The Blog From Another Dimension

2000 vs. 2004 Redux

Here's another comparison between the polls today and the polls in 2000 just three days before the election:

Today the TIPP tracking poll was a tie; at this time before the 2000 election, it was +5 Bush.

Today the Zogby tracking poll was a tie; at this time before the 2000 election, it was +3 Bush.

Today, the WP/ABC tracking poll (LV) was +3 Bush; at this time before the 2000 election, it was also +3 Bush...where it stayed, with a brief detour to +4, until its final poll, thereby missing the actual popular vote margin by 3.5 percentage points.

New data from TIPP has Bush moving one point ahead, but another new poll from Zogby has Kerry moving one ahead, so the new data is a wash.

If this polling comparison suggested that Bush would be getting more numbers, I'd be worried; but on top of giving Kerry the advantage, we also have the high Democratic turnout, which usually favors the Democrats, then there's the fact that early voters have been strongly Democratic, the fact that most newly registered voters are Democrats, the fact that the minority vote, strongly for Kerry, will likely be stronger than predicted, and that the youth vote, also for Kerry, is relatively uncounted. On top of that, the bin Laden "gift" for Bush seems to have deflated, and the polls remain steady.

Things are looking good.

Finally

Something I've been waiting for for quite some time: a fiber optic connection to the Internet. Living out where I do, it usually takes a while for new stuff to get out here. This time, it's F/O. Though this is probably not straight F/O, more likely vDSL, a combination of F/O to the building and then DSL into the building and to the room. They'll have a rep here this weekend to take orders. The max claimed speeds are 16 Mbps and 70 Mbps (both "best effort"), and if I can get near even the 16, that'll be a big improvement over now. Currently, I subscribe to a 26 Mbps ADSL service, but due to my 3km+ distance from the telephone office, the real speed is only 3 Mbps.

GOP Election Derailment

It looks like the GOP is going to throw an all-out nationwide election-sized monkey-wrench election derailment in the form of voter "challenges" based on their bogus lists. After stating that they would challenge as many as 35,000 Democratic voters in Ohio, and thousands more in Florida in addition to using copies of the scandalous felon list, they are now going to challenge 37,000 Democratic voters in Wisconsin. I would likely count on the thugs showing up in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and several other battleground states as well. The GOP is basing these lists on mailings sent to Democrats that were returned as "undeliverable" in the mail--assuming that a returned letter means a fraudulent registration, a baseless assumption. We don't even know if the GOP lists are anywhere near legitimate, just their say-so. But they will be using these lists in force at the polls on Tuesday.

What would this mean? Imagine thousands of Republican "observers" in each of those states, thick in Democratic strongholds, strangling the election process (which will already be jammed up by record turnout) by challenging a sizable percent of the people who walk through the door, demanding voters present identification and them forcing them to fill out a two-page legal form under the threat of prison for perjury, before they can cast a ballot. Can you imagine the chaos that will create?

The key question here is not "will they try it"--that much is established--but rather, "will they be able to get away with it"? What happens when the Republicans get out of line, and force hundreds, perhaps thousands of key heavily-Democratic polling places to become hopelessly jammed? Republican pundits will laugh and sneer, alleging that it proves Democratic election fraud, and see how those pathetic Democrats can't even vote, while things are going smoothly in Republican districts. Likely these challenges will lead to violence in many places, and this will further be used by conservatives to claim that Democrats are disrupting the process.

But most importantly, Republican officials will stand on the "legality" of the observers and their "right" to challenge anyone they like. If GOP "observer" operatives start abusing their position and jamming Democratic polling places, what will anyone do? Throw them out? That will lead to nationwide howls of protest by the GOP, wild claims of election fraud. What if the GOP operatives create such a mess that lines of Democrats wanting to vote will still be waiting when the scheduled closing time arrives? If any attempt is made to extend the hours for voting, Republicans will again start shouting hysterically about fraud, injustice, illegal tampering, and God knows what else.

In short, just like the fraud pulled off in Florida four years ago, the GOP knows that so long as it can disrupt the Democratic vote on election day, nothing else matters. If by the close of polls Tuesday evening they can succeed in preventing enough Democrats from voting, then there is no returning to it--no do-over, no changing what happened. This is a crime which can and has been committed by the GOP without any fear of punishment after the fact. That is what they are depending on.

Think about it. Let's say what I outlined happened. Maybe even just 3 or 4% of Democrats are kept from voting because Republican "observers" jam up the polling places, either shutting Democratic voters out or discouraging them from even trying. Then what? What is the recourse? As far as I can see, there is none. Who would be arrested? Very likely no one--on the face of things, GOP "observers" would be "within the law," however blatantly they abuse it. In short, the damage would be done. The Democrats would be disenfranchised--again--and no legal action could reverse any of that.

This is my greatest fear for the election--more than even a terrorist attack on the same day.

Bush Labor Dept. Uses Taxpayer Money for Slanted Election Report

This is a few days old already, but worthy of note: midlevel employees in the Department of Labor produced a study which predicts a Bush win that exceeds all polls and expectations:

The Labor Department has produced a report predicting that President Bush will win reelection on Tuesday.

This extraordinary example of your tax dollars at work was produced on Oct. 22 by the department's Employment and Training Administration. The report, a weekly installment of the "Briefing on Economic & Labor Market Conditions" prepared for Assistant Secretary Emily Stover DeRocco, a political appointee, begins with a brief review of economic statistics. Then it gets down to business with a four-page section titled: "In Focus: Predicting the Election Outcome."

The prediction? (Drumroll, please.) A smashing victory for Bush. [source]

The report predicts that Bush will win by 55.7% to 57.5%, rather incredibly optimistic considering all current information at hand. But the outrageously partisan finding of the report is less at issue than the fact that the Bush Labor Department is now apparently in the business of using official resources and taxpayer dollars to fund such a partisan report. Nonetheless, it is perhaps one of the least surprising examples of malfeasance within the Bush administration to date--despite the fact that had it happened under Clinton, it almost automatically would have prompted an official Congressional investigation, aside from all the indignant shouts of protest from the GOP about scandal and more scandal.

It is telling about the atmosphere of corruption that Bush has created that such a thing would be reported publicly, and so close to an election, and yet be almost universally disregarded as simply 'more of the same.'

Marshall Update

Josh Marshall has some new polling news. The good: Kerry is out ahead in key battleground states, under local polls just released: Kerry 49% to Bush 46%, New Hampshire; Kerry 49% to Bush 45%, Iowa; Kerry 49% to Bush 41%, Minnesota.

Electoral Call: My Prediction

Boy, either there's a mistake in the Washington Post, Tucker Carlson has gone mad, or things are much better for Kerry than they look. Rabid conservative Carlson is calling the election for Kerry, 51.5% to 48%, 278 electoral votes to 260. He gives both houses of Congress to the GOP, but his presidential call is still rather surprising. Loonie Ann Coulter, predictably, is calling for an all-out sweep for the Republicans, as much of a landslide as she can push for while not outrageously violating the laws of physics. Other predictions are a mix, but most cede the House to the GOP.

So it's probably about time I made my own list up. And I do not use the words "made up" without cause: this is not after a careful analysis of the political landscape, and certainly is not the result of a state-by state analysis, especially where congressional races are concerned. I've been watching things fairly closely, though, and since I have been repeating the mantra of "turnout, turnout, turnout" for some time now--in short, I've been predicting a very high relative Democratic turnout--it's time to put that into play for my predictions. I'll probably be overly optimistic, but it's simply the way I feel. So here goes:

(Map generated by USElectionAtlas.org, colors reversed in Photoshop)

The only two states I have doubts about Kerry winning are Colorado and Ohio; meanwhile, I feel that Nevada and New Mexico could similarly fall into the Kerry category. But I figure that I'll call it this way based upon the principle that Where the race is within two points, Kerry will take it, especially where minority votes could swing the balance, meaning Ohio and Florida. I think that minority voters are going to have massive turnout partly because of the feelings of disenfranchisement from 2000 and recent reports about suppressing the minority vote this year--and, of course, because Bush has not done well by them over the past four years. But I know that if I had felt that my vote was stolen four years ago, I would, by principle backed by outrage, make it a mission to make damned sure it counted this time.

Other than that, pure galvanization on the left, in addition to the youth vote, will help push Kerry over the top. Already, predictions of extremely high voter turnout are coming out, based upon early voting in many states. In 2000, 51% of eligible voters cast their votes; I'm predicting that it will be up over 60% this election--though i could actually be too low in that prediction--and that Democrats will represent an even larger margin than in 2000, when Democrats outvoted Republicans 39% to 35%; this year, I'm guessing it will be closer to 42% vs. 36% (more polarized). The caveat being that Republicans seem to be getting more and more energized as of late, but I believe when people on the edge actually get to the polls, more moderate-conservative hearts will simply not have it in them to go with Bush again, considering the pains of the last four years.

So that leaves Congress. This is a tough one. I would count on heavy Democratic turnout to sway races that way, but there is, on the other hand, Republican voters who may switch for Kerry but vote Republican for Congress as a counterbalance, as well as Republican seat theft in the House, especially from Texas (and I believe in Colorado as well). So here are the numbers I'm calling:

		Now	Predicted
Senate	Dem	48	51
	Rep	51	48
House	Dem	205	214
	Rep	227	220

I would like to call more House races than that, and will hope for a Democratic takeover of both House and Senate, but the House takeover is just a bit too far away, even for me. Still, I think we'll hold an edge in the Senate, and be close enough in the House to make some real differences. I think Kerry will be centrist enough that he will be able to get the moderates to come with him enough of the time, and more importantly, if the Republicans try the same crap with him that they did with Clinton, it won't fly even half as well,l and they'll look even more the dividers for it.

So there it is. Everyone coming to visit, please use the comments to make your own predictions. Remember, you don't need to put your email address, just your name or a handle would be great (though you can put full email and URL info if you want, of course).

Ah, the Hypocrisy...

Bush commenting on how vile Kerry is to even mention Tora Bora after the bin Laden tape was released, suggesting Kerry was shameful for taking political opportunity from the message:

"Unfortunately -- unfortunately, my opponent, tonight, continued to say things he knows are not true -- accusing our military of passing up a chance to get Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. As the Commander in charge of that operation, Tommy Franks had said, it's simply not the case. It's the worst kind of Monday morning quarterbacking. It is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America's enemy."

Two GOP officials, meanwhile:

"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."

A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."

He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.

Meanwhile, new poll numbers out partially covering the period after the bin Laden tape was released favor Kerry a bit more than not, meaning the bin Laden tape probably will not have any negative impact. I would not say that it stands to benefit him, as his trend was already slowly upward.

The Electoral Vote

This site is a good one if you want to look at a variety of electoral scenarios. You can play with your own electoral college turnout prediction too. The page shows you where the states are, and you can turn states blue and red (strange--the colors are reversed here) and it'll show you how the map looks and how things tally up if things break the way you suggest. Fun for the whole family!

Playing the Numbers Game

Read this article from the right-slanted Washington Times all the way through, and you'll be treated to the Republicans saying that a U.S. soldier destroyed 250 tons of explosives at al Qaqaa, and besides, there were only 3 tons at the facility in the first place. Or maybe there was 141 tons. But the soldier destroyed 250 of them, so he's bound to have gotten them all, right?

Of course, the first number they quote--380 tons--is most likely closest to the true amount. And despite the claims of the Bush Pentagon, this new testimony probably has absolutely no relevance to the IAEA issue. The explosives in question had IAEA seals on them, which would have to be broken to access them. The soldier in charge said that "I did not see any IAEA seals at the locations that we went into. I was not looking for that." Looking or not, he would have had to break the seals, and so would have seen them. Despite that, "Defense officials said they believe the 250 tons of explosives that Army troops destroyed after overruning the facility south of Baghdad included some of the 380 tons of explosives that have been reported missing."

But let's imagine that the Pentagon is accurate here; even if the soldier destroyed 250 tons, that leaves 130 tons of explosives (which could be used in building nuclear materials as well as terrorist attacks) left unguarded and probably looted. And it means that they knew the explosives were there, they needed to be destroyed, and yet they stopped short and left the remainder unguarded so looters could get them. But maybe that helps Bush, because it lets him blame the troops.

A Reminder About the Polls

You may notice that most polls have Bush out ahead by a few percentage points. The question is, how reliably does this predict the outcome? We know that this year, several of the polls have weighted their results much too far to the Republican voter side. But what about four years ago?

Look at this article, just where we are now--four days before the election--from the 2000 election. The polls had Bush ahead by three to six points. And in the actual election, Gore wound up getting half a million more votes than Bush. the difference between then and now:

Poll	2000	2004
CNN/Gallup	Bush +6	Bush +5
ABC	Bush +5	Bush +3
Zogby	Bush +3	TIE

In short, if past polling is any indication, Kerry could possibly take this one by a few percentage points. And remember, that election had fewer volatiles breaking for the Democrat--this election, the youth and minority votes promise to swing as-yet unmeasured votes Kerry's way.

Mission Accomplished?

This photo has cropped up already:

And maybe we should check the video closely to see if he's got a bulge in the back of his robes...

...Or Maybe There Will Be an Attack

In my last post, I suggested that the bin Laden tape might be his way of mucking with our elections in lieu of an attack, but then my father reminded me that people have said that bin Laden sometimes uses video announcements as signals to sleeper cells to activate.

Hmm.

Not an Attack, But a Halloween Scare

Many say this is the October Surprise, though neither campaign probably had anything to do with it. This is one of those last-minute variables which probably no one will be able to accurately measure before election day. And in a way, it is almost reassuring--it suggests that perhaps this is the al Qaeda action feared before the election, in lieu of an actual terrorist attack.

What it does, effectively, is to tip the ball in play and set both candidates into an unexpected fight to catch the ball and run with it to the endzone--and the politics of the situation has already begun.

Certainly, it is a surprise--we have not seen any definitive, datable proof that bin Laden really survived after Tora Bora, though we more or less knew that he was still around. But this video shows conclusively that bin Laden is alive and well. And it more or less puts to rest the theory that Bush caught bin Laden and was waiting till just before the election to tell everyone we got him.

So what will people's reactions be? Will they see this as a serious threat and go running to Bush to save us? Or will they see this as evidence that Bush dropped the ball, failed to get the bad guy, and we need to get someone else to do the job right? Will bin Laden's sharp criticism of Bush in the video allow Bush to run against bin Laden instead of against Kerry in the last days of the election?

Certainly this all helps Bush in one big way: no one is talking about the al Qaqaa explosives story now. Instead of the ball being carried slowly but surely into Bush's endzone, it is now up in the air at the 50-yard line.

Four days to go.

When Bush Loses...

...what will happen?

Remember how the Bush administration claimed that when the came to occupy the White House, they discovered all kinds of vandalism, from the alleged missing "W" keys on the computer keyboards to much more serious damaging and pilfering? Remember how the GSA, which maintains the White house, debunked the story, saying that most of the damage claims were false, and the "vandalism" was "consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy"? In other words, it was a Bush administration dirty trick after all--they just made it up as a way to attack the Democrats.

To be honest, I'm not worried about the Bush people pilfering all the "J," "F" and "K" keys from the keyboards when Kerry moves in. I'm much more worried about what damage his administration will do to the country and to the world in the three months they will occupy power whilst knowing they are leaving, and are going to be bitterly, angrily vindictive about it.

I do not consider Bush's father, H.W. Bush, to have been even nearly as bitter or vindictive, and yet look at what he did: after spending his entire presidency refusing to engage in any messy third-world quagmires, he chose one month after he lost the 1992 election to order 25,000 U.S. troops into Somalia--without an exit plan. Knowing that the start of the operation would appear victorious, strong, forceful and decisive, just as he knew that it would soon turn bloody, violent, and remorseful--on his opponent's new watch. Bush Sr. knew without a doubt that "winning" in Somalia was impossible; that if Clinton stayed in for too long that he would get caught in a quagmire, and that if Clinton pulled out, the Republicans could thoroughly attack him for weakness and being a "cut and run" president.

No president, unless under dire necessity, should ever begin such a military action, unilaterally, so close to exiting the White House. It was a low, mean and dishonorable thing to do--and violated the trust a president must keep with the military not to use them for political means.

We know that Bush Jr. has even less a problem with abusing the military to achieve his means. What will this Bush administration do when they know they can hand off any number of messy, bloody situations to an incoming John Kerry administration? Will they refuse to fund Iraq, leaving the troops in the cold, so Kerry's first move will have to be massive emergency funding for the Iraq conflict? Will they make a plethora of last-minute edicts on controversial issues so that Kerry's first move will have to be deconstructing presidential orders on flag burning, abortion counseling, the pledge of allegiance and other hot-button issues? Or will Dubya go whole hog like his father did and start a military action in a country where there is no chance of winning--say, the Sudan--leaving Kerry the option of watching our soldiers die in a quagmire, or looking weak by cutting and running?

Personally, I will not put thing one past this Bush administration.

There Goes All Doubt

Remember those soldiers that Bush claimed didn't find any explosives? He was talking about these soldiers:

These soldiers, who are on this video, at al Qaqaa, finding rooms full of explosives:

But hey, those could be any explosives, right? Maybe those are different explosives than the ones that the IAEA was talking about.

Oops.

According to the reports, the troops found "bunker after bunker" full of the explosives, having to break the IAEA seals to get into the buildings, the facilities left behind unsealed and unguarded because not enough troops were available, and with Iraqi civilians freely going in and out of the facility.

Meanwhile, Republicans are sinking to new lows to try to shift blame. After RNC chairman Ed Gillespie and George W. Bush himself falsely claimed that Kerry was blaming and denigrating the troops, GOP footsoldier Rudy Giuliani went on the NBC "Today" show and said the following:

''No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?''

Enough said.

More Blame-Shifting and Excuses Fly as Evidence of Bush Incompetence Mounts

From the New York Times:

Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday.

The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks.
...
But the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it.

"The looting started after the collapse of the regime," said Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a regional security chief, who was based nearby in Latifiya. But once it had begun, he said, the booty streamed toward Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Bush & Co. is desperately trying to throw up any and every theory about how the explosives were taken before the invasion--and failing badly. They tried to claim that soldiers who stayed overnight at the facility on April 10 with an NBC News team found the explosives missing, only to have that story contradicted and torn to shreds. The Washington Times is now trying to push the story that Russian special forces removed the explosives (is this or is this not sounding more and more desperate--Russian special forces? Please), but already that story has been shot down--the source is thoroughly discredited, and the Russian embassy in Washington is flatly denying that any Russian forces were in Iraq at all during that time frame.

So what next? Well, there was a group of other soldiers who went through the al Qaqaa complex on April 3, which the administration is now using. They say that those other troops "saw no signs" of the explosives. Case closed, right?

No, of course not. Josh Marshall, as usual, has the goods. It turns out that there was an April 5 news story, "the 3rd Infantry Division entered the vast Qa Qaa chemical and explosives production plant and came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box." The looted explosives, RDX and HMX, are white powders. An AP story the same day reported that "troops at Iraq's largest military industrial complex found ... a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives. ... A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives."

In other words, Bush & Co. are claiming that the troops found no evidence of the looted explosives. However, they did find explosives that look exactly like the ones that were looted.

Really, I don't know if Bush & Co. really care at this point--I believe that they are just flinging out story after story, hoping that (a) people will have heard "it's not Bush's fault" so many times that they'll believe it, or at least they won't remember that all claims were thoroughly discredited, and/or (b) that they can keep the ball in the air--that is, produce a line of explanations that will take time to debunk--so that they can continue to say "it's not a fact" until the election goes by.

However, the debunking--especially by bloggers like Marshall--are acting so quickly that each story only survives a very short time, and as the explanations fly, the story gets bigger and bigger.

Bush's Reality Distortion Field is on Maximum Power, folks--set phasers to "disintegrate."

A Good Omen for Boston?

In recent months, some have compared Kerry with the accursed Boston Red Sox--both come from Boston, both were believed to not have a chance ow winning. And yet here we are, the Red Sox coming back from a 0-3 cellar in the Playoffs and winning the World Series in 4 games.

Will the prognosticators who foresaw Kerry's doom in the Boston curse now apply the same comparison to the election, just less than a week away?

Election Night Scheduling

Well, I am happy to report that the scheduling of Japanese Holidays has made it possible for me to closely monitor the U.S. elections next week: it turns out that Wednesday, November 3rd is Culture Day in Japan, and the day is free. And with time zones and all, that means that the election results will be coming in throughout the day here. After DST takes effect in the U.S. on October 31, 8:00 pm EST will be 10:00 am here in Tokyo. Polls should close in Hawaii by 4:00 in the afternoon here, and unless it's really close, the preliminary results will be coming in by early evening. Perfect timing. And, of course, I'll be blogging like a madman throughout, most likely. I am already up to 953 posts on this blog, and #1000 may well come around on election day--rather fitting, if it's so.

In Good Company

A few posts back I pointed out how Bush, his people, and his supporters all are using the troops and other honorable people as straw-man scapegoats, falsely suggesting that when Kerry blames Bush, he is actually blaming someone else, like the troops. In effect, Bush is being a gutless coward by deflecting blame onto honorable people just to save his own sorry butt. Well, Bush is at it again:

Now the Senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy advisor admits "we don't know the facts." End quote. Think about that. The Senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts.

