Robert Crook: Kerry-Edwards 2004

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 04:43:32 GMT

Associated Press photo

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts places flowers on the casket of Marine Lance Cpl. Dimitrios Gavriel of Haverhill, Mass., during funeral services yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. Gavriel, who was 29 years old, was killed in action last month outside of Fallujah, Iraq.

"President" George W. Bush has yet to attend a single funeral of the more than 1,250 American military personnel who have died in Iraq since the Bush regime illegally, immorally, imperialistically and unprovokedly invaded Iraq in March 2003 against the wishes of the United Nations and most of the world.

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 22:48:41 GMT

AFP photos

Fox News won't tell you this, but John Kerry, not George W. Bush, might be inaugurated in January after the impending Ohio recount.

The ultimate closer?

Although I've been mostly silent on it, I've been following the aftermath of the Nov. 2 presidential election where the struggle to have Americans', especially Ohioans', votes properly counted is concerned.

Where we stand right now is that the current, unofficial electoral vote count is 286 electoral votes for George W. Bush and 252 for John Kerry. (A presidential candidate needs 270 of the 538 electoral votes to win the White House.) The Nov. 2 election all came down to Ohio, which Bush "won" -- unofficially -- by 136,000 votes. The official vote counts from Ohio's counties are not due to the state until Wednesday, and then there most likely will be a statewide recount of Ohio as the result of a federal lawsuit filed by Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik and Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb.

If Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes, were to be determined to have been won by Kerry, not by Bush, that would change the electoral vote count to 266 for Bush and 272 for Kerry, making Kerry president. (See a detailed analysis of what could happen with Ohio here.)

Kerry is oft-noted for being a closer, for coming back from the dead right at the end of a campaign, as he did in January when he pulled a Lazarus and trounced crown prince Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire for the Democratic presidential nomination.

If Ohio were to switch to Kerry's column and he were to be inaugurated in January, it would be his biggest close of his political career and one for the history books.

So far, the Kerry-Edwards campaign has done nothing to contest the election fraud in Ohio. (I say election fraud because interestingly, the voting irregularities that have been reported in Ohio and elsewhere throughout the nation disproportionately benefit Bush, not Kerry. If they were due solely to incompetence or computer malfunction or the like, there wouldn't be so many "mistakes" in Bush's favor.)

The Kerry-Edwards campaign doesn't have to lift a finger right now where Ohio is concerned, however; others are picking up the swords for them, such as Badnarik and Cobb, with their lawsuit to force a statewide recount; the Government Accountability Office, which is going to investigate voting irregularities that happened nationwide on Nov. 2; and the People for the American Way Foundation, which filed a lawsuit today to ensure that Cuyahoga County, Ohio counts the provisional ballots correctly so that no voter who used a provisional ballot is disenfranchised.

Several other organizations, such as blackboxvoting.org, are also all over Ohio election officials like stink on shit, as is Air America Radio's wonderful Randi Rhodes.

While the corporately controlled mainstream U.S. media aren't reporting it -- because they benefit from the Republican Party's and the BushCheneyCorp's pro-corporation, anti-people policies, and because they hate to report on complicated issues -- there is a below-the-radar groundswell regarding the legitimacy of the Nov. 2 vote, especially in Ohio. It's a zit that is gathering pus and could soon pop.

Many who voted for Kerry think that since Nov. 3 he has been like Al Gore, who pretty much rolled over and played dead in late 2000 while Team Bush, with a lot of help from the U.S. Supreme Court, stole Florida and thus the White House. While I have no insight into what Kerry is actually doing right now, I suspect that he is happily watching others go after Ohio elections officials on his behalf. If Kerry were to be front and center in the effort to ensure that Ohio isn't this year's Florida 2000, he would look like a sore loser. (Remember the "Sore Loserman" campaign that the anti-democratic, anti-vote-counting Republicans ran in late 2000?)

Kerry, I surmise, is wisely staying out of the limelight, watching and waiting, allowing everyone to think that George W. Bush's second term is inevitable, and then...

The strongest public statement that Kerry has made regarding the Nov. 2 election is like this one: "I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It's unacceptable in the United States that people still don't have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process."

That's politically astute; no one can criticize Kerry for calling for fair elections, but if he were to contest Ohio right now, it would be politically damaging. Americans just want their elections over and done with already so that they can get back to their reality television shows; whether or not their elections are actually conducted fairly and legally they aren't so concerned about, because ensuring fair and legal elections is, as Bush would say, hard work. (We Americans have boundless energy and resources, however, to ensure that democracy is practiced scrupulously in other nations, such as Iraq and Ukraine.)

Speaking of Ukraine, interestingly, Republicans, who are up in arms over alleged election fraud in Ukraine, are trying to prevent an Ohio recount.

This is from The Associated Press on Monday:

Keith Cunningham, director of the Allen County Board of Elections and incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, called the lawsuit [filed by Badnarik and Cobb] "frivolous," adding that he might mobilize counties to resist a recount.

"Commissioners are beginning to understand — and if they don't, will understand soon — what kind of financial impact this is going to have on them, in a year when elections already cost a great deal more than expected," said Cunningham, a Republican [emphasis mine].

The two former third-party candidates have said they raised more than $150,000 to cover the state's fee for a recount. Ohio law requires payment of $10 per precinct, or $113,600 statewide, but election officials say the true expense would be far greater.

LoParo has estimated the actual cost at $1.5 million.

I pose these questions to all Republicans: You're perfectly OK with billions and billions of American taxpayers' dollars going to Iraq to "democratize" that poor, beaten-down nation (beaten down first by Saddam Hussein and now beaten down by George W. Bush), but when it comes to ensuring that the democratic process in our own fucking nation is sound, you don't want to spend a fucking penny? And we liberals are the "traitors"? You oppose democracy for your own God-damned nation, and you're the "patriots"? No, you are fucking lucky that those of us who are true patriots let you live, that we fucking tolerate your blatantly anti-democratic bullshit. If we rise up, you are all dead fucking meat. (And you know that, which is why you are committing election fraud.)

