosm of the insult that this administration has heaped upon the environment.' My hunch is that Bush is better helped by soft sells to go with his harsh TV commercials and that high-profile surrogates vetting an environmental issue do more for Kerry here than he can do for himself with insult-a-day campaigning.

"If New Hampshire is on the verge of slipping away from Bush -- and his people are slightly less optimistic than Kerry's -- the reason is that moderate voters in the state's suburban southern tier and along the seacoast, especially women, have begun to slip away.

"Terrorism and fear of Kerry is the president's sole remaining card."

Power of the Blogosphere

A two-year old story - that Bin Laden escaped in Tora Bora - is the second-most viewed news article in the Washington Post's Nation section.

It has been linked to by many blogs lately as Bush-Cheney disputes Kerry's assertion that we bungled that one.

No Honor: More Geneva Conventions Violated

Memo Lets CIA Take Detainees Out of Iraq (washingtonpost.com): "At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation -- a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions.

"One intelligence official familiar with the operation said the CIA has used the March draft memo as legal support for secretly transporting as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq in the last six months. The agency has concealed the detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other authorities, the official said. "

100 Reasons

When I started this blog, the idea was to just collect the incontrovertible evidence that W. was one of the worst presidents ever ... The list may be from a partisan source, but The Nation's 100 Facts and 1 Opinion does what I had intended to do.

My favorite:

"24. The Bush Administration granted the 9/11 Commission $3 million to investigate the September 11 attacks and $50 million to the commission that investigated the Columbia space shuttle crash."

GOP suggests internal polling not good for their man

From Candidates Hit Key States With Election Still a Tossup (washingtonpost.com):

"GOP officials who talked to Bush-Cheney campaign leaders said the leaders have grown more worried about Ohio, Florida and other key states where Bush lacks a lead with just 10 days until the election. A poll by Ohio University's Scripps Survey Research Center, completed Thursday night, found Kerry leading 49 percent to 43 percent among registered voters, with a margin of error of five percentage points. ...

"One Republican official described the mood at the top of the campaign as apprehensive. ' 'Grim' is too strong,' the official said. 'If we feel this way a week from now, that will be grim.' ...

"The Republican official said polling for Bush showed him in a weaker position than some published polls have indicated, both nationally and in battlegrounds. In many of the key states, the official said, Bush is below 50 percent, and he is ahead or behind within the margin of sampling error -- a statistical tie.

" 'There's just no place where they're polling outside the margin of error so they can say, 'We have this state,' ' the official said. 'And they know that an incumbent needs to be outside the margin of error.' "

Reality-based

Ever wonder how a guy can turn a $3 trillion projected surplus into a $5 trillion projected deficit, get attcked by crazy Islamists on his watch, invade a country based on bogus reasons, and completely screw up the war, and still be a viable candidate for president?

Here's why. Bush supporters believe:

On Iraq and WMD:

• 46 % believe Saddam had WMD
• 25 % believe Saddam has an active WMD program
• 56 % believe most experts agree that Iraq had a WMD program
• 57 % assume that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program

On Saddam and OBL:

• 75 % believe Iraq was providing major support to Al Qaeda
• 63 % believe clear evidence of this support has been found
• 60 % believe this is the concludion of most experts
• 55 % believe this is the conclusion of the 9/11 commission

On other issues:

• 69 % believe Bush supports the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
• 72 % believe Bush supports the land mine ban
• 51 % believe he supports the Kyoto treaty
• 74 % believe he supports including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements

Source: The PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll: The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters.

"The primary poll was conducted October 12-18 with 968 respondents, but the analysis also included polls ... conducted September 3-7 and September 8-12, with 798 and 959 respondents, respectively. Margins of error ranged from 3.2-4%."

"A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience."

--Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1770

Cheney's 'Garbage"

U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight (washingtonpost.com): "The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

"Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December. "

GOPers in the Twilight Zone

The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters

The good news is, most people think that it would have been wrong to go to war if Iraq did not have WMD.

The bad news is that if you are Republican, you think he had them. Even now.

December surprise

The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket: "It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

" 'It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed,' an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that 'the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.'

"When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. 'We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report,' she said. 'We are very concerned.'

"According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been 'stalled.' First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.

"The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.

" 'What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that,' said the intelligence official. 'The report found very senior-level officials responsible.' "

'We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory.'

KR Washington Bureau | 10/17/2004 | Post-war planning non-existent: "WASHINGTON - In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

"Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

"The slide said: 'To Be Provided.'

"A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

"In fact, some senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003. Instead, more than a year later, 138,000 U.S. troops are still fighting terrorists who slip easily across Iraq's long borders, diehards from the old regime and Iraqis angered by their country's widespread crime and unemployment and America's sometimes heavy boots.

"'We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory,' said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy."

Frank Luntz: It's time for Bush to get worried

GOP pollster Frank Luntz says that it's time for Bush to get worried...

Another conservative strays ...

The New Republic Online: Conscientious Objector: "It's not simply a matter of outrageous spending or enlarged government programs--both offenses of which this administration is guilty, as manifested in a 25 percent domestic discretionary spending hike, a half-trillion-dollar Medicare expansion, and the ripping away of free-market agricultural reforms enacted over the past decade. The president continues to pursue tax cuts, as any conservative president would. But a government that cuts taxes and continues to spend ultimately becomes as amoral as one that raises taxes and spends.

"Yet the Bush administration's free-spending fiscal record only hints at its larger rejection of conservative principles. The more fundamental betrayal arises from the administration's central focus: an ill-defined 'war on terror' that has no determinable endpoint and that is used to justify an unprecedented expansion of executive power. To make matters worse, this administration shows little inclination to demand accountability from those who serve within it. In turn, the Republican Congress--ignoring its 1994 vow to 'restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives'--appears disinclined to check the powers of the executive. Together, these factors endanger the long-term health of the republic.

"It is a good thing Bush has an idealistic streak that informs his vision of the world. That idealism leads him to a belief that 'freedom is not America's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world.' But, without demanding accountability from his administration, that messianic zeal is being corrupted, and his policies are lurching out of control. Without a defined, limited overall vision of the war on terrorism and a corresponding commitment to government accountability, Bush can hardly claim to be the champion of "conservative values."

Clean sweep

The Emerging Democratic Majority WebLog - DonkeyRising: "It's a Beautiful Thing
....to look at all the basic results from all the debates all in one place. Kos thoughtfully organized these data and posted them over at the Daily Kos but I couldn't resist putting them up here as well. So, feast your eyes on these numbers--as the data show, Kerry won every single poll after all three debates and consistently did even better among uncommitted voters and independents. That's got to put a spring in your step as we move into the last weeks of the campaign."