As explained before, Kerry never attacked the troops or the generals, he clearly and singularly attacked Bush. Bush's lie on the matter echoes RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie's rather blatant out-of-context misquote of Kerry to the same effect.

Fortunately, I am not the only person to make this observation; I am in good company with the former chief of staff of the Air Force:

Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak said in a statement that Bush seems to believe that Kerry should not be criticizing him "since the president thinks he has never made a mistake."

McPeak continued: "Let's be perfectly clear: it is the President who dropped the ball. Senator Kerry is being critical of George Bush, not the troops. By embarking on the line of attack, George Bush is deflecting blame from him over to the military. This is beneath contempt."

Edwards is also sounding the same note:

"Why did George Bush (news - web sites) take three days to finally say something about 380 tons of missing explosives?" Kerry said. "They did nothing, nothing to secure them and now they're gone. And we don't know who has them. It's possible terrorists have them."

"And, what did George Bush have to say about this? He said that John Kerry doesn't support the troops."

In a dubious voice and shaking his head, Edwards asked from his platform in the middle of supporters in a gymnasium: "Aren't we sick and tired of George Bush and Dick Cheney using our troops as shields to protect their own jobs?"

Kerry also referred to this, citing Bush's willingness to blame anyone and everyone but himself. I am, to say the least, extremely pleased and gratified that people are calling Bush out on this spineless practice.

By the way, it's great to be ahead of the curve on this kind of thing--in this case, a full year ahead!

Top Iraqi Official: Explosives "Could Not Have Been Taken" Before US Invasion

This from Yahoo News:

A top Iraqi science official said it was impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year.

...

"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," said Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and previously worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam.

"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

Sharaa also warned that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered.

"The Al-Milad Company in Iskandariyah and the Yarmouk and Hateen facilities contained explosive materials that could have also been taken out," the official told AFP in an interview.

In other words, the Bush administration knows full well that the explosives were plundered on their watch, were taken because they didn't think to put enough soldiers on the ground to watch all the places that needed to be watched. And a week before the election, with things so close, they are scared silly to admit the truth, so they have been lying their hineys off.

The al Qaqaa debacle is, at the right time, so perfectly representative of all the debacles the Bush administration has been responsible for; it would be difficult to think of a better story to exemplify the incompetence of this administration, and why we need new governance.

The Political Art of Shifting Blame

I have written before about the political art of shifting blame to others: when you've made a colossal blunder and it threatens your political career or agenda, if reporters ask you if you made an error, then twist the question to make it appear like they are blaming an honorable group of people. Reagan did this when the Marine barracks were blown up in Lebanon, making it appear that any accusation of wrongdoing was equal to dishonoring the soldiers who died, saying their deaths were in vain. In my prior article on the subject, I noted that a FOX reporter tried the same thing on Wesley Clark, implying that if Clark said that Iraq was a sideshow and Bush was missing the real target in Afghanistan, that was equal to belittling the troops in Iraq.

The Bush campaign is in full-gear blame-shifting mode this week. First was the criticism that Bush outsourced the hunt for bin Laden to the local warlords, who let bin Laden escape. Searching for a way to dismiss this cogent and damaging criticism, Bush said:

Now my opponent is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001, and that our military passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field. This is the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

In other words, if there was a blunder made, it wasn't me, it was the generals. And how dare he criticize the generals!

But they didn't stop there. Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the RNC, sent out a mass email to millions of people, claiming that the ultra-super-liberal media was at it yet again, daring to report that the explosives in Iraq were looted after the invasion, when in fact American troops found the cache had been looted already, on Saddam Hussein's watch, and that an NBC News crew had confirmed it, therefore making Kerry's criticism and the press coverage of it a howling outrage.

Of course, he was wrong: the troops only stayed at al Qaqaa for the night, they did not look for the weapons (and would not have been qualified to make that determination anyway), and the NBC crew in fact contradicted the claim that the explosives had been found already missing. CNN's report of the NBC team and the soldiers finding the weapons gone was not even based on an NBC report, it was in fact based on a Matt Drudge story, and we all know how reliable he can be. Josh Marshall is all over the story.

But the point in this entry is that Gillespie used this blame-shifting technique; note carefully the words in bold, as well as Gillespie's careful use of quotation marks:

John Kerry seized on the New York Times headline to launch a political attack on President Bush, saying U.S. troops "failed to guard those stockpiles" and that is "one of the great blunders" of the war.

Senator Kerry and the New York Times leave the impression that these weapons went missing recently and U.S. troops were derilict in their duty to guard the stockpile — neither of which is true.

Not only does this shift the blame to the troops instead of the president, but it also carefully misquotes Kerry, whose original quote was:

After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this president failed to guard those stockpiles. ... Now we know our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics, this is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration. The incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be.

Notice Gillespie's careful and intentional editing of Kerry's quote, cutting it off just so he can take the blame Kerry puts squarely on Bush, and make it appear like Kerry is criticizing the troops. When in fact, Kerry not once said it was the fault of the troops, and quite clearly blamed the Bush administration, not once but repeatedly--kind of hard for Gillespie to miss.

We know these people are lying bastards, folks... but it's hard not to use even stronger language when you see such blatant lies such as these--not to mention cowardly attempts to hide behind honorable people in order to save your own sorry political ass.

BBC: Bush "Caging List" in Florida Reveals Voter Intimidation Plan

From The BBC:

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

The BBC is presenting it as a big deal, indicative of illegal activity; I am not certain about that. It appears to be the same kind of plan that the GOP is outwardly carrying out in Ohio; the Bush campaign claims that it is a list of voters with questionable addresses that they plan to challenge. The charge of illegality is based upon the fact that "US federal law prohibits targeting challenges to voters, even if there is a basis for the challenge, if race is a factor in targeting the voters." And Jacksonville is predominantly black. Still, intent of racial bias may be hard to pin down in federal court, especially if the Bush campaign can produce similar lists for other counties (which they probably have).

I would be especially interested to know exactly who called it a "caging list"; the BBC article is not specific about that. If it was language used by the Bush campaign, then that word alone could be heavily charged.

When it comes down to it, I see this as yet another plan--just like in Ohio--to intimidate voters at the polling place. The list certainly details how the GOP operatives there plan to stop people, and forcing so many to sign 2-page legal affidavits at the polling place will at the least be a disruption, and at most could discourage a great many people from voting. And while the elections supervisor quoted in the BBC article is a Democrat and so bias must be anticipated, he nevertheless reveals an interesting fact: "not one challenge has been made to a voter "'in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections.'" Which means that this Republican tactic is a new thing.

The BBC article also notes rather suspicious activity by shady characters at the early polling places:

In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were using the lists or other means of intimidating voters, we filmed a private detective filming every "early voter" - the majority of whom are black - from behind a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

The private detective claimed not to know who was paying for his all-day services.

Note: The BBC so far is the only news organization reporting this. None of the US services are mentioning anything about this, 8 hours and more after the story broke.

Another Quake in Niigata

Just a few minutes ago, another sizable tremor hit, and NHK has just reported that it is yet another powerful aftershock--a "6-" on the Japanese scale, maybe a 6.0 M quake or above on the Richter--at the same location in Niigata, where 31 people died, 3,400 were injured and more than 100,000 were made homeless. This tremor was predicted, but is not good news for those in the area, their situation already made worse by heavy rains yesterday.

The Quality of Criticism

It is interesting to note the differences in how the candidates criticize each other. Take, for example, Kerry's jabs at Bush in a recent speech on improving conditions for women in America:

George Bush’s promise was to protect Social Security. But for four years, he’s raided the Social Security trust fund to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. And recently, he said that if he was re-elected, he’d “come out strong” to privatize Social Security. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, that means benefit cuts of 25 to 45 percent. But what does it mean for a woman whose only income is a $1100 a month Social Security check? It means cutting more pills in half … it means not being able to buy a birthday gift for a grandchild … it means sitting awake at night, often all alone, worrying about what tomorrow will bring.
...
George Bush likes to talk about how being President is “hard work.” Mr. President, I’m very happy to relieve you of that hard work. And before the President complains about his job, he ought to come here and spend a day with you. He might learn something about how, day after day, the women of this country juggle so much with such grace and strength. What you do every day – now that’s hard work.
...
And I think that’s one of the biggest differences between George Bush and us. We believe that the middle class is the backbone of this country – and that hard-working women are the bedrock of our families. We believe that women deserve more than false assurances and empty promises from their President. They deserve a fresh start with a President who’s going to take responsibility, face reality, and make sure that they don’t just get by – they get ahead. If you give me that chance – I will be that President.

In contrast, here are representative jabs at Kerry by Bush in one of latest stump speeches:

THE PRESIDENT: I'm proud of my running mate, Dick Cheney. (Applause.) Now, look, I fully admit he does not have the waviest hair in this race. (Laughter.) But I want to assure you, I didn't pick him because of his hairdo. (Laughter.)
...
THE PRESIDENT: My opponent takes a different approach. He believes that instead of leading with confidence, America must submit to what he calls a global test.

AUDIENCE: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: I'm not making that up. (Laughter.) He was standing right about just there when I heard him say it. (Applause.) As far as I can tell -- as far as I can tell, that means our country must get permission from foreign capitals before we act in our own self-defense. [He is making that up--ed.]

AUDIENCE: Booo!
...
THE PRESIDENT: On Iraq, my opponent has a strategy of pessimism and retreat. He has talked about artificial timetables to pull our troops out. He has sent the signal that America's overriding goal in Iraq would be to leave, even if the job is not done.

AUDIENCE: Booo!
...
THE PRESIDENT: He voted against many of the weapons systems critical to our defense build-up.

AUDIENCE: Booo!
...
THE PRESIDENT: Senator Kerry has turned his back on "pay any price," and "bear any burden." He's replaced those commitments with, "wait and see," and "cut and run."

AUDIENCE: Booo!

The tone is fundamentally, qualitatively different. Bush's style includes ad hominen jabs--like implying that Edwards was chosen for the VP slot because of his hair instead of his judgment--and is followed by a litany of distortions: Bush's "understanding" of Kerry's words on the global test are patently false (Kerry said the president could act unilaterally and preemptively, and only afterwards his judgment would be tested by international approval); Kerry has always held that the job must be finished in Iraq, the direct opposite of what Bush claims; the tired chestnut of Kerry "voting against" weapons systems is actually based on Kerry agreeing with Cheney's own cuts; and Kerry has been the one to ask people to pay a price and never to cut and run, while Bush runs up debt as he gets us into quagmires.

Bush's speech cuts at Kerry with a laundry list of other lies--but note the tone. Sharp, cutting, caustic; you can see the smirk every time he makes a crack or a criticism, you can hear the "heh-heh" he adds when he says these things, and the audience consistently booing reflects his encouragement of negativity.

Compare that with Kerry's style, not depending on personal jabs or taunts, touching on values common to people in need, using solid figures usually from non-partisan sources--but overall, using a softer, less divisive tone. In fact, go to both web sites and read both speeches in their entirety. The difference is palpable, both in straight rhetoric and their more positive statements, as well as their criticism of each other. It is no mystery why Bush has divided this country more than ever before over the past four years. And it is no mistake to assume that Kerry will be far more the uniter--at least as much as is humanly possible, should the Republicans turn on him viciously and make it their mission to tear him apart as they did with Clinton, instead of working together with him in a bipartisan approach.

At least with Kerry, we have a chance at a more united country, so long as the Republicans extend even half the unity and bipartisanship the Democrats have offered over the past four years.

Rehnquist and Cancer

Is it a coincidence that we learn of Rehnquist's cancer just eight days before the election? I am not, of course, suggesting that Rehnquist scheduled his surgery for this time, but the chief justice has had his malady diagnosed for some time; for it to be publicly announced so close to a contentious election is without question subject to scrutiny. Was news of Rehnquist's illness meant to galvanize the conservative base, scaring them into believing that if they don't get Bush elected, then a Democrat could appoint the next chief justice of the Supreme Court? Could this be Rehnquist's new way of getting Bush elected after he led the conservative-majority court cabal in the 2000 election to stop legal counting in Florida and elect Bush the winner?

Naturally, if that is the case, it could also backfire: liberals could see this as a once-in-a-generation chance to win back seats on the highest court, sending it back to a more equal balance. Rehnquist would have to hang on for four more years if Kerry were elected, and he might not have that choice.

Looted Explosives (350 tons) in Iraq Covered Up by Bush Administration

Talking Points Memo is covering it in detail, after the story was broken by the Nelson Report, a private newsletter (no web site) reporting on Asia. Apparently, 350 tons of high explosive was looted early on in the U.S. occupation of Iraq--you remember, the looting which Rumsfeld pooh-poohed as insignificant, looting caused by a lack of sufficient troops which the administration tried to say wasn't important--and, as Kerry pointed out in the debates, is now being used against our own people every day in Iraq. Explosives which may have killed hundreds of our troops, in the hands of the insurgents because Bush did not do the job right. Apparently this type of explosive could also be used to trigger a nuclear device.

What's more, it was covered up: it seems that the Bush administration and the DoD did not report this to the IAEA or other bodies that it should be telling, and told the Iraqi government not to inform anyone either. Not to mention that it withheld this information from the American people. Considering the potential political implications of the story, this could be big. Expect it to break in the mainstream press soon. And keep in mind that Kerry was talking about this weeks ago.

Update: The New York Times is now carrying the story. And it seems to be 380 tons, not 350.

Newspaper Endorsements Surging to Kerry

From Editor and Publisher:

Sen. John Kerry continued his raid on newspapers that backed President Bush in 2000, grabbing 22 new "flip-flops," plus The Washington Post, which was a major supporter of the war in Iraq. The Democrat has now won endorsements from at least 33 papers that went for Bush in 2000, while Bush has earned only two Gore papers.

However, Bush got a prize in the key state of Ohio, The Columbus Dispatch.

Kerry now leads Bush 122-69 in endorsements in E&P's exclusive tally, and he leads by about 14.9 million to 8.9 million in the circulation of backing papers.

These endorsements have been breaking Kerry's way since the beginning, although admittedly many of them are as anti-Bush as they are pro-Kerry. Still, it's rather surprising how many that went for Bush have now switched and are going for Kerry. Despite the E&P emphasis on the Ohio paper going for Bush, included among those endorsing Kerry are several in battleground states, including the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, which wrote: "This president has utterly failed to fulfill our expectations. We turn now to his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, with the belief that he is more likely to meet the hopes we once held for Mr. Bush."

Other key papers switching from Bush to Kerry include Allentown Morning Call in Pennsylvania, the Quad City Times in Davenport, Iowa, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, The Sun and the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin in Washington, the Wausau Daily Herald in Wisconsin, the Billings Gazette in Montana, and the Bangor Daily News in Maine.

If Kerry Becomes President, Aliens Will Eat Our Brains, Cheney Announces

Not really, but you get the feeling that that is where he's headed. First, as his campaign decried "scare tactics" on the part of the Kerry campaign, Cheney claimed that a Kerry presidency would lead to a terrorist attack. then he claimed that the U.S. would be nuked if Kerry won. Now he's saying that if Kerry had been president in the 80's, the Soviet Union would still be in power. In addition, Saddam Hussein would probably control the Persian Gulf today. So, essentially, a vote for Kerry will lead to Soviet terrorists in league with a Super-Giant-Mega-Saddam Hussein, nuking us right and left.

What's precious about Cheney's Soviets-in-power claim is that he bases it on Kerry's votes against certain weapons systems. Except that it was Cheney himself who made the decision to cut those precise weapons systems in the first place!!

More About the Republican Voter Intimidation Drive in Ohio

From The Columbus Dispatch:

"Any political party supporting candidates on the ballot ... may appoint one person to each polling location as a challenger during the casting of ballots.... Any person voting may be challenged.... Voters' eligibility may be challenged on four grounds: they are not U.S. citizens, they haven't lived in Ohio for at least 30 days before the election, they do not live in the county where they are voting, they are not at least 18 years old. Voters who are challenged must sign an affidavit responding to the reasons challenged."

The affidavit, it turns out, is even more intimidating than it at first sounds:

Voters who are challenged will be asked to fill out a two-page form stating their name, if they are a U.S. citizen, where they were born, if they have resided in the state 30 days, the names of two persons who know where they live, the county and precinct in which they live, and if they are of legal voting age.

The bottom of the form contains the following warning in bold type: "Whoever commits election falsification is guilty of a felony of the fifth degree."

All of this begs the question: how the heck will they be able to spot people to challenge? What does a person who has not lived in Ohio for 30 days look like? Could you spot someone from a different county? It is not hard to predict that the Republican challengers will be well-trained to spot the most vulnerable voters and force them to go through all of this in order to vote. Voters who appear to be in a hurry will doubtless be targeted as well. And it is without doubt that the GOP challengers will spot the Democrats chiefly by their color.

Additionally, the GOP is challenging 35,000 newly registered voters in Ohio--Democrats, of course, mostly minorities--before they even get to the polling places. The GOP is claiming that a mass mailing they did to new registrants generated a large number of returned mail, suggesting incorrect addresses, in turn suggesting bogus registration. However, there is grave doubt as to the legitimacy of these claims; the GOP has most likely simply found a new way of keeping Democrats from voting. Those Democratic areas being challenged are now being thrown into turmoil, with tens of thousands of Democrats being forced to appear at hearings to prove that they are truly eligible to vote. In short, the GOP found a new way to legally intimidate voters, making them jump through hoops before they can be allowed to vote.

Not that they'll admit to it, of course; in order to make their intimidation appear legitimate, they have been claiming to the press that this is all about voter fraud on the part of the Democrats; for example, they claim that many false registrations were made by a man who "was paid in crack cocaine for his registration efforts by a representative of the NAACP." There are truly no depths that they will not lower themselves to.

The Sweet Frustration of Hypocrites

Well, it seems that the protest against the Sinclair broadcast intended to smear Kerry was successful; at least from the far-right perspective of Freepers, judging from their strangled, frustrated whining, the show was relatively balanced. Their bald ambition to have it be a savage attack on Kerry is undisguised:

Seriously though, I'm mad. This is stupid, and it's not making Kerry look bad. Then they showed a little hit piece on President Bush. Did Sinclair cave or what??------------------This thing sucks. Anything postive for the POWs and vets is "BALANCED" by whack jobs for kerry. Now they're doing the Bush AWOL thing - I am blocking SINclair on my box - what a setup! - It's on tape but I think I'll burn it. ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!------------------Sinclair is apparently a bunch of linguini-spined cowards who decided to chop up the documentary and insert so much cognitive dissonance as to make it useless. Shame on them! SHAME!

Hee hee, that's fun to read. Serves 'em right. This is the same crowd that howled bloody murder when the Reagan miniseries was to show--getting it bumped to cable--and that wasn't about a candidate and it wasn't two weeks before an election. With that miniseries, as you'll recall, Republicans demanded to screen the miniseries beforehand, and if they didn't like it, then they would demand a scrolling subtitle be constantly shown to emphasize that the series was fiction. Not so it would be balanced, but so it would be either sympathetic to their views or fully discredited as untrue. If they can justify that but then rail against this, they are quite clearly raving hypocrites.

Clearly the pressure put on Sinclair was effective. After their stock fell and their advertisers scattered, they announced that they were planning a "balanced" show after all--but no one doubts that if not for the protest, they would have shown only the smear documentary, possibly followed by a panel show, as they had originally announced. But even then there would have been the question of legality; it might have been more than fear of losing sponsors, if Sinclair had aired the anti-Kerry doc as originally planned, they could have been hit with lawsuits and possibly even lost their license.

It should also be noted that maybe the show wasn't quite son easy on Kerry as the Freepers feared; after all, their wing-nut view may just make them feel that the show wasn't an anti-Kerry screed; one of them points out, "It doesn't suck; it's just not slash and burn. Try to remember that the rest of the world isn't quite as strident about John Kerry as we are." To say the least.

It'll be interesting to see what the non-far-right-loony reaction is. But reading through the hundreds of posts by screaming, outraged Freepers is fun.

Large-Scale GOP Voter-Intimidation Drive Planned in Ohio

No, I'm not kidding:

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

In the meantime, Democrats recruited 3,600 people to protect those same voters from Republican intimidation. The Republican intimidation drive and the Democratic defense against it are taking place primarily in "heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities." This is not a two-sided attempt by both parties to intimidate voters on the other side--this is purely offensive on the part of the GOP, hoping to scare off as many Democratic voters as possible.

This is reprehensible. But not unexpected. The GOP is now running scared, and is evidently willing to stop at nothing to win this one by hook or crook.

They Told Us We Were Shooting a Greenpeace Commercial!

This web site via Josh Marshall. Very amusing, if the target of the site is anything but.

Niigata Hit Hard by String of Quakes (Felt Across Central Japan)

We are in the process of being hit by a string of strong earthquakes right now. At least one is a 6.8 (Richter scale, it seems) centered in Niigata, but it was felt strongly here. About 3-4 minutes later, I felt another smaller one, and then just now, another strong one, just as strong as the first. And these are up-and-down, not side-by-side quakes.