I'm not OK with billions of our tax dollars going to "democratize" Iraq while treasonous, anti-democratic, anti-vote-counting Republicans bitch and moan about the cost of ensuring fair elections here at home. Memo to the Republicans: Where it comes to ensuring democracy and fair elections in the United States of America, money is no fucking object. (Of course, it's not really the cost of recounts that bothers Republicans; it's democracy and fair elections that really bother Republicans, and they're just using the cost of recounts as an excuse, because they can't say that they oppose democracy and fair elections.)

But I digress; back to the possibility that Kerry, not Bush, will be inaugurated in January: As much as we Kerry supporters would like to see Kerry sit in the Oval Office in January, it could be a case of be careful what you wish for.

President Kerry would inherit Bush's many messes, foreign and domestic.

President Kerry would be starting off with the largest federal budget deficit in the history of the United States of America, thanks to the war-profiteering Bush regime, which over the past four years wiped out the federal budget surplus that outgoing President Bill Clinton left behind him. So Kerry couldn't exactly start a slew of social programs. And the Bushwhacked economy could take years to ever reach its Clinton-era level again.

President Kerry also, of course, would have the quagmire in Iraq to sort out, which could take years. As one columnist put it after the Nov. 2 election:

...[N]o one appears to have any good ideas for fixing Iraq. In this sense, the Democrats have dodged a bullet ... by losing this election. If Kerry had won, he would have been blamed, given public perceptions of Democratic national security weakness, for the likely failure to secure Iraq. From the get-go, this was Bush's war of choice. It is only fair that he suffer the consequences of his own overreaching. If the Iraq adventure fails, or drags on interminably, he, and not Kerry, will suffer the ugly political fallout. And that is likely to come sooner rather than later. The Democrats will be around in 2008 to pick up the pieces.

Indeed, mopping up the Bush regime's many messes would take years, and the citizens of the United States of Amnesia would blame the lack of national progress on President Kerry, not on Bush, who deserves full credit.

That Republicans want Power By Any Means And At Any Cost might destroy the Republican Party in the long term. If Bush is inaugurated in January, without any checks and balances -- with a Republican in the White House, a Republican-dominated Senate and a Republican-dominated House of Representatives and more Republicans appointed to the federal courts -- things should get so bad in and for the United States over the next four years that in their unbridled power orgy, the Republicans will alienate a clear majority of American voters.

If Bush is inaugurated in January and the Republicans don't destroy the world along with their party during the next four years, the Democrats should win 2008 in a landslide.

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 21:49:04 GMT

Associated Press and AFP photos

Above: Dick Cheney gloatingly shows us today who's really the president of the United States of America; President Bush looks like a village idiot and Laura Bush looks like a Stepford wife, as usual; John Kerry concedes; and John Edwards and Kerry demonstrate today that they still don't have that body space thing down, but they put up a good fight against BushCheneyCorp. Below: The map of the 2004 electoral vote count thus far (Iowa and New Mexico are still undetermined) demonstrates that the crazy dumbfucks in the red states are progressively pushing those of us Americans who are sane and intelligent into Canada and into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

America fails national I.Q. test;

evil triumphs over good (again)

When I went to bed around 3 o'clock this morning, the presidential election was left at 249 of the necessary 270 electoral votes for George W. Bush and 242 electoral votes for John Kerry, with Ohio, the state that would decide the election, up in the air. It could take days or even weeks for them to sort Ohio out, I learned on CNN.

It seemed safe to go to bed, and while I'd wanted resolution, it was better to know while going to bed that the election was still up for grabs than to know that Bush had won "re"-election.

About eight hours later, I awoke to the news that Kerry conceded to Bush today, acknowledging that he can't win Ohio. The numbers right now, according to The Associated Press, are 274 electoral votes for Bush, with Ohio under his belt, and 252 for Kerry, with Iowa's seven and New Mexico's five electoral votes still unassigned to either candidate. The AP also reports that so far in the popular vote, Bush is at 51 percent and Kerry at 48 percent.

My thoughts are swirling about, so I'll just write them as I can catch them:

What will another four years of George W. Bush look like, with a Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate?

Remember the scenes in "The Terminator" movies after the nuclear apocalypse? I can see it coming to that...

The upshot is that President Bush (I guess I don't need to use quotation marks around the word "President" now, since it looks like he finally actually won a presidential election, even if barely) will provide me with a helluva lot more blogging material for the next four years than President Kerry would have.

(But will my radiation burns prevent me from blogging?)

If I hear one former Howard Dean supporter say that Dean would have won, Dean will have himself one fewer former supporter.

Now that the election is over and Kerry no longer needs the Deanies' votes, I can say it: You Deaniacs are/were almost as out of touch with reality as is George W. Bush. You thought that a man with the temperament of a rabid Chihuahua on crack would be appealing to the national electorate? Jesus Fucking Christ.

I might have been able to support Dean had his fairly moderate record as governor of Vermont actually matched his new-found foaming-at-the-mouth liberal rhetoric. And I could never get over the fact that he refused to unseal the records from his governorship of Vermont. We were supposed to just trust him that there was nothing bad in those records.

While Kerry narrowly lost, Dean, had he been nominated, would have lost by a wide, embarrassing margin.

I do credit Dean for bringing millions of people into the political process -- even if they were creepy and clueless and self-centered and resembled cult members -- but I have to wonder how many of them actually voted when their guy didn't win the Democratic presidential nomination. Dean himself, in one of his many foot-in-his-mouth moments, quasi-threatened that if he didn't get the nomination, he couldn't see his supporters supporting another nominee.

