Anonymous Sources

2004-11-16T01:16:00.000-08:00

From Michael Moore (see Nov. 1st post below):

Sunday, November 7th, 2004
The Kids Are Alright

Dear Friends,

If there was one group who really came through on Tuesday, it was the young people of America. Their turnout was historic and record-setting. And few in the media are willing to report this fact.

Unlike 2000 when Gore and Bush almost evenly split the youth vote (Gore: 48%, Bush: 46%), this year Kerry won the youth vote in a LANDSLIDE, getting a full ten points more than Bush (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%).

Young people were the ONLY age group that voted for Kerry. In every other age group (30-39, 40-49, 50-59, etc.), the majority voted for Bush.

In my state of Michigan, observers noted that it was the record youth vote that helped to put Kerry over the top in the state (AP: "Young Voters Played Big Role in Kerry's Michigan Victory")

Contrary to all predictions and to tradition, MORE young adults (18-29) voted in last week's election than in any other since 18-year-olds were given the right to vote in 1972.

It was the first time that a MAJORITY of all young adults came out to the polls: 51.6%.

Young adult turnout was UP more than 9% higher than the 2000 election ("Big Voter Turnout Seen Among Young People").

4.7 million MORE young adults voted in this election than in the last one. All these numbers are likely to go up when the millions of provisional ballots (and absentee ballots) are counted later this week (it is believed that young people were among the hardest hit in being forced to vote provisionally and students away at college make up a large bulk of the absentee ballots).

Rock the Vote and MTV's "Choose or Lose" had set the seemingly unattainable goal of getting 20 million young people out to vote. In the end, nearly 21 million youth voters cast their ballots last Tuesday -- A RECORD.

From the beginning, I believed that young adults and "slackers" would rise up in this election. As we began our slacker tour in Syracuse's football stadium on September 20, we could tell that this election would be like no other. It was no longer uncool to talk politics like it was five or ten years ago. Now, you were considered a loser if you didn't know what was going on in the world.

After speaking to the 10,000 gathered in Syracuse, we went on to hold rallies in 63 cities, mostly on campuses. Every night the events were packed, with anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people showing up. We registered thousands to vote and got tens of thousands more to sign up to volunteer with Move On, ACT, the College Dems and other groups like Vote Mob and the League of Pissed Off Voters. We reached perhaps a half-million people in person and millions more on local TV and radio in those 63 cities (all but three of them in swing states).

To be honest, this tour was a killer and not the easiest thing to do for a guy who isn't 18-29. Two (sometimes three) cities a day for over a month, crisscrossing the country, is enough to make you want to sleep for a year. But I was deeply inspired by what I saw. The level of dedication and commitment amongst everyday, average citizens was overwhelming. Each night from the stage I could see it in people's eyes that they were not going to give up -- and they, too, would not rest until Bush was removed from the White House.

In every town, this movement was being fueled and often led by young people. I don't ever want to hear another adult talk about how apathetic the youth are or how they don't have "it" in them. What you are about to see in the coming months is going to shock you. These kids aren't going away. They have a resilience that cannot be snuffed out by older people's whining and moaning about the state of America. THEIR America has yet to be formed as they see it, and this one setback is not going to stop them.

Witness the students at Boulder High School in Boulder, Colorado on Thursday, two days after the election. These kids can't even vote yet but that was not going to get in their way of expressing their outrage over what we adults had just done. The high school students took over the school by staging a sit-in and would not leave the building. They stayed there all Thursday night. They told the media that they were protesting the election results and putting Bush on notice that there was no way they were going to allow the draft to come back. It was the most uplifting moment of the week.

In the day after the election, the pundits were spewing their hot air about how the youth vote didn't matter this year. I wonder, even though they have the same facts available to them as I do -- the ones I've cited above -- do they just chose to ignore them because it doesn't fit into their tired old routine they call "conventional wisdom." I guess it is easier to simply repeat the same broken down clichés than it is to find out what the truth really is.

And it's even more important to kill what smells like teen spirit to them. God forbid if young people ever realized their true power and used it. Maybe what young adults need to continue to do is keep creating their own new media and news sources on the Internet and through other new technologies. Just bypass the old farts on Fox and CNN and all the rest. One thing's for sure -- by never challenging this president on his lies that sent our young off to war, they have proven which side they are on and it isn't on the side of the young or the future.

Congratulations, 18 to 29-year-olds -- you rocked.

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
MMFlint@aol.com (if full, try mike@michaelmoore.com)

2004-11-01T01:40:00.000-08:00

October 31, 2004
Young Mobile Voters Pick Kerry Over Bush, 55% to 40%, Rock the Vote/Zogby Poll Reveals: National Text-Message Poll Breaks New Ground

Polling firm Zogby International and partner Rock the Vote found Massachusetts Senator John Kerry leading President Bush 55% to 40% among 18-29 year-old likely voters in their first joint Rock the Vote Mobile political poll, conducted exclusively on mobile phones October 27 through 30, 2004. Independent Ralph Nader received 1.6%, while 4% remain undecided in the survey of 6,039 likely voters. . . . The poll has margin of error of +/-1.2 percentage points.

The poll also found that only 2.3% of 18-29 year-old respondents said they did not plan to vote, and another .5% who were not sure if they would. The results of the survey are weighted for region, gender, and political party.

2004-10-27T19:31:00.000-07:00

BBC News Reports Potential Republican Interference with Black Voters in Florida (what a surprise)

New Florida Vote Scandal Feared

By Greg Palast
Reporting for BBC Newsnight
2004/10/26 17:06:30 GMT

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.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot.

They may then only vote "provisionally" after signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter "in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections."

"Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day; and discourage voters from voting."

Sancho calls it "intimidation." And it may be illegal.

In Washington, well-known civil rights attorney, Ralph Neas, noted 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.

The list of Jacksonville voters covers an area with a majority of black residents.

When asked by Newsnight for an explanation of the list, Republican spokespersons claim the list merely records returned mail from either fundraising solicitations or returned letters sent to newly registered voters to verify their addresses for purposes of mailing campaign literature.

Republican state campaign spokeswoman Mindy Tucker Fletcher stated the list was not put together "in order to create" a challenge list, but refused to say it would not be used in that manner.

Rather, she did acknowledge that the party's poll workers will be instructed to challenge voters, "Where it's stated in the law."

There was no explanation as to why such clerical matters would be sent to top officials of the Bush campaign in Florida and Washington.

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.

On the scene, Democratic Congresswoman Corinne Brown said the surveillance operation was part of a campaign of intimidation tactics used by the Republican Party to intimidate and scare off African American voters, almost all of whom are registered Democrats.

2004-10-27T01:09:00.000-07:00

President BU**SH** will lose the popular vote:

U.S. Confidence Takes Another Hit

Consumer index falls for third consecutive month amid job worries

The Associated Press
Updated: 11:53 a.m. ET Oct. 26, 2004

NEW YORK - Continuing job worries drove consumer confidence lower in October for the third consecutive month, a New York-based private research group said Tuesday. The decline was steeper than expected.

The Consumer Confidence Index dropped 3.9 points to 92.8, down from a revised 96.7 in September, according to The Conference Board. Analysts had expected a reading of 94.

“Subdued expectations, as opposed to eroding present-day conditions, were the major cause behind October’s decline in consumer confidence,” said Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center. “And, while consumers’ assessment of the labor market this month showed a moderate improvement, the gain was not sufficient to ease concerns about job growth in the months ahead.”

Economists closely track consumer confidence because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of all U.S. economic activity.

The Expectations Index, one component of the Index that measures consumers’ outlook over the next six months, declined to 92.0 from 97.7. Meanwhile, The Present Situation index dipped to 94.2 from 95.3.

Consumers’ assessment of overall current conditions was mixed. Those saying business conditions are “good” declined to 21.7 percent from 23.4 percent. Those saying conditions are “bad” edged up to 21.4 percent from 20.4 percent. On the employment front, consumers saying jobs are “plentiful” increased to 17.4 percent from 16.6 percent, while those claiming jobs are “hard to get” eased to 27.8 percent from 28.0 percent in September.

Consumers’ outlook for the next six months turned more cautious. Those anticipating conditions to worsen increased to 10.3 percent from 9.4 percent. Consumers expecting business conditions to improve decreased to 20.6 percent from 21.6 percent.

The employment outlook was also more subdued. Consumers expecting fewer jobs to become available in the coming months rose to 18.4 percent from 16.2 percent, while those anticipating more jobs to become available slipped to 16.5 percent from 17.8 percent. The proportion of consumers expecting their incomes to improve in the months ahead dipped to 18.4 percent from 20.0 percent last month.

AND:

Majority Says Nation Is Headed in Wrong Direction
By Christopher Muste
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 25, 2004; 5:00 PM

A majority of likely voters says the country is headed in the wrong direction . . . according to a Washington Post tracking poll.

Fifty-five percent of the likely voters interviewed Oct. 21-24 said they believe the country was "pretty seriously off on the wrong track," while 41 percent said it was "generally going in the right direction." Among the larger pool of self-described registered voters, and among all adults, the proportions were the same.

2004-10-22T02:07:00.000-07:00

Politics in the 'New Normal' America
By Joan Didion

1.
During the spring and summer of 2004 some Americans, most but not all of them nominal Democrats, spoke of the November 2 presidential election as the most important, or "crucial," of their lifetimes. They told not only acquaintances but reporters and political opinion researchers that they had never been more "concerned," more "uneasy," more "discouraged," even more "frightened" about the future of the United States. They expressed apprehension that the fragile threads that bound the republic had reached a breaking point; that the nation's very constitution had been diverted for political advantage; that the mechanisms its citizens had created over two centuries to protect themselves from one another and from others had been in the first instance systematically dismantled and in the second sacrificed to an enthusiasm for bellicose fantasy. They downloaded news reports that seemed to make these points. They e-mailed newsletters and Web logs and speeches and Doonesbury strips to multiple recipients.

These Americans had passed the point of denying themselves broad strokes. They kept one another posted on loosened regulations benefiting previously obscure areas of the economy, for example snowmobile manufacture. They knew how many ringneck pheasants Vice President Cheney and his party had brought down during a morning's stocked shoot at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, Pennsylvania: 417, of the 500 released that morning. They collected the vitae of Bush family associates named on the Web site of New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq." They made Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 the most commercially successful documentary ever distributed in the United States, earning in its domestic theatrical release $117.5 million. (By comparison, Moore's 2002 Academy Award–winning Bowling for Columbine had earned less than $22 million.) They were said to be "energized," "worked up," motivated in a way they had not been even by Bush v. Gore, which had occurred at a time, nine months before the mandate offered by September 11, when it had still been possible to imagine the clouded outcome of the 2000 election as its saving feature, an assured deterrent to any who would exercise undue reach.

The July week in Boston of the Democratic National Convention, then, was for these citizens a critical moment, a chance to press their concerns upon the electorate, which had seemed during the month preceding the convention to be at least incrementally moving in their direction. By late June a Washington Post–ABC News poll had shown the President's approval rating on the management of "the war against terrorism," previously considered his assured ace in the hole, down thirteen points since April. In the same poll, the percentage of those who believed the war with Iraq "worth fighting" had dropped to 47 percent. By the week before the convention, the Los Angeles Times was reporting that its own polling showed that 54 percent of those questioned "say the nation is moving in the wrong direction," and that "nearly three-fifths say the country should not 'continue in the direction he [the President] set out' and 'needs to move in a new direction.'"

The Democratic nominee for president was nonetheless not a candidate with whom every Democrat who came to Boston could be entirely comfortable. Many of those impatient with what they saw as a self-defeating timidity in the way the party was presenting itself took refuge across the river in Cambridge, at "alternative" events improvised as the week went on by Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future. "Kerry, Kerry, quite contrary," a group of young women calling themselves "Radical Cheerleaders" chanted outside Faneuil Hall. "So far right it's kinda scary." What troubled most was not exactly reducible to "right" or "left." There was the question of Senator Kerry's vote authorizing the President to use force in Iraq, and the unknowable ratio of conviction to convenience that prompted it. There was his apparent inability to say that, "knowing what we know now," he would not cast that vote again.

In fact he said, in an astonishing moment of political miscalculation, since if there was any consensus forming in the country it was to the point of Iraq having been a bad idea, that he would. There was his fairly blank-check endorsement, again raising the convenience question, of whatever Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon chose to do with the occupied territories. There was a predilection for taking cover in largely hypothetical distinctions (he had voted not "for" the war but for giving the President the authority to go to war) that struck many as uncomfortably close to what the Bush campaign had been saying about him all through the spring. Even to the basic question of his "electability," or performance as a campaigner, which seemed to many in Boston the only reason he was being nominated, there had been a certain uneasiness from the outset, notably about the temperamental defensiveness that left him uniquely vulnerable to the kind of schoolyard bullying that was his opponent's default tactic.

Yet his acceptance speech was a forthright demonstration of his intention to run for the presidency on his own terms, by no means the unconnected series of music cues that the DNC commercials later making use of it would tend to suggest. He had already put forth a number of detailed domestic proposals, the most expensive of which was a $650 billion health care plan that would offer protection to 27 million uncovered citizens and relieve businesses from the risk of increased premiums by having the government assume the cost of catastrophic care. He had said that he would pay for this by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200,000 a year. He had said that Americans would be free to buy prescription drugs from outside the United States, not an insignificant commitment in light of the $2.5 million the pharmaceutical industry was spending as a sponsor of the Democratic convention, but not an entirely significant one either: for the pharmaceutical industry and the six hundred lobbyists it maintains, $2.5 million was fractional, only a skim of the $29 million it had spent in the 2002 election cycle and the $11.5 million it had spent to that point in 2004. In the 2004 cycle, more than twice the amount of pharmaceutical money paid directly to the Kerry campaign had gone to the Bush campaign.

Still, it was a stand not without substance, and it was not the only such stand Senator Kerry had taken: he had established so firmly that his campaign would not be hostage to the reliable wedge issues ("What if we had a president who believed in science?" he had asked both in the Fleet Center and at his morning-after appearance with John Edwards) that he could launch a challenge to the Bush administration and its base voters on the Christian right over the question of stem cell research. He had made clear that since neither he nor most other people in public life could claim any high ground on the question of whether America should have embarked on its Iraq venture ("People of good will disagree" had been the conciliatory formulation in the Democratic platform), our only practical recourse now was to let the argument go, regard past differences as moot, and turn to recognizing and repairing our alliances with the rest of the world.

He had been, in other words, as realistic and as specific as it was reasonable in the pressure of a campaign to expect a candidate to be. Yet on the evening he spoke in the Fleet Center and after, among those whose profession it was to talk about politics, the word had been that there was "no message," "no substance," "at the end of the day I don't know what they stand for." On MSNBC that evening, only Willie Brown had defended Kerry. "He could have hit a home run," the others agreed, but hadn't. "Missed Opportunity" was the headline on the lead editorial in The Washington Post the next morning. "We don't know where they stand on free trade, or gay marriage," Craig Crawford of Congressional Quarterly and CBS News complained on Imus. (Actually we did. According to their platform and Web site, they were for free trade with nations that recognized US labor and environmental regulation, i.e., "free and fair trade," or "level playing field"; they were for equal legal rights for all domestic partners; they were against amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage.) "No substance at all," David Broder of The Washington Post said on PBS that evening. "He wants to bring everyone together, so there's nothing there." "What an incoherent disaster," David Brooks wrote in The New York Times a day or so later. "When you actually read for content, you see that the speech skirts almost every tough issue and comes out on both sides of every major concern."

We heard that weekend about the Democratic candidate's "aloofness," about whether the electorate would be willing to overlook his "personality deficits," about whether he had managed to "fill in the gap," make "the human connection," prompt an affirmative answer to the question long accepted as the most predictive in American electoral politics, the one about whether "you could imagine yourself sitting around the kitchen table with him sharing a beer." We heard about the self-laid traps that awaited him and his running mate, mistakes already irreversible in a game in which the ideal candidate is seen to be one who has been prevented by unassailable duty from taking a stand on any issue.

It would be hard, Cokie Roberts said to this point onscreen, for John Kerry and John Edwards to run on their records in "some parts of the country"; she was referring not to their votes as senators to authorize the use of force in Iraq but to the votes they had cast in 1999 against banning the procedure referred to on the right as "partial-birth abortion" (in 2003, when the question came up again, neither had voted), an issue she seemed to count so central to the nation at large that in a span of seconds she amended "some parts of the country" to "most parts of the country." "It is almost impossible to go through a 20-year record in the Senate and not be able to find things that might embarrass a candidate," the presidential historian Michael Beschloss told Jodi Wilgoren of The New York Times, who had raised the question of whether congressional experience could not backfire, "turning otherwise successful politicians into bumbling candidates forced to defend lengthy legislative records the average governor— or, better yet, general—can avoid."

The Democratic candidate, then, was unelectable because he "skirts almost every tough issue," or the Democratic candidate was unelectable because during twenty years in the Senate he had amassed a record (votes against some weapons systems, for example, and for 1997 deficit reduction legislation that resulted in the recent rise in Medicare premiums) the average general could have avoided. Or, an alternate scenario, the Democratic candidate could be electable, but only if he narrowed his appeal to the impulses and whims of the "swing voter," for the last several election cycles the phantom of the process, someone presumed to have no interest in politics who is nonetheless mysteriously available to talk to Paula Zahn for a CNN special or free up an evening to sit in on a focus group. Swing voters, we had been told at the time Senator Kerry named John Edwards as his running mate, would respond well to the vice-presidential candidate's "sunniness," his "optimism," his "small town roots." Swing voters, we had been instructed, responded negatively to "pessimism." "I'm optimistic about America because I believe in the people of America," the President was heard to say in an early round of television advertisements, and then, a startlingly unabashed suggestion from a president in whose term more jobs had evaporated than in that of any other president since Herbert Hoover: "One thing's sure, pessimism never created a job."

"Hope beats anger," Al From and Bruce Reed had advised in a March memo to John Kerry published in the Democratic Leadership Council's Blueprint Magazine. "Hope will beat fear every time," Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana dutifully said during her turn on the Fleet Center platform. ("Hope," in these approved constructions, tended to be not "hope for" but just "hope," strategically unattached to possibly entangling specifics about what the objects of the hope might be.) This nonspeak continued, a product of the "discipline" imposed on convention speakers by the DNC and the Kerry campaign: the Democratic candidates, it was said repeatedly on the Fleet Center platform, would bring hope and optimism back to America, build a stronger and more secure America, stand up for the values that Americans cared about. Hope and values, it was said, were what Americans believed in. Americans believed in the values of good-paying jobs, in the values of affordable health care, in protecting our security and our values. When Elizabeth Edwards was campaigning for the Democratic ticket in Tennessee, according to The New York Times, she cautioned supporters who had spoken harshly about the President not to be "too negative," not to use the word "hypocritical." "It's not useful," Mrs. Edwards said, "because that kind of language for swing voters—they are tired of partisanship." These voters, she advised, "don't want to hear how lousy the other guy is. Talk about how your values inform what you are doing."

This belief in the existence of Americans who did not "want to hear how lousy the other guy is" but did want to hear a cuckoo clock repetition of the word "values" was wisdom derived from focus groups, which made it tricky, as the lethal efficiency of the Bush campaign in basing its entire effort on "how lousy the other guy is" would demonstrate. Swing voters, Elizabeth Edwards had learned from this wisdom, "don't want to hear how lousy the other guy is," yet on the evening at the Republican convention when Senator Zell Miller of Georgia went negative on John Kerry ("more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure...bowl of mush.... This politician wants to be leader of the free world—free for how long?") the response among swing voters on whom MSNBC reported was strongly positive. "He was like the person next door," one said. "Send a marine," another said. ("And nothing makes this marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators," Senator Miller had said.) "Focus groups will tell you they hate negative ads and love positive ads," the Democratic strategist Steve McMahon told Jim Rutenberg and Kate Zernike of The New York Times. "But call them back four days later and the only thing they can remember are the negative ones."

Focus groups have long been routine in virtually every business that involves marketing, yet most people who use them recognize their inherent flaw, which is that the average person who turns out for one is at the moment of appearing or not appearing self-selected, and so either a little more or a little less interested (there to press an agenda, say, or there for the cold cuts) than he or she is supposed to be. The motion picture industry, for example, has used focus groups extensively since the early 1980s, when a former Gallup researcher named Joe Farrell introduced the technique first to the marketing and eventually to the conceptual stages of pictures. (Before Farrell and his National Research Group arrived on the scene, motion picture "research" had pretty much consisted of passing out cards at previews and asking for a rating of "Excellent," "Good," or "Fair.") I recall a producer telling me how he came to have doubts about focus research: after showing an unreleased picture to a supposedly virgin audience at a mall in Thousand Oaks, he heard from one volunteer for the focus group that he "preferred the ending you tested in Torrance."

On the Thursday night when John Kerry was delivering his acceptance speech in the Fleet Center in Boston, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, at the request of MSNBC, had run such a group in a Cincinnati hotel. (Luntz is the pollster who advised California Republicans on how to win the recall of Governor Gray Davis. "While it is important to trash the governor," he wrote in an internal memo reported in The San Francisco Chronicle, "it should be done in the context of regret, sadness, and balance.") Luntz, it was widely reported, was "stunned" by his findings in Cincinnati. "It was one of the strongest positive reactions I've ever seen in a focus group," Luntz said. "Kerry didn't lose anybody. More importantly, he was able to convince [former Bush supporters in the group] that he is presidential, that he would be tough yet open-minded. They now see him as a credible commander-in-chief."

The details of this session, during the days that followed the Democratic convention, were analyzed repeatedly, sifted and rubbed for meaning. Those present had ranged in age from nineteen to sixty-three. More than half had been men. A majority had voted for Bush in 2000, but only 40 percent were leaning toward voting for him in November. Disapproving reference to outsourcing had elicited strong positive responses. Outright criticism of the Bush administration's conduct of either its "war against terror" or its actual war in Iraq had elicited negative responses: "Cheap shot," "Pollyanna-ish," "a vast oversimplification of what obviously is a very complicated problem," "To look back and point fingers, any reasonable person would have done what Bush did." Overall, however, the winner that July evening in Cincinnati was seen to be Kerry: "The biggest question mark for many of these swing voters was whether Kerry had the fortitude to fight terrorists," The Cincinnati Enquirer reported. "After his speech Thursday, most decided he did. While a few still disparaged his war record, almost all of these Republican-leaning voters said it's fair to consider Kerry a 'war hero.'"

That this focus group had consisted of only twenty people seemed in no way—neither for Luntz nor for any of the weekend commentators who mentioned it—to lessen its perceived significance; the reduction of the American electorate to twenty people who lived in or near Cincinnati was in fact the elegance of the mechanism, the demonstration that the system was legible, the perfected codex of the entire political process. "This room," Luntz had declared after asking only three questions at a similar group the evening before, "is George Bush's greatest nightmare." Again, the wisdom was tricky: thirty-four days later, on the second morning of the Republican National Convention in New York, The Washington Post reported that its own polling showed that during those thirty-four days, five weeks during which the words "swift boat" had been allowed to dominate the news cycles, Senator Kerry had lost, on issues having to do with "leadership in the war on terror," fifteen points to President Bush. "That's what it means to play offense with terrorism and not just defense," as Rudy Giuliani said to another point on the first evening of the Republican convention in Madison Square Garden.