More as it comes in.

Update: just a few minutes later, I'm on the phone with my brother, and another one hits. that's three fairly good-sized quakes, ranging from at least 5.5 and up to 6.8 on the Richter. I would not want to be in Niigata right now.

NHK is reporting that the last quake was also a 6+, though they only say it's a 5.9 on the Richter.

Update (6:20): Tenki.jp is reporting that the second big quake I felt was a 6.2 on the Richter. They also report the other two quakes.

Update (6:35): Another one! This one just past 6:30, and it felt stronger than the others! I heard the NHK guy in Niigata on TV report it first, camera shaking and all, and then felt it here just a few seconds later.

Damn.

One TV station says it was a 6.3 (NHK concurs), [update: another quake I didn't feel here but was a 5.0 in Niigata; another also hit later] making the sequence:

5:56 pm: 6.8 M
6:03 pm: 6.2 M
6:12 pm: 5.9 M
6:34 pm: 6.3 M
6:36 pm: 5.0 M
6:51 pm: 5.1 M

No reports of damage or injury yet, but this quake hit in the countryside some miles south of Niigata City, so it could be a few hours before we get solid info on exactly what the damage is up there.

Update (7:00): The quake is now being reported in the international press, the best item issued by The Scotsman. Trains have stopped across the region (not a weekday, but still a heavy traffic time).

NHK is now reporting some building damage in Niigata, a broken water main, and a minor train derailment, possibly a bullet train. At least five injuries in one area have been reported, but no fires.

Update (7:22): Correction, ten people with injuries and counting. Reports of mudslides and collapsed houses are trickling in.

Update (7:48): At least one death has been reported, as well as a number of fires. 50-60 people are now reported injured. We are hearing of collapsed walls and fences and other damage. Some areas are affected by a power outage, other reports have electricity on but street lights out. The derailment was indeed a bullet train, with cars #1 and 9 going off the tracks, but it seems like there's not much damage there, no injuries on the train. There is also a report of a partially collapsed expressway. The train left Tokyo at 4pm, and was scheduled to arrive in Niigata at 6. Aftershocks--some of them over 5 on the Richter scale--continue to rock the area. A 5.2 hit at 7:36, and now reports are coming out of a low-6 quake hitting at 7:46.

Scare Tactics

From Reuters, October 19:

"Instead of articulating a vision or a positive agenda for the future, the senator is relying on a litany of complaints and old style scare tactics," Bush told a rally in New Port Richey.

From ABC News, October 22:

Bush suggested his Democratic rival "does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to keep America secure." His campaign reinforced that theme with a new television ad with chilling imagery of prowling wolves in a dense forest. "Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm," an announcer says.

Pop-ups Are Coming Back

Ever since Mozilla started blocking pop-up advertisements on web pages, I've had a great deal of success avoiding them. In fact, I hadn't gotten a single one for a few years--until recently. I just experienced the second one now, and it's becoming apparent to me that the spammers are breaking through here as well--they're somehow figuring out ways to get around pop-up blockers.

Ironically, it is partially due to Microsoft. In the recent Service Pack upgrade to Windows XP, Internet Explorer was improved to block pop-up ads--likely copying exactly what Mozilla has been doing for so long now. And since IE has such a huge chunk of the market, advertisers felt compelled to find away around it--and in doing so, got around the Mozilla protection as well.

Here's a story which explains it.

So we were doing great until IE moved in. There goes yet another neighborhood...

He Didn't But Says He Did

From the Des Moines Register, October 21:

President Bush touted himself as a man of his word Wednesday, reminding a crowd of 4,000 supporters about promises he made four years ago when campaigning in Iowa, and maintaining he's fulfilled them.

"I kept my word," Bush said repeatedly at a morning rally held at the North Iowa Fairgrounds in Mason City.

From Knight-Ridder, October 20:

President Bush will end his four-year term having fulfilled about 46 percent of the [178] promises he made during the 2000 presidential campaign, according to an analysis by Knight Ridder. ... A similar Knight Ridder analysis found that, during his first term, President Clinton had fulfilled about 66 percent of the 160 commitments that he made during his first presidential campaign.

This Reality Distortion Field Bush puts up is not a mistake; he very much wants people to believe things that are patently untrue--and it's working. According to PIPA, most Bush supporters have a completely mistaken idea of what Bush stands for. A slight majority are correct on his standing on defense spending (increase), and 70% know that he wants the U.S. to do nation-building in Iraq. But fewer than half know his standing on missile defense, the international court and even (unbelievably) the Kyoto accords--and fewer than 25% know that he opposes nuclear weapons testing bans or the land mine treaty. Only 13% know that he opposes labor and environmental conditions in trade agreements.

Kerry supporters, on the other hand, know their man much better. On only one topic--defense spending--do a minority understand his position, and that's 43%. On all the other above-mentioned topics, a majority of his supporters know where he stands: International court, 65%; Missile defense, 68%; Kyoto accords, 74%; Nuclear test bans, 77%; Land mine treaty, 79%; Role in rebuilding Iraq, 80%; and Labor/environment in trade agreements, 81%.

In short, people who support Kerry do so because they know that Kerry stands with them on the issues, while Bush has hoodwinked his own supporters into voting for him by making them think that he stands with them on the issues when he really doesn't.

A Vote for Kerry, FedExed

Finally, it's off in the mail. I went to the FedEx shipping center in Fuchu, Tokyo today to drop it off.

Federal Express has a special standing offer to Americans living overseas: bring your absentee ballots to us, and we'll ship them for you--free of charge. You have to drop it off at a manned station here in Japan, all of which are listed here (click on the location link for a map and phone numbers), but note that the free shipping offer is only good for FedEx offices in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka, and not in Tohoku or Hokkaido. For more details and instructions, call 0120-003-200 (toll free), or 043-298-1919.

I waited this long because I was waiting for a good-weather day when I had the chance to get things done. I decided to go to FedEx because, quite frankly, I didn't want to trust the Japanese post office with this one, not after what they pulled with my request for my ballot: after paying extra to send it registered mail, it took them a month to deliver it, and an additional two months to send the receipt. No thanks to that. FedEx has Internet shipment tracking, and its free. And fast.

When you ship it at FedEx, they have you fill out the Air Waybill form. The rep there (who spoke English) expressed disappointment that I'd already sealed the envelope--she said she needed to staple one of the waybill copies to the ballot itself. However, seeing as how the envelope is signed and everything must be official, I'd have been more than a bit nervous having her put other stuff in there as well. As it was, she stapled the waybill to the edge of the official envelope.

They were prepared for a variety of eventualities, by the way--I had not brought the phone number of the Elections Office, which it turns out is needed for the waybill, but the rep had a list of all the phone numbers for all the election offices in the U.S., ready to go. Though I got the feeling that I was the first one to bring a ballot into that particular office...

I should be able to track it from tomorrow morning--I turned it in too late for today's shipments. It'll be good to know that the vote is on its way.

Never Tear Your Popliteal in a Typhoon

So I'm walking to the train station, I see the elevator opening while I'm still a little distance from the entrance, and I take off at a jog to catch it.

Suddenly, something hits my left calf muscles hard. Like a small, heavy metal ball had just been thrown at high velocity smack at the center of the calf. I turn around to see who did that, but no one is there, and within a second I realize sickeningly that nothing hit me--rather, something in my leg had just snapped. Never a jolly thing, that.

It's not that bad at first, just like most muscle strains and pulls I get, but I know that it'll hurt like heck in the morning. By the time I get home, it's already too painful to walk on anymore. No swelling or bruising, just debilitating pain, that's all. I ice it, bandage it up, and elevate it on an old bundled-up blanket while I sleep, after figuring out (okay, my father figured it out) that it was the popliteal muscle, or tendon, or ligament or whatever, not that I'm too sharp on how those are different from each other. My level of understanding is, essentially, something snap bad go ouch, hurt long time no walk. This kind of thing apparently happens when you start off on a run or the like, and is more likely if you suffer pains in the muscle beforehand, which I had, twice in as many weeks.

The next morning I wake up early and go to the hospital, and the doctor turns out to be more of what I expect from the Japanese medical schools than the doctors I have been lucky enough to get recently. This guy essentially echoes everything I told him that I found out already on the web, but he gave me painkillers and crutches. Not much else he could have done, I suppose. He did seem willing to do an MRI, but I figured it would be way expensive and in the end would mean pretty much nothing.

All this as typhoon #23 is starting to hit, meaning I can't depend on traveling in good weather, and with crutches, that means no umbrella. And I have to get to the station from home, from the other station to work, from the main office to another school a good 15-minute brisk walk without crutches away, then to the station, and then station to home. So I took five taxi rides. That or get soaked and have both my arms be incredibly sore tomorrow.

Hopefully, the tendon or whatever will heal quickly (my dad's research says it's a vestigial muscle anyway, and we can do without), and this will be the last d*mned typhoon in a way-too-long-and-wet typhoon season.

Sorry. I'm just not a rain person.

The Numbers for Kerry Keep Getting Better

Discounting the Gallup and Newsweek polls because of their clear Republican bias, we see a race in a statistical dead heat (all results within the margin of error) between Kerry and Bush, with the trend favoring Kerry:

Poll	Date	Bush	Kerry
Rasmussen(3,000 LV)	10/15- 10/17	47%	47%
CBSNews (678 LV)	10/14- 10/17	47%	46%
TIPP(807 LV)	10/14- 10/18	47%	44%
Time(865 LV w/leaners)	10/14- 10/15	48%	48%

Furthermore, Kerry now has an edge in the swing states, including one poll that shows him pulling ahead in Florida, and pulling farther ahead in Pennsylvania:

Florida: SurveyUSA. 10/15-17. MoE 4.1%. (10/6 results)

Kerry 50 (46)
Bush 49 (51)

Pennsylvania: SurveyUSA. 10/15-17. MoE 4.1%. ( 10/6 results)

Kerry 51 (49)
Bush 45 (47)

Note that in both states, Kerry is moving ahead--actually improving by 4% in Florida. These have yet to be reflected at ElectoralVote.com as of this writing, but even without Florida in his column, Kerry still enjoys a lead of 10 electoral votes on that map.

Michigan is already strongly for Kerry, but it is of note that its former Governor William Milliken, a Republican has endorsed Kerry for president, accusing Bush of pandering to the "far right wing."

This Is Why We Need International Observers--And Lots More of Them

"If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."

--Michigan State Representative John Pappageorge (R), July 16, 2004
   (Detroit is 88 percent black in a predominantly white state)

It's almost as open as Pappageorge let slip back in July. Election fraud has already been found well under way in a dozen or more states, and by sheer coincidence, it is 100% Republican. And as in Michigan, much of the GOP fraud is aimed at keeping African-Americans from voting. This coming from a party that lauds itself as "The Party of Lincoln."

It's more visible in Philadelphia than anywhere else as of tonight, where the Bush campaign staff attempted a last-minute drive to shuffle around polling places in Philadelphia--again, a predominantly black city in a predominantly white state. The Bush team argued that they wanted to relocate 63 polling places because they allegedly lack sufficient handicapped access, and because of "intimidation." Said Matt Robb, the Republican leader of the 48th ward in South Philadelphia, "It's predominantly, 100 percent black. I'm just not going in there to get a knife in my back." Another gem of a Republican said they were trying to change polling places in black neighborhoods because "The black neighborhoods are the ones that do the funny stuff. What are you supposed to do?"

This request comes at the last minute, after 1.1 million Philadelphians have already been mailed directions to the polling places. A switch at this point would be strategically timed to confuse and disenfranchise the greatest number of minority and Democratic voters. The white population in 53 of the 63 affected districts is only 10%.

In case you've lost track of the numerous early-bird election fraud events by the GOP (a tidal wave of others will come fast and thick election day, you can bet on it), here's a quick list to remind you:

• Wisconsin: In Milwaukee, another city with a densely Democratic African-American population, more ballots were needed else the central-city districts run out, leaving thousands unable to vote. Guess who tried to block extra ballots from getting delivered? Yep. Republicans again.
• Florida: Jeb Bush, acting against the advice of Florida officials who informed him that the felon list was flawed, pushed for the list to be put into action secretly, actively denying public access to the information. Only after a court order released the list did we find that thousands of Democratic-leaning African-Americans entitled to vote would have been purged, while Republican-leaning Cuban felons had been removed from the no-vote list. Bush called it a "mistake."
• Florida Again: Republicans caught immigrants who had just been naturalized and urged them to register to vote. The forms they gave the brand-new citizens had already been filled out as Republican.
• Florida Yet Again: U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler had to file a lawsuit in order to get a paper trail of votes in Florida. The GOP vigorously opposed him. The electronic machines that the GOP wanted to be without a means of vote verification are made by a company run by a Bush campaign manager.
• Ohio: Here's where that Bush campaign manager is. He's Walden O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, the company that makes voting machines that will be used nationwide. One would think that, in his position as the guy who makes the voting machines without paper trails, O'Dell would be careful to at least sound somewhat fair. Well, guess what. Aside from being a huge Bush supporter and state campaign manager, he also stated publicly that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
• Nevada: Former state Republican Party Chair Dan Burdish attempted to wipe 17,000 Democrats off the voter rolls. He was prevented from doing so, but tried anyway.
• Also Nevada: The first reports of the Nathan Sproul (former head of the Republican Party and Christian Coalition in Arizona) organization, Voters Outreach of America (VOA), a self-purported "non-partisan voter registration company" which is, by sheer chance, funded by the Republican National Committee. In Nevada, workers from within the VOA charged that the company was hiding their affiliation, and working outside shops and malls, was getting hundreds and probably thousands of Democrats to register to vote through them, and then destroying the applications so the Democrats would be deprived of their votes.
• Oregon: VOA was also found to be doing exactly the same thing in Oregon, where a worker reported that he was told that he "might" destroy Democratic applications.
• Pennsylvania and West Virginia: Here VOA did not destroy Democratic applications, they just denied Democrats the forms to register, sometimes falsely posing as pollsters asking who people were voting for, they would press Republicans to register while Democrats were thanked and the conversation ended. Not exactly kosher if you're "non-partisan" and advertise yourself as such.
• Virginia: Even Nader is getting into the act, albeit via Republicans. In an attempt to get Nader on the ballot, Nader state campaign coordinator James P. Polk made 10 false statements in an official capacity, and has been indicted by a special grand jury . Polk is a former Republican activist.

Many of these and more are listed here.

What about Democrats? In Colorado, Republicans are making allegations of Democratic voter fraud. Only one problem: there is no evidence that any fraud is being perpetrated by Democrats. Some people are registering multiple times (though only being counted once); in other cases, false applications are being filled out by people registering others and getting paid by the registration. None suggest any organized fraud, nor does any evidence in the state suggest that Democrats or Republicans are guilty of transgressions more than the other.

This is a Republican game we're playing, folks. And we're not even two weeks away from the election yet. And you can bet your bottom dollar that we haven't found half the election fraud that's happened so far--most times people are smart enough to do it clandestinely. And as election day approaches, the amount of GOP fraud will steamroll until there will be just too damned much to stop.

Hopefully, Kerry will win despite this--and his poll numbers, as well as electoral vote counts, are suggesting he is headed that way--and so the fraud will matter slightly less. But if Bush gets a crucial state by a few hundred votes again--or even several thousand, this time, due to the scale of this year's fraud--then we will have an historic second theft of the presidency on our hands.

Update: Here's a site which keeps track of all the election fraud.

Spam Forum?

Query: Does anyone know a good forum, a discussion page where all types of spam can be talked about? I have searched all over for such a place and cannot find one--but I would think it would be a no-brainer, that several such forums should exist. And yet, none show up on searches. If you know of any place like that, please leave a comment pointing to it. Thanks!

Burn Through

And they're back. The referral spammers, that is. After less than 24 hours of being shut out by the .htaccess script, they're back in business. The comment spammers are back as well; the logs show them trying to access the mt-comments.cgi, getting bumped, then going into real posts, and finally ending up with the renamed comments script. And now they're hitting full force again.

I ask anyone who knows: how can a referral for a URL be left on a site when that URL is blocked by htaccess? Furthermore, I block IP addresses in the same script, and the in my activity log I see the very same IP address hit my site minute by minute. They act as if the htaccess script just isn't there, blowing right past it. How can that happen, and more to the point, how can it be stopped?

I hope I didn't fall prey to a spammer posing as a commenter--someone posing as a kindred spam-sufferer asked for the sample of the htaccess script I wrote just a few hours before the script got bypassed... I may have been had.

Hey, What About...

The upcoming terrorist attack? I know it's on my schedule here somewhere...

I find it interesting that this is not getting talked about. We are supposed to get attacked by al Qaeda sometime within the next two weeks, if I'm not mistaken. Is there a wide security net going up in the United States that isn't being talked about? What's being done to prevent it?

This is a rather complicated issue, and it is made far more difficult than usual because of the political dimensions, especially since this was used so often by Bush and his people as a political weapon. On the one hand, it seems likely: al Qaeda attacked in Spain just before a crucial election, and it is the time to attack if they want to have the maximum effect. On the other hand, the Spain election didn't shift to the liberals because of the al Qaeda attack, but rather because the conservatives used the attack as part of their political campaign, falsifying reports to make it seem like it was the Basques. Additionally, an al Qaeda attack before the elections in the U.S. could be tricky: from all appearances, it would solidify support for Bush and win him the election, which is likely what the terrorists want--but it would be tricky, like a toss-up in basketball, where the slightest action could send the ball flying in the other direction, like it did in Spain. Bush will probably get automatic support like he did after 9/11, but he might also get blamed for letting al Qaeda get off another attack.

On the one hand, since it is the ripe time for the terrorists to attack, one would want to tighten security to the maximum to prevent it, and have the FBI, CIA, NSA, local police and every available boy scout working overtime on full alert. The problem, on the other hand, is how political homeland security has become: everyone has been painfully aware of how Ashcroft and the Bush administration have used terror alerts and color changes for maximum political effect, especially where there is no new data or real threat but there is a political event benefitting Kerry which gets derailed by said terror alert.

One thing I think is almost assured: there will be a huge terror alert, with the color code changing to orange or perhaps red, in the 3-5 days prior to the election. If Bush throws up a red alert in that time range, it will work to his favor politically. It also covers his ass in case there is a terrorist attack, making it so he can say "I was on alert and did my best." And if Kerry criticizes him for it, Bush can always hit back with "he is interfering with your safety," and knowing the Democrats, they will all go into their fair-minded "we support the president when it comes to security" mode. Bush has almost nothing to lose, and almost everything to gain. The only possible pitfall would be an adverse public reaction, but that is not too likely.

Still, I find it disturbing that with so little time left, so little attention is being paid to what will happen regarding an attack. This should be talked about, publicly, a great deal, so people will be aware of the situation and not taken by surprise at the last minute. Because if we don't discuss this publicly, and we do forget about the threat, and then 2 or 3 days before election day something does hit, then it's going to be chaos. No time for serious polling to figure out what's happening, it will be a fog of political war with no way to discern truth from rumor from conspiracy from threat from dirty political tricks.

If there is a huge attack costing many lives, will we even be able to determine who it was? The obvious suspects would be al Qaeda, but let's not forget that they're not the only terrorists out there, and November 2 is a pivotal day in history for the entire world. If there is not enough time to investigate, then rumor will win the day, not truth.

Just like we prepare for earthquakes, we've got to prepare for this one. If Bush throws up a terror alert just before the election, then what? If the terrorists attack just before the election, then what?

Here's one idea: if you know any undecideds, then tell them to write down their likeliest choice for president a week before the election, just in case something does happen. Then if an attack hits or a massive terror alert is put out, tell them to follow their choice from before the attack or the alert, as the way to ensure that they're not being influenced by politicized homeland defense or by terrorist influence.

Any other ideas?

The Truth Slips Out

"My opponent seems to be willing to say almost anything he thinks will benefit him politically. After standing on the stage, after the debates, I made it very plain we will not have an all-volunteer army."

--George W. Bush, October 16, 2004, Daytona Beach, Florida

A Matter of Fairness and Law

From Jay Rosen's blog:

"All we know is that we've invited one guest, Sen. John Kerry. We've made no other offers to anyone else." People complaining about Sinclair's decision ought to realize there hasn't been any decision, he said. "If John Kerry sat down with us for two hours, we may end up with a 60-minute program that has 57 minutes of John Kerry presenting his side of the issues," Hyman told the Newshour. "That's fine. That's what this is all about. We've made an open invitation."

Sinclair has made no commitment to run the film. It wants Kerry to answer the POW's. "We want to put his view on the air," he said. "Putting on a few clips of what the allegations are, that will satisfy the concerns." Have you seen any press accounts highlighting that quote? I have not.

What Mark Hyman has been saying to the point of braying it is-- nothing's firm, let's negotiate. John Kerry can keep the documentary off the air by replacing it with himself. (And why not? Then it's like appearing on any other "show.") Sinclair has no other invitations out. So I say send Mike McCurry and Richard Holbrooke to Baltimore. Let them negotiate. Five minutes of film, 55 minutes of Kerry responding to questions sounds about right to me.