Expect more terrorist attacks upon Americans. While many American-haters thus far have given us a break, realizing that the Bush regime stole the 2000 election, they will now see George W. Bush as Americans' choice, even though, according to the count thus far, only 51 percent of Americans chose him.

The Bush regime has a great gig: Make the United States of America hated throughout the world, thus increasing the incidence of terrorist attacks, and then take credit for battling the freedom-hatin', terror-lovin', evildoing terrorists, who, according to the Bush regime's endless propaganda, attack us not because we've done anything wrong -- such as, oh, say, invade and occupy a sovereign Muslim nation that did absolutely nothing to us to warrant said invasion and occupation -- but because they're dyed-in-the-wool freedom-hatin', terror-lovin' evildoers.

As "Fahrenheit 9/11" and many books and articles have pointed out, the Bush dynasty is in bed with the Saudis, the people who spawned 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, yet apparently 51 percent of Americans, who are abject dumbfucks, can't and/or won't see that the Bush regime is creating the very same terrorists from whom it claims to be so valiantly protecting us.

Whatever. Those 51 percent of Americans who are dumbfucks are going to get what they deserve with another four years of the Bush regime's Armageddon-bent policies and practices. (Unfortunately, the rest of us have to endure it, too.)

I don't know if the United States has been more divided since the Civil War. And it's only going to get worse. Bush has acknowledged the division that yesterday's election has demonstrated, today's news reports say, but he is the one who has created it, despite his 2000 campaign promise to be "a uniter, not a divider."

If you think that Bush, with the Senate and the House of Representatives in his AmeriNazi column, is going to work on reaching out to those half of Americans who oppose him, you are one deluded fuck. (Maybe I'll run into you in the concentration camp the AmeriNazis will put us liberals, fags and dykes, sand monkeys, et. al. into and we can discuss this point further.)

Anyway, Bush lost to Al Gore by a half-million votes in 2000 and was installed by the five members of the U.S. Supreme Court who were appointed by Republican candidates, but he and his henchpeople proceeded to treat his 2000 "victory" like a fucking mandate.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that he and the members of his regime will act any differently over the next four years, even though only barely more than half of Americans (apparently) voted for him.

Those touch-screen voting machines: I understand that the conspiracy theories are already circulating about the touch-screen voting machines, which do not produce tangible proof of the voters' votes. Would I be surprised if I were to to learn that the Republicans stole yet another election? Absolutely not.

But as of this writing, I have no proof that that is the case, so, until and unless I have reason to believe otherwise, right now, I consider George W. Bush to have been elected as president of the United States for the first time yesterday, albeit very narrowly.

Am I angry at Kerry for fucking it up?

Not in the least. I'm not angry -- I'm disappointed, of course, but not angry, and I'm not devastated, because although I really thought that Kerry would win, I always knew that Bush might -- and I don't see that Kerry fucked it up.

Kerry gave it his all, and it was an uphill battle from the beginning, trying to unseat an incumbent who for the past three-plus years has fed the American people a steady diet of fear and and lies and disinformation, which at least 51 percent of them lapped up like obedient lapdogs. It's not Kerry's fault that at least 51 percent of Americans are dumbfucks and that for the past four years the Bush regime has played up to the fact that a good chunk of Americans are total fucking idiots who can be misled with minimal effort.

The Bushies can celebrate their victory, but our republic, our democracy, cannot and will not survive when more than half of its citizens are dumbfucks. So the AmeriNazis win a presidential election -- but now face the potential of the fall of the American empire within our lifetime.

Dumbfucks.

I gave the Kerry campaign hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours of my time and energy for the past year and a half. Do I regret it? Not in the least. When Armageddon arrives, at least I'll know that I did what I could do to prevent it.

Let us sane, intelligent, progressive, liberal Americans have our day or week or month of mourning that we are faced with another four years of the Bush regime, but let's not roll over and play dead. We are still 48 percent of the nation, at least!

We fight on!

Finally, those of you who are feeling suicidal should take some wisdom from my long-haired Chihuahua, Kit. She sees no difference between yesterday and today. For Kit there are still dog treats to eat, walks to take (and other dogs' urine to sniff and cats to be wary of during those walks), people food to beg for and baths to have to endure. She will continue to steal my pillow whenever I take my head off of it and will continue to jump into my laundry basket full of clean clothes within minutes of my return from the laundromat.

My point is that in many aspects, for the next four years our lives will go on much the same as they have the past four years.

Wait a minute -- that's the problem...

OK, so you'll have to look for sappy inspiration elsewhere.

But I still say:

We fight on!

P.S. This is funny. It's from Not a Dollar Short via The Forge:

In all seriousness, however, I recommend that those 48 percent (or so) of us Americans who are intelligent and sane continue to fight for our nation, not flee to Canada...

P.P.S. This is the e-mail that I received this morning from the Kerry-Edwards campaign:

Dear Robert,

Earlier today I spoke to President Bush, and offered him and Laura our congratulations on their victory. We had a good conversation, and we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need, the desperate need, for unity for finding the common ground, coming together. Today, I hope that we can begin the healing.

In America, it is vital that every vote counts, and that every vote be counted. But the outcome should be decided by voters, not a protracted legal process. I would not give up this fight if there was a chance that we would prevail. But it is now clear that even when all the provisional ballots are counted, which they will be, there won't be enough outstanding votes for our campaign to be able to win Ohio. And therefore, we cannot win this election.

It was a privilege and a gift to spend two years traveling this country, coming to know so many of you. I wish I could just wrap you in my arms and embrace each and every one of you individually all across this nation. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you.

To all of you, my volunteers and online supporters, all across this country who gave so much of themselves, thank you. Thanks to William Field, a six-year-old who collected $680, a quarter and a dollar at a time selling bracelets during the summer to help change America. Thanks to Michael Benson from Florida who I spied in a rope line holding a container of money. It turned out he raided his piggy bank and wanted to contribute. And thanks to Alana Wexler, who at 11 years old and started Kids for Kerry.