2.
"On one level nothing happens, but it is nothing at the very center of the world you are part of," the Newsweek correspondent Howard Fineman said to The New York Times by way of explaining the apparently intractable enthusiasm of American reporters for covering political conventions. "You are immersed to the eyeballs in the concentrated form of the culture you cover." A perception of nothing at the very center of the world you live in might suggest that a change is in order, yet no change was in sight: we had reached a point in our political life at which the selected among the 15,000 reporters who attended each of this summer's conventions could dominate the national discourse by talking passionately to one another on air about, say, "strong women" ("There's no reason to attack Heinz Kerry for it, in fact I admire strong women." "I agree"), or about "women who could take very untraditional roles and yet transmit traditional values" (the subject here was Laura Bush, whose way of transmitting "traditional values" in the "untraditional role" of prime-time speaker was to address the questions "that I believe many people would ask me if we sat down for a cup of coffee or ran into each other at the store"), or about "missed opportunities," for example "putting Jimmy Carter out there to talk about foreign policy missteps" during a Democratic convention at which, Joe Scarborough decreed on MSNBC, "he should have talked about values."

We took for granted that we would learn nothing from these discussions that reflected the actual issues facing the country, nothing suggesting that in the world off camera "foreign policy missteps" might be understood as inextricable from "values." We recognized that by tuning in we entered a world where actual information would vanish: a single Firing Line or Hardball was capable of wiping the average human hard drive. No one who had ever fallen asleep watching C-SPAN and woken to find, say, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media demanding to know why Michael Moore went after Halliburton ("but never tells you that the main competitor to Halliburton is Schlumberger—a French firm—do we really want a French firm? Why are we never told about that?") could be unfamiliar with the obliterative effect of watching people shout at one another on a small lighted screen.

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media would give way on the small lighted screen to Lisa De Pasquale of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. Lori Waters of the Eagle Forum would be promised. Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham would be in the green room. Dee Dee Myers would offer "the other side." We knew that. We also knew that the election for its explicators would once again come down to "character," the "human connection," or what Laura Bush would tell you about her husband if you ran into her at the store. We were no longer even surprised that the ability of these explicators to read character seemed to have atrophied beyond conceivable repair: consider the way in which the raw fragility of Teresa Heinz Kerry was instantly metamorphosed into "strong woman," or her husband's pained shyness into "aloofness," or the practiced courtroom affability of the plaintiff's attorney who was his running mate into "sunniness."

Or, most persistently, the calculated swagger of the President himself into "resolve." I recall, shortly after September 11, at a time when the President was talking about "those folks," "smoking them out," "getting them running," "dead or alive," reading one morning in both The Washington Post and The New York Times about how his words were his own, the product of what the Post called his "unvarnished instincts." "Friends and staffers," the Post reported, lending a hand in what was already an ongoing effort, the creation of the President as commander-in-chief and intuitive manager of his war on terror, "promise that it is genuine Bush." The Post headline on this story was "An Unvarnished President on Display." The Times went with "A Nation Challenged: The President; In This Crisis, Bush Is Writing His Own Script." Yet every morning, according to the same stories, the President met with senior advisers, including Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, and Andrew H. Card Jr., for a ten-minute "communication" session, the purpose of which was, in the Times's words, "to strategize about the words, emotional cues, and information Mr. Bush should be conveying."

There were two possibilities here: either the President was receiving his words, emotional cues, and information from his "unvarnished instincts," or he was "strategizing" them with Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, and Andrew H. Card Jr. We no longer expected such contradictions to be explored, or even much mentioned. We accepted the fact that not only events but the language used to describe them had been reinvented, inflated, or otherwise devalued, stripped of meaning that did not serve a political purpose. The 2001 tax cut, we learned from former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, was described by its political beneficiaries in the White House as "the investment package." The words "invasion" and "occupation," previously neutral terms in the description of military actions, had each been replaced by the more educational "liberation," to a point at which the administration's most attentive and least wary student, Condoleezza Rice, could speak without irony to the Financial Times about "the devotion of the US in the liberation of Germany from Hitler."

September 11, we were told repeatedly, had created a "new normal," an altered condition in which we were supposed to be able to see, as The Christian Science Monitor explained a month after the events, "what is—and what is no longer—important." "Government," for example, was "important again," and "all that chatter about lockboxes and such now seems like so much partisan noise." The "new normal" required that we adopt a "new paradigm," which in turn required, according to an internal White House memo signed by President Bush, "new thinking in the law of war," in other words a reconsideration of the Geneva Convention's prohibition against torture. "Torture" itself had become "extreme interrogation," which under the "new paradigm" could be justified when the information obtained by interrogation failed to tally with the information required by policy. "We're learning that Tariq Aziz still doesn't know how to tell the truth," the President told reporters in May 2003 about the interrogation sessions that were yielding, for reasons even then inconveniently clear, so little information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "He didn't know how to tell the truth when he was in office. He doesn't know how to tell the truth when he's been—as a captive."

As this suggests, the word "truth" itself had by then been redefined, the empirical method abandoned: "the truth" was now whatever we needed it to be, the confirmation of those propositions or policies in which we "believed in our hearts," or had "faith." "Belief" and "faith" had in turn become words used to drop a scrim, white out the possibility of decoding—let alone debating—what was being said. It was now possible to "believe" in one proposition or another on the basis of no evidence that it was so. The President had famously pioneered this tactic, from which derived his "resolve": he "believed" in the weapons of mass destruction, for example, as if the existence of weapons was a doctrinal point on the order of transubstantiation, and in the same spirit he also believed, he told reporters in July 2003, that "the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence and the speeches I have given are backed by good intelligence." The attraction of such assertions of conviction was the high road they offered for bypassing conventional reality testing, which could be dismissed as lack of resolve. "I do not believe we should change our course because I believe in it," Tony Blair was saying by September 2003. "I carry on doing the job because I believe in what I'm doing."

Similar use was found for the word "faith," originally introduced as a way to placate Republican base voters while spending, since few elected officials are anxious to go on the line against faith, the minimum amount of political capital. The President could have "faith" in the Iraqi people, which in turn was how he could "believe" that "a free Iraq can be an example of reform and progress to all the Middle East," which could even be (why not?) the reason we were there. Similarly, as he considered "problems like poverty and addiction, abandonment and abuse, illiteracy and homelessness," the President could again have "faith," in this case "faith that faith will work in solving the problems." As for faith's problem-solving role, or "compassionate conservatism," the specific promise to the Christian right of the 2000 campaign, the administration now spoke not only of "faith-based" schools and "faith-based" charities and "faith-based" prisoner rehabilitation but also of "faith-based" national parks, which translated into authorizing the sale in the National Park Service's bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View, the "different view" being that the canyon was created not by the continual movement of the Colorado River since the Tertiary Period but in the six days described in Genesis.

Peculiarities (faith-based national parks, say) that a few years before might have seemed scarcely possible now seemed scarcely worth remark. The more high-decibel political comment had become, the more blunted it had become, the more confined to arguments about "personality." "What a difference these few months of extremism have made," Jimmy Carter said in the Fleet Center on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention; on the cable shows that evening any potential discussion of what a former president of the United States might have meant by "extremism" got beaten back by the more pressing need to discuss his "cranky" refusal to allow his speech to be "scrubbed" of negativity by the Kerry campaign. We had seen the criticism of administration policy on Iraq doggedly offered by Senator Robert C. Byrd met with personal vilification, what Senator Byrd himself described in Losing America as "an ugly tone— 'old man,' 'senile,' 'traitor,' 'KKK.'" We had seen, after the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks made a comment onstage in London that could only with imaginative interpretation pass for "political" ("Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas"), widespread excoriation, radio bans against including the Dixie Chicks on playlists, and organized bonfires (at the time widely described as illustrations of market choice) in which their CDs were burned.

Rapid response, then, all barrels firing, would seem to have become the national political style, the manifestation of what was frequently called "polarization," yet it was not. The notion of "polarization" itself had come to seem another manipulation, one more scrim: the 2001 USA Patriot Act, despite voiced reservations that crossed conventional ideological lines, had been passed by the House with a vote of 357 to 66 and in the Senate with a vote of 98 to 1, the "one" in the latter case being Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin. We had more recently seen, when a former longtime member of the House of Representatives, Lee Hamilton, suggested at a hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission could be put in effect by "executive order," not only no polarization but virtually no response, no discussion of why someone who had long resisted the expansion of executive power now seemed willing to suggest that a major restructuring of the government proceed on the basis of the President's signature alone. "And usually, given my background, you'd expect me to say that it's better to have a statute in back of it," he had added. Was he suggesting a way to shortcut the process on only minor points? Or, since he seemed to be talking about major changes, was he simply trying to guide the Senate to the urgency of the matter?

Such questions did not enter the discourse. There was only silence, general acquiescence, as if any lingering public memory of separation of powers had been obliterated in the unendable crisis the executive branch had appropriated for itself. "The battle in Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on," the President had said on the late afternoon he landed in the flight suit on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln ("clearly reliving his days as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard," according to The New York Times), at once declaring combat operations complete on one front and laying a groundwork for whatever further fronts might be deemed expedient.

There had been many curious occurrences that might have earned our attention. There had been the reemergence of Elliott Abrams from the black hole of Iran-contra, this time around as the White House director of Middle Eastern affairs. "Whatever controversy there was in the past is in the past," was how a senior administration official characterized, for The New York Times, the appointee's 1987 guilty plea on a charge of withholding information from Congress and subsequent pardon by the President's father. There had been the reemergence from the same black hole of Otto Juan Reich, who had once figured in questions about the Reagan administration's covert campaign against the government of Nicaragua and was in 2001 given, after the Senate refused to confirm his appointment as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, a "recess appointment" by the President. In 2002, when the recess appointment ran out, he was named the state department's "special envoy" to the Western Hemisphere, a post not requiring confirmation.

There had been, albeit briefly, the reemergence of Reagan national security adviser John M. Poindexter, whose 1990 conviction on five Iran-contra-related felony counts was later overturned and who returned to the public from the private sector in 2002 as director of the Defense Department's "Information Awareness Office," a division of its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. In his twenty months at the Information Awareness Office, Admiral Poindexter's projects included an on-line futures market for betting on international developments and the prototype of an all-inclusive database for tracking pretty much anyone in the world. This prototype, the eventual point of which was to combine all government with all commercial data, involved, according to the DARPA Web site, the development of such suggested technologies as "story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance" and "biologically inspired algorithms for agent control."

There had even been the reemergence of the Iran-contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, who was reported to have had "several" meetings with two members of Douglas Feith's Pentagon staff. Newsday had originally placed these meetings in Paris; The New York Times later placed them in Rome. One of the two men present from the Pentagon, according to the Times, was Lawrence Franklin, who was this summer reported to be under investigation by the FBI in a matter that allegedly involved providing classified documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and ultimately to Israel. The other Pentagon representative at the Ghorbanifar meetings, according to Newsday, was Harold Rhode, who had "acted as a liaison between Feith's office, which drafted much of the administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exile disdained by the CIA and State Department but groomed for leadership by the Pentagon." Here the story, as reported by Newsday, took still another turn into time travel:

Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, a neo-conservative who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid-1980s when he introduced Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a National Security Council aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair. A former CIA officer who himself was involved in some aspects of the Iran-Contra scandal said current intelligence officers told him it was Ledeen who reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Feith's staff. Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an ardent advocate for regime change in Iran, would neither confirm nor deny [note: according to The New York Times, he later confirmed] that he arranged for the Ghorbanifar meetings.

What were we doing here? What kind of profound amnesia had overtaken us? How had it taken hold, come to prevent the laying down of not only political but cultural long-term memory? Could we no longer hold a thought long enough to connect it to the events we were seeing and hearing and reading about? Did we not find it remarkable that the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to concentrate our intelligence functions in the White House would have been met with general approval? That former members of Congress would urge action by executive order to enact a plan that would limit the congressional role to "oversight"? That the only reservations expressed would be those reflecting issues of agency turf?

Did we not remember the Nixon White House and the point to which its lust for collecting intelligence had taken it? The helicopter on the lawn, the weeping daughter, the felony indictments? Did we not remember what "congressional oversight" had recently meant? Did we have no memory that the Reagan administration had been operating under congressional oversight even as it gave us Iran-contra? Had we lost even the names of the players? Did "Manucher Ghorbanifar" no longer resonate? Had we lost all memory of Ronald Reagan except in the role assigned him by his creators and certified by the coverage in the week of his death, that of "sunny optimist"? Did we not remember that it was his administration, through its use of Islamic fundamentalists to wage our war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, that had underwritten the dream of unending jihad? Was no trace left of what we had learned about actions and their consequences?

3.
In March of 2003, before the war in Iraq had begun, Robert M. Berdahl, at that time chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, wrote, in The San Francisco Chronicle, an Op-Ed piece critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. He later spoke to the Berkeley alumni magazine, California Monthly, about his reasons for writing the Op-Ed piece, which he had recognized might antagonize some supporters of the university. Given his position, he said, he believed it correct to speak out only on issues critical to the university's future. He believed the Bush foreign policy to be such an issue. He believed, he said, that we were experiencing a fundamental change not just in foreign policy but in "the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this country." He was troubled that the doctrine of preemption had been adopted with so little congressional discussion. He was troubled that sweeping war powers had been granted with so little dissent. He was troubled by the way in which the Patriot Act allowed the government to subpoena university library records, medical records, and student records generally while binding the university to secrecy. He was troubled, finally, by the tenor of the discourse, which he saw as forcing universities into a dichotomized way of thinking, one in which "the critical faculty of understanding and recognizing the validity of conflicting points of view" could diminish to the vanishing point.

These were not uncommon concerns, yet they were concerns, during that period, discussed only rarely in the daily and weekly forums from which most Americans derived their understanding of what the government of the United States was doing and why it was doing it. Such concerns, when they were discussed, tended to be dismissed as dated, the luxuries of less threatening times; confessions no longer, in the "new normal," relevant. Attention was drawn instead to what seemed increasingly to be strategic diversions, sophistic arguments about the possibility of proving the existence or nonexistence of weapons of mass destruction, say, or conveniently timed "Homeland Security" alerts that flared and vanished, or the encouragement of nativist impulses. (Our borders were porous, the world beyond them "hated our way of life," the United Nations was in the words of Condoleezza Rice "playing into the hands" of Saddam Hussein, Senator Kerry "looked French.")

On the question of what use the administration might be making of its alerts and of its "war on terror" in general, there was most notably a fastidious reticence, a disinclination to speak ill encouraged by both the political fearfulness of the President's opponents and the readiness of his supporters to suggest that only traitors disagreed with him. "The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war," Andrew Sullivan had written in the London Sunday Times shortly after September 11, sounding the note that would see the current president through his first term and provide the momentum for his second campaign. "The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column."

This association of the administration with what had become known as "the heartland," alienated from and united against a tiny overentitled minority "in its enclaves on the coasts," a notion made graphic by the red-blue maps illustrating the 2000 election, was on its face misleading; the popular vote was basically even, and just one of those "enclaves on the coasts," California, represented that year not only 12 percent of the US population but the world's fifth-largest economy. Again, however, the projection of a "decadent" coastal minority was useful, in the same way the perceived intransigence of the United Nations and France was useful: the introduced specter of movie stars and investment bankers making common cause in attractive West Los Angeles and eastern Long Island venues had come to constitute, as the issue of school prayer and the words "abortion on demand" constituted, a straight-to-the-bloodstream intravenous infusion of the kind of class resentment that powered the Republican vote.

4.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise.... Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, although strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At the moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.... Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But this was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
—1984, by George Orwell, Part One, Chapter 3
Such was the state of mind in which many of us discovered ourselves at one point or another during the recent past: our memories were not satisfactorily under control. We still possessed "pieces of furtive knowledge" that were hard to reconcile with what we read and heard in the news. We saved entire newspapers, hoping that further study might yield their logic, but none emerged. Why, for example, on April 25, 2003, a day on which it was reported that the President had suggested for the first time that we might not "find" Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction ("but we know he had them"), did we seem officially unconcerned about the report in the same day's papers that North Korea claimed to possess exactly the weapons we were failing to find in Iraq? The explanation, according to "administration sources" quoted in that morning's Los Angeles Times, was that any reports of the North Korean claim were "leaks," which had come "from administration insiders opposed to Bush's efforts to negotiate a settlement with North Korea." Did the assertion that the information had been leaked materially affect the credibility of the information? Were we at war in Iraq but not in North Korea because a decision had been made that we could afford Iraq? Had we not recently supported Saddam Hussein as we were now trying to support Pyongyang? At what point would Iraq again become Eastasia, and North Korea Eurasia? Would we notice?

On September 6, 2003, The Washington Post published on its first page a story reporting that 69 percent of Americans, in a consensus broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans, and independents, at that time believed it "at least likely" that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Bush's defenders say the administration's rhetoric was not responsible for the public perception of Hussein's involvement," Post reporters Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane wrote, and quoted Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd: "The intellectual argument is there is a war in Iraq and a war on terrorism and you have to separate them, but the public doesn't do that. They see Middle Eastern terrorism, bad people in the Middle East, all as one big problem."

The source of any misunderstanding, then, was "the public," not the President (who said as recently as June 17 that "the reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda is that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda"), not Richard N. Perle (who had called the evidence for the putative Iraqi involvement "overwhelming"), not even, it seemed, Paul D. Wolfowitz. "I'm not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it," Wolfowitz had said a month before on The Laura Ingraham Show. Yet seven months before that, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he had foregone the opportunity to make "the intellectual argument" that "there is a war in Iraq and a war on terrorism and you have to separate them" and instead said this:

Iraq's weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are [sic] linked are not two separate themes—not two separate threats. They are part of the same threat. Disarming Iraq and the War on Terror are not merely related. Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the War on Terror.
The effort to shift responsibility for the wreckage that had been our Iraq policy had become, by this spring and summer, general, spreading from those who had most fervently made the war to those who had most ardently backed it. David Brooks, we learned on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on April 17, 2004, had "never thought it would be this bad." (Just seven days before, in the Times dated April 10, the same David Brooks had advised "Chicken Littles" on the subject of Iraq to "get a grip.") He "didn't expect," he now allowed, that "a year after liberation, hostile militias would be taking over cities or that it would be unsafe to walk around Baghdad." Most of all, he had "misunderstood" the way in which "normal Iraqis" might respond to the American occupation. Thomas J. Friedman, in May 2004, again on the Op-Ed page of the Times, admitted to having been "a little slow," but admirably so: he had tried, he disclosed, "to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post-9/11 world, in a bipartisan fashion." His only error, in this construct, had been generous, one of attributing the same approach to others: he had "assumed the Bush officials were doing the same."

The potential for cover in having "tried to think in a bipartisan fashion" was immediately apparent. "Were We Wrong?" The New Republic asked itself on the cover of a special June 2004 issue. The answer inside was yes, no, mea culpa but not exactly, not in the larger framework. ("We hawks were wrong about many things," David Brooks had written in the Times, an early responder to the larger-framework approach. "But in opening up the possibility for a slow trudge toward democracy, we were still right about the big thing.") Peter Beinart of The New Republic had "worried," but, like Thomas J. Friedman in the Times, he had also "assumed." He "didn't realize." He "might have seen some of the war's problems earlier than I did" had he "not tried so hard" to separate his thinking from "partisanship."

Senator Joseph Biden, also in The New Republic, believed his vote for the war to have been "just," but had "never imagined" the lack of wisdom with which the war would be pursued. "I am not embarrassed by my assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed the sort of arsenal that made him a clear and present danger," Leon Wieseltier declared in the same New Republic. The cadences surged: "And so I was persuaded," "Prudence and conscience brought me to the same conclusion," "But I was deceived." As for the collective "we" that represented the magazine's editors, they could see "in retrospect" that there might have been "warning signs," to which "we should have paid more attention." "At the time," however, "there seemed good reason not to," and, in any case (the larger framework again), "if our strategic rationale for war has collapsed, our moral one has not."

For Fouad Ajami it had been "an honorable and noble expedition." Leon Wieseltier could "imagine no grander historical experiment in our time than the effort to bring a liberal order to an Arab society." David Brooks could see the Iraq we had made as one in which "nationalism will work in our favor, as Iraqis seek to become the leading reformers in the Arab world." For these early enthusiasts, then, the "expedition" was in the past, its "moral rationale" intact, its errors not their own. The "historical experiment" was over. That it might have already passed beyond the limits of our control was not, in the thousands of words of self-examination that appeared during this period, a consideration.

5.
There seemed in New York on the September Friday morning after the balloons finally fell in Madison Square Garden a relief so profound as to approach euphoria. The President was gone, spirited from the Garden and the city to campaign from the porches and yards of those "undecided" citizens who had become as familiar as our neighbors. The black SUVs with police escorts were gone (even obscure political figures had seemed to "need" motorcades, and not only motorcades but Secret Service protection); the whine of the helicopters was gone. The low dread that had afflicted the city was dissipating. There would be no further need to plot movements around town so as not to be caught in the orange netting of one or another police sweep. ("You can't arrest 1,800 people without having somebody in the middle who shouldn't have been arrested," the mayor of New York said to this point, not reassuringly, on WABC-AM. "That's what the courts are there to find out afterwards.") There would be no further need to regard an official credential to enter the Garden (or "the perimeter," as the sealed area was called) as our sole protection, our fragile laissez-passer in a city that might at any time close down around us. (Closing down the city around us was called "expanding the perimeter.") "If you're leaving the perimeter, hide that credential," one convention aide warned me as I was leaving the Garden. "Because they are definitely out there."

The Republican convention, then, had done what September 11 never did, rendered the city embattled, an armed camp, divided between "they" and "we." This new mood had been reinforced by the convention itself, a stated theme of which was "A Safer World, A More Hopeful America" but the persistent message of which was that any notions of safety or hope we might have entertained were but reeds dependent for their survival on the reelection of the incumbent administration. "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice," Vice President Cheney would say a few days later, in Des Moines, and no one who had listened to what was said in Madison Square Garden could have been unaware that this had been its subtext: "Because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

That entire week in New York had been, not unexpectedly, an exercise in the political usefulness of keeping a nation in a state of unending crisis. The events of September 11, we were told repeatedly in Madison Square Garden, had "changed everything." We had entered "a new age of terrorism." Republicans understood this. Democrats did not. "Even in this post-9/11 period," Vice President Cheney said on the night he accepted his renomination, "Senator Kerry doesn't appear to understand how the world has changed." This changed world demanded "strong leadership," "conviction," above all "resolve," a quality understood in the Garden to be the President's long suit. "He has not wavered," John McCain declared on the first night of the convention. "He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield." Rudy Giuliani, on the same night, claimed to have looked at the falling towers and said to Bernard Kerik, then the police commissioner: "Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president."

The changed world also demanded that the President be allowed to demonstrate his unwavering resolve unhindered by possible disagreement from the nation's citizens. Demonstrators were corralled outside his sight line, penned behind movable barricades, kept under the watch of closed-circuit video cameras and an NYPD surveillance blimp. Not only demonstrators but also members of the opposition party could be seen as enemies of the republic. "Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?" Senator Zell Miller demanded, winding up for his fairly unveiled suggestion that nominating an opposition candidate for the presidency fell into the category of treason. (Locating treason was not a new task for Senator Miller, who had in May said on the Senate floor that those discussing the abuses at Abu Ghraib were "rushing to give aid and comfort to the enemy.") "Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan," he shouted from the podium to positive response, "our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander-in-chief."