It doesn't sound right to me. Essentially what is being done is that Kerry is being blackmailed, extorted into making an appearance on hostile ground, where the topic will be decided by people who hate him. Either that or allow Bush to get a free evening of anti-Kerry ads broadcast to a quarter of the nation just before the election.

As Heinlein once pointed out, the best way to find out if a deal is fair or not is to reverse it. Have a major network broadcast a rabid anti-Bush film for free just before the election, and the only way for Bush to be able to stop it would be to get him to appear in a live one-hour discussion/debate with Al Franken on any topic Franken pleases, like "did you use cocaine?" or "the lies of George W. Bush."

Do you think that the Republicans would sit still for that? Hell, no. They would be apoplectic. No matter how much Al Franken protests that he "just wants to put Bush's views on the air," they would call it the biggest dirty trick of all time, an abomination--and they would be right. (Though admittedly, I'd love the hell out of it.) So how's it fair to Kerry?

Sure, Kerry could potentially turn it to his advantage and debate Hyman or whomever else into the ground. But it is far more likely that Kerry would exposed to mostly smears and would be on the defensive most of the time--highly unappealing--and might even be seen as weak for letting himself be cornered like that.

No, the only fair solution is not to allow Sinclair to violate FEC laws in the first place. You might ask, where's the line between free-speech editorializing and violation of campaign finance laws? I think that this case is clearly over the line--if you allow one individual to buy essentially a multi-million dollar broadcast to attack one candidate, then you open the doors for the airwaves to be filled with dreck like that, from both sides, next time out (or even this time), making a complete joke of campaign finance laws because whomever wins will be indebted to the broadcaster as clearly as if the broadcaster had put millions of dollars into the candidate's palm. And I won't accept the idea of 'let it happen this once then its over,' or even 'let each side get a shot off.' The very principle at stake here is highly important.

This one isn't even close.

Gotcha

Ah... I finally found a way to format the .htaccess file which is keeping out the referral spammers. Sure, I'll have to keep an eye on them and maintain the .htaccess file almost daily, but then the blog already requires a certain level of maintenance, and this isn't much more.

If you're interested in knowing the correct formatting for the file and how to execute it, leave a comment with an email addressed (masked by any URL) and I'll email you a copy of what I have.

Now on to renaming the comments script to keep out the comment spammers--less of a hassle concerning the fact that MT-Blacklist is already keeping them off the site proper, though it'll be nice to see the stats for the comments file drop below 400 hits a day, knowing that they are 98% spammers.

Update: ...aaaand I just executed the major points of advice for comment spam listed on this page, and took a snapshot of the stats. Now time will tell if they work.

Koizumi Wants Bush to Win--No He Doesn't--Yes He Does

Talk about not having the message coordinated.

First, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he wanted Bush to win the election: "I don't want to interfere with another country's election but since I'm well-acquainted with President Bush, I want him to carry on," he said to the media. That, in itself, is quite a statement: "I don't want to interfere with the election, but here's my interference." His statement was immediately recognized by probably anyone who's been paying attention in Japan for what it is: Koizumi wants to maintain and expand the Japanese military presence overseas as a major front in revising the no-war constitution (a very big right-wing goal here).

The troops, by the way, are hardly a military presence--they mostly sit around in their compound and purify water for the equivalent of a small town. Reports say that they have "built" four schools, two roads and a soccer stadium--but they contracted out for the actual work. And as "troops" they are laughable: they have to hire Dutch troops to protect them.

But Koizumi doesn't want them to actually do anything in Iraq--in fact, he wants them to stay out of harm's way because any incident would look bad back home--which is why he turned so viciously on three independent Japanese humanitarian workers for their crass rudeness in being taken hostage. Koizumi needs an eventless 'military' mission so he can slowly build support for making Japan's military into a real war machine, and Bush is his best bet for that.

But a bit later in the day, Koizumi's Chief Cabinet Minister attempted some damage control, saying "it’s not that the prime minister is saying who should win. No matter what the results of the election may be, the ties between the United States and Japan are solid." A little diplomacy there, just in case Kerry wins it.

But then Koizumi's Liberal Democratic (don't let the title fool you, they're right wingers) Party Secretary General (Chairman, I guess) Tsutomu Takabe removed all doubt, saying: "I think there would be trouble if it's not President Bush," opposing Kerry's suggestion that bilateral talks be ongoing with the multilateral talks.

Note, by the way, that Japanese people, as opposed to the rightists in power, prefer Kerry 51 to 30. Which is in line with what I'm hearing from the Japanese people I speak to.

Still with the Spam

I haven't had a chance to rename my comments script yet, and since I removed the .htaccess block on the script (due to many legitimate visitors being blocked) and I have not found a .htaccess script to keep referral spam out, spammers have had open access to both areas--though MT-Blacklist has done a great job of keeping out 99% of the comment spammers. Still, it's not nearly enough.

The primary damage is to the access logs, which thanks to the spam are completely meaningless. There have been over 6000 hits on the comments script in two weeks, meaning 430 attempts are made to access the comments on any given day--and at most, I get 10 legitimate comments a day. My blog activity log shows the hundreds that are blocked every day. This bloats the number of counted visitors to the comments script, but probably not too much the number of total unique visitors, because they tend to use one IP address to spam with. When I had successfully blocked their access to the script, the number of spam that arrived were almost nil, but the daily visit numbers did not change much.

The referral spam, however, is another story. They must use IP spoofing a lot more. It used to be that one, maybe two or three referral spammers would show up in the top-25 logs, hitting my site maybe a dozen or two times a month. But now the top-25 list is nothing but spammers, the least of which has deposited 86 fake hits on my site. The worst by far is some place called "Burnhams" which by different referring URLs within their main site have hit me 351 times. The top 25 referrers have hit me a total of 2,691 times. 85 of the top 100 referrers are spammers, totaling about 4,000 hits. And the month is only half over.

I have got to get on top of this. It's not just the destruction of my referral logs, it's the principle of never giving a spammer a break.

If anyone out there knows of a way to purge access logs of identifiable spammers, I'd appreciate a tutorial.... this would, without a doubt, be a popular new piece of software. Something with a simple interface which would scan the logs and present a list of all referrers, with a check-box by each one; check the boxes next to spammers and click "delete and block," and the script would edit out the hits made by each one and modify the .htaccess file to keep them out, then allow AwStats to recalculate the logs; maybe a central blacklist of referral spammers could be kept and updated. In other words, something like MT-Blacklist for referral spam. Maybe I'm asking for the impossible, maybe it would just be too much work to keep it up, for too little return.

But for me, it would be sweet.

Kerry Blasts Bush out of the Water

Okay, I just got home after a day of avoiding all mention of news, so the debate will be fresh for me. One starting note: Bush's back looks smooth this time, at least so far.... And I should apologize in advance for the sheer length of this post.

From the start Kerry came off strong; Schieffer sent him a national security fast ball right over the plate, and Kerry hit that sucker clear out of the park--a lucid, point-by-point best-of bullet list of what Bush has done wrong and what Kerry will do right. Direct, smooth, and right on target.

As for Bush: boy, it looks like he's on prozac or something; his voice is lilting, he seems a bit tipsy, and he acted like he was almost about to break out into song when he announced that the first voter in Afghanistan was a 19-year-old woman (can you say "staged PR event"?). But his points are still the same old ones: we have to stay on the offensive, we already got 75% of al Qaeda, and we'll spread peace and Democracy all around the world. Hard to believe he's pitching that--Kerry should be able to hit that one out of the park as well. hell, much of what Bush has said has already been knocked down by FactCheck.org. And that's what Kerry--

WHOA!!!! Bush just claimed he never said he wasn't concerned about Osama bin Laden! Astounding! Here's Bush's quote from tonight's debate:

BUSH: Gosh, I don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden, that's kind of one of those "exaggerations."

And here's Bush from March 13, 2002:

"I don't know where [Osama bin Laden] is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important." And on the same day: "I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

This is incredible! I hope they played this on the news over and over again. Especially when Bush in tonight's debate paused, got this funny look on his face, and said the word "exaggerations" in a theatrical way so as to put huge quotation marks around it. I don't have to see the blogs tonight, I know exactly how they'll report this! And keep in mind that the "I truly am not that concerned" quote comes directly from the White House web site!

New strategy for Kerry: use that "exaggerations" delivery on the stump! "Bush said his tax cuts would create more jobs; that must be one of those 'exaggerations.' Bush said we'd be greeted as liberators in Iraq; that was probably one of those 'exaggerations.' Bush said we are 'turning the corner'; I guess it must be another one of those 'exaggerations.'"

In the meantime, Bush is continuing to sound downright giddy. It's bizarre.

The question on flu vaccines was interesting: if Bush's answer was true, then it was a real softball thrown by Schieffer; but even so, it is ironic that Bush said that he is now depending on Canada to deliver a safe, uncontaminated vaccine when in the last debate he claimed that drugs from Canada were unsafe. His exact words: "When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it cures you and doesn't kill you." So the flu vaccine bit is not exactly reassuring, if you take him at his word. He also wasn't very clear on the age issue: if you're young, don't get the flu shot--reserve them for the elderly and young. Then Bush rather clumsily and obviously turned the topic to lawsuits, which is untrue--vaccines are in short supply because they're not profitable, and so fewer drug companies make them.

Bush is getting a bit on edge already, seeming to strain at the bit to bark out that "a - plan - is - not - a - litany - of - complaints!" and then accusing Kerry outright of using "bait and switch." He had numbers ready, which means that he was absolutely prepared and scripted on that one. But Kerry hit it right back: Bush himself promised the same thing to seniors, and the costs would not be as high as Bush promised because people would buy into it, not be given it for free as Bush was implying.

Wow, Kerry just repeated the 1.6 million jobs numbers--but then, both candidates are repeating the claims others have knocked down. Bush just repeated the "he voted for tax hikes 98 times" chestnut. Bush went on in a litany of fuzzy math attacks on Kerry--you can bet almost every one of them will turn out to be a distortion like the 98-tax-hikes lie. Fully 43 of the 98 in Bush count did not affect actual taxes, but rather set targets; no one paid a penny more from them. Another 16 of the votes counted were votes on one single bill--Clinton's tax bill of 1993--that was voted on several times--and, by the way, a tax bill that heralded in one of the biggest economic booms of our time.

Then, on the question about what Bush would say to an American who lost a job to an overseas worker getting paid a frqaction of his salary:

BUSH: I'd say, Bob, I've got policies to continue to grow our economy and create the jobs of the 21st century. And here's some help for you to go get an education. Here's some help for you to go to a community college.

That's it? "I've got a policy and here's a couple bucks to study metal shop at a two-year college"? If I was in that spot and he said that to me, I'd be pissed. Bush is really tanking this debate so far. Kerry's answer is devastating to Bush.

Boy, Bush is really pushing the fiction of Kerry's voting record over the top-he's repeated the 98-times number three times, the last time breaking the rules of the debate and addressing Kerry directly, insisting that he voted 98 times. But again, Bush is losing it. Kerry is coming across as convincing and presidential, and Bush is coming across as petty and childish. If this keeps up, then Kerry will have come away with a huge win.

Kerry also answered well on the question of the Catholic church saying that voting for him would be a sin. You could really see his humanity in the answer, as well as an eloquently stated argument concerning responsible enactment of the separation of church and state:

Now, with respect to religion, you know, as I said, I grew up a Catholic. I was an altar boy. I know that throughout my life this has made a difference to me. And as President Kennedy said when he ran for president, he said, I'm not running to be a Catholic president. I'm running to be a president who happens to be Catholic.

My faith affects everything that I do, in truth. There's a great passage of the Bible that says, What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead. And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people.

That's why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith.

But I know this, that President Kennedy in his inaugural address told all of us that here on Earth, God's work must truly be our own. And that's what we have to – I think that's the test of public service.

Bush, on the other hand, brought up "partial birth abortion," a highly partisan micro-issue used as a political weapon, right after saying that we should all be able to come together.

On the Health Care question, Bush came across as weak explaining why health care costs are big, trying as much as he could to blame it on lawyers; but again, Kerry came through as decisive, again pointing out how Bush blocked drug imports from Canada, again pointing out how Bush forbade Medicare from negotiating for drug prices. bush then tried to attack Kerry on his record in the Senate, but Kerry hit back much harder, pointing out his authorship of bills and amendments and specifying one bill on health care that he wrote and got passed. Bush claimed he'd gotten 5 bills past, Kerry corrected him, noting he'd passed 56. Here's a list.

Bush's response to Kerry's note of major news organizations calling Bush's claims untrue was weird:

In all due respect I'm not so sure--is it credible to quote leading news organizations about-- ... uh, never mind. Anyway.. um... Let me quote the Lewin Report!

Wow, Kerry really blasted Bush to the ground on the Social Security private investment issue. And then on his own plans, he was solid. Kerry is just laying down his fire steady and confidently, point by point, staying on point--he's clear and convincing. Health care. Social security. Immigration. Minimum wage. Bam, bam, bam, bam. He's beating Bush with a stick on these things, and Bush is looking bushwhacked, pun intended. And he has some great lines in there, like "I'm tired of politicians who talk about family values and don't value families." Almost sounds like Aaron Sorkin wrote some of them.

On minimum wage, Bush weakly countered that there was a plan the he supported that "would have increased the minimum wage." Ah. "Would have." Well, that's reassuring if you can't afford to feed your children. Four years in office and there's one plan he supported that never got passed. And he only had the presidency and both houses of Congress. And what was this brilliant plan that Bush approved of? Raising the minimum wage by one dollar instead of two, and including a loophole so that the wage could be stopped at the state border--any and all states could refuse to accept the new wage, which would give corporations a huge edge in that they can lobby the states more effectively. Essentially, Bush backs only an emasculated minimum wage.

Then he actually claimed that "the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act when you think about it." And he hasn't even come close to fully funding it! If he's right in how to look at NCLB, then he's underfunded both jobs and education.

For his accomplishments in education, the only thing Bush could point to that even seemed positive was that he is "beginning to close a minority achievement gap now." That's his big achievement? First of all, it doesn't make clear whether minority achievement is going up or if white achievement is going down. Second, he doesn't say how it's measured, and third, he only claims that it is "beginning" to happen. After four years that's all he's got?

Schieffer just asked about Roe v. Wade and whether Bush would overturn it, and Bush flatly dodged it, rephrasing the question to himself (after Schieffer laid it out as a direct question), and saying "no litmus test, no litmus test"--and then stopping after just 15 seconds, apparently unwilling to dodge the question for the other one minute and forty-five seconds he was allotted. And Kerry cam after it just right, pointing out that Bush didn't answer the question. When Bush doesn't want to answer a question, the by golly, he doesn't answer it! Kerry at least has the guts to speak his opinion on the issue, knowing it will turn off a segment of the population.

And of course, Bush does have a litmus test--in fact, he has nothing but litmus tests. He just lies about it.

And now Kerry is just ripping Bush a new one on No Child Left Behind, with Bush just looking at him with a big, stupid, fake grin on his face, like he really doesn't want to be there right then. And again, Kerry is blasting Bush, this time on the assault weapons ban.

Kerry slipped up a bit on which groups Bush didn't meet with--he said Bush has never met with the NAACP or the Black Congressional Caucus. Bush countered that he did meet with the Black Congressional Caucus, in the White House, he added. And he did meet them--once. In the first two weeks in office. But not after that. And only because they came to the White House uninvited. On a bus.

Bush got off a few good laughs about listening to the strong women around him, and got the chance for a warm and funny last response. And Kerry got off his own great line ("and some would say maybe me more so than others!"). But that won't really erase what happened in the rest of the debate.

If you've read my last analyses of the prior debates, you'll see that I stayed pretty objective, not just claiming a Kerry or Edwards victory at every turn, admitting when Bush or Cheney came out ahead, and when Kerry and Edwards misstepped. And now I can honestly say that in this third debate was not even close. Kerry quite simply blew Bush out of the water. Kerry was on message, spoke clearly and confidently, and scored far more point than Bush, who stumbled just as much as before if not more, and came across as unconvincing.

And now a check on the news services tells me that again I called it right--Kerry wins this one hands-down.

Can't wait to see the heavy-duty national and state polls in two or three days. I have the feeling that Kerry will pull ahead at least by two points, maybe even three.

We'll see.

Debate Blogging Delay

Turns out that the timing of this last debate will put it right at the beginning of my work day here in Japan; just as I leave for work in about an hour, the debate will be starting. So I'm recording it on my DVR, and will watch it tonight and blog on it then. I'll have to avoid reading the news and political sites before then so as to avoid the spin...

The Fraud Keeps on Coming

This time its in Milwaukee, WI, a city with a lot of Democrats in a battleground state. A Republican politician is blocking a request for sufficient ballots in the city. The city asked for the ballots because of record registration, noting that districts in the city have run out of ballots in the past. Better to have too many than too few.

But the Milwaukee County Executive, Republican Scott Walker--who just coincidentally happens to be co-chair of the Bush campaign in Wisconsin--is refusing to provide the extra 260,000 ballots requested, on the grounds that he thinks that they could possibly be used for multiple voting. This is absurd, and the explosion of new voter registration is very real and strongly documented nationwide. The real reason for the refusal is more likely the fact that the area he is depriving of ballots just happens to be a Democratic stronghold in the state.

The mayor of Milwaukee said "I'm going to lay this at the footsteps of the county if there aren't enough ballots in the city." In my opinion, that's not nearly good enough; if there aren't enough ballots, then it will be too late, and those Democrats will be denied their constitutional right to vote. As for Walker's claim of potential abuse, it is a pitiful excuse--you cannot deprive whole segments of the state population of their right to vote on the potential and unproven suspicion that some may break the law. This is little more than yet another case of Republicans going to any and every extreme to steal another election. They're absolutely shameless this year, and have to be checked at every single turn.

Not Even in Fiction

Japan has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to World War II and the decades of imperial expansion that preceded it. Although many of its citizens know about the time, look upon it with disapproval, and are not apologists, there is a distinct segment of society that is strongly against recognizing the sins of Japan's past, and the majority of people in Japan seem to go along with it. Japan, like so many other countries, claims to follow Santayana's warning: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And like so many other countries, it heeds the warning wrongly. Santayana was telling us that we should remember the bad things we have done so that we can learn not to do them again. But nations tend to greatly dislike remembering their own misdeeds, led by nationalists and self-proclaimed patriots who assert national pride, but just as often suffer from denial.

Instead, nations profess to follow Santayana by remembering the misdeeds done to them by others. We all do it. Americans remember Pearl Harbor, but many protest when too much attention is paid to Hiroshima--not to mention the uproar we see now when anyone talks about American atrocities in Vietnam. Israel remembers the Holocaust, China remembers Nanjing, and so on. We memorialize and even aggrandize our victimization, and whitewash or tone down the darker parts of our own past actions. It is my assertion that this interpretation of Santayana is not just mislaid, but is opposite to his warning and can lead to the very condemnation he foresaw. If a nation feels victimized, it feels the right to go beyond ordinary means to defend itself, to the extent of paranoia. If a nation forgets its misdeeds, it feels more certain that it can do no wrong because its people look at the past and see few or no wrongs. This is a dangerous combination that makes a country feel threatened and righteous in going to extreme ends to 'defend' itself--in short, it leads us to exactly the fate Santayana warned us against.

I have witnessed both elements of the equation a fair amount in Japan. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are memorialized here far more than Pearl Harbor in America; survivors of the American invasion of the southern islands such as Iwo Jima describe the terrible experiences they suffered; and the primary mention of Japan's incursion into mainland Asia tends to be about Japanese people left behind after the war who suffered for so many years in Soviet prison camps. So much of Japanese suffering is focused on to a great extent, even in children's fiction--I remember early on in my Japanese language studies being made aware of a manga, a graphic novel written for children called "Barefoot Gen," which relates in grotesque detail the suffering of people in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

But today, a similar manga is being censored because the storyline includes a reference to the Rape of Nanjing as an actual historical event. You see, a strident segment of Japanese society vehemently believes that the Rape of Nanjing was a false story created to put Japan down, to shame it after World War II ended. No amount of documentary evidence, including photographs, countless eyewitnesses and even the writings and admissions of Japanese soldiers themselves can dissuade these nationalists from their belief that it is all a hoax. But unlike those who deny the Holocaust, those who deny the Rape of Nanjing here in Japan are not scoffed at, dismissed, or censured, No, those people here tend to be the ones who hold public office.

This is why the publishers of the Weekly Young Jump, a widely read manga, have decided to cut the story, which is a serialized story of a bureaucrat during the 30's, a serial carried by the publication for the past two years. This edition was to treat the Massacre as a historical fact, and would include a photograph. But that won't come out, and it was not due to massive public protest, but rather by a group of 37 local politicians who claim that the massive killing spree never took place, and who protested at the publisher's office last week. The publisher now calls the photo to be used a "fake" and says the story and the photo will be edited.

Those of you who have doubts might want to read Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanjing." For those who want rebuttal, this Japanese site provides one.

Technical Expert: Bush Was Wired

Photos from Salon.com

Salon is carrying this story, along with a photo of Bush on his ranch with an identical bulge in the back of his T-shirt. It is a device which works with an earpiece lodged in Bush's ear canal, receiving and sending via a transceiver unit worn on his back:

"There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability," said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president's back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.