CNN/Gallup chime in, too

CNN-Gallup: 52-39, Kerry

Insta-polls: Kerry win

Kos has the insta-polls: CBS has it Kerry 39-25; CNN panel went 10 Kerry, 7 Bush, 7 undecided; ABC had it 42-42 Kerry, but in a sample that was 38-30-28 GOP-Dem-Ind. That's a pretty remarkable number for being down 8 in the party registration column...

What's the frequency, GWB?

Salon.com News | Technical expert: Bush was wired: " Speculation continues to run wild about President Bush's mystery bulge. Since Friday, when Salon first raised questions about the rectangular bulge that was visible under Bush's suit coat during the presidential debates, many observers in the press and on the Internet have wondered aloud whether the verbally and factually challenged president might be receiving coaching via a hidden electronic device.

"Now a technical expert who designs and makes such devices for the U.S. military tells Salon that he believes the bulge is indeed a transceiver designed to receive electronic signals and transmit them to a hidden earpiece lodged in Bush's ear canal. "

The Boss has it right

Rolling Stone for this citation, but the Boss has said this repeatedly on the ACT tour:

"'There was no imminent danger. Saddam Hussein didn't have anything to do with 9-11.' Springsteen said, 'If you mislead the country ... you lose your job. It's not rocket science.'"

Independents on the second debate: Kerry by a mile

Political Wire: A Second Look at the Second Debate: "Here's who independents thought was the winner:

• Gallup: Kerry 53, Bush 37
  
• ABC News: Kerry 44, Bush 34
  
• Democracy Corps: Kerry 44, Bush 33"

700+ professors of politics and international relations: Bush foreign policy needs a "fundamental reassessment"

Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy - Open Letter: "An Open Letter to the American People:
We, a nonpartisan group of foreign affairs specialists, have joined together to call urgently for a change of course in American foreign and national security policy. We judge that the current American policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period, one which harms the cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists. ..."

They both lie. Bush lies are worse.

The Washington Monthly: "BUSH LIES MORE THAN KERRY....FILM AT 11....Here's a poser: do both candidates rely on deceit and distortion equally? Debate fact checking articles don't usually take sides on this question, but ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin does, telling his reporters in an internal memo last week that 'the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.' ... The details are all below the fold, but here are the results: Bush: 18 lies, total score of 118;
Kerry: 10 lies, total score of 60. Perhaps more important than the total score, though, is the number of serious lies. Bush had 7 serious lies (those with a score of 9 or above) while Kerry had only one. In other words, Bush rather clearly lied more than Kerry and lied more seriously than Kerry."

State of the Race - Kerry strong where it matters

While many people focus on the national horserace, DonkeyRising keeps its eye on the ball: How Kerry's doing among undecideds and in the swing states.

Some idea:

• Bush is at the crucial "under 50" number - 49 - nationally. More important, he's at 47 in the swing states
  
• First debate results among uncommitted voters: Kerry 43-28 (CBS); by 20 among independents (ABC); undecideds by 31 (Democracy Corps). When the results settled in, Kerry was judged the winner 57-25 by Gallup and 61-19 in Newsweek.
  
• Kerry won the second debate by smaller margins, but took the independents and undecideds by larger margins. And the latest Gallup had Kerry winning the second by 15 points - up from 2 on the night of the debate.

Lots more good stuff here ...

Concern for life ends at birth ...

The New York Times > Religion: Group of Bishops Using Influence to Oppose Kerry

"For Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate in Colorado, a swing state, there is only one way for a faithful Catholic to vote in this presidential election, for President Bush and against Senator John Kerry.

"'The church says abortion is a foundational issue,'' the archbishop explained to a group of Catholic college students gathered in a sports bar here on Friday night. He stopped short of telling them whom to vote for, but he reminded them of Mr. Kerry's support for abortion rights.
"He did not explicitly endorse Mr. Bush, but pointed out the potential impact his re-election could have on Roe v. Wade.

" 'Supreme Court cases can be overturned, right?' he asked.
Archbishop Chaput, who has never explicitly endorsed a candidate, is part of a group of bishops intent on throwing the weight of the church into the elections.

"Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and alarmed at the prospect of a president who, like Mr. Kerry, is a Catholic and supports abortion rights, these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate as among a handful of 'non-negotiable issues.'

"To the dismay of liberal Catholics and some other bishops, traditional church concerns about the death penalty or war are often not mentioned. "

Challenging Rest of the World With a New Order

The New York Times > The Issues: Challenging Rest of the World With a New Order

"Jorge Castaneda, Mexico's former foreign minister, has two distinct images of George W. Bush: the charmer intent on reinventing Mexican-American ties and the chastiser impatient with Mexico as the promise of a new relationship soured.

"The change came with the Sept. 11 attacks. 'My sense is that Bush lost and never regained the gift he had shown for making you feel at ease,' said Mr. Castaneda, who left office last year. 'He became aloof, brusque, and on occasion abrasive.'

"The brusqueness had a clear message: the United States is at war, it needs everybody's support and that support is not negotiable. Mexico's hesitant stance at the United Nations on the war in Iraq became a source of tension. Yet Mr. Castaneda said, 'I was never asked, 'What is it you need in order to be more cooperative with us? What can we do to help?' '

"It is a characterization of Mr. Bush's foreign policy style often heard around the world: bullying, unreceptive, brazen. The result, critics of this administration contend, has been a disastrous loss of international support, damage to American credibility, the sullying of America's image and a devastating war that has already taken more than 1,000 American lives. In the first presidential debate, Senator John Kerry argued that only with a change of presidents could the damage be undone."

Josh Marshall: Maine GOP operative may have been involved in illegal phone-jamming dirty trick

Josh Marshall reports that Jim Tobin has been implicated in the phone-jamming of NH Deomocratic get-out-the-vote efforts.

Two Republicans have already pleaded guilty in the crime -- hiring an Idaho company to knock out the Democrats' phones -- and the investigation is continuing. Tobin is active in the Bush-Cheney campaign.

The whole episode might seem to be fading back into history were it not for
the fact that a motion filed Friday in US District Court in Concord claims
that a key player in the felonious scheme was none other than the man who
now serves as the New England Chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004.

The Democrats' motion and associated news stories (PDF)

Gaming the system and gaming George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld

Boston.com: Study ties Hussein, guerrilla strategy
US may have played into plans, report says

WASHINGTON -- The ''shock and awe' attack that toppled Saddam Hussein in three weeks is often touted as a brilliant strategy that defeated Iraq with relatively few US casualties. But new information suggests that the United States may have played into Hussein's plans for a quick war followed by a long guerrilla insurgency.

The report last week of the Iraq Survey Group, based partly on interviews with captured leaders of the secretive Iraqi regime, said Hussein planned to have his troops and loyalists pull back after an initial US thrust and engage the Americans under terms more favorable to the Iraqis.