Yet this "changed world," as presented in the Garden, also demanded assent to the President on certain fronts, notably domestic, that did not actually involve his role as "commander-in-chief." This was the stealth part of those four days in the Garden. There were many evasions about what the President had actually done, or wanted to do, on those domestic fronts. There were misrepresentations. It was the President, we learned from Laura Bush, who had been "the first president to provide federal funding for stem cell research," which was technically true but misleading; embryonic stem cells were first isolated in 1998; the Department of Health and Human Services ruled in 1999 that such research could receive federal funding; the National Institutes of Health set guidelines for such funding in 2000; the President limited this research to "existing lines," which numbered no more than twenty-one and are now considered less safe than new lines, in 2001. The President, then, was not "the first president to provide federal funding" but the first president to claim any control whatsoever over, and in real terms to cut off, the funding that already existed.

Nor, if there remained any doubt about the efficiency of the operation, was Madison Square Garden the first venue to which Mrs. Bush had been dispatched with this sly message for anyone who might have listened to Nancy Reagan or seen her son at the Democratic convention in Boston. There were other misrepresentations. We heard a good deal about how this president was, in the words of the vice- president, "making health care more affordable and accessible to all Americans," as well as "reforming medical liability so the system serves patients and good doctors, not personal injury lawyers." The President himself told us how he was "honoring America's seniors" by "strengthening Medicare," "creating jobs" by "reducing regulation and making tax relief permanent." He was, we heard, "building an ownership society," in which "people will own their own health plans and have the confidence of owning a piece of their retirement."

We heard about "health savings accounts," and about "reforming Social Security." We heard, to the latter point, how we could "strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account—a nest egg you can call your own and government can never take away." We did not hear what would happen when those "younger workers" reached retirement age and realized that the "individual marketplace decisions" they had made for their "personal nest eggs" had proved unwise, or when the "health savings account you own yourself" got emptied by unexpected illness. "The magnitude of the Bush proposals is only gradually dawning on members of Congress," Robin Toner and Robert Pear had reported in The New York Times in February 2003, an assessment suggesting that members of Congress were less acutely aware of their vulnerabilities than the rest of us were. To read the Republican platform on this subject was in fact to enter a world in which no unexpected or catastrophic events could occur, a world in which we ourselves, not our employers, would pay insurers, but not exactly to "insure" us: one way the party would restore "choice" to health insurance, for example, was by overruling state laws requiring insurers "to provide benefits and treatments which many families do not want and do not need."

In this "changed world," then, one thing remained unchanged: the primacy, for this administration, of its domestic agenda, the relentless intention to dismantle or "reform" American society for the benefit, or "protection," since the closest model here was a protection racket, of those segments of the business community that supported the President. Everything said in Madison Square Garden on domestic issues was predictable. We knew what the domestic agenda was about. We had known it since the 2000 campaign, when the same messages got sent. We had seen clear-cutting our national forests described as "wildfire control," part of the "Healthy Forests Initiative." We had seen the administration distract us with arguments about whether our national parks should be "faith-based," even as that administration lifted the regulation of snowmobiles in the same national parks.

We had seen the President "right the wrong," as Senator Bill Frist put it in the Garden, of "miracle medicines denied by Medicare," and we had also seen who benefited from "righting this wrong": there would first be, since the law as enacted banned Medicare from negotiating the price of drugs, the pharmaceutical industry. Then there would be, still more meaningfully, since the drug benefit was to be offered only through private insurers and health plans (despite the fact that it cost Medicare significantly more to cover recipients through private plans than directly), the insurance industry. Finally, in the case of those Medicare recipients currently covered under their retirement plans, there was the considerable benefit to their former employers, who, by the government's own estimates, were expected to reduce or eliminate drug coverage for 3.8 million retirees. Those who lost coverage would then be forced, if they wanted a drug benefit at all, out of not only their retiree plan but also of Medicare's fee-for-service coverage, in other words into an HMO.

Such "improved benefits," like "personal nest eggs" and "healthy forests," had been since 2000 what was meant when the Bush administration talked about restoring "choices" to Americans. What made these misrepresentations seem more grave in 2004 was the larger misrepresentation: the fact that the administration had taken us, ineptly, with the aid and encouragement of those who had "never thought," or who had "misunderstood," or who "didn't realize," into a war, or a "noble expedition," or a "grand historical experiment," which was draining the lives and futures of our children and disrupting fragile arrangements throughout the world even as it provided the unending "crisis" required to perpetuate the administration and enact its agenda. "This is a great opportunity," the President was reported by Bob Woodward to have said in an NSC meeting on the evening of September 11, 2001. That large numbers of Americans continued to support him could be construed as evidence of their generosity, but it was also evidence of how shallowly rooted our commitment to self-government had turned out to be.

2004-10-21T23:53:00.000-07:00

Here:

Top 35 Trends that say Kerry will Take the White House in November
By Tom Ball
10/20/04

This election is not just any old presidential election. To Progressives, it's a matter of life and death.

It will be the difference between global respect for America and multilateral cooperation or increased anti-Americanism and never-ending, preemptive unilateral war...the difference between American values of civil liberty and freedom or curbs on inalienable rights and invasions of privacy...the difference between a future of hope, health, safety, peace and prosperity or one of isolation, violence, debt, and fear.

And this brings me to the reason that we will win in November...

...because we have to.

This 'do or die' perception is what is going to drive progressives and moderates to the polls in record numbers to end the madness. This is why the traditionally apathetic 18-24 year old demographic (Also known as 'Future Casualties of Bush Wars') is going to put down their cell phones long enough to pull the lever for Kerry.

So Who's Winning?

Recently, a couple nationwide polls have shown Bush with a substantial lead, including some nonsensical outlier from Fox News and an equally unrealistic poll from Gallup which showed likely voters favoring Bush by 8 points. What's going on?

Fear not. It is all a grand load of garbage!

Remember, a Gallup poll released on October 26, 2000, less than two weeks before the election, had George Bush leading Al Gore by 13 points! Numerous Gallup polls during the final weeks of the 2000 campaign had Bush with ludicrously large leads.
And this time, Gallup has Bush ahead by 8 among likely voters but by 3 among registered voters.

[...]

So how do you go from a 3 point lead among registered voters to an 8 point lead among likely voters? By projecting that 89 percent of registered Bush supporters will vote but only 81 percent of registered Kerry supporters will vote. But as we know, this is totally unrealistic.

Anyway, a Democracy Corps Poll released concurrent to the ridiculous Gallup poll showed Kerry with a 3 point lead.

Remember, in 2000, Democracy Corps' final poll, released five days before the election, was right on the money. In fact, every D.C. poll in the final weeks of the 2000 campaign showed the race to be very, very close.
Also...

* CBS News/NYT (10/19): Kerry 47%, Bush 47% among likely voters (Bush approval at 44%)

* NBC News/WSJ (10/19): Kerry 48%, Bush 48%

* Zogby, the most accurate pollster of the last two presidential elections has the race exactly tied at 45% with 7% still undecided. (Remember. Undecideds tend to break for the challenger. More on that below.)

The national polls however, are just one part of an extensive mosaic of influences on this election. And you might be heartened to know that virtually all the rest favor John Kerry.

Continue reading to discover the...

Top 35 Trends that say Kerry will Take the White House in November

1) Bush must lead by 4%: Professor Alan of the Emerging Democratic Majority shows that Bush must go into November 2 with an average of at least a 4% lead in such polls if he is to have any sort of hope for four more years.

2) The 'Cell Phone Polling' Phenomenon: Traditional polling relies almost exclusively on landline telephone. Unfortunately, according to Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report, as much as 18% of the electorate don't have land lines and instead rely exclusively on cell phones. The Hill gives us a little something about this demographic:

In-Stat.MDR, a wireless market-research firm based in Scottsdale, Ariz., conducted a survey of wireless users in February of this year. Of the 970 people questioned, 14.4 percent were cell-phone-only users, the majority of whom were single Americans between the ages of 18 and 24, living in mostly urban areas.
Anyone care to venture a guess as to how this demographic overwhelmingly votes?

Yup. According to Newsweek (10/16/04), Young voters (18-29) favor Kerry/Edwards by 9 points.

3) Zogby is the Most Accurate Pollster: Zogby, which touts the most accurate polls for the last two presidential elections, calls for a very strong Kerry victory. He has referred to the race as "Kerry's to lose."

In 2000, Zogby was one of several pollsters that was only two cumulative percentage points off from the actual, but it was the only one in that group to actually choose Gore as the winner (which we all know he was).
In 1996, Zogby hit the nail right on the head. Sure, everyone predicted a Clinton victory, but Zogby predicted the exact percentage totals for Clinton, Dole...and even Perot at 8%.

4) Kerry Has Large Lead in Swing States: Kerry is doing extremely well where it matters, leading Bush by 10% in the swing states. According to the Washington post.

5) PA Goes to Kerry:Pennsylvania is NOT in play! (and neither is New Jersey. Don't let the GOP Poll 'Strategic Vision' fool you.) That leaves Ohio and Florida as the next target.

6) Seniors Favor Kerry: Also, Among Registered Voters in a 3-way matchup, seniors favor Kerry over Bush by a large margin. According to Newsweek, Seniors (65+) favor Kerry/Edwards by 15 points, 54-39. The 65+ Category is particularly important in Florida where this age group make up a disproportionately large percentage of the voting population.

7) Kerry Appeals to Independents in the Debates: Polls showed that Kerry gained favor from swing voters as a result of his performance. Many more people had increased positive perceptions of Kerry as a result of the debates than the number of people who an increased positive perception for Bush. Conversely (I think), The number of those whose perception of Kerry grew more negative was less than the number of those whose perception of Bush grew more negative as a result.

8) Kerry Appeals to independents... Period.: In polling, self-proclaimed independents favor Kerry/Edwards by 11 points, 51-40.

9) New Standard for GOTV: GOTV efforts were allocated $25 million by the DNC in the 2000 election cycle. This year they will commit about the same. The difference, however, comes with a new 527 called America Coming Together, a group that will be devoting at least $125 million toward the GOTV effort. They will also be adding an expertise, coordination and organization unseen in prior years.

10) Democrats Won the Registration Wars: Voter Registrations have heavily favored the Democratic party this cycle. Dems have made significant gains on Republicans in numbers of party affiliated registrations in practically every swing state.

Debate Effect

11) Kerry Erased Doubts About Himself: The Debates erased many of the doubts held by undecideds as Kerry showed a man that was poised, consistent, tough, intelligent, able to think on his feet and keep his cool. He was a man with a plan for everything. Dare I say - He was 'presidential'...and he didn't need a transmitter to pull it off. Kerry was also successful in countering the nonsense charges of 'flip-flopping'.

12) Bush Increased Doubts About Himself: The debates raised doubts about Bush. He was inept, incoherent, repetitive, negative, inconsistent and lacking in identity. (Which debate had the 'real' Bush?). He was unable to defend his record and unable to conjure any meaningful new attacks on Kerry. Bush did succeed in one facet of the debates. He succeeded in spurring two rumors that might explain his dubious debate performances. One, that he was "hooked up" to his handlers via a transmitter hidden under his suit coat. And two. That he had suffered a mild stroke or some sort of onsetting dementia.

Now (Election 2004) vs. Then (Election 2000)

13) Ralph Nader: Nader is less of an issue this year, although he could still quite probably throw some swing states to the evil one. In any event, Nader is on the ballot in fewer states (but still on in Florida) than in 2000, and hopefully most Naderites will realize by Nov 2 that four more years of bush will finish the job of destroying everything that they claim to hold dear.

14) Howard Dean: The Dean Revolution has given rise to a new generation of Democratic voters and activists. It has given hope to a previously undercounted, underappreciated and underestimated demographic. It has rewritten the book on how elections are played. Long live Howard Dean. Yaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrhhh!!!

15) Michael Moore: The 'Moore Effect' and Fahrenheit 911. Love it or leave it, polls show that the film had significant influence on the impressions that 'uncommitted' voters had of Bush. In addition, most anecdotal evidence suggests that those self-proclaimed independents who saw it were 'disgusted and disturbed' with Bush - not exactly words of likely Bush voters.

16) George Soros: The Republicans have always had their sugar daddies to fund all their wacky pet projects -- Scaife, Coors, the Waltons, and others. Now we have one that, if not funding all our wacky pet projects, is at least putting his considerable resources toward the same goals. Thank you George Soros.

17) The 527's: The Joint Victory Campaign 2004, a consortium of organizations including Moveon.org, America Coming Together, the Media Fund, America Votes, and the Thunder Road Group along with others have turned this election cycle into one where Democrats have been able to manage a virtual and unprecedented financial parity with the GOP. At the same time, these groups have supplied Democrats with an enormous, talented, organized ground army as well as attack dogs that are able to proxy for the Dems when they couldn't involve themselves directly.

18) Newspaper endorsements: ...not they mean much by themselves, but as a group, an interesting phenomenon is occurring that might cause people to take notice. It seems that those newspapers across the nation that endorsed Gore are now endorsing Kerry - and those papers that endorsed Bush are now endorsing.....uh...well, some are endorsing Bush and some are now endorsing Kerry. Seems quite one-sided. Of course, I'm not suggesting that the editorial pages of America's newspapers represent Joe and Jane voter. But, the fact that prior Bush supporters, whomever they should be, are moving into the Kerry camp, while none of the Gore supporters are turning to Bush seems at least a tad bit telling.

19) The New Progressive Media: Beginnings of a true progressive media: The addition, since the 2000 election, of such institutions as Air America, the Center for American Progress, the Rockridge Institute, and Media Matters, along with the rise of the "progressive web" (Blogs, news and opinion sites, and headline aggregators) have given a new voice and a new outlet with which to air it. This emerges from the cloud of trash emanating from right-wing hate radio, Fox News, the Washington Times, the NY Post, etc. Of course this is just the beginning.

20) Better Informed Public: Voter fraud and intimidation has come under greater scrutiny. Hopefully this will cause the GOP to pause when they enact their schemes.

21) Better Educated Florida Electorate: Florida Voters are more aware and informed. Hopefully, that means that there will be fewer overvotes and undervotes. Hopefully people will know what to do if they feel they are a victim of voter intimidation. Hopefully Jewish seniors won't vote for Pat Buchanan. Hopefully, counties won't dabble in 'Butterfly' ballots.

22) Log Cabin Republicans: Log Cabin Republicans have abandoned Bush. This administration's flagrant and disgraceful bigotry targeted at gays has led the primary GOP organization for gays to forego any endorsement.. This means that the group, instead of sending out literature urging their members to vote for Bush, will be sending out information explaining that the administration's push to amend the constitution to define them as a second class citizenry has forced them to suggest that members stay home on election day. In 2000, one million self-described gays and lesbians voted for Bush (Most were not members of the Log Cabin Republicans organization). Nevertheless, the impact of this refusal to endorse Bush was felt across the demographic.

True, this doesn't mean that Bush will automatically lose one million votes, but consider this. Suppose 95% of those who voted for Bush in 2000 are likely to show up in 2004 as well. Now suppose only 30% of those are fed up enough not to vote (A reasonable, if not conservative estimate). That means 95% x 30% x 1,000,000 = 285,000 fewer votes will make it into Bush's electoral coffers than would otherwise have made it. To counter this effect, one might consider the increased number of votes from Bush's bigoted constituency, those who support the gay marriage amendment and who would not otherwise vote but for this issue.

23) Arab Americans: Arab Americans are abandoning Bush. This demographic went solidly for Bush in 2000. He will not receive their votes this year.

"In just the four battleground states we're polling, over 200,000 Arab American voters have switched from the Republican to the Democratic column," said Jim Zogby, senior analyst for Zogby International, which specializes in Muslim and Arab polling.
A Zogby poll of the four states in September projected a turnout of 510,000 Arab American voters. That includes 120,000 in Florida and 85,000 in Ohio - both of which went to Bush in 2000, along with their combined 46 electoral votes. The poll showed Kerry leading Bush in these states, 47 percent to 31.5 percent, with 9 percent backing independent candidate Ralph Nader.

A second Zogby poll of 1,700 Muslim voters nationwide conducted for Georgetown University showed Kerry leading Bush, 68 percent to 7 percent, with 11 percent backing Nader.

Zogby and other analysts estimate the Muslim electorate at around 2 million voters.

24) Cuban Americans: Bush owes much to the Cuban-American voters, particularly in Florida. Cubans are the only Latin American demographic which clearly favor Republicans and they are a voting force in Florida -- a necessary constituency if Bush hopes to pull Florida out of the bag once again. Recently, the Cuban American Commission for Family Rights announced their disfavor with the administration's policies in the following statement:

President Bush's new Cuban sanctions policy creates more hardship for Cuban Americans, his voting constituency, than to the Cuban government and opens itself up to serious discriminatory legal actions, aside from loss of votes.
This is the first time in the history of U.S. reunification policies that such policy goes against family reunification, discouraging visits and redefining the definition of who is family.

Coattail Indicators

25) Senate Races: NON-incumbent Democrats are running uncharacteristically strong in traditionally conservative strongholds. Dems are favored in such right-wing bastions as Alaska, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. And now we can add Kentucky to that list. The same is NOT true for NON-incumbent Republicans in traditional democratic strongholds.

26) Conservative Strongholds: Some conservative strongholds are in play, offering Kerry some nontraditional electoral opportunities including Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Colorado.

27) Vote Banking: Vote banking, voting prior to November 2nd (Not all states allow this), helped Gore take Iowa in 2000 and continues to help Kerry. This also helps alleviate long lines that typically occur in heavily populated Urban areas (i.e. Democratic Strongholds) on November 2nd and theoretically ensures that your vote gets counted. 'Irregularities' can be addressed prior to election day and voter intimidation is a more difficult prospect for the GOP during this period. Reports indicate that Vote Banking is in full stride, far outpacing any prior year.

Along these lines, early voters, favor Kerry/Edwards by 9, 52-43 (Meaning those voters who voted prior to the official election day).

Common Wisdom

28) The 50% Rule: If an incumbent is experiencing approval ratings below 50%, he or she usually loses. The latest CBS News/NY Times poll gave Bush only a 44% approval rating. The average of the last 5 polls shows Bush's job approval even further below 50%:

* Approve: 46%
* Disapprove: 48.1%

29) Right Track, Wrong Track: Polls say that more people think the country is on the wrong track than those who say the right track. This can hardly work in Bush's favor. People believe the nation under Bush is headed in the wrong direction. The average of the last 11 polls citing whether the nation is heading in the Right/Wrong direction heavily disfavors Bush:

* Right direction: 42%
* Wrong Direction: 52%

30) Incumbent Rule: 'Undecideds' break at least 60-40% for the challenger. Also, an incumbent president rarely gets even more than 1% of the popular vote than the final polls show. If an incumbent is polling, 47%, 48% just before the election, that is probably what he will get. In contrast, the challenger always does much better than the final polls indicate!

31) Reelect: Bush's Reelect numbers are terrible. The average of the last 6 independent polls shows Bush's reelect numbers at:

* Yes: 46.7%
* No: 49.2%

Fire in the Belly

32) Rocketing Gas and Energy Prices: The price of gas serves as a constant reminder of Bush's failures in both foreign and domestic policy. Common wisdom says that people vote their pocket. Indeed, nobody cares what the price is for a barrel of oil ...unless it filters into higher gas and energy prices. This is a material impact on their pockets of average Americans and even if some won't admit it, they blame the problem, at least in part, on the government (currently headed by George W. Bush). People also understand that the invasion of Iraq has 'something' to do with these prices. Sure, Bush supporters are unlikely to vote for Kerry because of this, but it might subconsciously give reason for some to find themselves just a touch too busy to make it to the polls on election day.

33) The Bush Draft: The administration and its minions are trying desperately to quash the spreading speculation of a 'Bush Draft'. Despite their best efforts, the word continues to spread -- and with ill effects for Bush. Bush is helping us to get out the 'cell-phone-only' demographic - people aged 18-24.

34) Expatriates: Non-military expatriates are motivated to remove Bush (as are non-career military personnel). These are the people who have had to deal directly with the lashback from the rampant, Bush-inspired anti-Americanism that has flourished during the last four years.

35) The left is fired up!: This is the key ingredient to ensure maximum turnout by the left on election day. This is one thing we can all thank Bush for. The left is so outraged and disgusted with the policies, lies and crimes of this administration, that we wouldn't stay home on election day if it was raining darts (which is something I'm sure the GOP is working on.)

The bottom line is that Kerry will win on November 2nd.

2004-10-15T02:22:00.000-07:00

From Tom Tomorrow:

Seymour Hersh, transcribed by Jonathan Schwarz:

I got a call last week from a soldier -- it's different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He's an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It's a place where we claim we've done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.
It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary... It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn't explicit -- we're talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody...

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you've complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back. You don't need that. And that's where we are with this war.

2004-10-06T21:31:00.000-07:00

You gotta love this:

All Cheney could do in response [to Edwards' debate-references to Halliburton] is bluster about it being a "smokescreen" and direct viewers to Factcheck.com--which, as numerous readers have pointed out, is actually George Soros's site. (Cheney presumably meant Factcheck.org). You gotta love that anyone who clicked on the site at Cheney's direction would have been greeted with the headline, "President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values."

2004-10-05T19:54:00.000-07:00

CIA review finds no evidence Saddam had ties to Islamic terrorists
By WARREN P. STROBEL, JONATHAN S. LANDAY and JOHN WALCOTT

WASHINGTON - A new CIA assessment undercuts the White House's claim that Saddam Hussein maintained ties to al-Qaida, saying there's no conclusive evidence that the regime harbored Osama bin Laden associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The CIA review, which U.S. officials said Monday was requested some months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, is the latest assessment that calls into question one of President Bush's key justifications for last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The new assessment follows the independent Sept. 11 commission's finding that there was no "collaborative relationship" between the former Iraqi regime and bin Laden's terrorist network.

While intelligence officials cautioned that information about al-Zarqawi remains incomplete, Bush, Cheney and other top officials have publicly made al-Zarqawi the linchpin of their contention that Saddam's Iraq had ties to al-Qaida. Questions about whether the president and other officials overstated the intelligence about Iraq and omitted contradictory information and analysis are now at the center of the campaign debate over Iraq policy.

Since the Sept. 11 commission's judgment in June, Bush and Cheney have repeatedly said that al-Zarqawi was an associate of bin Laden and received safe haven from Saddam. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld backed away Monday from such claims, apparently as a result of the new CIA assessment.

Bush and Cheney have charged that Saddam's regime allowed al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian native, to travel to Baghdad and to set up cells of his Islamic terrorist network in the Iraqi capital. Al-Zarqawi is now a major figure who's directing part of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq. He has appeared in videos in which U.S. and other hostages are executed, often by beheading.

"Zarqawi's the best evidence of connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida. He's the person who's still killing. He's the person, remember the e-mail exchange between al-Qaida leadership and he himself about how to disrupt the progress toward freedom," Bush said in the Rose Garden in June.

Al-Zarqawi "was in and out of Baghdad. He ordered the killing of an American citizen from Baghdad - (U.S. Agency for International Development official Laurence) Foley," Bush said Saturday in Ohio. "This is before ... we went in. Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction. I understood - I understand today that the connection between weapons of mass destruction and the terrorist network is the biggest threat we face."

According to a senior administration official and intelligence officials familiar with the review, at Cheney's request CIA analysts spent several months reviewing new material gathered since Baghdad fell last year and re-examining earlier intelligence.

A U.S. official familiar with the new CIA assessment said intelligence analysts were unable to determine conclusively the nature of the relationship between al-Zarqawi and Saddam.

"It's still being worked," he said. "It (the assessment) ... doesn't make clear-cut, bottom-line judgments" about whether Saddam's regime was aiding al-Zarqawi.