Darbut speculates that the device the president wears is provided by the Secret Service, noting, "They're not going to have him driving around the countryside on his ranch without being in instant contact with him."

The relevance is that if Bush were wired, it would be in direct violation of debate rules, and considered a rather severe case of dishonesty and cheating in such an important public event. The problem is, the Bush people can just keep denying it, and unless someone can bring up more proof, few enough people will accept it as certain, no matter what experts say.

It is not even certain that Bush stopped using one, or could conceal it better for the third debate. Ideally, the candidates would have their ears checked, but you know that Bush would never agree to that, even privately; he would just bull his way through. Scrambling transmissions would interfere with the TV broadcast, so those would probably be out as well.

Yet More Republican Election Fraud

Also from DailyKos: a private voter registration company has been registering people in Nevada--but they destroy the registration forms filled out by Democrats, making them think they've registered when they're not. According to the report, "The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee."

Just when you think you've seen the slimiest dirty tricks, the GOP finds new ways to utterly disgust you.

International Support for Kerry

From the debate:

CHENEY: You made the comment that the Gulf War coalition in '91 was far stronger than this. No. We had 34 countries then; we've got 30 today. We've got troops beside us.

It's hard, after John Kerry referred to our allies as a coalition of the coerced and the bribed, to go out and persuade people to send troops and to participate in this process.

From a Financial Times story quoting the German defense minister:

Germany might deploy troops in Iraq if conditions there change, Peter Struck, the German defence minister, indicated on Tuesday in a gesture that appears to provide backing for John Kerry, the US Democratic presidential challenger. ...

Mr Struck also welcomed Mr Kerry’s proposal that he would convene an international conference on Iraq including countries that opposed the war if he were to win next month's election.

Support is already filing in for Kerry, and it is pretty undeniable that a Kerry victory would be exceedingly warmly received around the world, meaning more international cooperation, and yes, troops and money that the Bush administration has already tried to get, many times, only to be rebuffed.

Note that one of Gwen Ifill's questions was, "French and German officials have both said they have no intention even if John Kerry is elected of sending any troops into Iraq for any peacekeeping effort. Does that make your effort or your plan to internationalize this effort seem kind of naive?"

Not quite so naive, it seems.

And do I really need to go into Cheney's 30-nation-troop-alliance and how only a few of them sent actual troops--and how almost as many don't even have actual troops?

In 500 Words or More...

DailyKos just printed an email from someone about going to events for Edwards and Bush. You'd think Bush was the bigger draw, but:

Bush is coming to Medford, Oregon Thursday. John Edwards is here Wednesday morning.

Edwards' visit is already sold out. There are tickets available for Bush, even though his visit was planned in advance. This is in republican-leaning rural southern Oregon.

I tried to get tickets to both events. Edwards was sold out, but I could still get them for Bush, provided I:

1. was a registered republican
2. wrote an essay about why he should be president
3. promise to support him

Write an essay? Sheesh. No wonder he's not sold out. Who reads the essays? Do they seat you according to writing style? And I bet you still have to sign a loyalty oath at the door in addition to all that, pledging your vote in advance. Bush could probably be way ahead by now if he gave free admittance like Kerry and Edwards. He'd get more hecklers, but he'd reach more undecideds.

Sinclair Plans to Abuse the Airwaves

In yet another demonstration of the right-wing nature of the media, Sinclair Broadcasting is planning to cancel regular prime-time programming two weeks before the election and instead give up their air time for free to broadcast a film that would smear John Kerry. Sinclair, along with Fox and Clear Channel, is well-known as a bastion of conservatism and has been known to take similar types of action before, such as when they refused to air Ted Koppel's "Nightline" when they spent the entire broadcast honoring the fallen American soldiers in Iraq. Sinclair called the memorial "contrary to the public interest." In a pathetic attempt to give the appearance of fair play, Sinclair plans to follow the 90-minute smear ad with a "panel discussion" to which Kerry is invited. The invitation, which they knew Kerry would have to be insane to accept, is their way of weaseling out of giving Kerry "equal time."

In case Sinclair forgot, the airwaves are owned by the public; Sinclair's action is nothing less than the use of public resources to air political propaganda, timed just before an election.

Remember how, just a few months ago, conservatives tried to ban any TV commercials for "Fahrenheit 9/11" because it could be construed as a political ad? Then what the hell is this? The complaint against commercials for F-9/11 might have been legitimate had they referred to any actual planned airing of commercials mentioning Bush 60 days before an election, but there were no commercials for the film planned during that time period, so the FCC concluded there was nothing to act on. This documentary, which very noticeably mentions Kerry and would be broadcast within the 60-day restriction, should be illegal itself under the same law used by conservative groups to try to silence Moore.

Don't think this qualifies as a campaign ad? The filmmaker is Carlton Sherwood, a former journalist for the right-wing Washington Times (owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon), who later worked for Tom Ridge and finally was hired by the Bush administration to handle PR for Homeland Security. Carlton was arrested in 1983 for illegally taping a conversation, and in 1984 falsely accused Vietnam vets of misspending money for the Vietnam memorial.

If the broadcast is, in the end, allowed, then a panel discussion won't be enough; Kerry should be given the exact same time slot one week later to run any damned thing he pleases.

Send email to the FCC expressing your outrage at this plan. The addresses are:

michael.powell@fcc.gov
kathleen.abernathy@fcc.gov
michael.copps@fcc.gov
kjmweb@fcc.gov
jonathan.adelstein@fcc.gov

Postscript: in case you thought that perhaps the guy running Sinclair is a paragon of virtue, check this out. He's still President and C.E.O., by the way.

Update: The DNC has decided to file formal charges against Sinclair with the FEC on Tuesday, calling the infraction "Sinclair Broadcasting's illegal in-kind contribution to the Bush-Cheney campaign." The FEC is closed until Tuesday because of Columbus Day.

Meanwhile, people against Sinclair's plans have wasted no time, and a variety of sites are now up and running, including this site to boycott Sinclair, with a list of their advertisers; give as many as you can a call. Also sign this petition. DailyKos is all over this one, and will likely continue to be.

Update 2: Morons.org has a pretty good rundown on how the Sinclair move violates Federal Election Law. It seems pretty clear that Sinclair's action is completely illegal.

Wired Bush?

It started when bloggers first noticed a strange triangle-shaped bulge in the back of Bush's jacket, and now the debate is growing fast: has George W. Bush been wired in the last two debates? Study the photos below:

The first photo is the one that caught everyone's attention. At first, the Bush campaign claimed that the image had been Photoshopped, but quickly retracted the claim after it was clearly there on the video records. Then they claimed that it was simply a "rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric." However, the questions persisted, and even noted newspapers such as the New York Times started asking the question. While Bush's own tailor claims that it was simply an artifact of Bush's stance, a Savile Row tailor in Britain said,

“Without a shadow of a doubt, I would say that he had some kind of wire running up his back underneath his clothing. Not even the seams on a cheap suit would look like that. It must have been some kind of transmitter.”

Additionally, during the second debate, it was noted that when Bush fidgeted with his jacket front and tie, what clearly appeared to be a wire hidden underneath became visible (second photo; for those of you who recorded it, it's 28-1/2 minutes into the debate, near the end of Bush's reply to the draft question).

Conservatives who are giant fans of Matt Drudge have been complaining about "Internet rumors," the same dismissal they gave to speculation that Bush may have to enforce a draft in order to keep the military running. The birth of a story on the Internet does not speak to its veracity one way or the other; what matters is whether or not it stands up to scrutiny. So far, few outside of Bush's core supporters have bought the "rumple in the fabric" story, and the bulge--not to mention the wire--have yet to be explained to satisfaction.

Update: Kudos to Yamantaka over at The Expat for the heads up on IsBushWired.com. Take a look.

Bush: I Will Nominate a Supreme Court Justice Who Will Criminalize Abortion

He didn't say it directly, but he did use all the code words:

BUSH: I really don't have -- haven't picked anybody yet. Plus, I want them all voting for me.

I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn't pick. I wouldn't pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn't be said in a school because it had the words "under God" in it. I think that's an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America.

And so, I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We've got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.

And I suspect one of us will have a pick at the end of next year -- the next four years. And that's the kind of judge I'm going to put on there. No litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution.

The first code word is "strict constructionists," whose basic ideology is that the Constitution only applies to matters that it directly and specifically addresses, and that any interpretation beyond that is not within the court's power; to these people, there is no such thing as "intent of the founders," and they would judge no new law from the original intent or principles derived from the constitution. Any new law is acceptable so long as it is not directly addressed in the constitution.

As such, Bush's remark that he wants "strict constructionists" and that the "judges interpret the Constitution" are not exactly consistent.

The right wing found strict constructionism as their legal philosophy while trying to find a way to fight Roe v. Wade; traditionally, it has been a Libertarian point of view. If one applies strict constructionism, Roe. v. Wade would be struck down, as would many other issues concerning civil rights and probably separation of church and state. This goes along with the current Republican agenda to remove power from the judicial so that conservatives in the legislative branch can pass whatever laws they wish with no challenge on their constitutionality.

Another code word from Bush's rhetoric was the Dred Scott decision, which, for those of you who forgot about it since high school, was a rather infamous Supreme Court decision which ruled that blacks were not citizens and were constitutionally the property of the slaveholders. Dred Scott is a famously popular case held up by pro-life groups as an example of how an entire class of people can be regarded as property to be dealt with without concern for their rights. The argument is that fetuses today are like blacks at the time of Dred Scott.

Bush's reference, therefore (as first pointed out by Paperweight), is little more than a code word meaning that he will have Roe stricken just as Dred Scott was.

Other comments on Bush's remarks: his joke about how he would "want them [Supreme Court justices] all voting for me" was borderline at best; few have forgotten how the politically partisan 5-4 vote on Bush v. Gore--considered by many as an illegal decision at least, and a coup d'état at most--handed Bush the presidency in 2000. It's a ballsy thing to joke about.

He also called the courts' ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance a "personal opinion," which is fiction, of course, but then on these matters, such fiction is standard fare for Republican politicians. The core issue of the pledge, of course, is the First Amendment and its protection that prevents the state--in this case public schools--from requiring any American citizen--in this case, schoolchildren--to make a religious pledge, and to prevent that government agency from endorsing any one belief system. It is a core constitutional matter on civil rights with very little real ambiguity (the only lack of clarity is in the GOP fiction), which is why the GOP is trying so hard to pass a law that would prevent the courts from ruling on "Pledge protection" laws without having to amend the Constitution to achieve that.

Finally, on the litmus test, Bush says that he would have "no litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution." However, since what he defines as "interpreting the Constitution" covers almost every major issue before the courts, he is essentially saying that he will choose a judge based upon a wide range of litmus tests, especially Roe v. Wade.

Yet Another Bush Whopper

BUSH: 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.

Like you, I'm concerned about the deficit. But I am not going to shortchange our troops in harm's way. And I'm not going to run up taxes, which will cost this economy jobs.

I caught it in the live coverage of the debate, but did not follow up on it--so many lies to deal with. Kevin Drum reported on this one:

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

It's laughable for Bush to pretend to be a frugal spender, working his tail off to bring an out-of-control Clinton budget down to earth. He's spending our children's money as fast as he can print it, and debate fact checkers shouldn't let him get away with pretending otherwise.

The proof? Drum prints the following data from the Boston.com News showing the non-defense discretionary spending that Bush mentioned:

• Nixon/Ford: 6.8% per year
• Carter: 2.0% per year
• Reagan: -1.3% per year
• H. W. Bush 1: 4.0% per year
• Clinton: 2.5% per year
• W. Bush: 8.2% per year

In chart form:



Sooooo, Bush's claim that Clinton was raising this spending at 15% and Bush cut it down to 1% is not exactly true. In fact, it is so outrageously untrue that one can only wonder what statistical gymnastics Bush could have performed to get his numbers--or if he was just plain making shit up. Usually, politicians "massage" the numbers to get what they want so they can still claim they were telling some version of the truth, but it is hard to see how Bush could have even done that. Maybe took the absolute worst month from Clinton and best month from his term and then claimed that each represented all from both? Whatever his statistical contortions were, it would be impossible for him to claim that he was not trying to make people believe an outright lie here.

Let's see how that works. Note the chart above, which shows the real spending rates. Now look at what a chart would have to appear like if the numbers were what Bush claimed:

Doesn't exactly match up, does it? Not by any stretch of the imagination.

That's Bush for you.

Bush Does Own a Timber Company

This surprised me--I thought Kerry had flubbed his line about Bush earning $84 from a timber company; Bush scored his biggest laughs of the night by acting like Kerry had gone nuts, claiming Bush owned a timber company.

But it turns out, he does, and Kerry was right--Bush earned $84 from it:

President Bush himself would have qualified as a 'small business owner' under the Republican definition, based on his 2001 federal income tax returns. He reported $84 of business income from his part ownership of a timber-growing enterprise.

Other weak debate utterances by Bush: when Kerry pointed out that Bush had broken a promise to have enough forces to get the job done, Bush countered:

I remember sitting in the White House looking at those generals, saying, "Do you have what you need in this war? Do you have what it takes?"

I remember going down to the basement of the White House the day we committed our troops as last resort, looking at Tommy Franks and the generals on the ground, asking them, "Do we have the right plan with the right troop level?"

And they looked me in the eye and said, "Yes, sir, Mr. President." Of course, I listen to our generals. That's what a president does. A president sets the strategy and relies upon good military people to execute that strategy.

First, "as a last resort"? Right. The inspectors were telling him that they were getting access and were not finding WMD; instead of letting them continue (and they were finding the truth), Bush yanked them out and invaded instead of waiting for real results.

But the main point here? First, Bush is essentially laying the onus on the generals--they decided the troop levels, and if you think it was wrong, Bush leaves you no choice but to blame the generals. But, second, as Kerry pointed out, the generals only got what they wanted for the original invasion, and not for the occupation afterwards. If Bush is trying to claim that he always delivered the troops his people were asking for, then he will not be believed except by his core supporters.

Another misstatement:

I vowed to our countrymen that I would do everything I could to protect the American people. That's why we're bringing Al Qaida to justice. Seventy five percent of them have been brought to justice.

Actually, that's only 75% of a few dozen known leaders. That is not all of al Qaeda, and does not count all the leaders, even those we do know about.

Then there's Bush's insistence that votes on reproductive rights are black and white, yes or no, no in-betweens:

KERRY: Well, again, the president just said, categorically, my opponent is against this, my opponent is against that. You know, it's just not that simple. No, I'm not. I'm against the partial-birth abortion, but you've got to have an exception for the life of the mother and the health of the mother under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother.

Secondly, with respect to parental notification, I'm not going to require a 16-or 17-year-old kid who's been raped by her father and who's pregnant to have to notify her father. So you got to have a judicial intervention. And because they didn't have a judicial intervention where she could go somewhere and get help, I voted against it. It's never quite as simple as the president wants you to believe.

GIBSON: And 30 seconds, Mr. President.

BUSH: Well, it's pretty simple when they say: Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion? Yes or no? And he was given a chance to vote, and he voted no. And that's just the way it is. That's a vote. It came right up. It's clear for everybody to see. And as I said: You can run but you can't hide the reality.

So, we can assume that Bush would ban an abortion of a non-viable fetus necessary to save the life of the moth, and would force a 16-year-old girl to get her father's permission for an abortion after her father raped her and made her pregnant. After all, it's yes or no, right? This was one of Bush's most outrageous assertions of the evening; Kerry, on the other hand, did an excellent job of pointing out the complexities that real life presents us.

Then finally, in one of Bush's biggest failures in the debate, he failed to answer a legitimate question of a woman in the audience about his errors: name his three biggest mistakes and what he did to correct them. When I heard the question, I was certain that Bush would have a pat answer ready, with some weak semi-errors that would not hurt him but make him appear humble. I thought he'd have made such an answer ready soon after he took body blows from not answering it before. To my surprise, he was as unprepared for that question today as he was before:

QUESTION: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.

BUSH: I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you never heard of, and some of them big. And in a war, there's a lot of -- there's a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have made that decision. And I'll take responsibility for them. I'm human.

But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I'll stand by those decisions, because I think they're right. That's really what you're -- when they ask about the mistakes, that's what they're talking about. They're trying to say, "Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?" And the answer is, "Absolutely not." It was the right decision.

The Duelfer report confirmed that decision today, because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program. And the biggest threat facing America is terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. We knew he hated us. We knew he'd been -- invaded other countries. We knew he tortured his own people.

On the tax cut, it's a big decision. I did the right decision. Our recession was one of the shallowest in modern history.

Now, you asked what mistakes. I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I'm not going to name them. I don't want to hurt their feelings on national TV.

(LAUGHTER)

Essentially, he dodged the question, answering it only in joke form (though it was crystal clear that, if he was serious about the appointments, everyone is precisely aware of the appointments he spoke of, those being the people who left his administration and criticized him later.

But the overall impression from the answer was that he didn't believe that he had made any mistakes. And that arrogance may cost him some on election day.

Key Points

Kerry had a few very good presentations in this debate. The first was on importing drugs from Canada:

John, you heard the president just say that he thought he might try to be for it.

Four years ago, right here in this forum, he was asked the same question: Can't people be able to import drugs from Canada? You know what he said? "I think that makes sense. I think that's a good idea" -- four years ago.

Now, the president said, "I'm not blocking that." Ladies and gentlemen, the president just didn't level with you right now again. ... The president also took Medicare, which belongs to you. And he could have lowered the cost of Medicare and lowered your taxes and lowered the costs to seniors.

You know what he did? He made it illegal, illegal for Medicare to do what the V.A. does, which is bulk purchase drugs so that you can lower the price and get them out to you lower.

He put $139 billion of windfall profit into the pockets of the drug companies right out of your pockets. That's the difference between us. The president sides with the power companies, the oil companies, the drug companies. And I'm fighting to let you get those drugs from Canada, and I'm fighting to let Medicare survive.

I'm fighting for the middle class. That is the difference.

The next point Kerry scored was on his vow about taxes:

QUESTION: Senator Kerry, would you be willing to look directly into the camera and, using simple and unequivocal language, give the American people your solemn pledge not to sign any legislation that will increase the tax burden on families earning less than $200,000 a year during your first term?

KERRY: Absolutely. Yes. Right into the camera. Yes. I am not going to raise taxes.

This was strong, convincing and bolstering--but it could also be held against him whether he breaks the vow or not, just like "read my lips" was used against Bush I. For example, let's say that Kerry wins, and the Republicans throw out a small tax cut for the middle class loaded with pork or something else unacceptable, and Kerry vetoes it--by their standards, voting against a tax cut is equal to a tax hike, and upon a Kerry veto Republicans would start throwing the "Right into the camera" line back at him.

Finally, Kerry gave a great answer about abortion funding to the woman who was clearly pro-life, explaining about separating faith from governance, about respecting the beliefs of everyone:

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that.

But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society. But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.

Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro- abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can't afford it otherwise.

That's why I think it's important. That's why I think it's important for the United States, for instance, not to have this rigid ideological restriction on helping families around the world to be able to make a smart decision about family planning.

I think this will be acceptable to people leaning pro-life but not ardently so, and it will be a strong point in favor of Kerry for people in the pro-choice majority as well as those who are on the fence on the issue.

Not everything went so smoothly for Kerry. He flubbed a line explaining how small businesses are defined and accidental said that Bush owned a lumber firm. (He meant to say that anyone earning even a small amount from partial ownership in a firm is counted as a "small business" by Republicans when making up their figures on the issue.) Kerry also decided to give the 1.6 million job loss figure, factoring out government-sector jobs, instead of using the more standard, though lower figure of 821,000, and still made just as strong an impression about the jobless recovery. Kerry also failed to cite specifics from the new jobs report, which mystified me. But Kerry did do a good job explaining the basics of long-term job creation:

I want to fully fund education, No Child Left Behind, special-needs education. And that's how we're going to be more competitive, by making sure our kids are graduating from school and college.

China and India are graduating more graduates in technology and science than we are.

We've got to create the products of the future. That's why I have a plan for energy independence within 10 years.

And we're going to put our laboratories and our colleges and our universities to work. And we're going to get the great entrepreneurial spirit of this country, and we're going to free ourselves from this dependency on Mideast oil.

That's how you create jobs and become competitive.

It's refreshing to hear a candidate who looks at the long term, who plans ahead and has the core values and principles down.

Who Won?

This was a closer debate than before, but I think that in the end, Kerry came out on top. Not by as much as before, he had a lot more stumbling at first, but he came out well and finished strongly. Bush came out too much as shrill and overly aggressive, taking pot shots and making some claims that just didn't work and clashed too strongly with what most people know is the truth. Bush had some smooth talking and got many talking points off, but lost points for his bluster. Kerry had the facts down better and made much stronger points toward the end of the debate, but stumbled too much at the start and didn't hit Bush as squarely as he could have.

Now to see what everyone else things and feels.