The quick fall of Baghdad was once seen as vindication of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's belief in the power of smaller numbers of fast-moving troops. But recently, even President Bush has conceded that the early victory of the US-led coalition helped lay the groundwork for an insurgency that has claimed the lives of 929 US troops since the end of major combat on May 1, 2003.

Bush portrayed the insurgency as an accidental consequence of a war plan that worked too well. Last week, however, the Iraqi survey report declared a guerrilla insurgency is exactly what Hussein envisioned. The Iraq Survey Group, a 1,500-member team created by the director of the CIA to search for weapons of mass destruction, has been on the ground in Iraq since the toppling of Hussein's regime.

George Bush bedrock principle: Can't have politicians making military decisions

Frequently when discussing his view of the Vietnam war, Bush complains that the major lesson was that “we had politicians making military decisions.” (See this MSNBC report from last year for some quick documentary evidence of this.)

Well, as has been obvious for some time, the LA Times reports today that "Major Assaults on Hold Until After U.S. Vote"

The Bush administration plans to delay major assaults on rebel-held cities in Iraq until after U.S. elections in November, say administration officials, mindful that large-scale military offensives could affect the U.S. presidential race.

Although American commanders in Iraq have been buoyed by recent successes in insurgent-held towns such as Samarra and Tall Afar, administration and Pentagon officials say they will not try to retake cities such as Fallouja and Ramadi -- where the insurgents' grip is strongest and U.S. military casualties could affect the U.S. presidential race.

Although American commanders in Iraq have been buoyed by recent successes in insurgent-held towns such as Samarra and Tall Afar, administration and Pentagon officials say they will not try to retake cities such as Fallouja and Ramadi — where the insurgents' grip is strongest and U.S. military casualties could be the highest — until after Americans vote in what is likely to be an extremely close election.

"When this election's over, you'll see us move very vigorously," said one senior administration official involved in strategic planning, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"Once you're past the election, it changes the political ramifications" of a large-scale offensive, the official said. "We're not on hold right now. We're just not as aggressive."

Any delay in pacifying Iraq's most troublesome cities, however, could alter the dynamics of a different election — the one in January, when Iraqis are to elect members of a national assembly.

Doonesbury blogs Ike's son's Kerry endorsement

http://doonesbury.msn.com/strip/dailydose/index.html

John Eisenhower: I'm voting Kerry

ND Prof probably in trouble this morning ....

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Voting Our Conscience, Not Our Religion

By MARK W. ROCHE
South Bend, Ind. -- For more than a century, from the wave of immigrants in the 19th century to the election of the first Catholic president in 1960, American Catholics overwhelmingly identified with the Democratic Party. In the past few decades, however, that allegiance has largely faded. Now Catholics are prototypical 'swing voters': in 2000, they split almost evenly between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and recent polls show Mr. Bush ahead of Senator John Kerry, himself a Catholic, among white Catholics.

There are compelling reasons - cultural, socioeconomic and political - for this shift. But if Catholic voters honestly examine the issues of consequence in this election, they may find themselves returning to their Democratic roots in 2004.

Feeling the heat, Bush steps up personal attacks

The New York Times > White House Letter: In a New Offensive, Bush Rearms His Stump Arsenal

Campaign officials insisted that Mr. Bush was not ditching his well-worked lines - all of them in the hopeful language of his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson - to keep pace with reality on the ground in Iraq. Instead, the officials said that with all the new attack lines against Mr. Kerry, something had to go.

And right now, with the race in a dead heat, Gersonian poetry can sound off-pitch as accompaniment to daily hand-to-hand combat.

'We're certainly in a tougher part of the campaign,' said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communications director. 'John Kerry called us a liar on the stump. We're going to go on the offensive every chance we get.'
(Actually, Mr. Kerry has stopped short of using the word 'liar,' as he pointed out in the first presidential debate. But he has repeatedly said Mr. Bush is 'not telling the truth.')

A Republican close to the Bush campaign said that the changes in the 40-minute stump speech were made on the 'strong recommendation' of Karl Rove, the president's chief strategist, and that the new presidential attack was working. 'It's resonating with voters more than the language about the bigger issues and bigger goals of a Bush presidency,' asserted the Republican, who asked not to be named because the campaign does not want its advisers publicly discussing strategy. 'You know it from polling, you know it from focus groups.'

Bush discretionary spending: I'm No 2!

Cato's Bush Budget Charts

Bush trails only LBJ in Cumulative Real Nondefense Spending Increases in First Four Years of Presidency, according to the libertarian/conservative Cato Institute.

For the first time in years, the media seemed to notice the obvious

Coors says the obvious

GOP Hopeful Raises War Doubts (washingtonpost.com): "The Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado suggested yesterday that Congress would not have voted to authorize a war in Iraq if the members had known 'what we know today.' GOP candidate Pete Coors went on to say that, 'based on weapons of mass destruction,' the United States should be more concerned about Iran and North Korea than Iraq.

"Coors, who will host President Bush at a large fundraiser today in Denver, has described himself as a 'strong backer of the war on terror.' But discussing the war yesterday on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' the brewery executive raised doubts about whether Congress would still give Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq, given the change in intelligence assessments since the congressional vote in 2002.

'I suspect that, given what we know today, there would be a much different outcome than we had a couple of years ago,' Coors said. "

Chris Reeve will not walk again

In discussing stem-cell research and the promise it holds to unlock cures for people with spinal cord injuries, John Kerry said at the second debate, "Chris Reeve is a friend of mine. Chris Reeve exercises every single day to keep those muscles alive for the day when he believes he can walk again. And I want him to walk again."

Reeve died Sunday at age 52 of cardiac arrest. He had suffered a severe infection of a "pressure wound," a common issue for people with paralysis.

Among Black Voters, a Fervor to Make Their Ballots Count

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Voters: Among Black Voters, a Fervor to Make Their Ballots Count: "JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Her bus was coming, but Charlotte Marshall had not yet finished talking about what mattered to her in the election. Social Security and health insurance, definitely. The Vietnam War, absolutely not. And she had still more to say.

The campaign for president has entered its final leg crackling with rare energy on the streets, in workplaces and in homes, perhaps with no greater vigor than among black Americans like Mrs. Marshall, who works for Stein Mart, a discount store.

It was nearly time for Mrs. Marshall to board, so she spoke quickly, definitively and passionately about the bleakness of Iraq. Finally, she turned to the voting process.
No matter whom she ends up choosing - maybe Senator John Kerry, said Mrs. Marshall, or perhaps President Bush, to untangle his Iraqi knot - she will work Election Day as a poll watcher. 'What happened in 2000 got me into it,' she said.