He said the report contained new details of al-Zarqawi 's prewar activities in Iraq, including the arrests in late 2002 or early 2003 of three of his "associates" by the regime.

"This was brought to Saddam's attention and he ordered one of them released," he said, providing no further details.

"What is indisputable is that Zarqawi was operating out of Baghdad and was involved in a lot of bad activities," he said, including ordering Foley's killing.

The report didn't conclude that Saddam's regime had provided "aid, comfort and succor" to al-Zarqawi, a senior administration official said.

He added that there are now questions about earlier administration assertions that al-Zarqawi received treatment at a Baghdad hospital in May 2002.

"The evidence is that Saddam never gave Zarqawi anything," another U.S. official said.

A congressional official said members of Congress had received an intelligence report in late August containing similar findings.

The officials who described the new assessment spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is classified and because, as one put it, "I don't want to get caught in the crossfire" between the White House and the CIA.

A CIA spokesman, Mark Mansfield, declined to comment on the subject or to confirm the existence of the new analysis.

The findings - delivered to Cheney last week - appear to put the Bush administration and the CIA on a collision course again over intelligence regarding Iraq.

They could provide an early test of whether new CIA Director Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman, will protect his analysts when they give conclusions that conflict with White House views or administration policy. In the past, some political appointees have been angered by intelligence assessments that they thought undercut administration policy.

Rumsfeld appeared to refer to the new assessment during a public appearance Monday at which he also backed away from the administration's broader claims that Saddam and al-Qaida were linked.

"To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," Rumsfeld said during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington research center.

In September 2002, before the war, Rumsfeld had said the U.S. intelligence community had "bulletproof" evidence of such links.

Apparently referring to al-Zarqawi, the defense secretary said Monday: "I just read an intelligence report recently about one person who's connected to al-Qaida who was in and out of Iraq and there's the most tortured description of why he might have had a relationship and why he might not have had a relationship."

Officials said the highly classified document on al-Zarqawi was delivered to Bush, Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.

There's no dispute that al-Zarqawi spent time in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, but virtually all that time was in a portion of northeastern Iraq that wasn't under Saddam's control.

Some officials believe that Saddam's secular regime kept an eye on al-Zarqawi, an Islamic extremist, but didn't actively assist him.

Al-Zarqawi 's ties to al-Qaida are in dispute. While he clearly shares much of al-Qaida's violent ideology and ran an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan, the Jordanian has his own organization, acts independently and hasn't sworn fealty to bin Laden.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his Feb. 5, 2003, presentation on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council, said al-Zarqawi went to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment and stayed two months, during which time nearly two dozen extremists converged on the Iraqi capital and established a base there.

Al-Zarqawi originally was reported to have had a leg amputated, a claim that officials now acknowledge was incorrect.

Much of the prewar intelligence on al-Zarqawi is reported to have come from eavesdropping by Jordan's security services.

The Bush administration has clashed repeatedly with the CIA and other intelligence community agencies over Iraq and terrorism.

Soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Pentagon civilians set up a small intelligence cell whose mission was to prove that there were links between al-Qaida and secular Arab regimes such as Saddam's.

The group's analysis was presented to then-CIA Director George Tenet and his analysts, who rejected it.

In recent weeks, administration partisans have sharply criticized the U.S. intelligence community for a new analysis that offers a pessimistic outlook on Iraq's future. They've attacked one of the report's authors, National Intelligence Council official Paul Pillar, by name and accused the CIA of trying to undermine the president.

Bush called the report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, a "guess," but later amended his remarks to call it an "estimate."

2004-09-24T01:24:00.000-07:00

Gorbachev Says Iraq War "Undermined" Law

Thu Sep 23, 4:44 PM ET

LONDON - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Thursday condemned the U.S.-led campaign toward war in Iraq as an affront to democracy, saying it undermined international law.

"I regard the invasion of Iraq as undermining international law and undermining democracy because millions of people spoke out against it," said the Nobel Peace Prize laureate during a visit to London. He added the war "was done without the mandate of the U.N. Security Council."

. . . He acknowledged that military intervention, with U.N. approval, was necessary where terrorist infrastructures exist, but argued terrorism should be fought by stopping its financial backers and alleviating world poverty.

2004-09-23T01:12:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore Launches 60-City Swing State Tour

College and NBA Arenas in 20 Battleground States to Feature Live, On Stage, Oscar-winning Filmmaker

He Plans to Rally Non-voters and Slackers, "America's Majority"

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Calling it his "Slacker Uprising Tour" in an effort to get millions of traditional non-voters to the polls on November 2, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and #1 bestselling author Michael Moore announced today that he will embark on a 60-city tour to the 20 battleground states beginning September 26 in Elk Rapids, Michigan, and ending on Election Day in Tallahassee, Florida.

Moore will be appearing on college campuses in their auditoriums, arenas, stadiums and field houses (Penn State, Univ. of Arizona, Univ. of Florida, among others), NBA arenas (Seattle), and hockey arenas (Toledo). Nearly all venues will hold between 5,000 and 15,000 people, with students -- historically the largest block of non-voters in presidential elections -- admitted for free at most events (at some events, non-students will pay $5 or a nominal charge to cover costs).

Moore's show will consist of his monologue, interaction with the audience, and a few surprise guests. He will read letters he's received from soldiers in Iraq (published in his new book, "Will They Ever Trust Us Again -- Letters from the War Zone"), offer prizes for people who register to vote, and conduct the "world's largest karaoke sing-a-long" to John Ashcroft's "Let the Eagle Soar." At many venues Moore will show as yet-unseen clips from his "Fahrenheit 9/11" DVD (to be released October 5), and give everyone present a chance to win their own "pet goat."

"It should be a lot of fun," said Moore. "Most Americans don't vote, and it's not all that hard to understand why. So, I'd like to offer them some incentives to give it a try, just this once. The 50% who are the non-voters are never called by pollsters and are usually ignored by candidates. Should just a few percentage points of the 100 million non-voters decide to show up on November 2 -- watch out."

Moore said his goal is to see that over 56% of the voting public votes in this election -- something that has not happened since 1968.

"It is not the wealthy and the elite who don't vote," added Moore. "The non-voters are the poor, the disenfranchised, the single moms and young people. I am calling for a non-voter uprising, led by thousands of campus slackers who proudly sleep 'til noon and who believe papers are for rolling, not reading. They are rightfully cynical, but this year their motto will be: "Bush and Kerry Both Suck -- That's Why I'm Voting for John Kerry!"

With a number of venues already sold out, over 600,000 people are expected to show up on his tour. Even more will see his film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which will be shown on most campuses before his arrival. In a warm-up to the tour, 10,000 people last night were able to get into to the Carrier Dome in Syracuse for Moore's appearance, with thousands more being turned away due to lack of seats.

Early word of Moore's tour has already sparked protests by campus Republicans and two schools have already caved to pressure to cancel Moore's event.

"I understand why some Bush supporters might be upset," Moore reflected. "I would be, too, if I only had a few weeks left in power."

2004-09-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

I was a day early with the "six weeks to go" post yesterday -- and overnight the picture looks much, much better for Kerry. Contrary to the plainly defective Time, Newsweek, and Gallup polls so loudly cited this month by the librul media, Kerry is still very strongly in this race.

The six-percent-or better category looks like this:

Kerry 183 ev's
Bush 194
in play 161

So Kerry needs 87 more, which are most likely to come from this pool of 113:

Iowa-7 ev's
K:50 B:47 N:2

Maine-4
48 44 4

Minnesota-10
49 45

New Hampshire-4
48 45

Pennsylvania-21
51 48

Wisconsin-10
50 48

*****

Arkansas-6
47 47 2

Florida-27
48 48

Maryland-10
48 48

****

Colorado-9
45 46

Nevada-5
47 49 1

2004-09-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

An e-mailer to Altercation makes the following excellent point;

Name: Alan Hampton
Hometown: Austin, TX
Can someone please explain to me how the Bush campaign can tell within 24 hours that a scan of a fax of a Xerox of a document that restates known facts about W's National Guard service is a forgery, but the same people couldn't determine for several months that the Niger "yellowcake" letters were obvious fakes? Are we supposed to hold 60 Minutes II to a higher standard than the State of the Union address? Are the pundits that are screaming that Dan Rather has lost credibility willing to apply the same standards to Bush?

P.S. Eugene Armstrong beheading video . . . Jack Hensley beheading video . . .

2004-09-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

ONE PERCENT A WEEK -- SIX WEEKS TO GO

Presuming that you usually can't gain more than one percent a week in the polls, right now it's:

Kerry 173
Bush 219
In play 146 -- of which, Kerry needs 97

Here are the likeliest sources of additional Kerry votes:

Kerry leads in these (e.g., Maine has 4 electoral votes, and the most recent poll shows Kerry 48, Bush 44, Nader 4 -- and so on down the list):

Maine-4
48 44 4

Michigan-17
48 46

Minnesota-10
49 45

Oregon-7
47 45 2

Kerry trails in these (again, the poll numbers are ordered Kerry-Bush-Nader):

Arkansas-6
46 48 1

Colorado-9
45 46

Florida-27
47 48

Iowa-7
46 48 2

New Jersey-15
45 49 2

Pennsylvania-21
45 47

West Virginia-5
44 45

total of all of the above: 128

(note that Maine can be split 3-1 if the loser of the state wins one congressional district; and that Colorado's voters may decide to divide their votes 5-4 instead of 9-0 for the winner)

2004-09-14T01:27:00.000-07:00

ONE PERCENT A WEEK

It's Tuesday. There are seven weeks left.

Assuming no one can make up more than one percent a week in the polls -- an assumption true much more often than not -- right now the "locked" electoral college vote is almost exactly what it was three or four months ago:

Kerry: 169 votes
Bush: 168 votes
in play: 201 votes

So: what is the Nader factor right now?

Here:

Arkansas-6 (i.e., 6 electoral votes)
K 46 B 48 N 1 (percentages in the most recent poll)

Colorado-9
K 46 B 45 N 1

Florida-27
K 49 B 49 N 1

Iowa-7
K 51 B 47 N 1

Maine-4
K 43 B 43 N 3

Minnesota-10
K 50 B 44 N 3

Nevada-5
K 47 B 47 N 2

New Hampshire-4
K 50 B 45 N 1

New Jersey-15
K 43 B 39 N 5

Ohio-20
K 47 B 50 N 2

That's 107 electoral votes, which would give Kerry 276 and the election -- and America three non-extremist Supreme Court Justices when the ancient Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Stevens quit during the next 4 years and 4 months.

2004-09-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

Remember when those two asshole snipers in DC killed 10 -- repeat: TEN -- exactly TEN -- to say it again, 10 10 10 ten ten ten TEN TEN TEN -- TEN PEOPLE?

Wasn't that awful? Wasn't that terrifying? It dominated the news for weeks.

Well, how about this:

"On Sunday, 13 Iraqis were killed and dozens injured in Baghdad when US helicopters fired on a crowd of unarmed civilians."

That's right -- THIRTEEN -- 13 13 13 13 -- THIRTEEN -- THIRTEEN PEOPLE.

Wasn't that irrelevant? Wasn't that a big snooze? Don't they know we're liberating them?

(By the way, the moronic National Review propagandist Jonah Goldberg exploited the DC sniper story with this brilliant right-wing theory: "I think the D.C. sniper shootings should be added to the lengthening list of al-Qaida assaults." Don't believe me? Go here for the conservative tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory.)

2004-09-14T01:02:00.000-07:00

Don't you feel a whole lot safer now --
now that, day by day, like once-unfrozen earth covered by a glacier, our basic right to privacy is reduced to nothing? (Can you say PATRIOT ACT?)

There is NO EVIDENCE that the 911 hijackers had ANY WEAPONS AT ALL.

50,000 Americans a year die as the result of medical negligence; another 50,000 from car crashes; another 50,000 from firearms. Do we reduce the speed limit on freeways to 40 MPH? Do we screen every doctor or nurse before every treatment? Do we ban guns? No -- and we shouldn't.

Yet . . . Every few years, a few dozen or a few hundred or (once) three thousand Americans die from terrorism . . .

. . . And the total number killed, the all-time total, throughout American history, as the result of terrorist use of AIRPLANES must be well below the number killed on the roads every three or four months. (Note: I just heard a moronic NRA spokesman -- perhaps Senator -- on CNN [Lou Dobbs show] say that "the preferred weapon of terrorists" is "a fully loaded airplane" . . . The level of discourse could not possibly slide any lower without actually serving gin.)

None of this airport humiliation has any purpose other than to condition us to the next stage of post-modern un-American servility.

Reminder: NONE of the four airplanes involved in 911 would have had any significant effect at all if the Air Force had not been ordered to STAND DOWN, as it most obviously was (see Gore Vidal's Dreaming War and Prof. David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor (he should have titled it "The Most Recent Reichstag Fire" . . .)). Simple, everyday, standard, by the book, drilled endlessly, never-before-or-after-ignored routines would have prevented what we now refer to as "911." One time, and one time only, those routines were not observed.

Here is a typical post-911 incident, useful to no one, improving nothing, posted by This Modern World correspondent (and American citizen . . . but so what? What, do you think the country OWES you a citizenship's rights? Typical something-for-nothing liberal!), Bob Harris -- note especially the 4th Amendment-friendly words "Taken to a special examination room. Thorough body search, front and back.":

[M]y own delightful recent experience while attempting to get on a Delta flight entering the United States:

First, routine: did you pack your own bags? Have they been in your possession the whole time? And did anyone give anything to you?

Normal so far. Then, with God and perhaps 100 other passengers in line as my witness:

Where did you stay on your trip, sir? What hotels? Do you have receipts to prove it? We'll have to see those.

Where did you purchase your ticket? How did you pay for it? Can you prove that?

Where did you stay in Istanbul, sir? Which hotel? How many days? Can you show us a receipt to prove it? Can you show us all the receipts you have?

Furious, intimidated, embarrassed, unsure. Feigning calm. On my knees in the ticket line, going through my bags, trying to remain cooperative while being forced to produce documentation no one else was asked for, and which I had no way of knowing I might need.

The line stops, grumbles, and is re-routed around me.

No explanation as to why I alone am pulled from the line.

Red sticker affixed to my passport.

At security checkpoint, my backpack opened and inspected thoroughly, item-by-item. My camera bag opened and inspected thoroughly, item-by-item.

At the gate, quiet hostility. A criminal suspect. My backpack opened and inspected thoroughly, again, twice more, item-by-item.

My camera bag opened and inspected thoroughly, again, twice more, item-by-item.

My camera equipment taken, with no promise of return. I watch as a security employee simply walks away with my things.

My passport and ticket taken and withheld.

Still no explanation of why this is happening, or why I'm the only one selected for such scrutiny. Polite, soft-voiced inquiries presented with a well-tended smile and a patient tone are met with increasing hostility.

Segregated from the rest of the passengers for 45 minutes. During this time, I am in a position to watch perhaps a half-dozen gates. Not one other passenger is receiving this treatment on any other flight that I can see.

Taken to a special examination room. Thorough body search, front and back.

No bombs in my testicles, we all learn. I am relieved.

Moments before the doors close, and a full hour after it was clear that I was clean, I am given back my passport and belongings and allowed to proceed to the United States.

I am also blithely told by Delta representatives, with no sense of irony, to "enjoy my flight."

Other passengers, having noticed the proceedings, react to my presence on the plane with a mixture of sympathy... and fear.

One particular bottle-blonde married to a square-headed pink man who snores watches me suspiciously for almost ten straight hours. Her grandchildren will no doubt grow weary of hearing about her thrilling bare escape from death at my hands.

I still have no explanation. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better. Did I look like someone? Did I pack too lightly, frightening them with my small backpack? Was it simply that I had visited two Muslim countries? Or was it something else?

I do not know. And I do not know how to know.

I am in Los Angeles now. I am in the United States.

But I am not home.

2004-09-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from Gore Vidal's latest collection Imperial America is in the 9/13/04 issue of The Nation. Here's a sample:

In some ways . . . it is remarkable how things tend to stay the same. . . . There is . . . -- always -- a horrendous foreign enemy at hand ready to blow us up in the night out of hatred for our Goodness and rosy plumpness.

. . . Now in the year 2004, when we have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns, Homeland Security appears to be uniting our secret police into a single sort of Gestapo with dossiers on everyone to prevent us, somehow or other, from being terrorized by various implacable Second and Third World enemies. Where there is no known Al Qaeda sort of threat, we create one, as in Iraq, whose leader, Saddam Hussein, had no connection with 9/11 or any other proven terrorism against the United States, making it necessary for a President to invent the lawless as well as evil (to use his Bible-based language) doctrine of pre-emptive war based on a sort of hunch that maybe one day some country might attack us, so, meanwhile, as he and his business associates covet their oil, we go to war, leveling their cities to be rebuilt by other business associates. Thus was our perpetual cold war turned hot.

My father, uncle and two stepbrothers graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point, where I was born in the cadet hospital. Although I was brought up by a political grandfather in Washington, DC, I was well immersed in the West Point ethos--Duty, Honor, Country--as was David Eisenhower, the President's grandson, whom I met years later. We exchanged notes on how difficult it was to free oneself from that world. "They never let go," I said. "It's like a family."

"No," he said, "it's a religion." Although neither of us attended the Point, each was born in the cadet hospital; each went to Exeter; each grew up listening to West Pointers gossip about one another as well as vent their political views, usually to the far right. At the time of the Second World War, many of them thought we were fighting the wrong side. We should be helping Hitler destroy Communism. Later, we could take care of him.

In general, they disliked politicians, Franklin Roosevelt most of all. There was also a degree of low-key anti-Semitism, while pre-World War II blacks were Ellisonian invisibles. Even so, in that great war, Duty and Honor served the country surprisingly well. Unfortunately, some served themselves well when Truman militarized the economy, providing all sorts of lucrative civilian employment for high-ranking officers. Yet it was Eisenhower himself who warned us in 1961 of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex." Unfortunately, no one seemed eager to control military spending, particularly after the Korean War, which we notoriously failed to win even though the cry "The Russians are coming!" was heard daily throughout the land. Propaganda necessary for Truman's military buildup was never questioned...particularly when demagogues like Senator McCarthy were destroying careers with reckless accusations that anyone able to read the New York Times without moving his lips was a Communist. I touched, glancingly, on all this in Nixonian 1972, when the media, Corporate America and the highly peculiar President were creating as much terror in the populace as they could in order to build up a war machine that they thought would prevent a recurrence of the Great Depression, which had only ended in 1940 when FDR put billions into rearmament and we had full employment and prosperity for the first time in that generation.

. . . I must say, I am troubled by the way I responded [in speeches in 1972] to the audience's general hatred of government. I sa[id] we are the government. But I was being sophistical when I responded to their claims that our government is our enemy with that other cliché, you are the government. Unconsciously, I seem to have been avoiding the message that I got from one end of the country to the other: We hate this system that we are trapped in, but we don't know who has trapped us or how. We don't even know what our cage looks like because we have never seen it from the outside. Now, thirty-two years later, audiences still want to know who will let them out of the Enron-Pentagon prison with its socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. So ... welcome to Imperial America.

2004-09-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

WANNA GO FOR A RIIIIDE?

A mysterious radio signal could be a message from an alien civilisation, scientists said yesterday.

It is believed to have originated 31 million years ago and to have travelled 182.9 trillion miles before reaching the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

The signal has been spotted on three separate occasions but has been observed for only about a minute in total -- not long enough to allow astronomers to analyse it in detail.

But they say it is unlikely to be the result of any obvious radio interference or noise and does not bear the hallmark of any known astronomical object.

Experts involved in the worldwide project Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence say that means it might really have been sent by aliens. . . .

Seti scientist Eric Korpela said: "It boggles my mind. We are looking for something that screams out 'artificial.' This just doesn't do that." . . .

The signal, named SHGbo2+14a, has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz, the magazine New Scientist reports today.

This is one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.

Some experts argue that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be most likely to transmit at this frequency.

The signal appears to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1,000 light years. . . .

2004-09-03T01:07:00.000-07:00

PERSONAL RE-EMPLOYMENT ACCOUNTS!!: a great way to privatize unemployment compensation!!

It just gets worse and worse. I don't know how I didn't see this coming.

Tom Tomorrow reports:

I knew that Republicans want to phase out Social Security in favor of personal investment accounts. And I knew that they think the answer to the health care crisis is to give tax breaks for individual medical accounts--in other words, to encourage each of us to save up our pennies in case we ever need to pay for major surgery. (So much more efficient than the old fashioned notion that we should collectively share the risk through some form of "insurance"--and it helps to cull the weak and the sick out of the herd at the same time!)

But even I was surprised by this bit from Elaine Chao's speech (my transcript):

"For workers experiencing unemployment, the President has proposed Personal Re-employment Accounts which workers can use to get the training and support they need."

So in addition to saving for your retirement and saving for the possibility of catastrophic medical care, Republicans would also like you to set aside some money for your own retraining in the event that their lousy economic policies lead to the loss of your job.

Pretty much sums up compassionate conservativism, doesn't it?

2004-08-30T04:15:00.000-07:00

According to the current issue of The Nation:

After scenes of violence and a turbulence that would have passed into riot but for the repressive hand of the police, the National Convention of the Republican party came to a close . . .

Couldn't resist: it's the magazine's reprint of its coverage of the 1912 Republican convention here.

2004-08-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

Has anyone but moi noticed that CORPORATE MALFEASEANCE has disappeared from the presidential debate? Kinda makes you wistful for Ralph . . . I'm serious: C'mon, Dems -- GET IT TOGETHER, ya freakin' republicrats. ENRON ENRON ENRON! (Oh, I forgot -- that never happened . . . all that's important is the war and the bad economy.) I'm getting ready to vote for Ralph again -- I don't care if it DOES cost three supreme court Justices. ENRON! WORLDCOM! C'mon, you stupid freakin' idiots -- what? did it not HAPPEN??

2004-08-28T01:21:00.000-07:00

Swift Boat Publishing Heir White Supremacist

William Regnery II, heir to the Regnery publishing fortune and a principal player in his father’s company which produced the Swift-Boat veterans’ “Unfit for Command,” is a leading advocate of white supremacy and is moving into a business aimed at “providing services and products to whites.”

His jumping-off point is a planned match-making service for “heterosexual whites of Christian cultural heritage,” according to numerous sites that have begun investigating Regnery’s past, among them Working for Change and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Even Newsweek did a piece about him, but apparently no one made the connection.

[Quote (news source) within quote] In an appeal to potential investors titled “Population is Destiny,” Regnery wrote that the Caucasian dating service would be no ordinary money-making opportunity, but a chance to ensure “the survival of our race,” which “depends upon our people marrying, reproducing and parenting.” [End quote within quote]

For more, go here.

2004-08-28T00:51:00.000-07:00

The Poor Man has a good post (click link) making the following obvious point:

It is interesting to compare the furor surrounding the Michael Moore/Wesley Clark "deserter" episode during the Democratic primaries, when pundits and journalists all shook with indignation at the scurrilous charges; to the current Swift Boat nonsense, when charges contradicted by every scrap of documentary evidence and every remotely credible eyewitness have been treated for weeks as a serious topic for debate.

On another point: two-decades'-long washed-up nobody Joe Piscopo is thinking of running for Governor of New Jersey. Remember when the Piscopo SNL catch-phrase "I'm from JOIzey" (circa 1981) swept the nation? (Um, let me explain . . . it didn't.) Joe says the Republicans are the party for the children and the common man (translation: ignorant idiot). [note: I tried to find a link other than the Moonies' Washington Times, so I picked UPI . . . until I remembered it's now the Moonies' UPI . . .)