Final Questions and Closings

On abortion: Kerry's right on. It's an article of faith, and I can't legislate that faith; as president, I have to represent everyone, and afford people their constitutional rights, and let them know all the options. Very well delivered. Bush: "I'm trying to decipher that." Got a laugh, but that'll chafe others. Bush is speaking directly to his base here--"Unborn Victims of Violence Act," "partial birth abortion ban." His answer is smooth, but partisan. Kerry's reply: great. It's not that simple, and he gave clear examples of exceptions. Bush's reply is vapid: you can only say yes or no, black or white. I think that's a mistake.

Last question: give three errors you've made, and what you did to correct them. Oh boy! Is Bush ready for this one? So far, he hasn't answered it. He's saying that the woman is really asking about Iraq, and now he's building his case on that. In other words, he's not answering the question! He's saying he "did the right decision." Ah--now he's saying his mistakes were some appointments, but he wants to spare their feelings. Lame. Absolutely lame. Kerry: he didn't live up to his own standards, keep his promise about the prosecution of the Iraq war, not the war itself, which Bush defended. "Beyond pitiful." Stolen ammo. Unarmored humvees. Kids with missing limbs. Good replies. Bush: brings up the $87 billion vote and Kerry's response to that. Kerry reiterated: I made a mistake talking about it, he made a mistake invading, which is worse? Kerry wins on this one, hands down. Good close.

Closing statements: Kerry is using a lot of it on the defensive--not giving a foreign veto on our security--and then positive on building alliances, hunting down terrorists, getting the job done in Iraq, building good education, protecting the environment, and ending on a note of optimism. Bush: we've come through recession, corporate scandals, war, but "we're on the move" (read: we're turning the corner). Don't increase the scope of the government (Bush has presided over the massive buildup of government after Clinton cut it down). Stay the course, fight the terrorists (then where is Osama and why did we drop the ball there?). Afghanistan will vote for president, there is a "free" Iraq (which is what all Americans wanted more than anything else, I suppose).

Gibson closes the same he ran the debate--clumsily and not in control. I hope they don't bring him back again, he really didn't run it well at all.

Back and Forth

Okay, Bush is losing it now, and Kerry's back on track. He's sounding desperate in insisting Kerry's not credible, and his attempts at humor are not working so well. Now, answering a question on the environment, he's stumbling a bit, and rattling off a list of environmental 'successes' that sound too memorized. He's not as smooth on this one. Kerry has a chance to smear him on this; will he?

Kerry answers more on the credibility issue first, and then goes on the environment. His answer is fairly strong, and then mentions going with the science. A strong single, maybe a double, but hardly a home run.

Now the questions turn to jobs; up to now, Kerry has pulled ahead, winning the second half hour.

Kerry is now sounding more focused and speaking in a way that people can connect to. He laid out clear plans and principles. Bush's reply on jobs is sounding more and more muddled, trivia laced with pot shots.

Something just happened with a timber company--I missed it, but if Bush is not hallucinating or distorting, then maybe Kerry just made an error.

Kerry is answering the stem cell question fairly well, but I think he was thrown by the claim made by the questioner about how ineffective embryonic stem cell research as opposed to adult stem cell research--wasn't sure about the facts there, so he spoke around it until he could get back around to the point about fertility clinics. Bush came out sounding much more certain, and quieter than before. Kerry's rebuttal was better, pointing out the dearth of resources Bush has made available.

Bush answered the Supreme Court question strangely: I'm not gonna tell you, besides I want them all voting for me. People are going to interpret that one badly, I think. Both we jokes, but the audience laughed at the first part, fell silent on the second.

Bush said he would get strict constructionists, but would not have a litmus test on how they would interpret the constitution. Come again? A bit of a contradiction there. Kerry's response was much better. He's making the point about what issues are at stake with the next court appointment.

Coming Back

So now the national security part of the debate is over. Bush wins on points so far.

Now the question is on drug importation from Canada. His answer: we have to make sure they're safer. A load of bullcrap, of course--there's more danger in buying drugs off the Internet. Kerry's answer is great: the drugs are safe, American-made, Bush blocked it--and he pointed out that Bush promised not to block it in 2000. Zing. The president denies Medicare from negotiating, the president sides with the companies. Bush jumps up and out on the 1-minute rebuttal without even waiting for the moderator to approve. The moderator is being wimpy--he should be calling Bush on this crap. But Kerry is doing a good job on doing that.

But Kerry's still stumbling on his delivery and not making his points as clearly as he could.

Bush comes off with the "most liberal senator" line (that's been blasted to pieces, but Bush doesn't care). Unfortunately, as I noted before, Bush is short of truth, but he's getting the zingers out, and his delivery is still smoother.

The overspending question came up. Bush's answer? Clinton ruined the economy, it's his fault, and then there's a war. But the fact remains that Bush and the GOP in control of Congress have been doing massive pork spending. Bush ends by excusing his overspending by saying that he's spending it all on the troops, and darn it, he won't short-change the troops! Well, George, how about buying them flak jackets and not making them pay for meals in the hospital when their limbs have been blown off?

Kerry just got the tax cut question: will you make a promise not to raise taxes on those making under $200,000. Kerry: Absolutely. Yes. Right into the camera. Yes, I promise. And then he laid out his plan, and on this question he sharp and strong. Kerry ends well with a josh at the moderator. Bush comes out with a "He's just not credible! Of course he's gonna raise your taxes!" He's sounding shrill now. And he just made a reference to "battering green eye shades?" Did I misunderstand? What was that? I think Bush just lost his cool.

Bush Blusters Through--but it Might Work

Bush just got the draft question, and he was obviously primed for it. He started off by script, with the new GOP strategy of defining it as an "Internet rumor" or "Internet hoax." His answer is muddled and not very convincing--we're bringing people home (yeah, from Europe, not from Iraq, and so they can replace people in the U.S. who could then be shipped off to Iraq) and we're getting new technology. Woo hoo.

Kerry is responding with a litany of generals and military people who support him because his policies are better, and then faced Bush directly and told him that we can't go it alone; that set Bush off, and he actually blustered through and past the moderator and started his answer. That could be good for him or bad, depending on how people perceive it.

Ouch, Kerry just stumbled on the why-there's-been-no-attack-since-9/11 question, forgetting how long it was between the WTC attacks (he said 5 or 7 years, I believe it was 8). Kerry's got to stop this stumbling, and focus his answers better. Kerry could be ahead right now, but Bush is coming off better. He's getting his talking points off in a smoother patter.

Facts vs. Style

Kerry's getting some good shots in there, but he's not calling Bush directly enough on the facts. He should be noting every misstatement or wrong/misleading fact by Bush and trying to work them into every reply, bringing in the line, "and the president is wrong on that, too." Well, there's still time, and maybe I don't fully understand the subtle touch.

On the question of why people overseas dislike us now, Kerry is responding with an account of how Bush bungled the job in Iraq, and mentioned what Bush said in the 2000 debate. If you ask me, he should have quoted Bush's "we have to be a humble nation" instead of his promise not to go to war without and exit strategy. It would have been sharper and more to the point of the question.

Bush is now blaming the war on the generals--do we have the right plan, the right troop levels, and the generals told him so. That may have been true for the invasion--but not for the occupation, when generals asked for more troops, and Bush didn't deliver. Kerry is getting on surer footing, and Bush is stumbling a bit more. We've got another hour and more, there's a lot of game left. But so far, it seems like a draw.

A Negative Start

Wow. Kerry starts off immediately negative. Not so sure that's a good idea. Well, at least it's not wishy-washy. Bush comes out immediately on the offensive as well, with his favorite flip-flop attack. I notice also that Bush said that Hussein was a "grave" threat--but that's not what he said before, he said "grave and gathering threat." He drops the "gathering" now because his own people (Duelfer) say that it was a diminishing threat.

However, however weak Bush is on the facts, so far he is winning on delivery. Kerry's start was a bit muddled and stumbling, Bush has had a smooth delivery so far. Kerry's also worrying me because of his stage presence--he doesn't walk around casually, he tends to shuffle.

I'm not sure that I like the moderator's style--he refused a follow-up for Kerry but gave one readily to Bush. At least right at the start, he should be more even-handed.

But, wow--Kerry just shot back a great response to Bush: he quoted the Duelfer report, what I was waiting for, and faced Bush directly and told him squarely that the sanctions and inspections were to keep WMD out of Iraq, and that's what they did, and Bush went to was unnecessarily. Bush just laughed at him--and that could be a mistake. Did we get a good shot of that on video? It would make a great campaign commercial for Kerry.

The Debate Begins

Well, the storm has abated well enough for now so my satellite signal to come through strong, let's hope that holds; I've got radio and streaming audio standing by just in case.

September Jobs Report Out

And it's not good for Bush. What he'll tout as the Greatest Thing Since Buttered Bread will be the unemployment rate, which held stead at 5.4% for the second straight month. While that's far from stellar (Clinton had a 3.9% rate in the late 90's), it is better than almost any other time in Bush's term. However, it does not really mean that fewer people are unemployed, it just means that fewer people are counted as unemployed, which is why the rate is deceptive. It leaves out people who have been unemployed longer than their benefits run and are not currently reported as seeking a job. Which means that millions of unemployed Americans are not even on that list.

But the big news is the number of jobs gained: 96,000, well below expectations, well below the 150,000 jobs needed each month just to tread water, to provide for population growth. In other words, there's a net loss of about fifty thousand jobs there. "Anemic" would be about right as far as describing it. This number plays up the fallacy of believing everything is OK because of the illusory unemployment numbers. And while July's numbers were adjusted upwards by a small 12,000 (August was revised down by a tiny 1,600), it is nowhere close to the upward revisions the Bush people were claiming would be seen.

It will be Kerry's challenge to make sure that he can best Bush at establishing which number is more indicative of the present economy. A few numbers that will help him do this is that in September, 18,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, while government bureaucracies swelled by 37,000 workers--Bush's version of "smaller government," apparently.

One More Endorsement

A funny little video, kind of a 527 campaign commercial, from a group calling themselves "George the Menace," claiming to have been spurred on by the Swift Boast liars. The video is self-explanatory, available in Quicktime and Real Media. I don't know how professional these people are, but they did a very slick job in the one special effect in the video--it looks quite realistic, and all the more wry. It would be even funnier if you didn't believe it to be all too true, generally speaking.

Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio

Telling it like it is. This is through Paradox at DailyKos. Rep. Ryan of Ohio gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House recently, telling why young people in this country believe that, if Bush is re-elected, that the draft will be brought back and those young kids will be sent unwillingly to war. From Ryan's speech, it is apparent that a Republican called it a "big Internet hoax." Here is the text of the speech (best as I could transcribe myself, it hasn't hit the news yet):

I rise in opposition of this bill, but I would like to clarify something. We're not trying to scare kids, this president's foreign policy is what's scaring the kids of this country. And if people had said today, why are people believing this? Why are people believing this 'big Internet hoax'?

Well, [these are the same people that] told us Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, same people that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, same people that told us we were going to be able to use the oil for reconstruction money, same people that told us that we'd be greeted as liberators, not occupiers, same people, same president that told us the Taliban is gone, same president that told us that Poland is our ally two days before they pull out, same president that tells us Iraq is going just great, same president that tells us the economy is going just great, same people that told us the tax cut was going to create millions of jobs. Same people that told us that the Medicare program only cost $400 billion, when it really cost $540 billion. So please forgive us for not believing what you're saying! Please forgive the students of this country for not believing what you're saying. Not one thing, not one thing about this war that has been told to the American people, that's been told to these college students has been true. Not one thing. Bremer says we need more troops, the Pentagon says we need more troops, and this president can't get them from the international community. There's only one option left [the draft]. Let's be honest with the American people.

If you'd like to see the video--he really delivers it well--you can view it here (Quicktime, 2.2 MB), or using a PC here or a Mac here (Windows Media, streaming), or listen to an audio MP3 version here.

Typhoon

We're getting slammed this typhoon season. We've been hit by several big storms recently--okay, not so much as Florida, but still, we get hit. For me, this is bad timing because typhoons usually make my satellite TV reception crap out, and tomorrow morning--practically zero-hour for the typhoon--is when the second debate gets broadcast. I may have to listen to it on the radio, or deal with webcasts or something. Damn. Hope the typhoon heads out to sea instead of hitting here... and, oh yeah, it would be nice for those people whose homes get destroyed in these storms, too.

Mozilla / Firefox

Here's a great testimonial by Kevin Drum, one of the top political bloggers, on switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox. He hits on several of the major reasons to use Firefox: tabbed browsing, far greater security, long-standing pop-up blocking support (not just-added), greater speed, and ease of installation.

He notes cons as being that not all web pages work well with Firefox--but this is something that will change over time as more and more people make the switch he just did.

A small note: PC users who now use Firefox now understand, to a small degree, what it's like to have a Mac--being more cutting-edge, and having better quality and features--but having to deal with people designing things for the other guys more than for you because everyone else is going for the herd-mentality me-too option. Everyone should be using Firefox because IE is such a drastically inferior product--but most people don't want to take the two minutes it takes to download Mozilla or Firefox, and would rather use IE just because Microsoft put it on their desktop.

Wake up, IE users. Download Firefox, or Mozilla for the full suite (email, newsgroups, address book, chat, web page construction in addition to browsing). It's free, it's better, it's safer, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense. So why are you still using the POS you have? Go on, do it!

Daily News

Michael J. Fox has made a new ad supporting John Kerry, citing his support for stem-cell research. In the video, available on Kerry's site, Fox states, "I say lives are at stake and it’s time for leadership. That’s why I support John Kerry for president." Right to the point--though those saved by stem cell research will only be a few whose lives would be saved by a Kerry presidency.

The economic figures are coming out very soon, and it's anybody's guess as to what they'll say. But there's little chance that they'll be anywhere near good enough to wipe out the past four years of mismanagement by Bush and the GOP, whose massive overspending has disgusted many even in the Republican party. In case you're not aware of it--and you should be before the next debate--you can find Kerry's plan for the economy here. The bullet points:

• Strengthen the Middle Class
  
• Stand Up for Workers Rights
  
• Create Good-Paying Jobs
  
• Restoring Fiscal Responsibility
  
• Opportunity for Small Business
  
• Free & Fair Trade
  
• Balance Work & Family

Kerry would keep tax cuts for the middle class and add targeted cuts (like those Gore proposed four years ago), while getting rid of tax cuts for those earning over $200,000; he would work to stop the overspending, and if he gets even one house of Congress controlled by Democrats, he'll have a far easier time of accomplishing that. He'll focus on creating jobs that pay well through direct incentives, not just throwing cash at rich people and hoping that it somehow makes its way into middle-class pockets; and he'll really invest in energy-independency, an effort which will lead to many good jobs in and of itself. That and a lot more, including detailed plans; read the page on his site.

And going in to the debate, Kerry has scored a 4-point lead in an AP/Ipsos poll, leading Bush 50-46.

Meanwhile, Bush is beginning to sound desperate--and that's not my headline, it's Howard FIneman's, not exactly a flaming liberal. FIneman describes how Iraq could be Bush's undoing. Some have opined, however, that Fineman is just trying to lower expectations for Bush for the debate Friday night.

He's certainly looking desperate to many: he suddenly announced a "significant speech" that he planned to make, stirring up all kinds of expectations, and it turns out that he had nothing new, he just wanted to trick the networks into carrying his stump speech live on TV. That is desperate, when you risk pissing off the networks so close to an election.

Other things not going well for Bush: oil prices hit $53 a barrel, an unprecedented high. Watch the gas prices continue to soar, while the man who said he'd be able to control those prices sits by and does nothing.

And to top it off, a new report came out from Charles Duelfer. Duelfer was hired by Bush when David Kay came out with a report that said Saddam had no WMD and was not a threat to us. This is rather typical Bush fashion: you don't like the facts, try to find someone who will give you different ones. Well, now Duelfer's report is due out, and the results are: Saddam had no WMD and was not a threat to us. In fact, Duelfer's report said that Hussein was a diminishing threat, not a "grave and gathering" one.

Cheney's reaction: the report justifies the administration's case to go to war. I kid you not. He's in full reality-denial mode now, folks. He's now resorted to using Iraqi abuses of the fuel-for-food program as justification for going to war.

That doesn't sound desperate, does it?

Cheney Lied

From the Debate, with lies noted in red, misleading in green:

CHENEY: (1)Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you "Senator Gone." (2) You've got one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate.

(3) Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session.

(4) The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

Here's the breakdown: (1) the paper that used the pejorative about Edwards was not his hometown paper, but a paper in a town some distance away. It's a weekly paper, no less. And oh yeah: they don't agree with Cheney on this. It was an editorial written 15 months ago and was in the greater context of criticizing Helms and mentioning that Edwards' record was not as bad as other Senators' records.

(2) Edwards has a bad attendance only during the recent campaign, which is SOP for any politician who is running for office. Bush was not in attendance as Governor of Texas much at all during his entire campaign four years ago.

(3) Cheney implies in his statement about presiding over the Senate that he's doing his job there more than Edwards. Note the careful wording that gives the definite impression that Cheney presides over the Senate every Tuesday, without actually saying it. It is true that it is his capacity to be the presiding officer of the Senate, but in fact, he rarely does so. In fact, he only presided over the Senate three times in 2003, for tie-breaking votes--in other words, only when he is absolutely forced to attend.

His statement about being there "most Tuesdays" is the most misleading statement here of all, and is absolutely a lie in context: he suggests that he presides over the Senate, or at least is at the Senate in a way that he could meet Edwards, every Tuesday. That's a lie: Cheney is only there on Tuesdays to attend Republican strategy meetings, to which Edwards is of course not invited. But Cheney is not there to preside on Tuesdays. In fact, during his entire tenure as vice president, Cheney presided over the Senate only twice--the same number of times Edwards has presided over the Senate during that same time! As far as Tuesdays are concerned, Edwards was doing Cheney's job just as often as Cheney was!

(4) And then there's the final statement, that he never met Edwards before the debate. In fact, they met on at least three different occasions, once at a prayer breakfast where Cheney even thanked Edwards for coming, and another time when Edwards escorted Elizabeth Dole to the podium of the Senate to be sworn in. Furthermore, Edwards did attend the Senate before he hit the campaign trail, and if Cheney had been doing his job as President of the Senate, he would have seen Edwards a lot more--in other words, Cheney didn't miss Edwards because Edwards was absent, but rather because Cheney himself was absent! More later if I find out that Edwards was present at any or all of the times Cheney presided over tie-breaking votes in the past.

Damn, That Felt Big

The quake we just felt was a 5.8 on the Richter scale, depending on who's saying, but it felt big
--the biggest one I've been in so far (again--they seem to be getting bigger as time goes by, or maybe just closer), this one almost up to get-the-hell-under-a-door-frame-now big. That one shook the whole apartment visibly--not quite enough to throw things off tables or out of cabinets, but it was close. So far, no reports of serious damage.

The quake was close, in southwestern Ibaraki, right close to where Tokyo, Saitama and Chiba are in proximity to Ibaraki. As far as I can figure, it was just 50 km (30 mi.) from central Tokyo, about 75 km from where I am.

Yikes.

FactCheck.com

Of course, many liberals are giggling out there because Cheney told the audience to go to FactCheck.com, when he apparently meant to say FactCheck.org. The dot-com address redirects you to GeorgeSoros.com, to a page titled, "Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush."

Cheney additionally implied that all the charges about him and Halliburton were wrong, when in fact the Fact Check organization only addressed a few specific ads, and only points that they had contention with--and not even all the ads were Kerry's. As Edwards pointed out:

The facts are the vice president's company that he was CEO of, that did business with sworn enemies of the United States, paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false financial information, it's under investigation for bribing foreign officials.

The same company that got a $7.5 billion no-bid contract, the rule is that part of their money is supposed to be withheld when they're under investigation, as they are now, for having overcharged the American taxpayer, but they're getting every dime of their money.

There's also the fact that there is an incredibly blatant conflict of interest, wherever Halliburton received a no-bid contract and was not the only outfit that could take on the task. Both the administration's choice of no-bids for Halliburton and the conflict of interest stink to high heaven, and Cheney knows it. His claim that Halliburton is brought up "because they want to obscure their own record," which is laughable, because Halliburton was brought up countless times before either Kerry or Edwards even announced their candidacies. It's Cheney who's erecting the smokescreen.

Polls and Clones

That's your view as a Republican. A poll of uncommitted voters at CBS found Edwards beating Cheney, 41% to 28%, with 31% calling it a tie.

Most outlets are quoting an ABC poll, which has Cheney beating Edwards 43% to 35% with 19% calling it a tie--but ABC did not interview uncommitted voters, and their sample had more Republicans in it by a ration of 38% to 31% for Democrats--a difference that almost exactly reflects the "higher" Cheney numbers for the poll. Real scientific there, ABC.

On another note, remember that Cheney claimed that he had never met Edwards before. Interesting. It must have been Cheney's clone in this picture, taken in February 2001, when Cheney thanked Edwards by name in his introduction. Edwards also met Cheney in the Senate in January 2003. Wait a few days while people check through Senate records, and they'll likely find a lot of other times they were both on the Senate floor.

Cheney also gave an interesting recount on how many times Kerry voted for tax hikes--Republicans have always said 350 times, but Cheney said 98, God alone knows the reasoning behind it, but that number still includes times Kerry voted for tax cuts which were not as low as Republicans wanted to go.