I thank all of you, who took time to travel, time off from work, and their own vacation time to work in states far and wide. You braved the hot days of summer and the cold days of the fall and the winter to knock on doors because you were determined to open the doors of opportunity to all Americans. You worked your hearts out, and I say, don't lose faith. What you did made a difference, and building on itself, we will go on to make a difference another day. I promise you, that time will come -- the election will come when your work and your ballots will change the world, and it's worth fighting for.

I'm proud of what we stood for in this campaign, and of what we accomplished. When we began, no one thought it was possible to even make this a close race, but we stood for real change, change that would make a real difference in the life of our nation, the lives of our families, and we defined that choice to America. I'll never forget the wonderful people who came to our rallies, who stood in our rope lines, who put their hopes in our hands, who invested in each and every one of us. I saw in them the truth that America is not only great, but it is good.

So here -- with a grateful heart, I leave this campaign with a prayer that has even greater meaning to me now that I've come to know our vast country so much better and that prayer is very simple: God bless America.

Thank you,

John Kerry


	Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.

John Kerry, entirely unlike George W. Bush, is a class act.

P.P.P.S. Some more:

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 06:06:57 GMT

Reasons not to 're'-elect Bush -- in pictures!*

*Especially helpful for those of you in the red states who have problems with the big words!

After he lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by more than a half-million votes in November 2000, George got into the White House with just a little help from his friends, such as Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (top), who just happened to also be co-chair of his Florida campaign (no conflict of interest there!); his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (who, I am sure, remained completely neutral); and the five members of the U.S. Supreme Court who just happened to have been appointed by Republican presidents. Yes, it was a completely fair election, and anyone who suggests otherwise is an enemy combatant.

To watch the video in which our decisive, resolute "war president" sits paralyzed in a classroom for several minutes after learning that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, click here. Or watch "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Hope that the U.S. military never comes to "liberate" you! (To see more images of Iraqi children maimed or killed during the unprovoked, illegal, immoral, imperialistic March 2003 invasion of Iraq by the unelected Bush regime, click here.)

Who can forget this great day in May 2003?

(For more images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins the Bush regime never wanted you to see, click here.)

(For more images of maimed U.S. military personnel the Bush regime also surely doesn't want you to see, click here.)

Hey, Halliburton got those no-bid federal government contracts fair and square! The BushCheneyCorp did not fabricate a war so that Dick Cheney's Halliburton and other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp could war profiteer -- because that would be wrong!

You can judge a man by the company he keeps...

Again, hope that the U.S. military never comes to "liberate" you! (For more images of the Nazi-like treatment of Iraqi detainees [most of whom were innocent of any crime, according to the Red Cross] at the hands of the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison, click here.)

The neocon cabal within the Bush regime said that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. In Fallujah in March, four American contractors were greeted by being turned into charcoal, mutilated, dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge.

Beheadings in post-"mission accomplished" Iraq became the new reality television! (That's American Nick Berg, the first contestant, in June. Don't fucking whine that I posted the photos, because while you only have to look at some unpleasant pictures and probably are, like I am, an overly comfortable American, Nick Berg, like the Iraqi children pictured above, had to experience the results of the fact that the American people just fucking let the Bush regime steal the White House. Because a group of people who would steal a presidential election surely wouldn't do anything bad once installed in the White House!)

This FBI memo makes it clear that it was known in July 2001 that Osama bin Laden was up to no good and that it involved airplanes. But "President" Bush was too busy on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas to pay much, if any, attention to the threat. (For the full "Phoenix memo" -- what parts of it aren't blackened out, that is -- click here.)

We have in custody former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (left), who posed no demonstrated threat to the United States or its allies whatsoever -- at the cost of billions and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars (much, if not most, of which has gone to Halliburton and other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp), the lives of more than 1,100 U.S. military personnel, and the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis. But the man who was actually responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden (right), has been on the loose for more than three years after 9/11.

Hey, I don't know about you, but I sure feel safe with BushCheneyCorp behind the wheel, and I say: "Another four years!"

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 00:39:10 GMT

Quote unquote

"There's no question [that Osama] bin Laden would rather have [George W.] Bush in the White House. The Iraq war has been a fantastic recruiting tool for him and the behavior of this administration has played into his hands."

-- James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute

"You cannot stand with Halliburton, big oil companies and the Saudi royal family and still stand up for the American people."

-- Vice presidential candidate John Edwards on BushCheneyCorp

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 20:08:06 GMT

In a new video of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden addressing Americans that was broadcast on Al-Jazeera yesterday, bin Laden actually makes some valid points; we Americans ignore what our opponents have to say at our own peril. The Associated Press notes that bin Laden appears "far healthier in the video released [yesterday] than many would have suspected, considering speculation that he was already ailing in the winter of 2001... U.S. officials have often described him as holed up in a dank and dreary cave, all but cut off from the outside world."

What October surprise?

This is the October "surprise"?

I'm disappointed.

My dictionary defines "surprise" as "a taking unawares."

Who was unaware that Osama bin Laden is still at large, except, perhaps, those well-informed Bush supporters who still believe that George W. Bush was fairly elected as president of the United States; that Iraq had something, anything, to do with the al-Qaeda-conducted terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which the United States found?

The pundits are crawling all over each other pronouncing what effect Osama's new video will have on Tuesday's presidential election.

My guess: It will have less effect on the election than will Eminem's new video (which you really must see if you haven't).

My guess is that for every person who feels more "inspired" by fear to vote for Bush because bin Laden has shown his salt-and-pepper-bearded face again, there is another person who is only reminded by bin Laden's resurfacing that more than three years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Bush regime has failed to capture bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11.