But what can you say? -- a Baldwin brother has accepted Jesus.

2004-08-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

You may have heard about the Times's Swift Boat Family Tree. Can you believe these scumbags are swinging the election? If the Dow goes up much over the next ten weeks, suddenly it's Bush's to lose.

2004-08-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

Bored with what's on TV? on the radio? on your boombox or DVD player or in that book you're reading? Go to THE ARCHIVES AT . . . .

Air America Place!!!

Yes, it works, the quality is good, the download is immediate, and . . .

IT'S FREE!!!

You can get recent broadcasts of every show on Air America -- so for you streamers, no more dealing with whatever is being broadcast in New York or whatever (am I REALLY going to be listening to Majority Report at, what, six PM or whatever it is? I mean, it's August and it's nice out.)

2004-08-25T04:08:00.000-07:00

It's the 700 Club!

Watching "Fox and Friends," I finally pinned down what it is that is so creepy about FOXNEWS.

I'm old enough to remember when the "700 Club" first went on the air in the 70s.

What is creepy about FOX is that it is so very much like the "700 Club."

There's a creepy bitch called "Edie" who could easily be a less Jesus-fixated Tammy Faye in her enthusiasm for "what Kerry did when he came back in 1971" or "whether Kerry was in Cambodia" or "why Kerry calling one of the SwiftBoat guys was in violation of 527 laws" or whatever evangelistic crap this born-again Christian -- whoops -- I mean Fox Republican -- is peddling this morning. The two asshole men are equally awful, of course, just like on the "700 Club." These people are vile, obviously -- what is less obvious is that they are the heirs of the 70s Jesus-TV movement (Edie, the cow, just said "Janeanne Garofalo can't express herself without cussing" -- I am NOT making this up) . . . AND that they portend a truly fascist TV-happy-talk standard being accepted on a mass-scale in the 2030's. I know I'm not allowed to say "fascist." But to see the "700 Club" on mainstream cable in 2004 makes me realize just how close to the next reich we are.

2004-08-24T02:23:00.000-07:00

Ignorant Right-Wing Blogger of the Week

For a good laugh, read "My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy"'s history of RADICAL ISLAM!! in this post.

Here's a telling excerpt:

By 1683 the Ottomans had suffered a series of defeats on both land and sea and the final and failed attempt to capture Vienna set the stage for the collapse of any further territorial ambitions and Islam shrunk into various sheikhdoms, emir dominated principalities, and roving tribes of nomads. However, by this time a growing anti-western sentiment, blaming its internal failures on anyone but themselves, was taking hold and setting the stage for a new revival know[n] as Wahhabism which came into full bloom under the House of Saud on the Arabian peninsula shortly before the onset of WWI. It is this Wahhabi version of Islam which has infected the religion itself, now finding adherents in almost all branches and sects, especially the Shiites.

Which, of course, leads (in ignorant right-wing-blogger land) to:

The strategy for this “holy war” . . . began with the plans for toppling the Shah of Iran back in the early 1970’s and culminated with his exile in 1979. With his plans and programs to “westernize” his country, along with his close ties to the U.S. and subdued acceptance of the State of Israel, the Shah was the soft target.

I'll just let that quote sit there on the page, stinking up the joint, for its sheer, perfect, archetypical epitomization of right-wing jingo ignorance. You can't get better propaganda than that. (But I MUST mention: notice how history in the first section jumped from 1683 to circa 1908 -- because, after all, it's the same group of crazy radical Islamicisizizisticists versus the Western World, right? And note: the blog's perma-statement invites us to: "Go back to your imaginary utopia, but come back when you grow up and can handle reality." I guess that means unreal reality, as it exists in make-believe right-wing jingo world.)

2004-08-23T03:11:00.000-07:00

War in Iraq: What a Great Idea!!

According to a June 2004 study by the Institute for Policy Studies:

The $151.1 billion expenditure for the war through this year could have paid for: close to 23 million housing vouchers; health care for over 27 million uninsured Americans; salaries for nearly 3 million elementary school teachers; 678,200 new fire engines; over 20 million Head Start slots for children; or health care coverage for 82 million children. Instead, the administration’s FY 2005 budget request proposes deep cuts in critical domestic programs and virtually freezes funding for domestic discretionary programs other than homeland security. Federal spending cuts will deepen the existing $40 billion shortfall in states budgets by an additional $6 billion through cuts in federal grants for all state and local programs other than Medicaid.

And you know what? The federal gasoline tax is 18.4 cents a gallon; in 2002, the tax added up to 24 billion dollars (130.7 billion gallons). For the cost of the war just through the end of this year, they could eliminate the gas tax AND subsidize every gallon of gas sold for the next year to the tune of 97.2 cents a gallon. If there were no war costs, you could pay about a dollar a gallon for the next year and the deficit wouldn't increase a cent. Think that might boost the economy for a while?

2004-08-22T22:59:00.000-07:00

Kerry now leads Pennsylvania (a twelve-point increase since March) . . . thanks to Michael Moore and Howard Stern:

The poll also asked respondents whether they'd seen Michael Moore's anti-Bush film, "Fahrenheit 911," or had listened to radio personality Howard Stern, who's been attacking Bush for months.

Eight percent of those surveyed described themselves as regular Stern listeners, and a little more than one in four of them said Stern's opinions made them more likely to vote for Kerry than for Bush. Doing the math, Howard moves about 2 percent of voters, at least a little.

Eleven percent of the sample said they'd seen Moore's film, and 39 percent of them said it made them more likely to support the Democrat. That amounts to some impact on about 4 percent of the electorate.

"In a close election, these commentators, personalities, whatever you call them, they can have a marginal, but not unimportant effect on voters' choices," Madonna said. "In an election that comes down to 1 or 2 percent, you can look at a lot of things as making a difference. Here we have . . . 'Fahrenheit 911,' and we have Howard."

Gotta love democracy!

2004-08-21T17:49:00.000-07:00

This is a freakin' TRIP:

Unwilling participants: Iraqi soccer players angered by Bush campaign ads

[Iraqi Olympic athlete] Sadir had a message for U.S. president George W. Bush, who is using the Iraqi Olympic team in his latest re-election campaign advertisements. . . .

"Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," Sadir told [Sports Illustrated], speaking calmly and directly. "He can find another way to advertise himself."

Ahmed Manajid . . . had an even stronger response when asked about Bush's TV advertisement. "How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?" Manajid told me. "He has committed so many crimes." . . .

[The athletes] find it offensive that Bush is using Iraq for his own gain when they do not support his administration's actions. "My problems are not with the American people," says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. "They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?" . . .

Manajid, 22, . . . hails from the city of Fallujah. He says coalition forces killed Manajid's cousin, Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was fighting as an insurgent, and several of his friends. In fact, Manajid says, if he were not playing soccer he would "for sure" be fighting as part of the resistance.

"I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?" Manajid says. "Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq."

Thanks to The Poor Man (perma-linked on this blog).

2004-08-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

New this week: Ralph Nader will NOT be on the ballot in VIRGINIA, MARYLAND, ILLINOIS, or MISSOURI. (If you don't have a Washington Post net subscription, try going to Google, pasting this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19955-2004Aug20.html in the search blank, and clicking on the result -- for some reason, the Post lets you get some things off Google without subscribing.)

This doubles the total of the previous list of ARIZONA, INDIANA, GEORGIA, and NORTH CAROLINA. (Also: He is unlikely to be on the ballot in OREGON.)

Of the nine non-Nader states (so far), four states are locks (31 ev's for Kerry, 26 for Bush) . . . but five comprise 56 potential toss-up electoral votes: In the most recent polls, it was 48-47 for Bush in Missouri (11 ev's), 48-45-2 for Bush in Virginia (13), 48-45 for Bush in Arizona (10), 51-45 for Bush in North Carolina (15), and 50-46-2 for Kerry in Oregon (7).

For a nifty Nader-effect electoral map, go to this site. Click on Ralph's face to see the swing. The site claims that Kerry is in a dead heat with Bush in the electoral college . . . unless Nader drops out, in which case Kerry, as of now, wins. (I'm confused, though, by the site's reference to "272 needed to win" -- it's 270, unless they know something I don't.)

2004-08-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

Here is an excellent site for poll-watching some of the swing states. Highly recommended for bookmarking.

2004-08-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

Good thing that the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution gave black men the vote, the 19th Amendment (1920) gave black women the vote, and the 24th Amendment (1964) outlawed poll taxes -- because now the 666th Amendment (Bush/Cheney, 2000) renders the other three meaningless, at least in Florida:

The New York Times' op-ed (Bob Herbert) reports:

[Florida] police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November.

. . . The state police officers, armed and in plain clothes, have questioned dozens of voters in their homes. Some of those questioned have been volunteers in get-out-the-vote campaigns.

I asked [a law enforcement official overseeing the operation] to tell me what criminal activity had taken place.

"I can't talk about that," he said.

I asked if all the people interrogated were black.

"Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at -- yes," he said.

He also said, "Most of them were elderly."

. . . Not surprisingly, many of the elderly black voters who found themselves face to face with state police officers in Orlando are members of the Orlando League of Voters, which has been very successful in mobilizing the city's black vote.

. . . The vile smell of voter suppression is all over this so-called investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

. . . Now, said [a lawyer who has represented a leader of the Orlando League of Voters], the fear generated by state police officers going into people's homes as part of an ongoing criminal investigation related to voting is threatening to undo much of the good work of the league. He said, "One woman asked me, 'Am I going to go to jail now because I voted by absentee ballot?'"

According to [the lawyer], "People who have voted by absentee ballot for years are refusing to allow campaign workers to come to their homes. And volunteers who have participated for years in assisting people, particularly the elderly or handicapped, are scared and don't want to risk a criminal investigation."

. . . A heavy-handed state police investigation that throws a blanket of fear over thousands of black voters can only help President Bush.

The long and ugly tradition of suppressing the black vote is alive and thriving in the Sunshine State.

2004-08-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page (link available from Krugman's never-updated blog, which in turn is linked here on Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com), here's a transcript of Krugman's "debate" with Bill O'Lielly on the MSNBC show hosted by that irrelevant, dimwitted chubby GroupThinkin' guy whose name I can never remember.

The Unofficial Krugman site also informs us that: "Paul Krugman is a regular guest on the Al Franken Show every Tuesday. The Al Franken Show airs weekdays 12PM to 3PM and is repeated at night 11PM to 2AM." Air America is on our A.S. links list.

Also, here's a link to an Air America audio archives site (which I have NOT taken for a test-drive with my slow no-frills laptop dial-up): Air America Place.

2004-08-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

Correspondent Unknown brings this article to our attention:

Filmmaker Moore Quotes Goss on Lack of CIA Credentials
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Congressman Porter Goss, President Bush's nominee for CIA director, could be his own worst enemy when it comes to making the case that he deserves to lead the U.S. intelligence agency.

"I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified," the Florida Republican told documentary-maker Michael Moore's production company during the filming of the anti-Bush movie "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Unknown also has a T-shirt for sale, featuring the American flag on the front (right on! -- I've been thinking of putting one on my car) and, on the back, the celebrated Goebbels quote about fooling the people with pseudo-patriotic demands for supporting unjust wars.

2004-08-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

It's getting better: Perhaps due to an Edwards bounce, Bush now leads Kerry by only three percent in North Carolina. And note: N.C. is one of several states where Nader absolutely, definitely will not be on the ballot.

In fact, Kerry is within striking distance in North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee -- four states thought to be sure things for Prez BU**SH** only a few months ago. Bush is going to have to put money into campaigning in the SOUTH! I think it may be time for some cautious optimism.

As for Nader, it is difficult to determine exactly where: he is, isn't, might be, and will not be on the ballot. Here's what I've got, thanks largely to a USA Today story from August 12:

Due to support from the Reform Party, Nader MIGHT be on the ballot in FLORIDA, MICHIGAN, COLORADO, MISSISSIPPI, KANSAS, and MONTANA -- if the Reform Party in those states agrees. This contradicts a previous post in which I said he (as opposed to the Reform Party, as such) was on these ballots.

Meanwhile, he apparently IS on the ballot in his own right in ARKANSAS, NEVADA, NEW JERSEY (NOOOOOOO!!), and SOUTH DAKOTA.

He is definitely NOT going to be on the ballot in ARIZONA, INDIANA, GEORGIA, or NORTH CAROLINA. He is unlikely to be in OREGON.

He might make it on in NEW HAMPSHIRE and SOUTH CAROLINA.

The rest is uncertain.

2004-08-16T20:45:00.000-07:00

Another reason to vote for a change in the Supreme Court (i.e., for Kerry):

Jim Hightower reports that Republican whips in Congress really, really, really want to maintain a Patriot Act law allowing no-probable-cause searches of library and bookstore records. A true victory for the party of libertarian small government

FIGHT FOR YOUR FREEDOM TO READ
8/4/2004

After a recent congressional vote on the "Freedom to Read Protection Act," one angry member said: "You win some, and some get stolen."

He was a Republican, defying George W, John Ashcroft, and his own party's top leadership in congress – all of whom lobbied furiously (and unethically) to defeat this act, which sought to to ensure one of our most basic American liberties: The right to keep government snoops and bullies from secretly spying on the reading habits of perfectly innocent citizens. What could be more Mom and Apple Pie than that?

Bush, Ashcroft, & Gang, however, had undermined this fundamental freedom with a nasty provision they tucked into their infamous, liberty-busting USA Patriot Act in 2001. It allows federal agents to get a secret order from a secret court to walk into any public library or bookstore and demand the records of any and all patrons, without showing anyone – even the court – any evidence that the people being investigated are involved in any criminal activity whatsoever. It's jackbooted autocratic power like this that led to the American revolution.

And just as in 1776, today's librarians, bookstore owners, writers, and freedom-loving people of all political stripes have risen up against the Bushites' authoritarian, un-American intrusion into our privacy. This grassroots uprising led to the Freedom to Read Act, which would have halted the intrusion.

The good news is that the act passed 219 to 201. The sad news is that the GOP hierarchy then cheated. They held the vote open beyond the 15 minutes allowed by the rules, taking an extra 23 minutes while the leaders broke the arms of nine Republicans, forcing them to switch votes. This finally produced a 210-210 tie, defeating the act. In other words, the Bushites stole it...and they also stole an important piece of our liberties.

But we've only begun to fight this insult to democracy. To join the uprising, call The American Library Association: 800-545-2433.

2004-08-10T04:41:00.000-07:00

From the RALPH! -- PLEEEEZE!! -- QUIT!! -- QUIT!! -- PLEEEZE! file:

I'm still pissed off about this story, posted a month or two ago here on Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

It still blows my mind

It is soooo contrary to everything I believed about America when I was growing up

On the date of the post, I wrote: "If you're over the age of 40, you remember when you thought this sort of thing wasn't (officially) OK in America. But now we accept everything. After all, there's a war on -- right? One that will last forever (or at least until there aren't any more terrorists, which should happen, at the outside, in a few years, um, I think)."

Today, again, I wave a flag and say: THIS IS UN-AMERICAN:

Cops can demand ID, high court rules
The Associated Press June 21, 2004

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people do not have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police their names.

The 5-4 decision frees the government to arrest and punish people who won’t cooperate by revealing their identity.

The decision was a defeat for privacy rights advocates who argued that the government could use this power to force people who have done nothing wrong to submit to fingerprinting or divulge more personal information.

Police, meanwhile, had argued that identification requests are a routine part of detective work, including efforts to get information about terrorists.

The justices upheld a Nevada cattle rancher’s misdemeanor conviction. He was arrested after he told a deputy that he didn’t have to reveal his name or show an ID during an encounter on a rural road in 2000.

2004-08-08T02:50:00.000-07:00

THE NADER FACTOR

Back on July 10, 2004 (scroll down), Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com suggested that Kerry had a lock on 153 electoral votes and Bush had a lock on 144 electoral votes.

According to the latest polls, represented in the percentages given below . . .

It's pretty much stayed the same . . . except:

For Bush, move South Carolina (8 ev's, B: 51%, K: 44%) and Tennessee (11 ev's, B: 48%, K: 46%) out of the "absolutely definitely for Bush" column, and move Louisiana (9 ev's, B: 52% K: 36%) into it.

For Kerry, move Michigan (17 ev's, K: 52%, B: 41%) and New Jersey (15 ev's, K: 49%, B: 36%, Nader: 6%) into the "absolutely definitely for Kerry" column . . . and nothing out of it.

So as of now, Kerry can count on 185 electoral votes, and Bush can count on 134 electoral votes.

That leaves 219 in play, of which Kerry must get 85 to win. That is by no means a sure thing.

As of now, here are the 75 -- not 85 -- ev's Kerry has the best shot at, in order of his biggest leads (counting Nader votes more than 50/50 toward Kerry):

Washington 11 ev -- K: 51, B: 43, N: 3
Pennsylvania 21 ev -- K: 51, B: 43, N: 2
Florida 27 ev -- K: 50, B: 43, N: 2
New Hampshire 4 ev -- K: 49, B: 42, N: 2
Oregon 7 ev -- K: 50, B: 46, N: 2
West Virginia 5 ev -- K: 48, B: 44, N: 2

The remaining 10 ev's, as of now, are most likely to come from this pool of 31 ev's:

Minnesota 10 ev -- K: 47, B: 45, N: 3
Iowa 7 ev -- K: 48, B: 46, N: 2
Maine 4 ev -- K: 46, B: 45, N: 5
Wisconsin 10 ev -- K: 47, B: 46, N: 3

RALPH!!! GOOD GOD, MAN -- QUIT!! PLEASE!! WE'RE BEGGING YOU!! OK, OK -- SO, YES, IT'S THE REPUBLICRATS!! BUT . . . THREE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, MAN!!

2004-08-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

Believe me: You WANT to watch this: Will Ferrell at the Bu**sh** ranch. There are two download speeds each for Quicktime and Windows.

2004-08-06T23:47:00.000-07:00

Exactly whom did Ms. Heinz-Kerry tell to shove it? Eric Alterman explains (emphasis mine):

Leading into Kerry's big speech, perhaps the biggest story to obsess television and tabloid reporters was Teresa Heinz-Kerry's now infamous "shove it" response to a reporter, Colin McNickle. This was taken almost universally to be evidence of her temper and instability, and therefore, somehow, her husband's unsuitableness for office. What was rarely if ever reported, however, was the fact that McNickle's paper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, is the plaything of far-right billionaire Richard Mellon-Scaife, who financed the Arkansas Project, the $2.4 million smear campaign during the 1990s which sought to paint the Clintons as drug dealers, thieves and murderers. The newspaper has attacked Heinz-Kerry and her philanthropic projects for years, and McNickle, as editor of the editorial page, has been responsible for many of the false accusations and distortions about her charities contained in its pages. (I have dealt with some of these charges HERE.) Under McNickle's editorship, the page has taken such principled stances as regularly calling Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell a socialist, and referring to an anti-immigrant militia in Arizona as "a suitable and practical expression of disgust." It is the only newspaper in the United States to publish a column by white nationalist Sam Francis, a racist so extreme he was fired from The Washington Times.

2004-08-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

It's August 6th . . . do you know where your supporters are?

Across the board (of pollsters), President BU**SH**'s approval rating is at its all-time low. Don't believe me? Look at the 15-poll graph.

2004-08-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

News item, Monday morning, August 9, 2004: Dow opens at 9815.33

Suppose you invested $1000 in a Dow Jones Index on July 30, 1997 . . .

that is, over 7 years ago . . .

Q: How much would you have today, corrected for inflation?

A: $1000

-- a zero percent return!!

Way to go, Republican Administration!

2004-08-03T02:12:00.000-07:00

Re Iraq, Bush, protests, the election, etc.: A really interesting interview of Norman Mailer, done by his son. Highly recommended. (Norman worries, reasonably, that Seattle-style protests at the Ground-Zero Republican Convention could win the election for Bush.)

2004-08-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

In regard to the post below, note that Iowa and Minnesota (17 total votes) are the two "dead heat" states right now . . . and in both, Nader is the difference, with 2% in the relevant polls. Right now, Ralph is on seven state ballots, including Michigan, where . . .

. . . the Republicans have been working to get him on the ballot. In Michigan, the Nader campaign submitted only 5,400 signatures, falling short of the required 30,000 to get him on the state ballot. However, Republicans filed an additional 43,000 signatures for Nader, which got him on the ballot.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, RALPH -- QUIT! QUIT! QUIT! PLEASE! WE'RE BEGGING YOU! YOU COULD GIVE THE RIGHT-WING THREE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, DUDE!

2004-08-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of our invaluable friends at Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, here's a mysterious story of electoral shenanigans that may make 2004 "another 2000." I'll look into this more over the next couple days to get the Constitutional lowdown, and report back.

[T]oday's news. A group of Colorado citizens have proposed a change to the state's constitution specifying that Colorado's nine electors be apportioned strictly in proportion to the popular vote. Currently Bush is ahead 48% to 43% there, so under the proposed system, Bush would get five electoral votes and Kerry four electoral votes, instead of nine to zero. The group has turned in petitions containing 130,000 signatures. If about 68,000 of these prove to be valid, the question will be a ballot referendum in November. If it passes, the change takes effect for this year's election. If it makes the ballot, on the evening of Nov. 2, the TV news anchors will probably be saying: "President Bush won Colorado with 55% of the vote, but we don't know how many votes he will get in the electoral college until they finish recounting the closely fought referendum on changing the Colorado state constitution." Whoever loses will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which once again may have to rule on the sensitive issue of state's rights. To learn more about what may be the sleeper issue of the year, start here. [slow link]

EVP2004 has also provided a template link to their site, featuring the current prediction. The numbers tend to change several times a week. It's over above my permanent links on the upper right. If the total isn't 538, that means the remaining electoral votes are from a state or states where the most recent poll indicates a dead heat.

2004-07-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

Tom Tomorrow hits a home run for the second week in a row. I defy you not to laugh while reading this.

2004-07-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

If you watched the Daily Show last night, you know that a great many pundits, with plugs in their ears, were highly critical of Al Sharpton's convention speech. WHY?

Could it be . . . RACISM?

Here's what Sharpton said:

Thank you.

Tonight I want to address my remarks in two parts.

One, I'm honored to address the delegates here.

Last Friday, I had the experience in Detroit of hearing President George Bush make a speech. And in the speech, he asked certain questions. I hope he's watching tonight. I would like to answer your questions, Mr. President.

(APPLAUSE)

To the chairman, our delegates, and all that are assembled, we're honored and glad to be here tonight.

I'm glad to be joined by supporters and friends from around the country. I'm glad to be joined by my family, Kathy, Dominique, who will be 18, and Ashley.

We are here 228 years after right here in Boston we fought to establish the freedoms of America. The first person to die in the Revolutionary War is buried not far from here, a Black man from Barbados, named Crispus Attucks.

(APPLAUSE)

Forty years ago, in 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party stood at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City fighting to preserve voting rights for all America and all Democrats, regardless of race or gender.

Hamer's stand inspired Dr. King's march in Selma, which brought about the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Twenty years ago, Reverend Jesse Jackson stood at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, again, appealing to the preserve those freedoms.

Tonight, we stand with those freedoms at risk and our security as citizens in question.