Post-Debate Impressions

I think they're going to call this one a draw. This will almost certainly not effect much. Both candidates had their own appeals, both attacked the other rather savagely, both defended themselves well. There were a few zingers in there, but also quite a bit of snooze time. As I mentioned before, your opinion may vary according to which personal style you prefer; it may also vary according to your prior expectations about who would win.

To repeat a prior concern, it really seemed to me that Ifill chose her answers more to the benefit of Cheney; I'll have to read the transcript and see if that was really the case, or was I just imagining it. For example, she asked Edwards about his inexperience, but (unless I missed it) she did not ask Cheney about his health, just as cogent and roughly equivalent. She also asked about two issues which are Republican chestnuts: gay marriage and flip-flopping. Yes, she framed the flip-flopping question in the context of both candidates doing so, but it's still a Republican attack point.

And now to see what spin prevails in the media...

Down-Home Cheney?

Cheney just tried to claim that his personal experiences and job background are very similar to Edwards, in that he has a humble background. Sorry, Cheney, but that ain't gonna fly. Edwards was no a long-time political party hack, does not have two DUI arrests, and has not been a corporate bigwig for a giant multinational.

Cheney is also covering up his microphone from time to time, muffling his voice, by lacing his hands just below his mouth.

Ifill is at it again, bringing up a pet Republican topic--flip-flopping. After asking about Edwards' inexperience. What is she thinking here?

Lies, Choices, and Tedium

Cheney is spouting off numbers and statistics, 'facts' and claims at a furious rate. This will undoubtedly result in detailed lists of inaccurate and misleading statements laid out on blogs in the next days, but Cheney knows that if you make one lie, you'll get nailed for it, but if you make a hundred small lies, people will not pay attention to them.

Ifill is asking about same-sex unions, which is further eroding my respect for her. Bring up a classic Republican chestnut, which the GOP set up as a distraction? Could she really find nothing else to bring up, no other issue? Good for Edwards for pointing out that the matter is purely a political tool, and that they should be focusing on real issues.

But one thing I have to say, this debate is not nearly as engaging as the Kerry-Bush debate. I feel my interest drifting away from time to time. I doubt too many people will come away from this with very strong feelings unless they had those feelings already.

Edwards Fighting Two Fronts?

Cheney has gall, you gotta give him that: he looked Edwards straight in the eye and told him that the reason he's bringing up Halliburton is because he's missed so many Senate sessions. Edwards is not faring as well in the "you're a bastard" exchange.

Ifill just did a big no-no: when Cheney said it was not his turn to take a question, Ifill said she'd asked Edwards a question about Israel but that Edwards had not answered the question, that he hadn't talked about Israel--a direct put-down, leaving Edwards to defend himself, quickly, and looking like he's on the defensive. That was incredibly inappropriate of her to say that.

The Credibility Shield

There was just a bit of a scuff-up between the two, with CHeney insisting Edwards is not respecting Iraqi sacrifices, Edwards interrupting him denying it, Cheney interrupting right back and insisting it's true. One thing about Cheney, he's able to say anything you could imagine and look like he believes it one hundred and ten percent. He could say, "the tooth fairy abducted Elvis in a UFO" and come across looking absolutely convinced, credible, and that there is no question but that it is true; you have to switch on your skepticism full strength to look at his statements and see that they're pure baloney.

Edwards is bringing up Halliburton, and Cheney's response is basically, it's a smokescreen and I don't have time to argue about it. A perfect example of Cheney's Credibility Field--pure BS, but he is relentless in insisting and acting like it's God's own truth.

An Even Fight

You can really see Edward's practice as an attorney here, for example when he asked the American people to listen very carefully to a point he was about to make, and telling viewers to carefully watch what Cheney said about the issue because of what Edwards expected him to say. These sound like what an attorney would say in giving the closing argument of a case.

Both are trading shots back and forth. Cheney directly addresses Edwards back, giving as good as he got, accusing Edwards to his face of being wrong, lacking conviction, and so forth--even taking a pot shot at Edwards about his voting record while running for office. Edwards holds his own in that respect, shooting right back. Cheney is not letting Edwards put him on the defensive like Bush did--showing that he's a lot more capable than Bush, making you understand why Bush insisted Cheney be with him when he went before the 9/11 commission.

Both are coming across as convincing, knowledgeable, aggressive, calm, and convincing. So far, this debate looks like it will come out a tie. The only thing I can see them affecting in undecided voters is their manner: Cheney being calm, quiet and professional-looking, Edwards being more personable, likable, and just as convincing.

The VP Debate

Okay, here we go with the second debate.

Ifill's first question was to Cheney: Bremer said we had not enough troops, a good plan, and did not stop looting, Rumsfeld said there was no connection between Hussein and al Qaeda; Cheney's answer was a succinct summary of all the old excuses. Edwards faced and addressed Cheney directly and told him he wasn't being straight with the American people, and then gave what seemed like just as scripted a reply. Edwards seems to be taking the strategy of directly addressing Cheney to tell him he's wrong.

Cheney is coming across as calm, clear and professional; Edwards is too, with a sense of easiness and a southern accent. So far both are solid in their own ways.

Building to a Crescendo...

Okay, it looks like things may start happening fast in the next few days, and maybe last until past the end of the last debate in a week or so.

The Edwards-Cheney debate is due to start in about seven hours. A lot of people have been painting Edwards as a "silver-tongued" trial attorney, fast on his feet and experienced at zapping corporate heads before juries--but Cheney, while being the curmudgeon he is, exudes a great deal of confidence and authority; in short, he's no pushover. This will be a challenge, for both of them.

Bush is poised to steal the limelight should Edwards score points: he has scheduled a "significant" speech at the last minute that is to focus on terrorism and the economy. There have been a few whispers about this being the "October Surprise," but others feel that it's just being pumped up in order to trick the networks into giving Bush live air time so he can speak without Kerry there to whup his ass.

It may be Bush taking preemptive action against Kerry before the next presidential debate, as there are reports that the White House is spreading rumors of a "revision" to jobs numbers from March 2003 to March 2004, adding as many as 288,000 jobs to that time period, adding 40% more jobs created. Have your BS Detectors on full-charge, though--economists say that the revision would be more like 140,000 jobs, which could be subtracted from the total as well as possibly being added.

Wall Street expects about 150,000 new jobs to have been created in September, which would be about the number needed to keep up with population growth--no real job growth, in other words. But that number may not be reached--there were huge layoffs this September, 107,863 to be exact, 41% more than this time last year. Layoffs were mostly in computer, transportation, telecommunications and consumer products industries--mostly high-paying markets.

In the meantime, a notable Republican has just endorsed Kerry: Marshall Wittmann, until recently an aide to Senator John McCain, is putting his weight firmly and fully behind Kerry and Edwards; give his announcement a read.

And an incentive to vote Kerry if you're pro-choice and undecided: thirty states are poised to outlaw abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court. If Bush gets into office again--lest we forget--he will likely have a shot at at least one and perhaps as many as four appointments to the SC. Meaning that the court could be stacked solidly with conservatives who will likely be in lockstep with radical conservatives on a wide range of issues, abortion being only one. Others will concern constitutional rights and antiterrorism laws, separation of church and state, gun control, and a host of other issues of vital importance to many. That alone is good reason to vote Bush out.

There is good news in the polls: Rasmussen, one of the more honest polls, had Bush ahead of Kerry 49% to 45% just three days ago. Over each of those last two days, however, Kerry has gained one point per day, and Bush has lost the same, putting both at 47%.

Oh, and hey, remember Florida? More suspicious activity. The Republican, strongly pro-Bush secretary of state Glenda Hood is now pressuring counties to disqualify large numbers of voters based upon a technicality, namely "skipping the citizenship box if they affirmed elsewhere with their signatures that they are U.S. citizens." In other words, they affirmed they were citizens, but if they didn't do it twice, then they are denied the right to vote. Miami-Dade, Leon and Orange counties are defying the order, and will not deny citizens the right to vote over such a trivial oversight. Broward county, however, is gung-ho in following the order. If you recall, Broward was one of two counties in 2000 which allowed Republican operatives unlimited and illegal access to absentee ballot requests that had been filled out wrongly, essentially allowing the local GOP reps to erase all the mistakes made by Republican applicants. That was one of the several independent incidents of election fraud of which any one gave the election to Bush.

There's a lot more, but it's late and I'm tired... I have to wake up in time to catch the debate! Stay tuned--it's only going to get busier.

Yargh

Well, I thought I had a great way of keeping spammers at bay, with the .htaccess file. As it turns out, I also seem to be keeping out most of the legitimate visitors as well; reports have come back from helpful visitors that sometimes even access to the comments themselves is restricted. Damn. Well, the .htaccess is gone, so now there should be a lot more visitors leaving comments again... as well as a flood of spammers.

Time to start looking into MT 3.0 and comment registration again.

Update: ...aaaand within just a few hours, spam starts rolling in. Ah, well. Meanwhile, the referral spamming cockroaches are crawling into the site at full force; more than 600 such spams in five days, more than any other time before.

Return of the Sneer

You gotta love the title of this Seattle PI story:

Darth Cheney meets Luke Edwards

Trouble Posting a Comment? Please Help

Ever since I put in the spammer-block on my mt-comments script file, I've had a drop-off in comments, and am beginning to wonder if it doesn't have anything to do with the script. I have been getting comments, and all experiments with various people I've asked to post comments have been successful. However, one person who has my email address has noted that he had a problem commenting here from Firefox--though I tested the browser on my PC and was able to get through myself. Anyone else who can't get a comment through can't reach me, so I'd be unable to hear about problems like that.

The easy way would be to have an active email address for this site posted, but spammers would get it and drown me in spam (I tested that before). So here's what I'd like to try:

I will post a comment myself to this entry. I will use a new, unique email address that I can throw away later if it get spammed. It should be protected by the spam block feature in the link (this will be a good test of that as well).

If you have tried commenting to this site before and were blocked, then get the email address from the first comment to this post and send me an email letting me know if there's a problem.

Thanks for your help!

The Persistence of Gutter Slime

The tactic of using .htaccess to shut out spammers has been widely successful, but not entirely. One spammer has somehow gotten through the block, and has attempted to spam this site 534 times in the past one week. Persistent little cockroach. Thank goodness for MT Blacklist.

I still haven't found a way to deal with the other scumwads, namely referral spammers. Tried to do an htaccess script on them as well, blocking access to anyone coming from a certain URL, but for some reason the script made the site invisible to me, and I know I didn't use keywords that are likely to be in my ISP's URL. Anyone know about what to do about these spammers?

Kerry Debate Bounce

Well, it's pretty much official. In two major polls--both weighted towards Republican voters--Kerry has a post-debate bounce of 5% to 6%. Gallup has him at 49% now, as opposed to 44% before the debate; Newsweek puts Kerry at 47% as opposed to 41% before. Bush has suffered a drop of about the same amount, putting him and Kerry about equal as Kerry's numbers are on the rise leading into the second debate.

New Kerry Speech

No time to comment on it or summarize, maybe later. Give it a read though, on the Kerry web site.

Pivotal Jobs Report Due Oct. 8

One thing to keep in mind: by the time the next debate comes round, the new numbers for employment for the month of September--and possibly revisions for July and August--will be coming out, last jobs report before the election. And the economy will be one of the big issues in that debate. If the numbers stink, Bush will have to go into "around the corner" overdrive, and Kerry can mop the floor with him on it; if the numbers are good, then Kerry will have to try to make the point about overall job loss, outsourcing and the deterioration of job quality, while Bush can simply smirk and say, "the numbers are good." But the Veep candidates will get first shot: the numbers are due out on October 8th, the day of the Edwards-Cheney debate.

Food for thought.

Newsweek: Kerry Leads

Well, the first major post-debate poll is out, and it has Kerry leaping ahead of Bush. Remember, Newsweek was one of the polls which had Bush out in front by double digits, as they disproportionately weight their polls towards Republican voters. Their last poll had Bush ahead 52% to Kerry's 41%.

And now? Kerry leads with 47% to Bush's 45%, a huge change from before--and remember, the poll is still weighted towards Republicans. It will be very interesting indeed to see what one of the more balanced polls will demonstrate in the next few days. And if one of them has Kerry with a significant lead, will all the news services trumpet it as much as they trumpeted Bush's lead before?

On a side not, it seems that Newsweek is also paying attention to the blogs. Soon after Newsweek reported that Bush's lead had "all but evaporated," Josh Marshall jumped on them for inaccuracy: according to their poll, Bush's lead had entirely evaporated., and Kerry led by two points. And soon after, Newsweek, in an update, changed the headline to say that Bush's lead "has evaporated." Not as egregious as FOX's errors and later revisions, but it does emphasize how much clout bloggers are beginning to have as counterweights to the major news sites.

Ready to Vote

By the way, my absentee ballot arrived in the mail yesterday. In an interesting twist, much of the ballot is crossed out, preventing me from voting on city and county races and all initiatives in the state. I'm OK with it, but it makes me a bit nervous--will they cross out Senate and House races next?

Apparently they might--it's already happening in some states. According to Ruth McCreery of Democrats Abroad,

We have already found several counties that are placing restrictions on overseas voters (such as requiring copies of ID with the ballot or re-registering after the primary) that are contrary to federal law. We have also found that several California counties are sending out what is labelled a "sample ballot" instead of a real one, and some in Indiana are only sending out the ballot for state offices, with extremely obscure instructions about securing a federal ballot. One county in another state left the candidates for House of Representatives off the federal ballot!

When you get yours, better check it carefully. Make sure it is all in order, read the instructions excruciatingly carefully, do everything by the numbers, and send it back soon. I just hope the post office will get it there in time--when I sent in my absentee ballot request, by registered mail, the Japanese P.O. mucked it up and didn't get it there until an entire month later. They still haven't delivered me the receipt. This time I'm sending it from the Shinjuku Main Post Office, no local yokel branch for this delivery.

FOX Reports Fiction, Then Changes without Comment

Atrios caught FOX News representing the Republican group "Communists for Kerry" as an actual pro-Kerry group, when in fact it is a Republican group running a "satire" web site. The original FOX story read:

Of course, there were some Kerry supporters in attendance who had no doubts whatever about their candidate.

"We're trying to get Comrade Kerry elected and get that capitalist enabler George Bush out of office," said 17-year-old Komoselutes Rob of Communists for Kerry.

"Even though he, too, is a capitalist, he supports my socialist values more than President Bush," Rob said, before assuring FOXNews.com that his organization was not a parody group. When asked his thoughts on Washington's policy toward Communist holdout North Korea, Rob said: "The North Koreans are my comrades to a point, and I'm sure they support Comrade Kerry, too."

It is unclear whether the Kerry campaign has welcomed the Communists' endorsement.

Apparently, word got back to FOX that they had screwed up yet again, and so they altered the story, without comment or explanation, at the exact same address of the original story:

And then there were the pranksters in the audience . . . the Communists for Kerry (who, in fact, are rooting for Bush) and the Billionaires for Bush (who, of course, are Kerry supporters).

"We're trying to get Comrade Kerry elected and get that capitalist enabler George Bush out of office," said 17-year-old Komoselutes Rob of Communists for Kerry.

"Even though he, too, is a capitalist, he supports my socialist values more than President Bush," Rob said.

One would think that they would at least have the decency to post an Editor's Note explaining why they posted this fake story, like they did yesterday with the story that contained fake Kerry quotes.

I guess that fatigue and poor judgment must be endemic at FOX News.

FOX "News" Makes Up Story on Kerry

In case you hadn't heard: No way it'll be as focused-on as the CBS documents about Bush, but FOX News, after the debates, posted a story by a correspondent named Carl Cameron that contained completely fabricated quotes by Kerry. The text included:

Rallying supporters in Tampa Friday, Kerry played up his performance in Thursday night's debate, in which many observers agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president.

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Kerry said Friday.

With the foreign-policy debate in the history books, Kerry hopes to keep the pressure on and the sense of traction going.

Aides say he will step up attacks on the president in the next few days, and pivot somewhat to the domestic agenda, with a focus on women and abortion rights.

"It's about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures," Kerry said.

Kerry still trails in actual horse-race polls, but aides say his performance was strong enough to rally his base and further appeal to voters ready for a change.

"I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy," the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.

A "metrosexual" is defined as an urbane male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.

Presently the FOX story has been edited so the made-up stuff is no longer a part of the story, and FOX added the disclaimer:

Editor's Note

Earlier Friday, FOXNews.com posted an item purporting to contain quotations from Kerry. The item was based on a reporter’s partial script that had been written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast. We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice.

The thing is, the report had to go through an editor first. Maybe it's just that their editing is as slipshod as much of their reporting is. And how could "fatigue" factor into a reporter actively writing a fake news story and uploading it to the web site? Even if the reporter wrote this in his spare time, it calls into question his integrity and bias concerning the topic that he covers for the network. Josh Marshall is on top of the story at Talking Points Memo.

On Ichiro, Baseball, and Japan

I am very happy for Ichiro and his accomplishment; he seems like a nice guy, a great sportsman and is destined to be a major Hall-of-Famer.

As for the reaction of sports fans and the baseball establishment here in Japan, my enthusiasm is a bit more muted. The reason for that is the lack of reciprocity. Japan loves few things as much as a Japanese who travels to America and is a success, especially in breaking records or winning at a popular game. And I would be absolutely fine with that--if the reverse were just as sportingly accepted. But the fact of the matter is, much of Japan despises the foreigner who intrudes and threatens to break a native record. It is not openly spoken of, but it is acted out, by both sportsmen and by the fans.

When I first came to Japan in 1985, I remember the American slugger Randy Bass had come within one home run of breaking the record in Japan. The record holder was Sadaharu Oh, Japan's Babe Ruth, who got 55 homers in 1964. Bass came within one home run of that record in the last few games of the season, and the last opponent his team played was the Yomiuri Giants--managed by Sadaharu Oh. A standing order was given to the pitchers: walk Bass. For two games, he was intentionally walked, and not allowed to try for the record. And it was generally understood that if it had been a Japanese player, he would have been pitched to. And the Giants were not in contention for the Japan Series, as I recall, so it was not strategic in that sense.

Can you imagine an American baseball manager in the same position? Imagine an American player, turned manager, telling his pitchers to walk out someone who challenges his record. The manager would be booed out of the stadium, even by the home crowds. But add to that a racial element, that he's denying the challenger the record because of his race... there would be riots. It would be considered the nadir of sportsmanship.

But maybe that's just Sadaharu Oh. In 1985, a lot of Japanese were behind him, but in 2001, when American Tuffy Rhodes had tied Oh's record and was threatening to break it, other teams gave him shots, were fair to him. But the last two games of the season were against the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks--managed by Sadaharu Oh. And again, the American player was shut out. Oh claimed that he was "out of the loop" on the decision to pitch around Rhodes, just as he claimed in '85, but there's no doubt in anyone's mind that the orders came directly from him. To his credit, Japanese baseball commissioner Hiromori Kawashima stated publicly that Oh's actions were "completely divorced from the essence of baseball, which values the supremacy of fair play." But no disciplinary action was taken against Oh, who still manages the Hawks today. If you ask me, he should have been fired and removed from any halls of fame he has been inducted into.

But it was not only the home-run record being denied, it was an entire system of treatment towards non-Japanese players. Umpires called strikes according to a much-expanded foreigners-only strike zone. Pitchers beaned foreign players far more than they did other Japanese. Fans would often shout racial epithets. And sports newspapers would alter the word 外人--gaijin ("foreigner," or "outside person")--to read 害人 (also pronounced gaijin, but meaning, literally, "harmful-person") to the extent that the word itself had to be banned in the sport.

It was not just in baseball, either; sumo also reacted this way to successful Americans. When Akebono, Musashimaru and Konishiki, all Americans, made the top ranks of sumo, there was a great deal of resistance. Every time one of them won a match, the reaction by the fans were muted. Whenever a Japanese wrestler won against one of them, the crowds went wild, throwing their seat cushions around the arena in abandon, even when the winning wrestler was not all that popular. It kind of turned me off of the sport.

As always, please understand that I am not one of those moan-and-whine Americans who just hates everything about Japan--quite the contrary, I love Japan and I love the people here. But I won't turn a blind eye to any flaw in the nation's character here, any more than I would to national flaws in America. These things can only be changed by talking about them openly.

Maybe the game and the fans here have changed in the past 20 years, regardless of what Oh did a few years ago--but frankly, I don't think it has changed all that much (ask Alex Cabrera, who ran into the same wall in 2002). When I see a foreign player in baseball or sumo (soccer doesn't count--it's not long-standing here, so there are few native records of note to break) do well and not only not be hindered, but to have as strong a following and as deep an acceptance as Ichiro has in the U.S., I will be impressed and encouraged.

A Closer Look at the First Debate: Part I

Well, it's been an interesting few days since the debate. Everyone, outside of the Republican spin doctors, is saying that Kerry won. There is division on exactly where it happened--I thought it was in the first half of the debate, but many saw him come out strong in the second half. Wherever it was that he did best, it is pretty unanimous that he beat Bush. My own analysis seems pretty tame compared to the opinions out there saying that he wiped the floor with Bush, but I was basing my evaluation not on what Kerry did for me, but what I figured he do for the average American, taking into account the counterweight Bush would provide.