Like Mrs. Marshall, many African-Americans are speaking about the fundamental act of voting this year with rekindled fervor, throwing a high-wattage backlight behind the issues and personalities of the campaign. The disqualified ballots, excluded voters and contentious ending of the 2000 election - when black precincts in Florida had votes rejected at three times the rate of white precincts - have formed a galvanizing memory. 'We feel betrayed,' said Rod Owens, 22, a student at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. 'We're looking for revenge.' "

Gaming the System

The New York Times > News Analysis: Foreign Policy: A Doctrine Under Pressure: Pre-emption Is Redefined

CRAWFORD, Tex., Oct. 10 - Under pressure to explain anew his decision to invade Iraq in light of a damaging report from the C.I.A.'s top weapons inspector, President Bush appears to be quietly redefining one of the signature philosophies of his administration - his doctrine of pre-emptive military action.

Traditionally, pre-empting an enemy is all about urgency, striking before the enemy strikes. In the prelude to the invasion in March of last year, Mr. Bush and his aides stopping short of saying Saddam Hussein posed an 'imminent' threat. Still, they used urgent-sounding language at every turn to explain why they could not afford to wait for inspectors to complete their work, or for the United Nations Security Council to come to a consensus on authorizing military action. 'Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,' he said in a speech delivered Oct. 7, 2002.

But the C.I.A. report released last week, written by Charles A. Duelfer, described the evidence as anything but clear and the peril as far from urgent. Mr. Hussein's military power began waning after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the report concluded. While Mr. Hussein most probably wanted to rebuild his illicit weapons, there is no evidence he had started by the time Mr. Bush was delivering that speech.

So over the last five days, with some subtle changes of language and a new previously undiscussed justification for the war, Mr. Bush appears to have expanded the conditions for a pre-emptive military strike. He no longer talks about urgency. Instead, for the first time, he has begun to argue that a military invasion is justified if an opponent is seeking to avoid United Nations sanctions - "gaming the system" in his words.

Massachusetts Supreme Court: 2004's Wild Card?

When I was a kid growing up in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, the local school district decided to desgregate. As my father tells it, the board was filled with the scions of the community -- executives at the local steel mill, doctors, other industry leaders. These leaders said that despite the fact they had not been pressured to desgregate by the federal government, they were going to go ahead with their plan "because it's the right thing to do."

In front of a very hostile crowd, they passed the desegregation plan unanimously. (Interestingly, segregation was achieved in part in Coatesville by busing white children away from their neighborhood schools, so in some ways that school board vote ended busing.)

It took two election cycles because of the members' staggered terms, but that courageous, principled school board was replaced in its entirety by people who were, to put it mildly, far less qualified to lead a community school system. The district went into a decades-long tailspin that held down community property values even as the growth of the Philadelphia suburbs fueled astonishing increases in neighboring towns.

As soon as the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that banning gay marriages was unconstitutional, I knew that they had opened a Pandora's box that will affect this election.

Forget Kerry's nuanced position on gay marriage and states' rights. The various referenda around the country are going to be energizing a crowd that ain't likely to vote for the Senator from Massachusetts. And Ohio is one of those states, where the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that at least one voter supports a constitutional ban on gay marriage, saying, 'It's in the Bible. It should be in the constitution.'

GOP strategy: Knock 'em off the registration lists

Behind the Scenes, Officials Wrestle Over Voting Rules (washingtonpost.com): "As President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry enter the final weeks of a tight presidential campaign, election officials in many key states are waging less noticed but equally partisan battles that could affect the outcome of the race.

"In the battlegrounds of Ohio and Missouri, Republican secretaries of state have crafted election rules that Democrats say could disenfranchise legitimate voters likely to cast ballots for Kerry. Republicans say Democratic election officials in New Mexico and Iowa are making it easier for potential Kerry supporters to vote.

"The disputed 2000 election cast a new light on the crucial role that secretaries of state play in crafting the rules that determine who can vote -- and whose votes are counted. Florida's then-secretary of state, Katherine Harris (R), was pilloried by Democrats when a series of decisions made by her office helped elect George W. Bush."

Bewildered by the Dred Scott reference? It's code to the anti-abortion crowd!

When Bush pulled Dred Scott out of midair Friday, it left many liberals bewildered and amused. What did an 1857 Supreme Court ruling have to do with the new Supreme Court?

I had a couple of thoughts:

• Didn't Dred represent strict constructionist reasoning at its absurd extreme (certainly by 2005 standards)? I've not seen much credible writing to make that connection, but it is clear that the framers recognized slaves as less than white citizens.
• Was it some bizarre play for African-American votes? That seemed desperate and reaching, even by the standards the Bush campaign has set since the polls shifted

Salon's Geraldine Sealey comes to the rescue to explain that "For many who oppose abortion rights, Roe is 'Dred Scott II,' denying the unborn rights they deserve just as the Court once denied blacks.

Here's the logic from the National Right to Life Committee: 'In an 1857 court case, known as the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled that slaves, even freed slaves, and all their descendants, had no rights protected by the Constitution and that states had no right to abolish slavery. Where would Blacks be today if that reasoning had not been challenged?'

'The reasoning in Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade is nearly identical. In both cases the Court stripped all rights from a class of human beings and reduced them to nothing more than the property of others. Compare the arguments the Court used to justify slavery and abortion. Clearly, in the Court's eyes, unborn children are now the same 'beings of an inferior order' that the justices considered Blacks to be over a century ago.'

Pro-life Sen. Rick Santorum made the point in an interview with The New York Times: '[He] likened Roe to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, when the court ruled that blacks born into slavery had no constitutional rights. 'The more people understand how wide open Roe v. Wade is, how unlimited it is,' Mr. Santorum said, the more they turn against it.' And as Paperwight pointed out, a simple Google search shows how widespread the Roe = Dred comparison is.

There's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says: "Fool me once..."

Bush Recasts Rationale For War After Report (washingtonpost.com)

In announcing 19 months ago that the United States was poised to invade Iraq, President Bush told the nation: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. . . . The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

Bush's decision to attack Iraq came after urgent warnings by the president and his top aides about the challenge posed by Iraq -- what Bush called "a serious and mounting threat to our country" in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address before Congress. Few lawmakers questioned these warnings -- Sen. John F. Kerry, now the Democratic presidential nominee, did not -- and many frequently echoed them.

But the argument that the United States faced a moment of maximum peril in early 2003 from Iraq has been greatly weakened by the release last week of the comprehensive report of chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer. The report found that the 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons capability, leaving it without any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein hoped to someday resume his weapons efforts, the report said, but for the most part there had been no serious effort to rebuild the programs.

In the wake of the report, President Bush has reframed the way he characterizes his rationale for the launching the war. A review of his public statements before the war and this week shows how broadly his public argument has shifted, away from warnings that Hussein actually possessed horrible weapons in favor of talking almost exclusively about the dictator's intent.

This week, Bush said Iraq had been a "unique threat" and the United States was justified in attacking, largely because Hussein "retained the knowledge, the materials, the means, and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction."