I have come here tonight to say, that the only choice we have to preserve our freedoms at this point in history is to elect John Kerry the president of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

I stood with both John Kerry and John Edwards on over 30 occasions during the primary season. I not only debated them, I watched them, I observed their deeds, I looked into their eyes. I am convinced that they are men who say what they mean and mean what they say.

(APPLAUSE)

I'm also convinced that at a time when a vicious spirit in the body politic of this country that attempts to undermine America's freedoms -- our civil rights, and civil liberties -- we must leave this city and go forth and organize this nation for victory for our party and John Kerry and John Edwards in November.

(APPLAUSE)

And let me quickly say, this is not just about winning an election. It's about preserving the principles on which this very nation was founded.

Look at the current view of our nation worldwide as a results of our unilateral foreign policy. We went from unprecedented international support and solidarity on September 12, 2001, to hostility and hatred as we stand here tonight. We can't survive in the world by ourselves.

(APPLAUSE)

How did we squander this opportunity to unite the world for democracy and to commit to a global fight against hunger and disease?

We did it with a go-it-alone foreign policy based on flawed intelligence. We were told that we were going to Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction. We've lost hundreds of soldiers. We've spent $200 billion dollars at a time when we had record state deficits. And when it became clear that there were no weapons, they changed the premise for the war and said: No, we went because of other reasons.

If I told you tonight, "Let's leave the Fleet Center, we're in danger," and when you get outside, you ask me, Reverend Al, "What is the danger?" and I say, "It don't matter. We just needed some fresh air," I have misled you and we were misled.

(APPLAUSE)

We are also faced with the prospect of in the next four years that two or more of the Supreme Court Justice seats will become available. This year we celebrated the anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education.

(APPLAUSE)

This court has voted five to four on critical issues of women's rights and civil rights. It is frightening to think that the gains of civil and women rights and those movements in the last century could be reversed if this administration is in the White House in these next four years.

(APPLAUSE)

I suggest to you tonight that if George Bush had selected the court in '54, Clarence Thomas would have never got to law school.

(APPLAUSE)

This is not about a party. This is about living up to the promise of America. The promise of America says we will guarantee quality education for all children and not spend more money on metal detectors than computers in our schools.

(APPLAUSE)

The promise of America guarantees health care for all of its citizens and doesn't force seniors to travel to Canada to buy prescription drugs they can't afford here at home.

(APPLAUSE)

The promise of America provides that those who work in our health care system can afford to be hospitalized in the very beds they clean up every day.

The promise of America is that government does not seek to regulate your behavior in the bedroom, but to guarantee your right to provide food in the kitchen.

(APPLAUSE)

The issue of government is not to determine who may sleep together in the bedroom, it's to help those that might not be eating in the kitchen.

(APPLAUSE)

The promise of America that we stand for human rights, whether it's fighting against slavery in the Sudan, where right now Joe Madison and others are fasting, around what is going on in the Sudan; AIDS in Lesotho; a police misconduct in this country.

The promise of America is one immigration policy for all who seek to enter our shores, whether they come from Mexico, Haiti or Canada, there must be one set of rules for everybody.

(APPLAUSE)

We cannot welcome those to come and then try and act as though any culture will not be respected or treated inferior. We cannot look at the Latino community and preach "one language." No one gave them an English test before they sent them to Iraq to fight for America.

(APPLAUSE)

The promise of America is that every citizen vote is counted and protected, and election schemes do not decide the election.

It, to me, is a glaring contradiction that we would fight, and rightfully so, to get the right to vote for the people in the capital of Iraq in Baghdad, but still don't give the federal right to vote for the people in the capital of the United States, in Washington, D.C.

(APPLAUSE)

Mr. President, as I close, Mr. President, I heard you say Friday that you had questions for voters, particularly African- American voters. And you asked the question: Did the Democratic Party take us for granted? Well, I have raised questions. But let me answer your question.

You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule.

That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres.

We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.

(APPLAUSE)

Mr. President, you said we would have more leverage if both parties got our votes, but we didn't come this far playing political games. It was those that earned our vote that got our vote. We got the Civil Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the Voting Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the right to organize under Democrats.

(APPLAUSE)

Mr. President, the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn't gained because of our age. Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham. This vote is sacred to us.

(APPLAUSE)

This vote can't be bargained away.

(APPLAUSE)

This vote can't be given away.

(APPLAUSE)

Mr. President, in all due respect, Mr. President, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale.

(APPLAUSE)

And there's a whole generation of young leaders that have come forward across this country that stand on integrity and stand on their traditions, those that have emerged with John Kerry and John Edwards as partners, like Greg Meeks, like Barack Obama, like our voter registration director, Marjorie Harris, like those that are in the trenches.

And we come with strong family values. Family values is not just those with two-car garages and a retirement plan. Retirement plans are good. But family values also are those who had to make nothing stretch into something happening, who had to make ends meet.

I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table.

But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.

(APPLAUSE)

And I wanted somebody in my community -- I wanted to show that example. As I ran for president, I hoped that one child would come out of the ghetto like I did, could look at me walk across the stage with governors and senators and know they didn't have to be a drug dealer, they didn't have to be a hoodlum, they didn't have to be a gangster, they could stand up from a broken home, on welfare, and they could run for president of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

As you know, I live in New York. I was there September 11th when that despicable act of terrorism happened.

A few days after, I left home, my family had taken in a young man who lost his family. And as they gave comfort to him, I had to do a radio show that morning. When I got there, my friend James Entome (ph) said, "Reverend, we're going to stop at a certain hour and play a song, synchronized with 990 other stations."

I said, "That's fine."

He said, "We're dedicating it to the victims of 9/11."

I said, "What song are you playing?"

He said "America the Beautiful." The particular station I was at, the played that rendition song by Ray Charles.

As you know, we lost Ray a few weeks ago, but I sat there that morning and listened to Ray sing through those speakers, "Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains' majesty across the fruited plain."

And it occurred to me as I heard Ray singing, that Ray wasn't singing about what he knew, because Ray had been blind since he was a child. He hadn't seen many purple mountains. He hadn't seen many fruited plains. He was singing about what he believed to be.

Mr. President, we love America, not because all of us have seen the beauty all the time.

But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.

Starting in November, let's make America beautiful again.

Thank you. And God bless you.

(APPLAUSE)

2004-07-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

What Would Jesus Do . . . in the Ballot Box?
According to Pat Robertson, Jesus would vote against:

Abortion
Gay Marriage
Not having the Ten Commandments in public schools

Those were the only three votes Robertson would attribute to Jesus

Apparently, Jesus would have no opinion about, say, welfare or foreign policy

(Source: Hannity and Colmes today)

2004-07-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

News item, July 26, 2004: Dow opens at 9962.22

Suppose you invested $1000 in a Dow Jones Index on April 6, 1998 . . .

that is, 6.3 years ago . . .

Q: How much would you have today, corrected for inflation?

A: $1000

-- a zero percent return!!

Way to go, Republican Administration!

2004-07-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

For some reason, MSNBC reports that Kerry has sort of given up on Missouri.* Apparently, no one said to the reporter: "Show me!" (A July 20 poll puts Kerry ahead 46-44. Overall, the electoral college right now favors Kerry 310-217, with 11 -- a surprising Tennessee -- undecided. From the MSNBC story, you'd think Kerry was trailing -- must be that liberal media bias thing again.)

[*"Missouri, a traditional battleground, recently moved to the Bush-leaning category and is being written off by some Democrats. The Kerry campaign reduced its ad campaign in the state after polls showed him consistently 4 to 6 percentage points behind Bush, with little room for improvement. Republican advantages in rural Missouri and the fast-growing exurbs make the state tough for Democrats, but Kerry will likely keep it on the table through November in case the political winds shift. Besides, abandoning a traditional battleground would be embarrassing."]

2004-07-23T00:52:00.000-07:00

Tom Tomorrow gets it dead-on, once again.

PS I figured out the new blogger format, at least in part -- sure is nice they gave such great directions ... not.

2004-07-23T00:27:00.000-07:00

1) Anonymous has been way, way too busy to post lately;

2) Blogger removed its "link" shortcut for some stupid reason, and now it's a pain in the ass to include a link unless it says "link" or the actual address (hellloooo? blogger?)

Meanwhile, keep checking the electoral college survey update from last week's last post. Kerry's ahead by well over 100 e.v.'s.

Here's some interesting points about the 9/11 commission, courtesy of a letter(e-mail)-writer to Altercation (no link, because -- thanks to blogger -- it's too much of a hassle):

Unsupported by the Bush administration, acceptance of the investigation was forced by grieving family members of individuals that lost their lives to the horror of 9/11.
Bush, in an attempt to sandbag the process, names Henry Kissinger to lead the commission.
Family members counter the Bush administration's attempts to sandbag by pushing for disclosures from Kissinger on his clients that leads to his resignation.
The Bush administration plays politics with the commission's deadlines, before giving in to the committee's request for more time.
The Bush administration claims Executive Privilege in an attempt to keep Rice, Cheney and Bush from testifying.
The administration gives in to public pressure and allows Rice to testify under oath. Rice's testimony leads to the most memorable soundbite of the hearings: Bush had been given a report on August 6, 2001, entitled, "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United Sates."
Rice's public statement that no one ever imagined terrorists using planes as weapons is contradicted by Louis Freeh's testimony that the use of planes as a potential weapon for a terrorist attack was known.
The administration gives in to public pressure and allows Bush and Cheney to meet with the commission privately. Bush becomes the target of late night talk show barbs for needing to have Cheney with him when he testifies.
Bush and Cheney, in the face of evidence to the contrary, continue to spin that intelligence warnings indicated al-Qaeda attacks would be overseas and not here in the U.S.
Bush accepts George Tenant's resignation.
Despite an Interim Report from the commission that states no evidence was found linking Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, Cheney continues to publicly link al-Qaeda and Iraq.
The commission rebukes Cheney's public comments that he probably had more facts than the commission on the al-Qaeda links to Iraq by offering Cheney an opportunity to provide them with that information Cheney provides no such information.
Early reports indicate that the commission will tie Iran to al-Qaeda. Iran had much to gain from the removal of Saddam and his secular government.

2004-07-14T05:02:00.000-07:00

Wow! Now it's 322-205! [link as of today -- will change soon]

And an update on Hubble.

2004-07-10T17:43:00.000-07:00

Update (see last two posts): As of now, Nader is ON THE BALLOT in Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Colorado, Kansas and Montana, and maybe more. I don't know where he is definitely NOT GOING TO BE except Arizona, where he dropped out. His website refers to "get us on in 40 states," suggesting that either a) he's ON three more states than I've listed; or b) he will definitely NOT be on three more states than I've listed; or c) some combination.

Of the six listed, Florida (27 votes), Michigan (17), and Colorado (9) are the biggest danger zones; I did not list Florida and Michigan below, but that's only because the poll data is inconclusive.

If Kerry wins Florida, Michigan, and Colorado, he will need only 64 more electoral votes to win the election -- and reshape the Supreme Court for a generation or two to come.

Ralph: QUIT! QUIT! For God's sake, QUIT!

2004-07-10T17:16:00.000-07:00

Ralph, Ralph, Ralph -- pleeeeze . . . we're begging you: QUIT. GET OUT. Your numbers no longer help the Green party (they have a different candidate). Kerry is the most liberal major party candidate since McGovern; Edwards is the most liberal VP candidate since -- who? Ferraro?

In any case, for God's sake -- four or five Supreme Court justices are freakin' DECREPIT. PLEEEEZE RALPH!! PLEEEEZE!

Based on the current polls and general error margins, these are the ten -- count 'em, TEN --states where Nader IS a factor, meaning he could LOSE the state for Kerry (note: I do not know where he is or isn't on the ballot):

Ark 6
Col 9
Iow 7
Maine 4
Minn 10
Missouri 11
Nev 5
NH 4
Penn 21
Wash 11

Total: 88 electoral votes

These are the five states where Nader MIGHT BE a factor:

NJ 15
NMex 5
Ore 7
WVirg 5
Wisc 10

Total: 42 electoral votes

That's 130 in all; given that Kerry has 153 wrapped up, were Nader to drop out Kerry would be a sure thing (i.e., even if he lost a couple of the Nader-factor states) unless Bush ran the board in the 7 remaining non-Nader states (out of 22 total, including those above) that are in play.

See the earlier post from today for more details.

2004-07-10T03:54:00.000-07:00

The thirteen percent arbitrary line I've drawn.

There's just under four months till the election. Let's do a reality check.

It's 153-144 Kerry over Bush, for certain -- the rest of the votes are in 22 possible (if not probable) toss-up states.

That means the real election consists of 241 electoral votes; to tie, Kerry needs 116; to tie, Bush needs 125.

Giving Kerry 3/4 of Nader's percentage and Bush 1/4, 29 states show a candidate at least 13 percent ahead [in either a) the most recent poll, or b) if there have been no polls in the state, the last election, as shown with an asterisk]:

These states' electoral votes -- 144, out of 269 needed to tie -- DEFINITELY will go to Bush:

Alab 9
Alas 3
Geor 15
Idah 4
Indi 11
Kans 6
Kent 8
Mississippi 6
Mont 3
Nebr 5*
NDak 3*
Okla 7
SCar 8
SDak 3
Tenn 11
Texa 34
Utah 5
Wyom 3*

These states' electoral votes -- 153, out of 269 needed to tie -- DEFINITELY will go to Kerry:

Cali 55
Conn 7
Dela 3*
DC 3*
Hawa 4*
Illi 21
Mary 10
Mass 12
NY 31
RhIs 4
Verm 3

Accounting for the Nader factor, this means that (as of now) there are 8 true battleground states (9+ electoral votes, and Nader not constituting the margin of error of Bush over Kerry), with 14 more "near-battleground" (9+ votes but Nader not a factor as of now, or 8 or fewer votes and a wider spread):

The 8 are:

Colo 9
Mich 17
Minn 10
Missouri 11
Ohio 20
Penn 21
Virg 13
Wisc 10

= 111 votes

Note the consistency: ALMOST ALL NORTHERN (except Virg, maybe Missouri). ALMOST ALL NON-WESTERN (except Colo, maybe Missouri). MOSTLY RUST-BELT (Mich, Minn, Ohio, Penn, Wisc, maybe Missouri). [THE MYSTERY OF MISSOURI!!]

These are the 8 states to watch -- and to spend money on. In any case, the rust-belt theme may prove interesting in terms of the Michael Moore factor . . . .

For the record, here are the 6 biggest of the other 14, and the leader DISREGARDING Nader:
Bush 9+ electoral: Ariz 10, Loui 9, NCar 15 = 34.
Kerry 9+ electoral: Fla 27, NewJ 15, Wash 11 = 53.

And . . . The remaining 8 = 43 electoral votes total.

2004-07-10T03:12:00.000-07:00

From Jim Hightower:

July 09, 2004 BUSH'S PROSPERITY

What's wrong with you people? Don't you know that the economy is humming, that our very own president has declared "mission accomplished" on his promise of prosperity, that the stock market is up by 40 percent over last year, that jobs are cropping up like crabgrass, that the bluebird of happiness is officially singing everywhere across our land, and that you should be grateful, for godssake?

Republican politicians, corporate economists, and the media barons are totally befuddled these days, because their economic statistics tell them that the economy is in great shape––yet you, you wretches, are still grumpy, even giving Bush the lowest marks of his presidency for his economic stewardship. George himself has gone into one of his high-pitched whines, chastising those who "can't see the sunshine."

He's sounding a whole lot like his daddy did back in '92 – like he's just another rich son-of-a-Bush who is totally oblivious to the realities of Americas workaday majority. He's looking at rosy economic indicators handed to him by his political operatives, rather than looking at such real-life pocketbook indicators as jobs that only pay poverty wages, gasoline topping $2 a gallon, milk at $4.43 a gallon, health-care costs rising three times faster than wages, and 401(k)s being shrunk to 1(k)s.

Also with their heads in the clouds are such media powers as the New York Times, which recently bemoaned the public's economic gloom, referring to it as a "mood." A mood? Your job's being downsized or offshored, your kids can't afford to go to college, Bush is trying to cut your Social Security benefits and raise your retirement age to 70––and they think you're moody?

Meanwhile, a clueless Republican Senator, Jim Talent of Missouri, blithely says that prosperity is everywhere, but "It just takes awhile longer for that to filter through to folks."

Filter this, senator: We'll believe the economy is humming when we are.

2004-07-10T03:03:00.000-07:00

Remember Saddam's statue "toppling"? (no other verb is allowed in our free press):

From the LA Times (courtesy of Common Dreams (see link)):

The Army's internal study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last year produced the most memorable image of the invasion.

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.

After the colonel — who was not named in the report — selected the statue as a "target of opportunity," the psychological team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to an account by a unit member.

But Marines had draped an American flag over the statue's face.

"God bless them, but we were thinking … that this was just bad news," the member of the psychological unit said. "We didn't want to look like an occupation force, and some of the Iraqis were saying, 'No, we want an Iraqi flag!' "

Someone produced an Iraqi flag, and a sergeant in the psychological operations unit quickly replaced the American flag.

2004-07-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

Last week, correspondent Unknown directed our attention to this underreported story (courtesy of, get this, Variety):

Sounds of Silence Jun 30 by Pamela McClintock

NEW YORK -- U.S. news networks agreed to let the American military censor out certain images of Saddam Hussein's court hearing Thursday in Baghdad, one in a bizarre series of events surrounding coverage of the session.

American and Iraqi officials did not want any footage shown of Iraqi guards or court personnel, and they asked broadcast and cable news nets to honor this request.

But the situation took an unexpected turn even before the hearing began, when U.S. officials ordered CNN and Al-Jazeera, the pool camera crews, to disconnect their audio equipment. Officials said it was the wish of the Iraqi judge.

Following the hearing, the CNN footage was taken to the convention center, where a CBS News employee transmitted the footage after it was viewed and okayed by two military censors.

As the silent footage of Hussein began to air on U.S. networks around 8:30 a.m. ET, CBS News anchor Dan Rather explained that the tapes had been "taken to another location, edited, and what you're seeing is in effect a censored version" of what happened in court earlier today. . . ."

Throughout the day, several news net[work]s said it wasn't always clear which footage was from what source, and that it could have been DOD footage, meaning the Pentagon was directly controlling what was being heard.

The two U.S. military officials watching over the CNN footage being transmission ordered that some of the ambient sound be muted. . . .

Some news editors spent hours scouring the portion of the tape with audio for harsh words leveled at President Bush (news - web sites) by Saddam, but could not find the quote reported by New York Times reporter John Burns, who was the pool print reporter in the courtroom and accompanied by a translator. Burns reported that Saddam said, "Everyone knows that this is a theatrical comedy by Bush, the criminal, in an attempt to win the election." . . .

The Pentagon could not be reached for comment as to why it didn't want any audio, or why it allowed some of the sound.

2004-07-09T02:27:00.000-07:00

The script for the first two parts of Moore's F911 are, as of today, available here (part one) and here (part two).

2004-07-08T06:11:00.000-07:00

A happy 64th birthday to Ringo Starr.

Hmmmm... I wonder what song will be played -- all day -- everywhere -- today? (Hint: Paul wrote it; it's on Sgt. Pepper.)

2004-07-08T02:20:00.000-07:00

Since first reading his blog, I've always suspected that Eugene Volokh was not to be taken seriously. Now I have proof.

[Eugene Volokh, June 28, 2004 at 8:14pm] Litigation as an enemy military tactic:
I've blogged below about one aspect of the Guantanamo detainees case; but here's the bigger picture: Say that we're fighting a World War II-like war, but against insurgent forces in various allied countries, and not against national governments. (You'll see in a moment why this proviso is important). We capture 50,000 alleged enemy soldiers, partly because some of the enemy forces have surrendered en masse; apparently we had captured millions that way towards the end of World War II. The allied countries don't have strong enough militaries to effectively detain these people themselves (think France in early 1945), so we detain them instead. This is actually quite normal for large-scale wars, consider again World War II, except that the war is a modern war against insurgents and not a traditional war against governments.

Now, the detainees file 50,000 petitions for habeas corpus, all claiming that they aren't actually enemy soldiers. This means civilian courts would have to process all those cases, and the military would have to respond to all the petitions, and get affidavits or even live testimony from various soldiers in the field whose testimony is relevant for this purpose.

2004-07-08T01:35:00.000-07:00

According to the polls, as of now it's Kerry over Prez BU**SH** 280-247 -- with 11 electoral votes (Washington) too close to call.

But if Edwards swings his home state, that makes it: 295-232. Pretty good odds.

So ... guess what? Cheney's gone. Bush will pick a woman. That will secure Wisconsin and pick up Ohio, Michigan, Washington, and Maine -- and maybe Minnesota, Florida, and Nevada (BU**SH** 322-216).

Some Republican woman in America will be VP in six-plus months. Who?

2004-07-07T23:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a stat you hear way too much about on TV: "one in four U.S. Marines surveyed reported killing Iraqi civilians." Oh, wait -- did I say "too MUCH"? My bad.

July 1, 2004

Soldier mental illness hits Vietnam levels: Many returning troops suffer combat-related afflictions

By RAJA MISHRA, THE BOSTON GLOBE

Nearly one in five U.S. combat troops returning from war-torn Iraq suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression or other serious mental afflictions, according to new data detailing the psychic costs of the bloodiest war in a generation.

A study conducted by the U.S. Army shows that combat-related mental problems have been higher among those who have served in Iraq than in any military action since Vietnam.

It also paints the first broad statistical picture of the battlefield horrors encountered by the American combatants on the front lines in Iraq. For instance, one in four U.S. Marines surveyed reported killing Iraqi civilians. About one in five Army members surveyed reported engaging in hand-to-hand combat. More than 85 percent of those in Marine or Army combat units said they knew someone who had been injured or killed. More than half said they had handled corpses or human remains. The figures were based on soldiers' responses; the military does not have statistics available to confirm them....

With more than 800 U.S. soldiers killed and more than 5,000 wounded, Operation Iraqi Freedom has become the deadliest American military conflict since the Vietnam War, in which some 58,000 Americans died.

.... [N]early half of Iraq veterans reporting mental symptoms said they had trouble scheduling a psychiatric appointment [with the "mental health services provided by the military"].

The mental trauma from the Iraq war appears to be approaching Vietnamlike levels for the 40,000-plus U.S. soldiers in the thick of daily violence, according to the new study.

... The study found that 12 percent to 13 percent of troops returning from Iraq reported PTSD symptoms, and another 3 percent to 4 percent reported other mental distress. By contrast, PTSD estimates for veterans of the first Gulf War range between 2 percent and 10 percent. The rate is about 4 percent in the U.S. adult population. The new Army study found about 11 percent of troops returning from Afghanistan reported symptoms of mental distress.

2004-07-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

What the F##K??

Pentagon investigates whether kidnapping in Iraq is a hoax By Jim Miklaszewski July 07, 2004

The strange disappearance of Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, reportedly kidnapped in Iraq nearly three weeks ago, grows even more mysterious.

Senior Pentagon officials tell NBC News, a man claiming to be Hassoun, called his family in Lebanon and the U.S. embassy in Beirut, saying he was — "released by his kidnappers somewhere in Lebanon" and that he was "waiting to be picked up."

But in Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell said U.S. officials remain in the dark. "We have received reports that he may be in contact with various individuals and there are other reports that he might be in Lebanon. But we cannot confirm any of these at this time," said Powell.

Late Wednesday, FBI agents showed up at the Hassoun family home in West Jordan, Utah. And Pentagon officials tell NBC News that the Navy has now launched a criminal investigation into Hassoun's disappearance, and the possibility that his kidnapping may be part of an elaborate hoax.