But one other thing that I didn't consider also affected my assessment: I was blogging throughout the debate. And I am not a touch typist. Which means that I was looking at my keyboard a lot of the time, so to a large degree, I was listening to the debate rather than watching it. One of the things I missed was Bush's mugging on the split screen while Kerry was talking--blinking, smirking, rolling his eyes, and very often looking peeved and annoyed. The DNC has kindly edited together a one-minute best-of reel of Bush's mugs (Real Player or Windows Media).

People also speak about how Bush seemed at a loss for words, stumbled in his answered, and looked lost at times. I am pleased that people are talking about these things, but I'm also a bit surprised--I thought that everyone knew about and expected these things, and that many Americans accepted them as part of his down-home everyman charm. Glad to know that I was wrong on that one.

So, as I mentioned before, it's time for me to watch the debate again, this time with a pause button and some fact-checking.

---

First of all, I find it interesting to see my observation about the height difference between the two candidates come up later: Fox News posted a photo of the two candidates shaking hands which seemed to show Bush almost as tall as Kerry; for a while, it was thought that Fox had photoshopped it, but it turns out that they had simply chosen the one photo from the one angle that gave the illusion of similar height.

Kerry's opening, as many have observed, was a bit weak; he used the word "left them [our alliances] in shatters" rather than "left them in tatters," and he seemed to lose his place for a moment once or twice, but he quickly regained his footing; still, the initial shakiness caused a few of his supporters to worry--concern which was quickly relieved soon enough. Bush, in his first reply, had the same amount of shakiness to him--but his pauses and lost moments only increased through the evening.

Bush's first rebuttal to the question to Kerry on national security was very indicative of how Bush dissembles so easily and, to many Americans, so convincingly. He said that we have "pursued al Qaeda wherever al Qaeda tries to hide," for example. Really? How about Afghanistan? "75% of known al Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice." First of all, 19 of the top 22 al Qaeda leaders are still at large. And second, is he really so simple as to believe that they could run out of leaders, that they are not a replenishable resource? And what about this "bin Laden" guy, the only one most Americans care about? "We've upheld the doctrine that said, if you harbor a terrorist, you're equally as guilty as the terrorist," except that Pakistan was in league with al Qaeda, still gives them shelter, and their chief nuclear scientist was spreading secrets on how to make nukes all through the region and Bush let him go with a slap on the wrist. "And the Taliban, no longer in power," but someone better tell that to the BBC, not to mention the Army. Bush added, "10 million people have registered to vote in Afghanistan in the upcoming presidential election." Actually, the number is now 10.3 million. A very interesting figure, considering that the U.N. estimated that only 9.8 million were eligible to vote, and nearly a million women have not registered yet.

Bush went on with his accomplishments: "In Iraq, we saw a threat and we realized that after September the 11th, we must take threats seriously before they fully materialize. Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell; America and the world are safer for it." Here is Bush's first allusion to the idea that Saddam Hussein was a threat to us, or even was in on the 9/11 attack. Bush will make a stronger allusion to it later on, and Kerry will call him on it. "We continue to pursue our policy of disrupting those who proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Libya has disarmed." Which, of course, Bush has little or nothing to do with. The process started under Clinton, and is a result of Gadhafi wanting to get out from under sanctions, like the sanctions said were not working in Iraq. Bush, however, is trying to give people the impression that Gadhafi was building nukes, but when he saw Bush invade Iraq, he wet his pants and rushed to surrender. But if Gadhafi had been doing that, he would have easily seen that the American military is stretched far too thin to be any threat to him. Bush, in short, is claiming victory for something that has nothing to do with his policies.

But the next claim is what raised a lot of eyebrows: "The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice." Really? "Justice"? Khan was immediately pardoned by Musharraf--a pardon which was blessed by Bush--and is both a free man and a hero in Pakistan today.

I am spending much time and putting much detail into this list that Bush mentioned quickly in his first words in the debate to make a point: the strategy of the Bush administration is to make outrageous claims, from outright false to simply misleading, knowing that most people will believe them, and it will be too hard for their opponents to make all Americans aware of all the facts in all their detail. Bush's list of reasons as to why are more secure was almost completely a package of misleading and false impressions, but no doubt millions of Americans bought the whole thing. This is one of their greatest advantages.

Bush sidestepped a question by Jim Lehrer about his and Cheney's past claims that Kerry being elected would bring on terrorist attacks. Not only did Bush not take the opportunity to take back the allegation or deny that he'd made it, Bush in fact restated the belief using different words: "I don't believe it's going to happen. I believe I'm going to win," in other words, if he didn't win, then an attack would happen. Very, very slick--he gives the impression that he's not so mean-spirited to make such a claim, while at the exact same time he repeats that very claim.

By his first rebuttal, Kerry was already strongly back on track, taking to a tactic that he would hold to for the entire debate: first stating his own ability to do the job and do it well, and then cutting into Bush, reciting a litany of facts about how Bush has bungled the job. And here's where seeing the debate was a big influence: you could see Kerry was poised and resolute while speaking, and on the split-screen, Bush was looking almost lost, blinking far more than normal, with his famous deer-in-the-headlights expression appearing on and off. In his second rebuttal to Kerry, on what Bush's "colossal blunders" were, Bush came across as annoyed and peevish--and was off to a half-hour of being on the defensive.

He also continued to make false claims: "Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming. Why should he?" Well, the problem with that statement is that Saddam was not being asked to disarm conventional weapons, but rather weapons of mass destruction. That was the demand. Get rid of your chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And here is Bush telling everyone that Saddam did not disarm--after it has become painfully clear that he had disarmed! Maybe not intentionally, probably because of Clinton's sanctions and other actions, but there were no weapons of mass destruction. So what is Bush saying that Saddam refused to do?

Bush added that the Saddam "was systematically deceiving the inspectors." How? By hiding nonexistent WMD? Again, Bush is trying to be slick here, implying, claiming in a roundabout fashion that Saddam did have WMD when the inspectors were sent in. The fact is, Saddam was actually telling the truth when he said he didn't have them--much to everyone's surprise. Bush could get away with saying, well we thought he had them, but instead goes whole hog and implies that Iraq did indeed have WMD at that time.

A little later, Bush even confused Hussein with bin Laden: "Of course, we're after Saddam Hussein -- I mean, bin Laden."

Kerry, in his rebuttal, made a statement that struck me as being strange; about Iraq, he said, "And we've got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up." I noted this in my live coverage, and it remains a bit strange to me now. Charitably, one can presume that Kerry meant that conventional weapons are pouring into Iraq but that the effect they have is equal to mass destruction in their harm to our soldiers. But it's still strange, and I'm kind of surprised that more wasn't made of it, especially by Republicans, later on.

Bush, naturally, ignored what had been clearly stated in criticizing Kerry: "I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises. It's like a huge tax gap -- anyway, that's for another debate." Aside from sounding flustered, he also seemed deaf; Kerry had just stated that "long before President Bush and I get a tax cut -- and that's who gets it -- long before we do, I'm going to invest in homeland security, and I'm going to make sure we're not cutting COPS programs in America, and we're fully staffed in our firehouses, and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants." What part of that was not clear? Kerry would take the tax cuts away from the millionaires and billionaires to pay for it, while keeping middle-class tax cuts in place. Does anyone really have a problem with that?

Meanwhile, Bush's claims that he's spent a lot of money on security were flawed; he claimed, for example, that "We spent $3.1 billion for fire and police." However, precious little of that amount has actually reached fire and police services--the states have intercepted the money and are using it to pay for any number of other programs mandated by Washington D.C. but not paid for, i.e. "unfunded mandates."

And then Bush claimed that he was also funding Iraq security: "Let me first tell you that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job. And that's what we're doing. We got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, over 200,000 by the end of next year." Except, of course, that it's not true.

I noted this in my live coverage, and indeed Bush's claims do not check out. Out of the 90,000 police on the streets, only about 10% have training, and few in the military are trained :

The Pentagon documents show that of the nearly 90,000 people now in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.

Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," according to the documents.

Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks."

Another example of the glib falsehoods that Bush hopes will go unnoticed.

That's about all I can handle tonight. I'll try to get back to more of this later--it's just that there is so much of this to go over. Check out Media Matters for commentary on media fact-checking, and the DNC has a list of the top 20 "misleading statements" made by Bush in the debate.

Debate Note

A little later I'll have a recap of the debate, and at some point (maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow) I'll re-watch the recording of the debate and make a more detailed analysis. But for right now, I just wanted to note that there is a consensus on who won: Kerry, hands down. It's pretty much as I concluded myself (see my then-live running blog entries on the debate), that Kerry didn't win by a knockout, but he sure won on points. Most polls have Kerry winning by a good 20% of the people surveyed.

One point that I wanted to mention now, since I don't see anyone else talking about it: this was the debate that was supposed to be easiest for Bush. This was foreign policy, which Bush is supposed to be strongest on. The second debate, on October 8, will be open-topic, town-hall style, and the third on October 13 will be on domestic issues.

If Kerry can run with today's success and trump it up, he could get something started that could lead up through the next debates and up to election day. And it seems like he might be off to a good start--I noticed that most of the news web sites, right after the debates, featured Kerry ads; hopefully that's part of a post-debate ad blitz, a perfect time for Kerry to spend a big chunk of that $75 million he's allotted.

More later.

Summing Up: Kerry Comes Away with the Advantage

Okay, they're in their final statements now. Since Kerry had the first answer, Bush has the last statement. Kerry's statement had a few stumbles, but mainly hit his main points. Bush comes across as reassuring here, looking at the cameras, not the audience. "We will stay the course," more or less. He also hits his main points. He stumbles a bit as well, but I think comes across as more personable. Ah, and now he's using landscape metaphors.

So, how did the debate go?

On points, Kerry won, most definitely from the first half hour, where Kerry pounded Bush and Bush was weak and on the defensive. However, a lot of people will focus more on the ending, and Bush had recovered by that time. But one of the main goals for this debate for Kerry was getting exposure, letting the people see who he is, and he did an admirable job here. Anyone who watched this one saw a good representation of Kerry. Kerry was more poised and definitely came across as presidential. This is critical for Kerry, for undecideds, and even Democrats and Republicans, to see him as presidential material, capable of doing the job, and holding his own on a stage with Bush--and that's what he did. He managed to state his case well, and stayed on the offensive against Bush, never letting up.

Bush's goal was more to hold his own, and while he succeeded later in the debate, he fumbled it in the first half hour. Any analysis on this debate will depend on whether or not that is counted. Bush did have a warm, reassuring style, but he was weak on the facts, not to mention the mention of "the enemy attacked us," obviously implying that Hussein attacked us. Kerry did very well to call him on that immediately, and Bush will lose points on that one. Overall, Bush could have done a lot better.

Kerry did not get a knockout here, but he definitely won on points (even the pundits on CNN are pretty much in agreement on that one).

It'll be interesting to see the broader response in the media, from the public, and in the polls. But for now, I gotta run to work. More later.

Winding Down

What is the biggest threat to the US: Kerry came out very quickly and confident: nuclear proliferation. This answer is representative of Kerry tonight: confident, knows his stuff, and then as quickly as he can, hits Bush hard. Kerry: "we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation." I almost feel like Kerry is saying the world "nuclear" a lot to contrast with bush's pronunciation.

Whoa! Bush said "nuclear," not "nucular"! But Bush's response is on proliferation, with shades towards terrorism. Bush actually just brought up Khan in Pakistan, how he stopped them--but look at what happened to Khan, immediately pardoned, and now very little is different there. He also brought up Libya.

Kerry hit again on how Bush let North Korea and Iran slip, Bush hit back on multilateral talks, of course ignoring that Kerry wants both multi- and bilateral talks.

Now the question is on Russia and Putin, but this debate is mostly over, it looks like there will be no big developments from here on.

Update: Kerry hit Bush, Lehrer handed Bush a present, allowed Bush to say how much of a "calm guy" he is in a conversation setting. A few last punches to the face.

Sparring in the Late Rounds

A lot may depend on which parts of the debate people remember: if people remember the whole debate, Kerry will have won. If Bush can hold on to the even fight right now, and if people only focus on the last part of the debate, then it might be called a draw or even a Bush win, if the spinmeisters can spin it that way.

But wait--Kerry is really getting it out here on Korea! Hitting Bush hard, and a point made by Lehrer allowed Kerry to make his point more solidly before Bush could get in his 30-second interruption. For the even fight, Bush still seems less comfortable than Kerry. Bush is more down-home, Kerry is more solid and confident.

Kerry: Bush has overextended the military, stretched out tours by soldiers; Kerry will build them back up and reconstitute our ability to fight a war if necessary. Both he and Bush somewhat sidestepped the Sudan question, using it more to sell their policies.

Lehrer: does Kerry have the character to be president. Bush: "Whew! That's a loaded question." Here's where Bush gets to be noble and "admire" Kerry, but you know there will be a "but" in there. He's just laid a few--doesn't agree with Kerry's record, he went to Yale... Hits Kerry on his "mixed messages" (read: flip-flops). Bush: "I just know how this world works!" Oh really?

Kerry: acknowledges Bush on family. Bush and Kerry exchange compliments, laugh at the same point. Kerry goes on the defensive about certainty, but also hits Bush: "it's one thing to be certain, it's another to be certain and be wrong."

The debate feels like it's winding down, like it won't end with a knock-out (we'll see). They're pounding home their points, beginning to repeat themselves.

An Even Fight

Kerry lays out a good, clear plan for getting out of Iraq, while getting his hits in against Bush.

Bush: 100,000 Iraqi troops trained. Excuse me? That's wrong. Only a small fraction of that number are trained, 100,000 is the goal. And now Bush is hitting Kerry again on Kerry hitting on "our allies." Bush appears to be defending Alawi, but he is more using him as a bludgeon. Kerry might have to respond to this. Bush is much more on the offensive now, he's come back from his initial defensiveness. Damn.

Bush: declarative, "We're going to win this war in Iraq."

Question to Bush: Will you take us into a preemptive war again? Bush: I hope not, but maybe I'll have to. He tried to make the point that he was reluctant to go into Iraq. That's an interesting stretch. "We used diplomacy every chance we get." The big lie--he did nothing of the sort. And now he's trotting out Libya, as if that's a response to the Iraq war.

Kerry pointed out that "the enemy attacked us," but Iraq, Hussein did not. I'll have to check the transcript on that, that would be a big gaffe by Bush. Kerry points out how it was al Qaeda that attacked us, and Bush let Osama go; also, Bush was "factually incorrect" (them's fightin' words!) on the threat from Iraq--they weren't a threat. And meanwhile, North Korea and Iran have gone nuclear.

Kerry: the president always has had the right for a preemptive strike. Hmmm... I don't like that, and I'm not sure that I agree. I did not think that this was official policy--I'll have to look that one up too. Kerry's using the de Gaulle story, hitting Bush on leadership.

Both candidates are hitting hard, it's more or less an even fight now.

Bush Recovers

Bush is coming across a bit better now, having hit Kerry on consistency, and gotten a softball from Lehrer about the war in Iraq being worth it. Bush is totally on script now, his footing surer, telling a heartwarming story and so on. This is his chance to get back on track.

Kerry response was just as warm, just as reassuring--but he finishes by laying out his plans about Iraq and hitting Bush, and Kerry gets the next question--he could pick this up again. Ended with saying Bush has four words, "more of the same." Ah--Bush asked for a 30-second spot, he obviously knew he had to jump in here. And he's using it to smash at Kerry, calling him more or less unfit to lead. Kerry hits back with the "Pottery Barn" rule. Kerry" I'm going to get it right--I have a plan, he doesn't. Good play by Bush there, but Kerry held his ground.

Bush Is not Coming Across Well

Bush is again trying to say that the coalition is broad--but after England, he mentioned Poland. Not exactly a major power. Bush is acting exasperated, a bit upset, with an accusatory tone. I think he knows that things are not going well.

Kerry once again is making his points: the U.N. did not come in fully, no grand coalition.

Bush: What about Poland? Amazing. He's now acting upset about "denigrating the coalition." I'll be amazed if people buy that. Poland makes the coalition grand? Bush's speech now has a lot of "uh"s and "um"s and pauses. He's not coming off well. He's literally pounding the podium at times, seemingly signaling which of his points are practiced so he has to hammer them in.

Kerry is hitting back hard on the coalition: just America, Great Britain, and a few others. And Bush ignored North Korea.

On Lehrer's question, Kerry is now laying out Bush's lies: Iraq tried to get uranium from Niger; Bush would go to the UN; Bush would get a real coalition; Bush would plan carefully; we would go as a last resort--Bush "misled" the people on all those points. Kerry wrapped up with building alliances, and how he would be better on that.

Bush responds with feigned incredulity about how Kerry said Osama used Iraq to spread hatred about America, again hitting the concept that somehow the war in Iraq was defensive for the US, closing by almost directly calling Kerry a flip-flopper. At one point he said, "let me finish" when there was no interruption. Kerry hit back: I have been consistent, one view. Bush: he's consistent only in that he's inconsistent. That's a point for Bush: though devoid of structure, it sounds like a hard hit.

Kerry is really hitting Bush

Kerry is really hitting Bush on every point, and while he is busy taking notes behind the podium while Bush speaks, Bush just sits there looking around while Kerry speaks.

Bush quotes figures in his rebuttal about how much he's spent on homeland security, and many will buy it--but very little analysis should show that these are not as significant as Bush is making them look. You can talk about how much money we spend, but the real point is how much new money is coming through, and is it enough?

Bush just declared: "You better have a president who chases these terrorists down and bring them to justice," while pounding the podium. What a setup--he cut and ran from Afghanistan!

Bush is absolutely on the defensive here, Kerry is getting his shots off against him. Bush just spent a few minutes trying to convince the audience how vital Iraq is for our freedom (really?).

Kerry is coming back with support for the troops, telling a personal story. Now Kerry seems a lot more relaxed, making his points more clearly than Bush; and Bush is sounding more tense and stumbling.

OK, now Bush just came out with a scripted reply: giving the wrong message to the troops by saying "help is on the way," hitting Kerry for supporting the war.

Kerry just hit a home run: I spoke wrongly about my vote, but Bush invaded wrongly: which is worse? Bingo! Followed up with how Bush promised to plan and proceed cautiously, consult allies, and so forth, but then did not. He's really doing well here, he's hitting his stride. If he can keep this up, then he'll definitely win this debate!

Kerry is coming out swinging

Kerry is coming out swinging in his first rebuttal to Bush, making the point very, very strongly about Bush failing to follow up in Afghanistan and went to Iraq when it was not necessary.

And now Lehrer just gave Kerry a real softball right over the plate: what failures is Bush guilty of? Kerry's trouble here is that he doesn't have enough time--he started a bit weak, but he's now focusing on how Bush did not go to war as a "last resort," and made points about the cost in lives and money, and bringing the point back to Afghanistan.

Bush's response: misquoting Kerry and misrepresenting his opinion, now he's going for the flip-flop spin. Then Bush tried to explain his reasons on going into Iraq; maybe others would buy it, it's not very convincing to me. And now, on the next question, he's trying to say that (a) our forces are not stretched, and (b) we have a real world-wide coalition. Bush is now stumbling a bit on his words, and sounding less organized, but he's getting his points in there--though he's not attacking Kerry as much as I'd expected. Kerry's obviously preparing well on his rebuttal, taking notes behind his podium.

Kerry's shooting back about how Iraq was not the center, or even part of the war on terrorism. A very good, straightforward point here; he's hitting Bush hard on how badly things are going in Iraq. Bush responds again claiming that Kerry supported the war. Kerry declined to answer that, but made the point that he has the legitimacy to bring other nations to the table.

Did Kerry say "Weapons of Mass Destruction" coming into Iraq in there? Maybe I misheard...

Starting impressions

The two candidates just came up on stage--I noticed that Kerry came as close to Bush as he could, undoubtedly to demonstrate the difference in height!

On the first question: on preventing another 9/11. Kerry comes out strongly, answering strongly and confidently, with a good thank-you and nod to Floridians. Kerry's longer answer on the topic does contain a few small stumbles, but his sentences are shorter, more terse, to the point--he's really getting his points out well, and he's laying out his argument.

Bush started out very quickly with a religious reference. He sounds more relaxed, almost bored, but it gives perhaps a more confident impression. His answers are less substantial, but better-sounding. That will probably be his main style in this debate--he'll be remarkably short on substance, and will just use comforting words and an easy, slow style to win the night, while Kerry will be coming out with facts and plans. That would be a challenge for Kerry, whose style is less personally endearing.

Pre-Debate Set-up

Well, the pundits, of course, are already spinning. On CNN, in the half hour before the debate, the pundits are already putting the onus on Kerry, as if all Bush has to do is stay the course and he'll win, while Kerry will have to hit a home run in order to get anywhere. And, of course, because it's CNN, the poll numbers they're quoting are Gallup's, which are by far the most favorable to Bush.