"And he could have passed that knowledge on to our terrorist enemies," the president told reporters.

In the months leading up to the war, however, Bush and other administration officials made serious and specific allegations about Iraqi capabilities in biological, chemical and nuclear warfare ...

For Marines, a Frustrating Fight

For Marines, a Frustrating Fight (washingtonpost.com)
Some in Iraq Question How and Why War Is Being Waged

ISKANDARIYAH, Iraq -- Scrawled on the helmet of Lance Cpl. Carlos Perez are the letters FDNY. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York, the Pentagon and western Pennsylvania, Perez quit school, left his job as a firefighter in Long Island, N.Y., and joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
'To be honest, I just wanted to take revenge,' said Perez, 20.

Now, two months into a seven-month combat tour in Iraq, Perez said he sees little connection between the events of Sept. 11 and the war he is fighting. Instead, he said, he is increasingly disillusioned by a conflict whose origins remain unclear and frustrated by the timidity of U.S. forces against a mostly faceless enemy.

"Sometimes I see no reason why we're here," Perez said. "First of all, you cannot engage as many times as we want to. Second of all, we're looking for an enemy that's not there. The only way to do it is go house to house until we get out of here."

Perez is hardly alone. In a dozen interviews, Marines from a platoon known as the "81s" expressed in blunt terms their frustrations with the way the war is being conducted and, in some cases, doubts about why it is being waged. The platoon, named for the size in millimeters of its mortar rounds, is part of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment based in Iskandariyah, 30 miles southwest of Baghdad.

The Marines offered their opinions openly to a reporter traveling with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines during operations last week in Babil province, then expanded upon them during interviews over three days in their barracks at Camp Iskandariyah, their forward operating base.

The Marines' opinions have been shaped by their participation in hundreds of hours of operations over the past two months. Their assessments differ sharply from those of the interim Iraqi government and the Bush administration, which have said that Iraq is on a certain -- if bumpy -- course toward peaceful democracy.

"I feel we're going to be here for years and years and years," said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. "I don't think anything is going to get better; I think it's going to get a lot worse. It's going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We're going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We're always going to be here. We're never going to leave."

If America Is Richer, Why Are Its Families So Much Less Secure?

If America Is Richer, Why Are Its Families So Much Less Secure?
For 25 years, government and business have forced workers to take on mounting risk. A Times analysis shows ever-larger swings in household incomes.

By most conventional measures, Paul Fredo is an American success story.

The son of a coal miner, he made almost $200,000 in the last year, enough to place him in the top 2% of wage earners. As a financial manager for the U.S. unit of Alstom, the French bullet-train maker, he has lived an expense-account life, spending most nights in hotels and jetting to meetings in Washington and Paris.

But look carefully at Fredo's circumstances and a less appealing picture begins to emerge � one in which, over the last 25 years, economic risk has been steadily shifted from the broad shoulders of business and government to the backs of working families like his.

By the time Fredo joined Alstom here last year, he had become an itinerant executive, a contract worker brought in for a particular purpose, then sent packing. 'They tell me every Friday whether to come back,' the 57-year-old explained.

Between his last regular job as the chief financial officer of another company and his hiring at Alstom, Fredo was unemployed for nearly two years and saw his income decline by two-thirds. He has long been without health benefits, holidays, paid vacation or job security.

'We come from the old school that you work hard and give it your all, and the job will be there for you,' said Fredo's wife of 35 years, Donna. 'It's different today.'

They vote along partisan lines for everything

The New York Times: An Inexplicable Vote for Death

"Paul Gregory House was convicted of murdering a neighbor in 1985, before the era of DNA typing. The Tennessee jury that found him guilty was told that the semen found on the body of the neighbor, Carolyn Muncey, matched his blood type. The jury, citing the fact that Mrs. Muncey had been raped, said Mr. House should be sentenced to death.

"It's hard to believe that the jurors would have come to that conclusion if they had known that the semen's DNA matched that of Mrs. Muncey's husband, Hubert, not the defendant. A 15-judge United States Court of Appeals panel in Cincinnati that heard a request to reopen the case knew that. Yet the judges recently voted, 8 to 7, that Mr. House should neither be freed nor given a new trial. They were not swayed by six witnesses implicating Mr. Muncey. Two said Mr. Muncey had told them he had killed his wife while he was drunk.

"That eight judges would condemn a man to be executed under these circumstances is shocking. What's worse is that the judges divided along partisan lines. The eight judges appointed by a Republican president voted to keep Mr. House on the road to the death penalty. Six judges appointed by a Democrat wanted to free him, and the seventh called for a new trial. It's hard to dismiss the thought that the Republicans voted as a show of support for capital punishment, not on the merits of the case.

"For Mr. House, the next stop is the Supreme Court. For the rest of us, his case should serve as a reminder that when we elect a president, we are also deciding the makeup of our courts."

Farnaz Fassihi: Only the half of it ...

In Under Fire in Baghdad: Get Me Rewrite. Now. Bullets Are Flying., New York Times Baghdad correspondent Dexter Filkins stands by his Wall Street Journal Farnaz Fassihi's 'reporting' -- and then some.

(Fassihi wrote a private email that presented a much more shocking view of conditions in Iraq than Americans have been getting from "objective reporting," and it may have landed her in hot water at the WSJ.)

Writes Filkins:

"Here at The New York Times, where we have spared no expense to protect ourselves, the catalogue of hits and near-misses is long enough to chill the hardiest war correspondent: we have been shot at, kidnapped, blindfolded, held at knifepoint, held at gunpoint, detained, threatened, beaten and chased. One of our correspondents was driven blindfolded to the outskirts of a town in the dead of night by armed men who told him to get out of the car. Another time, a crowd began throwing bricks, and one of our photographers, who was standing next to me, was struck in the head and required stitches.

And that's just the intentional acts. On any given day here, car bombs explode, gun battles break out and mortar shells fall short, none of them exactly aimed at us, if they are aimed at anyone at all. In the writing of this essay, a three-hour affair, two rockets and three mortar shells have landed close enough to shake the walls of our house. The door to my balcony opens onto an Iraqi social club, and the roar from the blasts set the Iraqis into a panic, their screams audible above the Arabic music wafting from the speakers."

'All the President's Men' for the 21st Century

Richard Clarke's 'Enemies' heading to theatres

"LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Former anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke's memoir of his days in the White House, in which he accuses the Bush administration of not taking the al Qaeda threat seriously enough before Sept 11, will soon be hitting the big screen.

"Former Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman John Calley is producing the adaptation of 'Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror,' a best seller about Clarke's reign as terrorism czar through three presidential administrations.

"James Vanderbilt will write the screen adaptation for Columbia Pictures.