Hassoun disappeared from his Marine unit on June 20. He showed up a week later in a hostage-style video, with a sword held over his head and his alleged captors threatening to kill him. Terrorist experts say, however, the group said to have held Hassoun is unknown.

"We don't know whether this group is simply an Internet address. ... We don't know if they were simply fabricated. We have no idea what's going on here," says terrorism expert Steve Emerson.

A second group later claimed Hassoun was beheaded — then retracted that claim. Pending the investigation, military officials refuse to say Hassoun's kidnapping was a hoax, but they point out he had reportedly talked openly about leaving his Marine unit to join his family in Lebanon. Whether he was kidnapped and then released along the way remains a mystery.

2004-07-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

Happy Fourth of July from da man (go to link for his hyperlinks):

Sunday, July 4th, 2004
My First Wild Week with "Fahrenheit 9/11"... By Michael Moore

Friends,

Where do I begin? This past week has knocked me for a loop. "Fahrenheit 9/11," the #1 movie in the country, the largest grossing documentary ever. My head is spinning. Didn't we just lose our distributor 8 weeks ago? Did Karl Rove really fail to stop this? Is Bush packing?

Each day this week I was given a new piece of information from the press that covers Hollywood, and I barely had time to recover from the last tidbit before the next one smacked me upside the head:

** More people saw "Fahrenheit 9/11" in one weekend than all the people who saw "Bowling for Columbine" in 9 months.

** "Fahrenheit 9/11" broke "Rocky III’s" record for the biggest box office opening weekend ever for any film that opened in less than a thousand theaters.

** "Fahrenheit 9/11" beat the opening weekend of "Return of the Jedi."

** "Fahrenheit 9/11" instantly went to #2 on the all-time list for largest per-theater average ever for a film that opened in wide-release.

How can I ever thank all of you who went to see it? These records are mind-blowing. They have sent shock waves through Hollywood – and, more importantly, through the White House.

But it didn't just stop there. The response to the movie then went into the Twilight Zone. Surfing through the dial I landed on the Fox broadcasting network which was airing the NASCAR race live last Sunday to an audience of millions of Americans -- and suddenly the announcers were talking about how NASCAR champ Dale Earnhardt, Jr. took his crew to see “Fahrenheit 9/11” the night before. FOX sportscaster Chris Myers delivered Earnhardt’s review straight out of his mouth and into the heartland of America: “He said hey, it'll be a good bonding experience no matter what your political belief. It's a good thing as an American to go see.” Whoa! NASCAR fans – you can’t go deeper into George Bush territory than that! White House moving vans – START YOUR ENGINES!

Then there was Roger Friedman from the Fox News Channel giving our film an absolutely glowing review, calling it “a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.” Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice surmised that Bush is already considered a goner so Rupert Murdoch might be starting to curry favor with the new administration. I don't know about that, but I’ve never heard a decent word toward me from Fox. So, after I was revived, I wondered if a love note to me from Sean Hannity was next.

How about Letterman’s Top Ten List: “Top Ten George W. Bush Complaints About "Fahrenheit 9/11":

10. That actor who played the President was totally unconvincing

9. It oversimplified the way I stole the election

8. Too many of them fancy college-boy words

7. If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported

6. Didn't have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger

5. Of all Michael Moore's accusations, only 97% are true

4. Not sure - - I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe

3. Where the hell was Spider-man?

2. Couldn't hear most of the movie over Cheney's foul mouth

1. I thought this was supposed to be about dodgeball

But it was the reactions and reports we received from theaters around the country that really sent me over the edge. One theatre manager after another phoned in to say that the movie was getting standing ovations as the credits rolled – in places like Greensboro, NC and Oklahoma City -- and that they were having a hard time clearing the theater afterwards because people were either too stunned or they wanted to sit and talk to their neighbors about what they had just seen. In Trumbull, CT, one woman got up on her seat after the movie and shouted "Let's go have a meeting!" A man in San Francisco took his shoe off and threw it at the screen when Bush appeared at the end. Ladies’ church groups in Tulsa were going to see it, and weeping afterwards.

It was this last group that gave lie to all the yakking pundits who, before the movie opened, declared that only the hard-core "choir" would go to see "Fahrenheit 9/11." They couldn't have been more wrong. Theaters in the Deep South and the Midwest set house records for any film they’d ever shown. Yes, it even sold out in Peoria. And Lubbock, Texas. And Anchorage, Alaska!

Newspaper after newspaper wrote stories in tones of breathless disbelief about people who called themselves “Independents” and “Republicans” walking out of the movie theater shaken and in tears, proclaiming that they could not, in good conscience, vote for George W. Bush. The New York Times wrote of a conservative Republican woman in her 20s in Pensacola, Florida who cried through the film, and told the reporter: “It really makes me question what I feel about the president... it makes me question his motives…”

Newsday reported on a self-described “ardent Bush/Cheney supporter” who went to see the film on Long Island, and his quiet reaction afterwards. He said, "It's really given me pause to think about what's really going on. There was just too much - too much to discount." The man then bought three more tickets for another showing of the film.

The Los Angeles Times found a mother who had “supported [Bush] fiercely” at a theater in Des Peres, Missouri: “Emerging from Michael Moore's ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ her eyes wet, Leslie Hanser said she at last understood…. ‘My emotions are just....’ She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. ‘I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before.’"

All of this had to be the absolute worst news for the White House to wake up to on Monday morning. I guess they were in such a stupor, they "gave" Iraq back to, um, Iraq two days early!

News editors told us that they were being "bombarded" with e-mails and calls from the White House (read: Karl Rove), trying to spin their way out of this mess by attacking it and attacking me. Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett had told the White House press corps that the movie was "outrageously false" -- even though he said he hadn't seen the movie. He later told CNN that "This is a film that doesn't require us to actually view it to know that it's filled with factual inaccuracies." At least they're consistent. They never needed to see a single weapon of mass destruction before sending our kids off to die.

Many news shows were more than eager to buy the White House spin. After all, that is a big part of what "Fahrenheit" is about -- how the lazy, compliant media bought all the lies from the Bush administration about the need to invade Iraq. They took the Kool-Aid offered by the White House and rarely, if ever, did our media ask the hard questions that needed to be asked before the war started.

Because the movie "outs" the mainstream media for their failures and their complicity with the Bush administration -- who can ever forget their incessant, embarrassing cheerleading as the troops went off to war, as though it was all just a game -- the media was not about to let me get away with anything now resembling a cultural phenomenon. On show after show, they went after me with the kind of viciousness you would have hoped they had had for those who were lying about the necessity for invading a sovereign nation that was no threat to us. I don't blame our well-paid celebrity journalists -- they look like a bunch of ass-kissing dopes in my movie, and I guess I'd be pretty mad at me, too. After all, once the NASCAR fans see "Fahrenheit 9/11," will they ever believe a single thing they see on ABC/NBC/CBS news again?

In the next week or so, I will recount my adventures through the media this past month (I will also be posting a full FAQ on my website soon so that you can have all the necessary backup and evidence from the film when you find yourself in heated debate with your conservative brother-in-law!). For now, please know the following: Every single fact I state in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the absolute and irrefutable truth. This movie is perhaps the most thoroughly researched and vetted documentary of our time. No fewer than a dozen people, including three teams of lawyers and the venerable one-time fact-checkers from The New Yorker went through this movie with a fine-tooth comb so that we can make this guarantee to you. Do not let anyone say this or that isn't true. If they say that, they are lying. Let them know that the OPINIONS in the film are mine, and anyone certainly has a right to disagree with them. And the questions I pose in the movie, based on these irrefutable facts, are also mine. And I have a right to ask them. And I will continue to ask them until they are answered.

In closing, let me say that the most heartening response to the film has come from our soldiers and their families. Theaters in military towns across the country reported packed houses. Our troops know the truth. They have seen it first-hand. And many of them could not believe that here was a movie that was TRULY on their side -- the side of bringing them home alive and never sending them into harms way again unless it's the absolute last resort. Please take a moment to read this wonderful story from the daily paper in Fayetteville, NC, where Fort Bragg is located. It broke my heart to read this, the reactions of military families and the comments of an infantryman’s wife publicly backing my movie -- and it gave me the resolve to make sure as many Americans as possible see this film in the coming weeks.

Thank you again, all of you, for your support. Together we did something for the history books. My apologies to "Return of the Jedi." We'll make it up by producing "Return of the Texan to Crawford" in November.

May the farce be with you, but not for long,

Michael Moore www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

P.S. You can read letters from people around the country recounting their own experiences at the theater, and their reactions to the film by going here.

P.P.S. Also, I’m going to start blogging! Tonight! Come on over and check it out.

2004-07-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

A story the mainstream media will bring to critical mass in five or ten years . . .:

News machine outfoxed by bloggers July 2, 2004 by Paul Carr.

Last month, the Boston affiliate of America's Fox TV network ran a news item about a new craze sweeping cyber space. It turns out that all over America young people are creating websites full of information about their daily lives.

Or, as Fox's breathless reporter put it, "to catalogue the details of their lives on web pages created for them, by them ... just blah-blah-blogging".

Incredible. I wonder what burgeoning technological trend Rupert Murdoch's news machine will uncover next? Mobile tar-tar-telephony? The rah-rah-radio? Far-far-fire? The devil may have the best tunes but it'll be a long time before he works out how to upload them to his aye-aye-iPod.

Fortunately in most other sections of the media, attitudes towards blogging - and online journalism in general - couldn't be more different. Not only are news organisations rolling out blogs of their own, but in the past year the influence of bloggers over their print, television and radio counterparts has grown massively.

Consider a decision made by organisers of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston next month. So keen are they to get their message through to the people of Blogistan that for the first time they have issued press accreditation to political bloggers.

Just try to imagine any major political organisation recognising blogs in the same way this time last year and you'll realise how far bloggers have gone up in the estimation of those in power. Or, in the case of the DNC, those who will probably be in power next year, voter fraud notwithstanding.

An even more impressive example of how web journalism has started to influence the mainstream media comes from the US's newest radio network, Air America Radio. The New York-based station was set up as a liberal challenge to the dominance of right-wing talk radio in the US.

Through affiliates in cities from New York to Honolulu, angry liberal voices such as Al Franken, author of the anti-Bush bible Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Hollywood's Janeane Garofalo are taking on right-wing blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly.

But unlike Limbaugh and O'Reilly, who frequently replace research and reason with rage and rhetoric, Air America's hosts are armed to the teeth with hard, up-to-the second facts to support their relentless Bush bashing. Their sources? Blogs. And the blogging bloggers who blog them. . . .

[more at link]

2004-07-01T03:33:00.000-07:00

From the Onion (40:25):

Coalition: Vast Majority Of Iraqis Still Alive
BAGHDAD—As the Coalition Provisional Authority prepares to hand power over to an Iraqi-led interim government on June 30, CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer publicly touted the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"As the Coalition's rule draws to a close, the numbers show that we have an awful lot to be proud of," Bremer said Tuesday. "As anyone who's taken a minute and actually looked at the figures can tell you, the vast majority of Iraqis are still alive—as many as 99 percent. While 10,000 or so Iraqi civilians have been killed, pretty much everyone is not dead."

According to U.S. Department of Defense statistics, of the approximately 24 million Iraqis who were not killed, nearly all are not in a military prison. Bremer said "a good number" of those Iraqis who are in jail have been charged with a crime, and most of them have enjoyed a prison stay free of guard-dog attacks, low-watt electrocutions, and sexual humiliation.

U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt explained the coalition's accomplishments in geographical terms.

"There are vast sections of the country where one can go outside unarmed during the daylight hours," Kimmitt said, speaking from a heavily guarded base outside of Baghdad. "Even in cities where fighting has occurred, many neighborhoods have not been torn apart by gunfire. And, throughout the country, more towns than I could name off the top of my head have never been touched by a bomb at all."

Kimmitt said the bulk of the nation's public buildings are still standing.

2004-07-01T01:43:00.000-07:00

Remember "trope"?

It was a lit-crit term in the 80s . . . just as "PC" was (yes, it's true) a left-wing term, used by US disparagingly.

Tonight on the O'Reilly Fuck-up, Tony "Brit Hume" Snow referred to "The Bush-is-a-liar trope."

Wow.

Snow also said that Michael Moore 451 will not win over the red states. Or doesn't represent them. Or something. It had something to do with how irrelevant the movie is and, um, the red states, or how irrelevant the movie is, um, in regard to the red states, or something.

But now, with the help of the Tony-Snow-is-an-80s-structuralist-trope, let's reflect upon the red-states-are-anti-Moore trope . . .

After all, it only takes one Scalia or Thomas voting in Florida to swing the election . . .

Obviously, the talking points are being circulated, as evidenced by this "all the banality that's fit to print" piece:

Calling Bush a Liar By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF June 30, 2004

So is President Bush a liar?

Plenty of Americans think so. Bookshops are filled with titles about Mr. Bush like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," "Big Lies," "Thieves in High Places" and "The Lies of George W. Bush."

A consensus is emerging on the left that Mr. Bush is fundamentally dishonest, perhaps even evil — a nut, yes, but mostly a liar and a schemer. That view is at the heart of Michael Moore's scathing new documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

In the 1990's, nothing made conservatives look more petty and simple-minded than their demonization of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were even accused of spending their spare time killing Vince Foster and others. Mr. Clinton, in other words, left the right wing addled. Now Mr. Bush is doing the same to the left. For example, Mr. Moore hints that the real reason Mr. Bush invaded Afghanistan was to give his cronies a chance to profit by building an oil pipeline there. . . .

[warning from Anonymous: in the next paragraph, you'll encounter "polarizes" and "polarization" -- those ominous dead-heat-call-in-the-Supremes-trope words, which we dislike so much when we know what's right for people to be thinking and talking about, like Herr Kristof]

I'm against the "liar" label for two reasons. First, it further polarizes the political cesspool, and this polarization is making America increasingly difficult to govern. Second, insults and rage impede understanding.

First, I want to say that I've been worried about this terrible polarization, and all its incivility, since 1800's dead heat between mud-throwing Tom Jefferson and shit-slinging Aaron Burr (with muck-raking Alex Hamilton in the shadowy background).

Second, note the implication: IT IS SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE THAT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S FOREIGN POLICY HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH PIPELINES.

That's the Bush-is-not-an-easily-predictable-and-very-typical-and-common-imperialist trope, which, come to think of it, is a trope-on-the-trope of a similar trope applied, in its time, to Jefferson, Polk, McKinley, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon . . . oh, what the hell -- let's mention Eisenhower, too (NO! IT CAN'T BE! We (they?) LIBERATED Iran! The Shah said so!).

It makes you really regret being alive, having a brain, and living here and now. So much better to go back to sleep. But that would be the Tony-Snow-is-a-sleeping-imperialist trope. We don't want that.

2004-07-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogpost.com linked to a story about Sun Myung Moon's faux coronation among various federally elected representatives. Now I can't find that entry, and I think it may have disappeared in a mid-March blogosphere catastrophe. In any case, now, three-plus months later, Salon [requires clicking through an ad] brings us up to date:

By John Gorenfeld June 21, 2004
You probably imagine your congressman hard at work in the Capitol debating legislation, making laws -- you know, governing. But your newspaper probably didn't tell you that one night in March, members of Congress hosted a crowning ritual for an ex-convict and multibillionaire who dressed up in maroon robes and declared himself the Second Coming.

On March 23, the Dirksen Senate Office Building was the scene of a coronation ceremony for Rev. Sun Myung Moon, owner of the conservative Washington Times newspaper and UPI wire service . . . .

2004-06-29T04:07:00.000-07:00

Our Constitution at work (you have the right to plausible deniability):

Thursday, June 24, 2004 -- U.S. moves to classify Guantanamo abuse suit documents -- Action pre-empts judge's expected ruling to unseal papers -- By PAUL SHUKOVSKY -- SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Thanks again to Seriously Though.

2004-06-29T04:03:00.000-07:00

Why Ray Bradbury's pissed (with respect to the silliness published recently by Ms. Althouse):

Political cartoon of the week

Thanks to Seriously Though.

2004-06-29T03:34:00.000-07:00

From my old pal (I mean that figuratively --- loved the guy back in the 80s, never met or contacted him) Bill Grieder [note: they're his "quote-unquote" marks]:

"Embedded Patriots"
June 24, 2004
The most intriguing story in Washington these days is a subterranean conflict that reporters cannot cover because some of them are involved. A potent guerrilla insurgency has formed in and around the Bush presidency -- a revolt of old pros in government who strike from the shadows with devastating effect. They tell the truth. They explode big lies. They provide documentary evidence that undermines popular confidence in the Commander in Chief. They prod the media and the political community to ask penetrating questions of the Bush regime. Doubtless, these anonymous sources act from a mixture of motives -- some noble, some self-interested -- but in present circumstances one might think of them as "embedded patriots."

2004-06-29T03:26:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from Noam Chomsky's blog:

. . . a few weeks ago, the national press reported the release of Nixon-Kissinger interchanges (over Kissinger's strong objections). The report noted in passing that Kissinger, always the obedient bureaucrat, transmitted Nixon's orders to bomb Cambodia with the words: "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves."

I cannot think of a comparable call for extraordinary war crimes. If someone were to unearth a document in which Milosevic orders the Serbian air force to reduce Bosnia or Kosovo to rubble with the words "Anything that flies on anything that moves" -- or even something remotely approaching it -- the prosecutors would be overjoyed, the trial would end, and Milosevic would be sent off to many successive life sentences for the crime of genocide, a death sentence if the Tribunal followed US conventions. In this case, after casual mention in the world's leading newspaper, there was no detectable interest, even though the horrendous consequences are well-known.

2004-06-29T03:08:00.000-07:00

The " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'recovery' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' ":

Think Again: On the Economy, Listen To The Voters by Bill Scher
June 24, 2004

On Sunday, the New York Times suggested that Americans aren't as optimistic about the economy as they should be.

"After enduring three years of a deteriorating job market and one economic false start after another, Americans finally have reason to think that the long slump of the early 21st century has ended. Employers are hiring again. The stock market has risen more than 40 percent since early last year.

"And how have the American people celebrated? By becoming a lot grumpier about the economy."

That was just the latest of a series of mainstream press reports pushing a conservative message that George Bush's economy is doing better than people think.

And in many cases instead of exploring what legitimate reasons voters may have for being dissatisfied, reporters are assuming voters are too focused on Iraq or simply reluctant to believe the good news. Take a look at this unbroken chorus:

For example, on June 5, the San Francisco Chronicle reported:

A string of very strong job growth numbers -- totaling nearly 1 million in just the last three months -- appears to be sustainable through November, but hasn't broken through the bad news from Iraq to give the expected lift to President Bush's re-election campaign, economists and political analysts said."

The June 10 Washington Post put a sharper point on it:

"The nation's economy is growing smartly, wages have begun to rise, and employers have added more than 1.4 million jobs to their payrolls in the past nine months. Yet voters continue to give President Bush poor ratings on his handling of the economy.

"It may sound baffling but interviews with voters, pollsters and economists suggest Bush's stubborn difficulties on domestic policy boil down to an obvious problem abroad."

The next day, the Associated Press made the same case:

"The U.S. economy has gained about 1.2 million jobs in the last six months, but word hasn't trickled down to most Americans, according to voters in a survey by The Associated Press.

"They're too focused on the war in Iraq and other news - and too busy trying to make ends meet - to notice the upbeat economic development. Few voters seem to be giving President Bush credit for the new jobs or other signs of recovery."

And on June 14, CNN political analyst Bill Schneider chimed in:

"Here's a little secret: the nation's economy is actually doing very well. President Bush has been trying to spread the word…the administration's projection of 2.6 million new jobs this year, a figure that was widely ridiculed a few months ago, now looks too low. Are happy times here again? Not if you ask the people who matter, the voters…There's always a time lag between statistics and perceptions."

These mainstream outlets that point the finger at voters' skepticism are picking up an argument pushed by some conservatives who want people to think the current state of Bush's economy is worth getting excited about.

Yet what is receiving almost no attention from those pontificating on the economy is the nature of the growth they so admire. In fact, it demonstrates a massive growth discrepancy between corporate profits and wages. As the Economic Policy Institute calculated last month, corporate profits have grown by 62 percent since the first quarter of 2001, but "labor compensation" -- which includes paychecks and benefits -- grew only 2.8 percent, and "private wage and salary income" fell by 0.6 percent.

In turn, the EPI study concludes:

"Most of this growth in total labor compensation has been accounted for by rising non-wage payments, like health care and pension benefits. Rapidly rising health care costs and pension funding requirements imply that these higher benefit payments are not translating into increased living standards for workers, but are rather just covering the higher costs of health care and pension funding."

Other recent confirm the view that living standards are not improving and may even be declining. This week, Bloomberg reported:

"A 2.2 percent rise in wages in the 12 months through May has been more than offset by a 3.1 percent gain in consumer prices. It's unlikely that employees will get raises that outpace inflation over the next five to 10 years, said William A. Niskanen, former acting chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the Ronald Reagan administration.… Niskanen and other economists cite global competition, which forces companies to keep costs down, shrinking union clout and continuing slack in a labor market…"

Doesn't the recent job growth count for anything? Well, not as much as might appear. Not only does the economy still suffer from a net job loss during Bush's term, but many of the new jobs pay less than the lost jobs. As the AFL-CIO data demonstrates, the top five job-creating industries since August offer average wages ranging from $8.20 to $18.58, while the average for the top five job-losing industries range from $14.69 to $21.29.

Furthermore, as the Los Angeles Times reported, 28.5 percent of the newly created jobs were filled by noncitizens, according to a Pew Hispanic Center report released this month. That doesn't just reduce the electoral benefit for Bush; it also provides additional evidence of how low-paying many of the new jobs are. . . .

2004-06-29T02:54:00.000-07:00

November 1980: Reagan elected

December 1980: John Lennon shot and killed

Of course, Lennon was instantly irrelevant and Reagan won the Cold War.

Or maybe not:

An irony worth noting is that much credit for winning the Cold War should go to the people Reagan so disliked as governor of California -- the hippies, the anti-Vietnam War protesters and counter-culture figures who in the 1960s produced the music, ideas and ethos of non-conformism that appealed to the educated youth suffocating in the communist world. Those who had the most access to the West, including the children of elite apparatchiki or professionals, found themselves drawn more to Lennon than Lenin, more to Mick than Marx.

Just ask Pavel Palazchenko, the bald, mustachioed interpreter who stood between Reagan and Gorbachev whenever they met. In the 1960s, he studied at the elite Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, where, he recalls in a wise, little-noticed 1997 memoir, the "stupidity of the official ideology was not even funny." For relief, he and his fellow students "scraped enough [money] together for parties with girls and a lot of drinking (vodka was cheap in those days). And we had the Beatles," he said.

"We knew their songs by heart. . . . To the Beatles, even more than to my teacher of phonetics, I owe my accent. But I and my . . . contemporaries owe them something else too. In the dusky years of the Brezhnev regime [1964-1982] they were not only a source of musical relief. They helped us create a world of our own, a world different from the dull and senseless ideological liturgy that increasingly reminded one of Stalinism. . . . I believe that only some of us in those years drew inspiration from [dissident physicist] Andrei Sakharov, for we had not yet matured enough to understand his vision. But the Beatles were our quiet way of rejecting 'the system' while conforming to most of its demands."