But even if the Bush regime were to capture bin Laden today, how would our personal situations change whatsoever? Are we better off today than we were four years ago?

Hell no, and that's why the BushCheneyCorp is toast on Nov. 2.

At any rate, here is a translation of bin Laden's latest video, which I have cobbled together from WorldNetDaily's translation and World Press Review's translation:

To begin: Peace be upon he who follows the Guidance.

People of the United States, my speech to you concerns the best way to prevent another Manhattan and deals with the war and its causes and results. Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. [If we hate freedom,] then let him explain why we did not strike Sweden, for example.

We know that those who hate freedom don't have defiant spirits like those 19 [a reference to the 19 Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers, 15 of whom were from Saudi Arabia and not one of whom was an Iraqi -- Ed.] who were blessed. No, we fight because we are free men who do not sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our Muslim nation; and just as you lay waste to our nation, so shall we lay waste to yours.

I am so amazed at you. Although we are in the fourth year after the events of Sept. 11, Bush is still practicing distortion and deception and hiding from you the real causes [of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks], and, therefore, the reasons still exist for a repeat of what happened before.

So I shall tell you the story behind those events and I shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken for you to consider.

I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we saw the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind. The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982, when the United States allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon with the assistance of the American sixth fleet.

And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.

In those difficult moments, many ideas that I can't describe bubbled in my soul, and they resulted in intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong determination to punish the oppressors. As I looked at the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in the same way and destroy towers in the United States so that they taste some of what we tasted, and so that they stop killing our women and children.

We have not found it difficult to deal with Bush and his administration due to the similarity of his regime and the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by military and the other half of which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents. Our experience with them is long. Both types are arrogant and stubborn and the greedy and take money without right.
This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Senior to the region at a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by the United States and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries. All of a sudden [Bush Senior] was affected by these monarchies and military regimes and he became jealous that for decades they were remaining in power, stealing the public's wealth without anybody overseeing them.
So he transferred dictatorship and the suppression of freedoms to his son, and they named it the PATRIOT Act under the pretenses of fighting terrorism.
[Bush Senior] was bright in installing his sons as governors of states, and he didn't forget to transfer his observations of election fraud by the rulers of our region to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.
All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration.

And for the record, we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Atta, God bless him, to execute the whole [Sept. 11] operation within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration would notice. We never thought that the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in both towers to face those great horrors alone when they needed him most.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by listening to the little girl telling him about about her goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the airplanes butting the towers, we were given three times the amount of time we needed to execute the operation. Thank God.

Your security is not in the hands of [John] Kerry or Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your hands. Each nation that doesn't interfere with our security has automatically secured its own security.

I'll get hate e-mail and nasty comments for this, but fuck it: I agree with bin Laden on many points.

The Bush dynasty is just as bad as is the Saudi dynasty. (Actually, the Bush dynsasty is worse because it commits its crimes against humankind in the name of "democracy" and "freedom," while the Saudi dictatorship doesn't pretend to be democratic, to my knowledge.) Both dynasties, and all dynasties, need to go, need to be replaced with democracies -- not the bullshit, pseudo-democracies that the Bush regime pushes, in which it uses the U.S. military to invade sovereign nations and then install in those nations puppet prime ministers who lick the United States' ass, but real democracies.

Bin Laden, unlike many Americans, is sane enough to point out that George W. Bush's presidency has been illegitimate from Day One, that Bush became "president" only because of the blatant election fraud that the Republicans perpetrated in Florida in 2000. And bin Laden seems to have seen "Fahrenheit 9/11," because he refers to how Bush, when he was informed that a second airplane had hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, sat dazed, confused and paralyzed in a classroom for several minutes. (Eminem opens his new video with a scene inspired by this. I guess Eminem is an America-hatin' Commie like me.) Yeah, I have nothing but confidence in our current "commander in chief" to protect me from the big bad terror-lovin' freedom-hatin' sand monkeys when it's clear that when crisis hits, he fucking freezes.

Like bin Laden, I also believe that the United States should just leave Muslim nations the fuck alone; invading and occupying Iraq without provocation and without reason, killing as many as 100,000 Iraqis in the process, certainly doesn't qualify as the United States leaving Muslim nations the fuck alone.

Let the Muslims be Muslims in the Muslim nations and let Americans be Americans in the United States. The two cultures mix like, um, oil and water, and while I hope for good relations between all peoples someday, if two groups of people can't get along for the time being, if their meetings result only in violence and destruction and death, then it's better for the groups to keep to themselves.

Lest readers who live in the red states think that I agree with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks because I agree with some of the things that Osama bin Laden said in his latest video, I will state for the record, once again, that I'm against anyone killing anyone unless it's in clear self-defense or in the clear defense of others who, without intervention, would face imminent death.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 upon the United States do not meet that test -- and neither does the BushCheneyCorp's illegal, immoral, unprovoked and imperialistic invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Both were terrorist attacks and the perpetrators of both terrorist attacks should be brought to justice.

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 03:18:09 GMT

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 03:06:28 GMT

New Yorker, silent on presidential races

for 80 years, endorses John Kerry

Here is a copy and paste from The New Yorker's Web site:

COMMENT

THE CHOICE

Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25

This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger—who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war—as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger’s adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on November 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays. On Tuesday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million Americans went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable plurality, voted to make Al Gore President of the United States. Because of the way the votes were distributed, however, the outcome in the electoral college turned on the outcome in Florida. In that state, George W. Bush held a lead of some five hundred votes, one one-thousandth of Gore’s national margin; irregularities, and there were many, all had the effect of taking votes away from Gore; and the state’s electoral machinery was in the hands of Bush’s brother, who was the governor, and one of Bush’s state campaign co-chairs, who was the Florida secretary of state.

Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring them—by cutting off the process and installing Bush by fiat—the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism.