"'I'm very excited to be bringing it to the big screen. It's like an 'All the President's Men' for the 21st century,' Vanderbilt said. 'I'm going to be spending some time with Richard Clarke and getting to know him. The book doesn't give a lot away about him, but this will revolve around him.'"

The first 100 or so pages of Clarke's damning book, Against All Enemies, are riveting and will take little editing to become a movie script.

Some Not Even Swayed by Close-Up View of Debate

In a follow-up to the debate, Some Not Even Swayed by Close-Up View of Debate, the citizen participants in the debate told the New York Times that they were unswayed.

Linda Grabel, the woman who asked Bush if he could name three mistakes, said
she "had misgivings about Mr. Bush because of 'the war, jobs, his alienating our allies - it seems like there really isn't a plan.' "

"But she said Mr. Kerry did no better. ' 'I have a plan' is the end of his answer - 'I have a plan to educate our children, I have a plan that will produce more jobs.' What is it?'"

We can help! Try here for the plan on the economy (there's too much to link to individually) and go here for the education plans.

Bush whopper

Daily Kos points out that Bush's claim, "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," sounds like a whopper.

Citing the liberatrian-conservative Cato institute and the CBO, Bush's non-discretionary spending is a record-breaking 8.2 percent per year. (Clinton's was 2.5 percent per year.) Here's Cato's 2003 report, "On Spending, Bush Is No Reagan" (PDF).

Channeling Bush

Salon's Dave Lindorff, whose story on the speculation that Bush was being fed his debate lines through some kind of radio device catapulted the issue from wacky Internet rumor to funny sidebar for the big boys (NYT, Post), is not letting it go away:

"Such feeble denials [by the campaign flacks] are not helping the story go away. Already a new photo from Friday night's debate is making the rounds on the Internet. This time the photo of the president's back reveals what appears to be an oblong hump under his jacket. Some people have noted the jacket is not particularly well fitted (the sleeves appear a little long and the back is wrinkled -- both odd for a president in one of the key appearances of his presidency). Speculation that Bush is getting secret help via an electronic transmission will probably not be squelched until the president offers to be searched before the third and final debate next Wednesday. Don't bet on it. "

Can't find the photos he's talking about yet. While the whole thing strikes me as absurd, is it is a fun little story. The political calculus on this one is interesting as both sides try and figure out whether to keep it alive: Does it make the Dems look like conspiracy kooks, or does it (regardless of the facts) keep alive the image of a president incapable of articulating anything and controlled by Presidents Rove and Cheney?

Good news: Afghan Vote Is Peaceful

The New York Times: Afghan Vote Is Peaceful, but Challengers Cry Foul

ABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 9 - Afghans turned out to vote in large numbers Saturday in their first presidential election, an event that was unexpectedly peaceful but soon marred by 15 candidates' declaring the election illegitimate because of what they said was widespread cheating and fraud.

Those candidates asked for a new vote. But United Nations and Afghan officials overseeing the voting largely dismissed their concerns, saying they believed any problems had been corrected during the day, although they did say they would investigate all complaints.

Faith-based

The New York Times: Can Prayers Heal? Critics Say Studies Go Past Science's Reach

"In 2001, two researchers and a Columbia University fertility expert published a startling finding in a respected medical journal: women undergoing fertility treatment who had been prayed for by Christian groups were twice as likely to have a successful pregnancy as those who had not.

"Three years later, after one of the researchers pleaded guilty to conspiracy in an unrelated business fraud, Columbia is investigating the study and the journal reportedly pulled the paper from its Web site.

"No evidence of manipulation has yet surfaced, and the study's authors stand behind their data.

"But the doubts about the study have added to the debate over a deeply controversial area of research: whether prayer can heal illness.

"Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3 million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science.

" 'Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science,' said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a psychologist at Harvard. 'It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money.' "

Ike's kid: Why I will vote for John Kerry for President

The Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News:
Why I will vote for John Kerry for President

"By John Eisenhower
The Presidential election to be held this coming Nov. 2 will be one of extraordinary importance to the future of our nation. The outcome will determine whether this country will continue on the same path it has followed for the last three-and-a-half years or whether it will return to a set of core domestic and foreign policy values that have been at the heart of what has made this country great.

"Now more than ever, we voters will have to make cool judgments, unencumbered by habits of the past. Experts tell us that we tend to vote as our parents did or as we "always have." We remained loyal to party labels. We cannot afford that luxury in the election of 2004. There are times when we must break with the past, and I believe this is one of them. "

Debate 2: Solid Kerry victory (at least among those who matter)

DonkeyRising points to this detailed poll about last night's debate from Democracy Corps that found that Americans believed Kerry won the debate 45-37 (and the group polled went for Bush 49-45 in 2000) and that there are significant chinks in Bush's armor: 54 percent believe the Iraq War has made us less safe and 62 percent don't think the economy is going well for middle class people.

Lots of juicy detail in that one.

Other polls:

• ABC: Kerry 44-41 (44-34 among Independents)
• CNN: Kerry 47-45 (53-37 among Independents)
• SUSA Snap Polls on West Coast states (reported by Kos)

Also, the print pundits summary (again, courtesy of Kos).

Focus Groups suck

In my work at a marketing company, I cringe whenever someone says, "Let's do a focus group!"

Focus groups are hokum, in my opinion. Watching the post-debate analysis teams is a lesson in focus group mentality. Watch blustery Chris Matthews force a consensus on MSNBC about his own view and then express shock when polls tell him the public saw it differently.

Even Fox News falls prey, with its commentators apparently agreeing that Bush had a relatively poor showing last night. Excerpts of the Fox conservatives' remarks are on the Daily Kos.

Bloomberg.com: U.S. Sept. Payrolls Rise 96,000, Less Than Forecast

Bloomberg.com's account of the government jobs report:

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. employers added 96,000 workers in September, fewer than expected, as an expanding economy failed to spur faster job growth in the final report before the presidential election. Factory jobs fell for the third time this year. ...

The jobless rate was unchanged at 5.4 percent, the Labor Department said in Washington. The government lowered its previous estimate for August by 16,000 jobs to 128,000 and said a series of hurricanes didn't "materially'' affect employment.

The results fell short of the average 150,000 jobs a month some economists say is needed to absorb a growing labor force and keep the jobless rate steady.

Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD (sic)

The Key Findings

Nuclear:
"Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and signifi cance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.

• Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest
  concerted efforts to restart the program.
  
• Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years."

Chemical:
"While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

• The scale of the Iraqi conventional munitions stockpile, among other factors, precluded an examination of the entire stockpile; however, ISG inspected sites judged most likely associated with possible storage or deployment of chemical weapons.

"Iraq’s CW program was crippled by the Gulf war and the legitimate chemical industry, which suffered under sanctions, only began to recover in the mid-1990s. Subsequent changes in the management of key military and civilian organizations, followed by an infl ux of funding and resources, provided Iraq with the ability to reinvigorate its industrial base.