Not all Soviet leaders were oblivious to these subversive influences. In December 1980, the month after Reagan's election, KGB chief Andropov circulated a confidential memorandum to the Central Committee. It wasn't about the president-elect, but about the murder of John Lennon that month. Andropov reported that "in many of Moscow's establishments of higher education," anonymous posters had appeared to organize a demonstration in memory of the ex-Beatle. "The KGB has taken the necessary measures to identify the instigators of this gathering and is in control of the situation," Andropov assured the party elite.

2004-06-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

In 2000, it was an electoral college dead-heat. But then . . .

Remember how 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING?

Yeah, right.

[Note for future clicks on that site: as of today, it's 269 apiece . . .]

2004-06-29T02:44:00.000-07:00

From the NYT:

Market research leading up to the weekend had shown that the documentary would rank second or third at the box office after the two mainstream comedies. But "White Chicks" took in $19.6 million for the weekend on 2,726 screens, while "DodgeBall" took in $18.5 million on 3,020. "Fahrenheit 9/11," rated R, was released on 868 screens.

And . . .

"The biggest news to me this morning is this is a red-state movie," he said, referring to the state whose residents voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. "Republican states are embracing the movie, and it's sold out in Republican strongholds all over the country."

And . . .

Theater owners in large cities and smaller towns reported sellout crowds over the weekend, with numerous theaters declaring house records.

2004-06-29T02:39:00.000-07:00

I love this part of the Salon story (requires watching ads for a day-pass) about the jerks trying to pressure theaters not to show F911:

MAF vice-chair Morgan blames the deep pockets and international tentacles of financier George Soros for backing MoveOn to support the movie. (The group says it has secured pledges from 109,000 people to see the movie when it opens.) But MAF itself has been dogged by reporting on its ties to conservative power brokers. An investigation by the Web site Whatreallyhappened.com, which snooped around MAF's domain registration info, revealed that it is no ordinary citizen's movement.

The webmasters were careless enough to leave the contact information for the Sacramento public relations firm Russo, Marsh and Rogers. That gave away the fact that the supposedly grass-roots Web site was the creation of one Douglas Lorenz. A Russo employee, Lorenz was the information-technology guy for Bill Simon, the candidate too conservative to beat ultra-unpopular then-Gov. Gray Davis in 2000. He's listed on the DefendReagan.org Web site (which rallied the fight against CBS's Reagan movie last year) as the "grassroots coordinator," apparently foreshadowing his role in creating the faux-grass-roots Move America Forward Web site. "Doug has been very active in developing volunteer political organizations," his bio says, "and utilizing advanced technologies to extend their reach." (Lorenz did not reply to Salon's request for an interview.) The P.R. firm's namesake, Sal Russo, was chief strategist of the Recall Gray Davis committee, and the firm itself has Republican ties that run far and deep.

2004-06-25T01:34:00.000-07:00

More than one percent fewer per every two days. At this rate, nobody will support the invasion by November . . .

Poll: Sending troops to Iraq a mistake
Thursday, June 24, 2004

For the first time since the start of the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans say the United States made a mistake in sending troops to that country, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday.

Fifty-four percent of those polled said it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq, compared with 41 percent who expressed that sentiment in early June [note from Anonymous: that's 23 or fewer days ago . . .].

Most poll respondents, 55 percent, also said they don't believe the war has made the United States safer from terrorism -- rejecting an argument that President Bush has repeatedly advanced in his rationale for the war. . . .

The poll, based on interviews with 1,005 Americans -- including 521 likely voters -- was conducted by telephone June 21-23. The margin of error varied by question, from a low of 3 percentage points to 4.5 percentage points.

2004-06-25T01:09:00.000-07:00

If you're over the age of 40, you remember when you thought this sort of thing wasn't (officially) OK in America. But now we accept everything. After all, there's a war on -- right? One that will last forever (or at least until there aren't any more terrorists, which should happen, at the outside, in a few years, um, I think).

Cops can demand ID, high court rules
The Associated Press June 21, 2004

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people do not have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police their names.

The 5-4 decision frees the government to arrest and punish people who won’t cooperate by revealing their identity.

The decision was a defeat for privacy rights advocates who argued that the government could use this power to force people who have done nothing wrong to submit to fingerprinting or divulge more personal information.

Police, meanwhile, had argued that identification requests are a routine part of detective work, including efforts to get information about terrorists.

The justices upheld a Nevada cattle rancher’s misdemeanor conviction. He was arrested after he told a deputy that he didn’t have to reveal his name or show an ID during an encounter on a rural road in 2000.

2004-06-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

A revelatory quote from OUR PRESIDENT on Arianna Huffington's Blog:

In his March 21, 2003 letters to the House and Senate justifying the war against Iraq, the President wrote:

"I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

2004-06-24T04:43:00.000-07:00

More blissful (and, of course, fond -- and appreciative -- and belovedistical) memories of when America was STANDING TALL:

Reagan was the Butcher of My People
By Fr. MIQUEL D'ESCOTO
as told to Democracy Now!

Editors' Note: Fr. Miguel D'Escoto is a Catholic priest in Managua, Nicaragua. He was Nicaragua's Foreign Minister under the Sandinista government of the 1980s, when the US was arming and supporting the Contra death squads. Ronald Reagan said of the Contras: "They are our brothers, these freedom fighters and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers." The following text is drawn from an interview with Fr. D'Escoto on the national radio/TV show Democracy Now!

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA

First of all, let me start out by saying that, of course, Reagan is now dead. And I, for one, would like to say only nice things about him. I'm not insensitive to the feelings of many U.S. people mourning President Reagan, but as I pray that God in his infinite mercy and goodness forgives him for having been the butcher of my people, for having been responsible for the deaths of some 50,000 Nicaraguans, we cannot, we should not, ever forget the crimes he committed in the name of what he falsely labeled "freedom and democracy."

More perhaps than any other U.S. President, Reagan convinced many around the world that the U.S. is a fraud, a big lie. Not only was it not democratic, but, in fact, the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples. Reagan was known as the "great communicator" and I believe that that is true only if one believes that to be a great communicator means to be a good liar. That he was for sure. He could proclaim the biggest lies without even as much as blinking an eyelash. Hearing him talk about how we were supposedly persecuting Jews and burning down non-existent synagogues, I was led to believe really, that Reagan was possessed by demons. Frankly, I do believe Reagan at that time as much as Bush today was indeed possessed by the demons of manifest destiny.

Of course, as I say this, I'm quite aware that to the people of the Project for a New American Century, that is counted as a big loss. Because of Reagan and his spiritual heir George W. Bush, the world today is far less safe and secure than it has ever been. Reagan in fact was an international outlaw. He came to the Presidency of the United States shortly after Somoza, a Dictator that the U.S. had imposed over Nicaragua for practically half a century; had been deposed by Nicaraguan Nationalists under the leadership of the Sandinista Liberation Front. To Reagan, Nicaragua had to be re-conquered. He blamed Carter for having lost Nicaragua, as if Nicaragua ever belonged to anyone else other than the Nicaraguan people. That was then the beginning of this war that Reagan invented, and mounted and financed and directed: the Contra War. About which he continually lied to the People, helping the United States people to be the most ignorant people around the world. I said ignorant, I don't say not intelligent. But the most ignorant people around the world about what the United States does abroad.

People don't even begin to see -- if they did, they would rebel. And so, he lied to the people, as Bush lies to the people today and as they push on, thinking that the United States is above every law, human or divine. And we took the United States, Reagan's United States, his government to court, the World Court. I was Foreign Minister at that time here in Nicaragua. I was responsible for that. And the United States government received the harshest sentence, the harshest condemnation ever in the history of world justice. In spite of the fact that the United States since the early 1920's has been proclaiming to the world that one of the proofs of its moral superiority as compared to other countries around the world is the fact that it abides by the international law and was obedient to the world court when the United States was brought to the world court in Nicaragua and received the condemnation that the United States failed to heed the sentence and they till owe Nicaragua by now must be between 20,000 and $30,000 million at the time when we left government that the damages caused by that Reagan war was over $17 billion, and this, according to very moderate estimators of damage, people from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, people from Howard University and from Oxford and from the University of Paris basically this is the team that was pulled together to estimate the damage. The United States was ordered to pay for the damage. Bush never even wanted to talk to me about it. I said, "Well, let's have a meeting so that you comply with your sentence of the court." He said to me in two different letters that there was nothing to talk about.

So, Reagan did damage to Nicaragua beyond the imaginations of the people who are hearing me now. The ripple effects of that criminal murderous intervention in my country will go on for 50 years or more.

[Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicated radio/TV program broadcast on more than 220 stations. www.democracynow.org]

2004-06-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

From a sweet lady at a message board:

Bill Richardson for Vice-President

I would like to propose John Kerry choose Bill Richardson for his running mate. I sent an email to the Kerry campaign yesterday saying just that. I think we, the people, must promote a peacemaker to try to repair the damage done by Bush--and I think Bill Richardson is that peacemaker.

Bill Richardson is an American-born Latino (his mother is Mexican and his father is Anglo-American) who speaks three languages fluently. He has impeccable political credentials and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times!

Richardson graduated from Tufts University and received an MA from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His first foray into politics was his election to Congress as a representative of New Mexico where he served with distinction for 15 years.

In 1997, he was nominated to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. His service took him to some of the most dangerous places in the world, including Iraq, North Korea and the Sudan. He has already successfully negotiated with many of the powers Bush termed, "The axis of evil." Here is a list of just a few of his diplomatic accomplishments:

He persuaded Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to release two Americans imprisoned in Baghdad after they wandered into Iraq (while lost in the Kuwaiti desert) and were convicted of entering the country illegally. Hussein agreed to release them citing Richardson’s “humanitarian appeal.”

In North Korea, that same year, he helped negotiate the release of a U.S. pilot held by the North Koreans after his helicopter crashed.

In Burma, he was one of a few foreigners allowed to meet with Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi during her prolonged house arrest, and he successfully lobbied for her release.

In Haiti in 1994, with the country on the brink of civil war and 3,000 U.S. Marines waiting off the Haitian coast, he persuaded military dictator Raoul Cedras to surrender power, telling him that as the Chief Deputy Whip in Congress he had enough votes to support a military invasion. As part of the effort to boot Cedras, Richardson met with Joaquin Balaguer, president of neighboring Dominican Republic, to persuade him to stop allowing goods essential to the Cedras regime in violation of UN sanctions.

After meeting with Fidel Castro for five hours, Richardson was successful in persuading the Cuban government to cut in half the $600 fee it charged Cubans to receive U.S. immigration visas.

During a trip to Vietnam he collected more than 100 documents on U.S. servicemen missing in action.

He negotiated a peaceful transfer of power in the former Congo.

He brokered an agreement (after securing a military stand-down) for face-to-face peace talks between the Taliban and opposing factions in Afghanistan.

He secured safe passage for some 7,000 Tajikistan refugees trapped in northern Afghanistan through Uzbekistan.

Closer to home, Richardson was instrumental in passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, even while his own party’s leadership — with its ties to labor and environmental groups — bitterly opposed it.

It is also important to note that Bill Richardson has always enjoyed wide bi-partisan support in Washington. When Clinton appointed him secretary of the Department of Energy, his nomination was unanimously approved. Even Jesse Helms confirmed him and was often heard to say that he respected Richardson (no small praise from Helms!) Richardson’s international activities at the Dept of Energy included negotiating a series of nonproliferation agreements with Russia, agreements made in an effort to keep Russian nuclear intelligence out of the hands of Iraq, North Korea and assorted Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

Did I mention Bill Richardson has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times!?!

After the last election, Richardson went back to his home state and, in 2002, declared his candidacy for the governor of New Mexico. He achieved a substantial victory, by a margin not seen in New Mexico since 1964.

Other things that I think are important include the fact that Bill Richardson is fluent in three languages! Have we ever had a president who was fluent in three languages? I can’t think of one and yet I can see how valuable that would be.

Bill Richardson is known for his sense of humor and his easy-going style. He is an articulate and diplomatic person. On the issues side, he has celebrated American-Indian sovereignty, he regularly attends Peace Prayer Day, he supported the Global Earth Summit and he has signed a number of pro-choice pieces of legislation.

Based on what I know, I think he’d make a great President -- and perhaps the first step toward that is the vice-presidential nomination.

If the people want a peacemaker to lead us, I believe it's up to us to find one and promote him or her ourselves. To that end, I have sent this same suggestion to the Kerry campaign and I intend to float it among my politically active friends as well--a truly grassroots campaign! I encourage other like-minded folks to do the same. It's time we replaced our warriors with peacemakers...

2004-06-24T02:44:00.000-07:00

Well, at first, one is inclined to say . . .

Those craaaaaazy peaceniks in the CIA:

In his book, titled "Imperial Hubris," [the 22-year CIA guy] calls the Iraq invasion "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat,”...

But of course there's no way he doesn't have another agenda (I mean, for chrissakes, in the above-linked article he's talking to the freakin' wife of Alan Greenspan):

The real enemy, he asserts, is the radical form of Islam that bin Laden and his followers espouse. And he calls for escalating the level of violence in the war against al-Qaida.

Sounds like a Hitchenesque guy with an anti-Woolsey flavor . . . if you know what I mean (and I'm sure you do).

Moral: Ignore this story -- it's just the same old ultra-right vs. fascist debate. You realize fascism is wrong, and suddenly somebody from the ultra-right looks great . . . or you realize ANYBODY on the ultr-right is wrong, and suddenly somebody (Hitchens, Woolsey) looks great by comparison, until you remember THEY are on the ultra-right too. Good luck with your assignment, Anonymous.

2004-06-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

How can a major paper publish a list of "The 1,000 Best Movies Ever Made" and NOT include the extraordinary "Easy Rider"*? I mean, I can almost understand leaving it off the Top Ten list -- but not even the top thousand?

[* warning: pop-ups]

2004-06-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to The Lefty Directory for putting us on their blogroll (and continuing thanks to the honorable and good Another Day in Paradise -- our alphabetical-order neighbor -- for the same).

2004-06-23T23:42:00.000-07:00

From Noam Chomsky's blog:

Iraq and Vietnam
Posted by Noam Chomsky at June 22, 2004 07:10 PM

Personally, I don't see much useful analogy between Iraq and Vietnam.

Vietnam was in a remote corner of the world that no one cared about very much, so the US could pound away at it, devastating four countries, with little international protest, and that little mostly about the bombing of the regions in the northern part of north Vietnam, where bombing might have costly repercussions. And even that protest, in the US too, was long delayed.

Iraq, in contrast, is at the heart of the world's major energy reserves, which is why the US invaded in the first place. So anything that happens is likely to have major effects.

Some of these likely consequences are much too little discussed. That includes the reasons why the US simply cannot permit authentic sovereignty and democracy in Iraq. One reason, which gets a little attention, is that an independent and democratic Iraq may well move towards accommodation with Iran. And it might stir up movements towards independence in Shi'te parts of Saudi Arabia nearby -- which happen to include most of the world's major oil reserves. That could possibly even lead to a Shi'ite bloc controlling most of the world's energy. The US would never tolerate that.

Even more serious, and scarcely discussed to my knowledge, is that a free and independent Iraq would presumably assume its natural role as the leading state in the Arab world: huge resources, educated population, virtually approaching first world standards before the wars and sanctions. As such, it would naturally want to counter the regional superpower, by now almost an offshore military base and high-tech adjunct of the US. That means it would rearm, probably also develop WMD to counter Israel's huge WMD capacities and military force, now being enhanced significantly by the Bush administration.

As long as the US and Israel refuse to recognize elementary rights of Palestinians, and persist in vicious repression, the Arab and Muslim worlds will be enflamed, and a free Iraq would become their natural leader. The US will do almost anything to prevent that.

2004-06-23T02:19:00.000-07:00

Anti-Fahrenheit bullshit watch (this should be fun for a few weeks):

June 23rd, 2004
Michael Isikoff and Newsweek Magazine Deceive the Public About Fahrenheit 9/11

In the June 28, 2004 issue of Newsweek Magazine, Newsweek writer Michael Isikoff makes completely false and misleading statements about facts and issues contained in Fahrenheit 9/11. Isikoff has also gone on television shows repeating the charges.

Here are some of the falsehoods he is telling, and the truth:

Saudi Flights: Isikoff writes that "The movie claims that in the days after 9/11, when airspace was shut down, the White House approved special charter flights so that prominent Saudis - including members of the bin Laden family - could leave the country. Author Craig Unger appears, claiming that bin Laden family members were never interviewed by the FBI. Not true, according to a recent report from the 9/11 panel."

Isikoff's account of the movie is flatly untrue.

What the movie says is this: "It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis. At least six private jets and nearly two dozen commercial planes carried the Saudis and the bin Ladens out of the U.S. after September 13th. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country."

These facts are based entirely on the findings contained in the 9/11 commission draft report, which states, "After the airspace reopened, six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin." National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Threats and Responses in 2001, Staff Statement No. 10, The Saudi Flights, p. 12;

Isikoff claims that Fahrenheit 9/11 says that these flights out of the country took place when commercial airplanes were still grounded. The film does not say this anywhere. The film states clearly that these flights left after September 13 (the day the FAA began to slowly lift the ban on air traffic).

Moreover, in an interview with author Craig Unger, the film makes reference to the fact that these individuals were briefly interviewed before they were allowed to leave. Here is how Unger put it in a Letter to the Editor to Newsweek today (June 22, 2004):

To the Editors:

In "Under the Hot Lights," Michael Isikoff attacks Fahrenheit 9/11 by asserting that "Craig Unger appears, claiming that bin Laden family members were never interviewed by the FBI." The article then goes on to say that this assertion is false.

Unfortunately for Isikoff, I make no such statement in the movie. I do argue -- accurately -- that the bin Ladens and other Saudis were whisked out of the country without being subjected to a serious investigation. But the sequence to which Isikoff refers ends with director Michael Moore summing up my account of the bin Laden evacuation by saying, "So a little interview, check the passport, what else?" "Nothing," I respond.

It would be one thing if Isikoff had simply made an honest error; but that clearly is not the case. When he called me, I specifically told Isikoff that the evacuation process involved brief interviews of the bin Ladens which fell far short of the kind of intense criminal investigation that should have gotten underway after the murder of nearly 3,000 people. The worst crime in American history had just taken place two days earlier, and the FBI did not even bother to check the terror watch lists. Isikoff omitted all that. Instead, he put words in my mouth that are simply not in the movie.

Isikoff also wrongly asserts that the Saudi "flights didn't begin until September 14 -- after airspace reopened." In fact, as I reported in House of Bush, House of Saud, the first flight took place on September 13, when restrictions on private planes were still in place. According to the St. Petersburg Times, that flight has since been corroborated by authorities at Tampa International Airport. Isikoff knew all this. I told him. I even gave him the names of two men who were on that flight and told him how to get in touch with them. But Isikoff left all that out as well -- as he did other information that did not suit his agenda. In dismissing the Bush-Saudi ties, Isikoff even omits the fact that more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts went from the House of Saud to companies in which the Bushes and Cheney have been key figures -- all of which is itemized in my book. Isikoff begins his article by asking, "Can Michael Moore be believed?" The real question should be whether Michael Isikoff can be believed. Clearly, the answer is no.

Craig Unger
New York City, NY

(Note: The St. Petersberg Times article to which Unger refers also states, "The 9/11 Commission, which has said the flights out of the United States were handled appropriately by the FBI, appears concerned with the handling of the Tampa flight... Most of the aircraft allowed to fly in U.S. airspace on Sept. 13 were empty airliners being ferried from the airports where they made quick landings on Sept. 11. The reopening of the airspace included paid charter flights, but not private, nonrevenue flights." Jean Heller, TIA now verifies flight of Saudis; The government has long denied that two days after the 9/11 attacks, the three were allowed to fly.
St. Petersburg Times, June 9, 2004.)

2. Carlyle and United Defense. Isikoff writes, "The movie quotes author Dan Briody claiming that the Carlyle Group 'gained' from September 11 because it owned United Defense, a military contractor. Carlyle Group spokesman Chris Ullman notes that United Defense holds a special distinction among U.S. defense contractors that is not mentioned in Moore's movie: the firm's $11 billion Crusader artillery rocket system developed for the U.S. Army is one of the only weapons systems canceled by the Bush administration."

This is completely misleading. The Crusader contract was canceled AFTER UNITED DEFENSE WENT PUBLIC, which is the entire point of the movie.

Here is what the film says: "September 11th guaranteed that United Defense was going to have a very good year. Just 6 weeks after 9-11 Carlyle filed to take United Defense public and in December made a one day profit of $237 million dollars."

This is exactly what happened, to wit:

"On a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries, the Army's fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company public only after the Sept. 11 attacks... On Sept. 26, [2001], the Army signed a $665-million modified contract with United Defense through April 2003 to complete the Crusader's development phase. In October, the company listed the Crusader, and the attacks themselves, as selling points for its stock offering. Mark Fineman, "Arms buildup is a boon to firm run by big guns," Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2002.

"Or its 1997 purchase of United Defense for $ 180 million. Four years later -- just before Rumsfeld canceled its Crusader howitzer program -- Carlyle took United Defense public and sold about half the stock for $ 588 million." Greg Schneider, "Connections and then some," The Washington Post, March 16, 2001

In "Crusader a Boon to Carlyle Group Even if Pentagon Scraps Project," Washington Post's Walter Pincus wrote (May 14, 2002):

Carlyle's financial success with United - and the success of others associated with the Crusader - shows how major Pentagon weapon systems can turn into cash cows. In turn, United's lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions show why they can be so difficult to kill, as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld announced he would try to do with the Crusader last week.

'Carlyle's aggressive approach ...is one reason why the Crusader lived this long,' said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary in the Reagan Pentagon and now director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Even if Rumsfeld's decision stands, Korb said, United still will have received $ 2 billion from the Crusader program and will receive substantially more to close it down.

Still, in its annual report for 2001, United announced that it had been awarded a three-year, $ 697 million contract to complete full upgrading of 389 Bradley units and had added a $ 655 million contract modification to complete the Crusader's "definition and risk-reduction phase contract," which would be worth $ 1.7 billion through 2003. Together, the Crusader and Bradley programs contributed 41 percent of United sales in 2001, the report said.

With Crusader and the Bradley upgrade in hand, a decision was made to sell United stock to the public in late 2001. In preparation, United refinanced the roughly $ 180 million it owed on the original purchase loan, securing a new $ 600 million loan and $ 200 million in revolving credit.

...

After the debt restructuring came the stock offering. The United offering filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission included this boilerplate caveat to potential investors: 'The Carlyle group, our other stockholders and our executive officers will realize substantial benefits from the offering.'

When it took place, in December 2001, Carlyle sold 11 million shares of the 20 million offered at $ 19 a share, receiving a total of about $ 225 million. Even so, Carlyle still owns more than 47 percent of the outstanding United shares and controls United's board of directors.

Also in late 2001, according to SEC filings, Peay and Shalikashvili were paid 'performance' bonuses, though their separate employment contracts filed with the SEC state they only are to serve as directors and receive $ 25,000 annual retainers plus stock options and reimbursed expenses. Peay received $ 160,000, and Shalikashvili $ 102,586, according to a filing with the SEC.

A United spokesman said the generals did no lobbying and that their bonuses were similar to ones given company officers based on "the performance of the company." Neither retired general responded to requests for comment. Korb, who served as a vice president at Northrup, said he had never heard of company directors receiving bonuses based on the performance of the company.

2004-06-19T03:04:00.000-07:00

How very stupid the National Review Online will look for publishing this. In the future. If anyone cares. Which they won't.

2004-06-19T02:32:00.000-07:00