A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the damage would have been far less severe if the new President had made some effort to take account of the special circumstances of his election—in the composition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals, perhaps even in the goals themselves. He made no such effort. According to Bob Woodward in “Plan of Attack,” Vice-President Dick Cheney put it this way: “From the very day we walked in the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election—full speed ahead.”

The new President’s main order of business was to push through Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening environmental protection and cutting off funds for international family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in English, not Arabic) as “the base,” which is to say the conservative movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The President’s enthusiastic embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the Administration, the defection of a moderate senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, cost his party control of the Senate. And, four months after that, the President’s political fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but inexorable decline. Then came the blackest Tuesday of all.

September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of solidarity, global and national—solidarity with and solidarity within the United States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a second opportunity to create something like a government of national unity. Again, he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the political capital handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through more elements of his unmandated domestic program. A year after 9/11, in the midterm elections, he increased his majority in the House and recaptured control of the Senate by portraying selected Democrats as friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that the anger felt by many Democrats is even greater than can be explained by the profound differences in outlook between the two candidates and their parties?

The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently, ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence.

In January, 2001, just after Bush’s inauguration, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated bounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last year’s federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year’s will top four hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3 trillion.

Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation that enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects them to go away on schedule; they were designated as temporary only to make their ultimate results look less scary. If Congress extends the expiration deadlines—a near-certainty if Bush wins and the Republicans retain control of Congress—then, according to the C.B.O., the cumulative deficit between 2005 and 2014 will nearly double, to $4.5 trillion.

What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq’s collapse in April, 2000. It’s true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn’t make them wise policy. “Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans,” Bush said during his final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is false—a lie, actually—though at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller marriage penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly. Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of ninety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-two dollars.

These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of American jobs. This Administration’s most unshakable commitment has been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that rewards wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, another Washington research group, estimates that the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about twenty-three per cent. The President promises, in a second term, to expand tax-free savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains, and permanently abolish the estate tax—all of which will widen the widening gap between the richest and the rest.

Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as “new source review,” which requires power-plant operators to install modern pollution controls when upgrading older facilities. The change, it turned out, had been recommended by some of the nation’s largest polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was chaired by Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed new rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions from power plants. The E.P.A.’s regulation drafters had copied, in some instances verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing the utility industry.

“I guess you’d say I’m a good steward of the land,” Bush mused dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you’d say nothing of the kind. The President has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast stretches of accessible wilderness have been opened up to development. By stripping away restrictions on the use of federal lands, often through little-advertised rule changes, the Administration has potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area larger than Indiana and Iowa combined, to logging, mining, and oil exploration.

During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has been excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About others there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for example, permits government investigators to obtain—without a subpoena or a search warrant based on probable cause—a court order entitling them to records from libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and Internet service providers, among other public and private entities. Officials of the Department of Justice say that they have used Section 215 with restraint, and that they have not, so far, sought information from libraries or bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be more reassuring if their record were not otherwise so troubling.

Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the Justice Department under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its investigation had resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The arrests have continued, but eventually the Administration simply stopped saying how many people were and are being held. In any event, not one of the detainees has been convicted of anything resembling a terrorist act. At least as reprehensible is the way that foreign nationals living in the United States have been treated. Since September 11th, some five thousand have been rounded up and more than five hundred have been deported, all for immigration infractions, after hearings that, in line with a novel doctrine asserted by Ashcroft, were held in secret. Since it is official policy not to deport terrorism suspects, it is unclear what legitimate anti-terror purpose these secret hearings serve.

President Bush often complains about Democratic obstructionism, but the truth is that he has made considerable progress, if that’s the right word, toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues. The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one of his judicial nominees, more than the per-term averages for Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush senior. Senate Republicans blocked more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees; Senate Democrats have blocked only ten of Bush’s. (Those ten, by the way, got exactly what they deserved. Some of them—such as Carolyn Kuhl, who devoted years of her career to trying to preserve tax breaks for colleges that practice racial discrimination, and Brett Kavanaugh, a thirty-eight-year-old with no judicial or courtroom experience who co-wrote the Starr Report—rank among the worst judicial appointments ever attempted.)

Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it has been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. Like some of the Court’s worst decisions of the past four years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its best—salvaging affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for terrorist suspects, striking down Texas’s anti-sodomy law, banning executions of the mentally retarded—were reached by one- or two-vote majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two justices removed from reversal.) All but one of the sitting justices are senior citizens, ranging in age from sixty-five to eighty-four, and the gap since the last appointment—ten years—is the longest since 1821. Bush has said more than once that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are his favorite justices. In a second Bush term, the Court could be remade in their images.

The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that long antedates 9/11. The President’s hostility to science, exemplified by his decision to place crippling limits on federal support of stem-cell research and by a systematic willingness to distort or suppress scientific findings discomfiting to “the base,” is such that scores of eminent scientists who are normally indifferent to politics have called for his defeat. The Administration’s energy policies, especially its resistance to increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, are of a piece with its environmental irresponsibility. Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind education program, enacted with the support of the liberal lion Edward Kennedy, is being allowed to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding. Some of the money that has been pumped into it has been leached from other education programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year.

Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But this election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education, and the rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect of large-scale terrorist attack. The most important Presidential responsibility of the next four years, as of the past three, is the “war on terror”—more precisely, the struggle against a brand of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that uses particularly ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon.

Bush’s immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was an almost palpable bewilderment and anxiety. Within a few days, to the universal relief of his fellow-citizens, he seemed to find his focus. His decision to use American military power to topple the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who had turned their country into the principal base of operations for the perpetrators of the attacks, earned the near-unanimous support of the American people and of America’s allies. Troops from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Norway, and Spain are serving alongside Americans in Afghanistan to this day.