• Poor policies and management in the early 1990s left the Military Industrial Commission (MIC) financially unsound and in a state of almost complete disarray."

Biological:
"With the economy at rock bottom in late 1995, ISG judges that Baghdad abandoned its existing BW program in the belief that it constituted a potential embarrassment, whose discovery would undercut Baghdad’s ability to reach its overarching goal of obtaining relief from UN sanctions.

"In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specifi c work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level. Iraq would have faced great difficulty in re-establishing an effective BW agent production capability."

But you only need five votes ...

The New York Times: The Presidential Candidates' 2nd Debate

Q. Mr. president, if there were a vacancy in the Supreme Court and you had the opportunity to fill that position today, who do you choose and why?

Mr. Bush: I'm not telling. I really don't have, haven't picked anybody yet. Plus I want them all voting for me.

U.S. Supreme Court rules manual vote recounts unconstitutional

... Although the ruling reflected a 7-2 split, the concurring and dissenting opinions revealed a 5-4 split along ideological lines, with the conservative faction ruling against the recounts and the liberal wing arguing the case lacked merit and the recounts must continue.

Broadly speaking, the 7-2 split was over the question of reversing the Florida court, but the 5-4 split was over the termination of manual recounts.

Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward....

But the consortium [of news organizations], looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium's independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to "count all the votes."

In addition, the review found statistical support for the complaints of many voters, particularly elderly Democrats in Palm Beach County, who said in interviews after the election that confusing ballot designs may have led them to spoil their ballots by voting for more than one candidate.

More than 113,000 voters cast ballots for two or more presidential candidates. Of those, 75,000 chose Mr. Gore and a minor candidate; 29,000 chose Mr. Bush and a minor candidate. Because there was no clear indication of what the voters intended, those numbers were not included in the consortium's final tabulations.

W CV

Hello. My name is George Bush and I'm running for President. Please consider my qualifications as set forth in the following resume.

EDUCATION:

• I entered Yale in 1964 with a SAT of 1206 (Verbal 566, Math 640), 200 points below Yale's average freshman in 1970.
  
• I graduated Yale in 1968 with a 2.35 GPA
  
• In the fall of 1970 I was rejected from admission at University of Texas Law School.
  
• In 1973 I applied to Harvard Business School with a 2.35 GPA. 1973 admission statistics are unavailable, but for an incomplete comparison today's Harvard students average a GPA of 3.5 - no students were accepted with a GPA lower than 2.6.
  
• I graduated Harvard Business School with an MBA and below-average grades.
  

CRIMINAL RECORD:

• Two negligent collisions in July and August 1962 in Houston, TX (p20)
  
• Arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in New Haven, CT in December 1966 (p20) for stealing a christmas tree while drunk
  
• Convicted of drunk driving on September 4, 1976 in Kennebunkport, Maine.
  

MILITARY EXPERIENCE:

As a strong supporter of the Vietnam War I did everything in my power to avoid military service, both foreign and domestic:

• In February 1968 I applied to the Texas Air National Guard after scoring the bare minimum of 25th Percentile (p25) for the Officer's Pilot Aptitude Test. With low scores, no other qualifications listed, and a long list of applicants ahead of me nobody is sure how I got into the guard. Ben Barnes offers one explanation, swearing under oath that he called Brig Gen. Jim Rose at the request of my father's friend Sidney Adger, allowing me a privilege I did not otherwise deserve.

You get the idea ...

Bremer: 'We never had enough troops'

MSNBC - Bremer: 'We never had enough troops':

"Ambassador Paul Bremer, who ran the U.S. provisional government in Iraq for more than a year, now claims the U.S. military should have had more troops in Iraq to halt the widespread looting after the fall of Baghdad.

'We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. We never had enough troops on the ground,' Bremer said Monday at a conference in West Virginia.

After leaving Iraq last June, Bremer said much the same on the 'Today' show.

'Obviously, it would have been better if we could have had more security sooner. No question about that,' Bremer told NBC's Matt Lauer.

But last month in a speech at DePauw University in Indiana, Bremer went even further saying: 'The single most important change would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout' the U.S. occupation."

Open Letter to President

In an "Open Letter to President", 400 economics and business professors express their concern about U.S. economic policy. Excerpt:

"As professors of economics and business, we are concerned that U.S. economic policy has taken a dangerous turn under your stewardship. Nearly every major economic indicator has deteriorated since you took office in January 2001. Real GDP growth during your term is the lowest of any presidential term in recent memory. Total non-farm employment has contracted and the unemployment rate has increased. Bankruptcies are up sharply, as is our dependence on foreign capital to finance an exploding current account deficit. All three major stock indexes are lower now than at the time of your inauguration. The percentage of Americans in poverty has increased, real median income has declined, and income inequality has grown.

"The data make clear that your policy of slashing taxes -- primarily for those at the upper reaches of the income distribution -- has not worked. The fiscal reversal that has taken place under your leadership is so extreme that it would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The federal budget surplus of over $200 billion that we enjoyed in the year 2000 has disappeared, and we are now facing a massive annual deficit of over $400 billion. In fact, if transfers from the Social Security trust fund are excluded, the federal deficit is even worse -- well in excess of a half a trillion dollars this year alone. Although some members of your administration have suggested that the mountain of new debt accumulated on your watch is mainly the consequence of 9-11 and the war on terror, budget experts know that this is simply false. Your economic policies have played a significant role in driving this fiscal collapse. And the economic proposals you have suggested for a potential second term -- from diverting Social Security contributions into private accounts to making the recent tax cuts permanent -- only promise to exacerbate the crisis by further narrowing the federal revenue base."

Rumsfeld: Al-Qaeda-Saddam link is weak

USATODAY.com reports that Rumsfeld now admits no strong evidence to tie Al-Qaeda to Saddam:

"WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that he hasn't seen 'any strong, hard evidence' to link Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who staged the Sept. 11 attacks, a more direct statement than he has made on the subject before.

"Rumsfeld's comments came as a new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found that 42% of those surveyed thought the former Iraqi leader was involved in the attacks on New York City and Washington. In response to another question, 32% said they thought Saddam had personally planned them."

Side note 1: the 9/11 Commission found that there was "no collaborative relationship" between Saddam and Al Qaeda; see this Washington Post story for details.

Side note 2: USA Today/Gallup has been asking Americans whether they believe Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks: 42 percent say yes (see question 22).

How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence

The New York Times: How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence

"In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States now had 'irrefutable evidence' - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.

"Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were 'only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,' Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.'

"But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets.

"The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.

"Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, an examination by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.

"One result was a largely one-sided presentation to the public that did not convey the depth of evidence and argument against the administration's most tangible proof of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq."

Undecideds break for the challenger

American Prospect Online: The Big Five-Oh
An incumbent who can’t break 50 percent is in trouble, even if he’s ahead. Not that we’re referring to anyone in particular.

"The numbers for challengers look quite different. In every case, the challenger(s) -- I include Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 -- exceed their final poll result by at least 2 points, and the average gain is 4 points. In 1980, Ronald Reagan received 51 percent, fully 6 percentage points above his final poll results.

"This happens because elections are fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent. The first step in voters' decision-making process is to answer the question 'does he deserve re-election?' Undecided voters have basically answered that question in the negative, and their undecided status reflects the fact that they don't know enough about the challenger (yet) to feel comfortable stating a public preference.

"Does this mean that literally all undecided voters cast their ballots for the challenger? Presumably not, though an overwhelming majority do. In addition, some who support the incumbent in pre-election polls are low-information voters basing their answer simply on name recognition, but who defect to the challenger at the last moment. In any case, the net effect is crystal clear: We can expect George W. Bush to receive about the same share of the vote -- or a bit less -- on November 2 as he receives in the final public polls.

"Think of it this way: The percentage that Bush receives in polls represents his ceiling of support; he may get a little less, but won't get more. In contrast, Kerry's percentage represents his floor, and he will almost certainly do better on election day. Assuming that Ralph Nader and other minor candidates will receive about 2 percent -- which is what current surveys suggest -- 49 percent becomes the critical line of demarcation in this election. "

Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story

The New York Review of Books: Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story

"What we know as 'the Abu Ghraib scandal' has in fact become an increasingly complex story about how Americans in Afghanistan and Cuba and Iraq came to commit acts, with the apparent approval of the highest officials, that clearly constitute torture. The images themselves, however, having helped force open the door to broader questions of how the Bush administration has treated prisoners in the War on Terror, are now helping as well to block that door; for the images, by virtue of their inherent grotesque power, strongly encourage the view that 'acts of brutality and purposeless sadism,' which clearly did occur, lay at the heart of Abu Ghraib. Even public officials charged with investigating the scandal--these are the fourth and fifth full reports on the matter, with at least four more to come--at the same time seek to contain it by promoting the view that Abu Ghraib in its essence was about individual misbehavior and sadism: 'Animal House on the night shift,' as former secretary of defense James Schlesinger characterized it, even as his own report showed in detail that it was a great deal more.

"The second 'master narrative' of Abu Ghraib is that of the Muslim preacher Sheik Mohammed Bashir, quoted above, and many other Arabs and Muslims who point to the scandal's images as perfect symbols of the subjugation and degradation that the American occupiers have inflicted on Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. In this sense the Hooded Man and the Leashed Man fill a need, serving as powerful brand images advertising a preexisting product. Imagine, for a moment, an Islamic fundamentalist trying to build a transnational movement by arguing that today 'nations are attacking Muslims like people attacking a plate of food,' and by exhorting young Muslims to rise up and follow the Prophet's words:

And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)?—women and children —whose cry is: 'Oh Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'

"...The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush's controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The decision rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that 'the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," in fact, a "new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions....' In a prefiguring of later bureaucratic wars, lawyers in the State Department and many in the military services fought against this decision, arguing, prophetically, that it 'would undermine the United States military culture, which is based on a strict adherence to the law of war.'

"For torture, this decision was Original Sin: it made legally possible the adoption of the various 'enhanced interrogation techniques' that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military's prison at Guantánamo Bay."

Joint Economic Committee: What Happened to the Surplus

The U.S. Senate's Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Robert Bennett (R-Utah), explains what happened to the surplus:

• 37% gobbled up by weak economy
  
• 24% gobbled up by tax cuts and economic stimulus
  
• 39% gobbled up by increased spending and 9/11

In other words, 63% of the surplus was eaten up by the decisions of Bush and Congress. Even with the added security expenses after 9/11, the Republican Senate's own account of the vanishing surplus does not look good in terms of fiscal sanity.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in its report, "What happened to the surplus?" says that 72 percent of the deficit portion attributable to legislative decisions is a result of the tax cuts.

Budget: Biggest Deficits ever

It is expected that the government will break its record deficit this year. In August, the Congressional Budget Office predicted a $422 billion deficit for 2004: CBO's August Monthly Budget Review.

The record broken will be last year's: $375.3 billion, by far the largest budget deficit in history.

Fun facts: How elections work

In THE UNPOLITICAL ANIMAL, How political science understands voters, Louis Menand reports these fun facts in the August 30 New Yorker:

An analysis of the 1956 electorate showed:

• 10 percent of the electorate had a "political belief system" that added up to a coherent political philosophy
  
• 42 percent vote not on ideology, but perceived self-interest
  
• 25 percent vote for incumbents if things are good and challengers if things are bad
  
• 22 percent vote based on "factors that have no discernible 'issue content' whatever"

The political scientist who conducted that analysis, Phillip Converse, "concluded that 'very substantial portions of the public' hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do."

"Findings about the influence of the weather on voter behavior are among the many surveys and studies that confirm Converse’s sense of the inattention of the American electorate. In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered 'don’t care' or 'don’t know.' In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.

"Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that '2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet' as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election."

Last, "The most widely known fact about George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six per cent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty."

CBO: Limiting Tort Liability for Medical Malpractice

Some highlights of the CBO report on Limiting Tort Liability for Medical Malpractice:

"The available evidence suggests that premiums have risen both because insurance companies have faced increased costs to pay claims (from growth in malpractice awards) and because of reduced income from their investments and short-term factors in the insurance market."

"Evidence from the states indicates that premiums for malpractice insurance are lower when tort liability is restricted than they would be otherwise. But even large savings in premiums can have only a small direct impact on health care spending--private or governmental--because malpractice costs account for less than 2 percent of that spending.(3) Advocates or opponents cite other possible effects of limiting tort liability, such as reducing the extent to which physicians practice 'defensive medicine' by conducting excessive procedures; preventing widespread problems of access to health care; or conversely, increasing medical injuries. However, evidence for those other effects is weak or inconclusive."

9/11 Commission: Executive Summary

The 9/11 Commission Executive Summary includes:

"The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were far more elaborate, precise, and destructive than any of these earlier assaults. But by September 2001, the executive branch of the U.S. government, the Congress, the news media, and the American public had received clear warning that Islamist terrorists meant to kill Americans in high numbers."

And ...

"The problem is that al Qaeda represents an ideological movement, not a finite group of people. It initiates and inspires, even if it no longer directs. In this way it has transformed itself into a decentralized force. Bin Ladin may be limited in his ability to organize major attacks from his hideouts.Yet killing or capturing him, while extremely important, would not end terror. His message of inspiration to a new generation of terrorists would continue.
Because of offensive actions against al Qaeda since 9/11, and defensive actions to improve homeland security, we believe we are safer today. But we are not safe."

To really get the full sense of the enormity of the government failure, read the full report. (PDF, 2.3 MB)