The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last month’s Presidential election, for which the votes are still being counted, is clearly a positive sign. Yet the job in Afghanistan has been left undone, despite fervent promises at the outset that the chaos that was allowed to develop after the defeat of the Soviet occupation in the nineteen-eighties would not be repeated. The Taliban has regrouped in eastern and southern regions. Bin Laden’s organization continues to enjoy sanctuary and support from Afghans as well as Pakistanis on both sides of their common border. Warlords control much of Afghanistan outside the capital of Kabul, which is the extent of the territorial writ of the decent but beleaguered President Hamid Karzai. Opium production has increased fortyfold.

The White House’s real priorities were elsewhere from the start. According to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a Situation Room crisis meeting on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld suggested launching retaliatory strikes against Iraq. When Clarke and others pointed out to him that Al Qaeda—the presumed culprit—was based in Afghanistan, not Iraq, Rumsfeld is said to have remarked that there were better targets in Iraq. The bottom line, as Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said, was that the Bush-Cheney team had been planning to carry out regime change in Baghdad well before September 11th—one way or another, come what may.

At all three debates, President Bush defended the Iraq war by saying that without it Saddam Hussein would still be in power. This is probably true, and Saddam’s record of colossal cruelty--of murder, oppression, and regional aggression--was such that even those who doubted the war’s wisdom acknowledged his fall as an occasion for satisfaction. But the removal of Saddam has not been the war’s only consequence; and, as we now know, his power, however fearsome to the millions directly under its sway, was far less of a threat to the United States and the rest of the world than it pretended—and, more important, was made out—to be.

As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain, Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome views are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-created bubble of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism been more damaging than in the case of Iraq. The arguments and warnings of analysts in the State Department, in the Central Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military services, and in the chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no more effect than the chants of millions of marchers.

The decision to invade and occupy Iraq was made on the basis of four assumptions: first, that Saddam’s regime was on the verge of acquiring nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with Al Qaeda and (as was repeatedly suggested by the Vice-President and others) might have had something to do with 9/11; third, that within Iraq the regime’s fall would be followed by prolonged celebration and rapid and peaceful democratization; and, fourth, that a similar democratic transformation would be precipitated elsewhere in the region, accompanied by a new eagerness among Arab governments and publics to make peace between Israel and a presumptive Palestinian state. The first two of these assumptions have been shown to be entirely baseless. As for the second two, if the wishes behind them do someday come true, it may not be clear that the invasion of Iraq was a help rather than a hindrance.

In Bush’s rhetoric, the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, with precision bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, and ended exactly three weeks later, with the iconic statue pulldown. That military operation was indeed a success. But the cakewalk led over a cliff, to a succession of heedless and disastrous mistakes that leave one wondering, at the very least, how the Pentagon’s civilian leadership remains intact and the President’s sense of infallibility undisturbed. The failure, against the advice of such leaders as General Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to deploy an adequate protective force led to unchallenged looting of government buildings, hospitals, museums, and—most inexcusable of all—arms depots. (“Stuff happens,” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld explained, though no stuff happened to the oil ministry.) The Pentagon all but ignored the State Department’s postwar plans, compiled by its Future of Iraq project, which warned not only of looting but also of the potential for insurgencies and the folly of relying on exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi; the project’s head, Thomas Warrick, was sidelined. The White House counsel’s disparagement of the Geneva Conventions and of prohibitions on torture as “quaint” opened the way to systematic and spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American-run prisons--a moral and political catastrophe for which, in a pattern characteristic of the Administration’s management style, no one in a policymaking position has been held accountable. And, no matter how Bush may cleave to his arguments about a grand coalition (“What’s he say to Tony Blair?” “He forgot Poland!”), the coalition he assembled was anything but grand, and it has been steadily melting away in Iraq’s cauldron of violence.

By the end of the current fiscal year, the financial cost of this war will be two hundred billion dollars (the figure projected by Lawrence Lindsey, who headed the President’s Council of Economic Advisers until, like numerous other bearers of unpalatable news, he was cashiered) and rising. And there are other, more serious costs that were unforeseen by the dominant factions in the Administration (although there were plenty of people who did foresee them). The United States has become mired in a low-intensity guerrilla war that has taken more lives since the mission was declared to be accomplished than before. American military deaths have mounted to more than a thousand, a number that underplays the real level of suffering: among the eight thousand wounded are many who have been left seriously maimed. The toll of Iraqi dead and wounded is of an order of magnitude greater than the American. Al Qaeda, previously an insignificant presence in Iraq, is an important one now. Before this war, we had persuaded ourselves and the world that our military might was effectively infinite. Now it is overstretched, a reality obvious to all. And, if the exposure of American weakness encourages our enemies, surely the blame lies with those who created the reality, not with those who, like Senator Kerry, acknowledge it as a necessary step toward changing it.

When the Administration’s geopolitical, national-interest, and anti-terrorism justifications for the Iraq war collapsed, it groped for an argument from altruism: postwar chaos, violence, unemployment, and brownouts notwithstanding, the war has purchased freedoms for the people of Iraq which they could not have had without Saddam’s fall. That is true. But a sad and ironic consequence of this war is that its fumbling prosecution has undermined its only even arguably meritorious rationale—and, as a further consequence, the salience of idealism in American foreign policy has been likewise undermined. Foreign-policy idealism has taken many forms—Wilson’s aborted world federalism, Carter’s human-rights jawboning, and Reagan’s flirtation with total nuclear disarmament, among others. The failed armed intervention in Somalia and the successful ones in the Balkans are other examples. The neoconservative version ascendant in the Bush Administration, post-9/11, draws partly on these strains. There is surely idealistic purpose in envisioning a Middle East finally relieved of its autocracies and dictatorships. Yet this Administration’s adventure in Iraq is so gravely flawed and its credibility so badly damaged that in the future, faced with yet another moral dilemma abroad, it can be expected to retreat, a victim of its own Iraq Syndrome.

The damage visited upon America, and upon America’s standing in the world, by the Bush Administration’s reckless mishandling of the public trust will not easily be undone. And for many voters the desire to see the damage arrested is reason enough to vote for John Kerry. But the challenger has more to offer than the fact that he is not George W. Bush. In every crucial area of concern to Americans (the economy, health care, the environment, Social Security, the judiciary, national security, foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the fight against terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective alternative to Bush’s curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery. Pollsters like to ask voters which candidate they’d most like to have a beer with, and on that metric Bush always wins. We prefer to ask which candidate is better suited to the governance of our nation.

Throughout his long career in public service, John Kerry has demonstrated steadiness and sturdiness of character. The physical courage he showed in combat in Vietnam was matched by moral courage when he raised his voice against the war, a choice that has carried political costs from his first run for Congress, lost in 1972 to a campaign of character assassination from a local newspaper that could not forgive his antiwar stand, right through this year’s Swift Boat ads. As a senator, Kerry helped expose the mischief of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, a money-laundering operation that favored terrorists and criminal cartels; when his investigation forced him to confront corruption among fellow-Democrats, he rejected the cronyism of colleagues and brought down power brokers of his own party with the same dedication that he showed in going after Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal. His leadership, with John McCain, of the bipartisan effort to put to rest the toxic debate over Vietnam-era P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for Washington’s normalization of relations with Hanoi, in the mid-nineties, was the signal accomplishment of his twenty years on Capitol Hill, and it is emblematic of his fairness of mind and independence of spirit. Kerry has made mistakes (most notably, in hindsight at least, his initial opposition to the Gulf War in 1990), but—in contrast to the President, who touts his imperviousness to changing realities as a virtue—he has learned from them.

Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed opportunity. But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate. Kerry’s mettle has been tested under fire—the fire of real bullets and the political fire that will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected—and he has shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a properly Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal broadly to the American center. In a time of primitive partisanship, he has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.

— The Editors

Meanwhile, The Associated Press reports today that Kerry is beating "President" Bush's ass in newspaper endorsements:

The polls may be too close to call, but there's one area in which Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry seems to be pulling well ahead of President Bush: newspaper endorsements.

According to an ongoing tally by Editor & Publisher, a newspaper industry magazine, so far 125 newspapers have endorsed Kerry — including at least 35 that had endorsed Bush in 2000 — versus 96 for Bush. Meanwhile, only two newspapers that went for Al Gore in 2000 have endorsed Bush.

What's more, several papers that had backed Bush four years ago are now declining to make any endorsement at all, including several in key states: The Detroit News in Michigan, The Tampa Tribune in Florida, and The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa.

In an editorial published [yesterday], The Detroit News told its readers that Bush's failures to deliver on promises of fiscal conservatism, prudence in foreign affairs and limited government left the paper "with a decision we detest but are nonetheless compelled to make" in endorsing neither candidate for president. The paper has never endorsed a Democrat for president, and held back endorsements only twice before, during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era.

In Tampa, the historically conservative Tampa Tribune told readers in an editorial last week that it was "deeply conflicted about the presidential race." While the Tribune said it found it "unimaginable" not to be joining other right-leaning newspapers in endorsing Bush, the paper said it could not do so because of his "mishandling" of the war in Iraq, record deficit spending and Bush's "assault on open government."

In an age when many people get their news from TV, newspaper endorsements don't necessarily sway large blocs of voters, though they could have a bearing in some key states such as Florida where the race is close. In fact, in that state, a number of key papers have come out in favor of Kerry, making it an interesting test case of how effective endorsements are, says Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher.

E&P did not do a similar tally of newspaper endorsements for the 2000 election, but an informal count done by a researcher at George Washington University at the time and published on the university's Web site found that 175 papers endorsed Bush four years ago, while 121 backed Gore.

...Even The New Yorker magazine decided to jump into the fray this time around, making its first-ever political endorsement this week with a five-page editorial backing Kerry. Spokeswoman Perri Dorset said the magazine broke with tradition because the editors felt that "this is a very critical election and an important time in our country."

The New York Times has already endorsed Kerry, while several other large national papers — including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times — do not normally make endorsements.

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 05:50:49 GMT

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 05:49:19 GMT

Reuters photo

Children voted for John Kerry over "President" Bush, 57 percent to 43 percent, on Nickelodeon's Web site. The kids' vote on the Web site accurately reflected the winners of the past four presidential elections.

John Kerry wins kids' vote

On Nov. 2, will the adults be as smart as the children?

Here's an encouraging story from The Associated Press today titled "Kids Pick Kerry to Be the Next President":

NEW YORK -- Kid power! Democrat John Kerry is the winner, and the rest of the country should pay attention because the vote on Nickelodeon's Web site has correctly chosen the president of the United States in the past four elections.

Nearly 400,000 children and teens voted, and the results were released [today]. Kerry received 57 percent of the vote; President Bush got 43 percent.

Nickelodeon has been airing information on the Nov. 2 election, plus sponsoring debates where kids could put forth their views on the environment, the war in Iraq and terrorism. Some animated shows on the cable channel also have been focusing on the election.

Linda Ellerbee, who writes and hosts "Nick News," says their voting usually reflects their parents' views -- but not all the time.

"Every so often you get a kid that says, 'My parents are voting for X, but I'm voting for Y,'" she said. "It's amazing, the point when kids start forming their own ideas about issues."

Ellerbee said Nickelodeon has been traveling the country teaching about the election and the importance of being socially informed....

"If we can get kids interested earlier in voting, when they can legally vote, they will," she said. "They will run for office, they will be the candidates (that) people want to vote for."

Ellerbee, who will announce the results on "U-PICK Live" [tonight], said many children wonder why they can't vote in the real election.

"Kids aren't dumb, they're just younger and shorter," she said. "In fact, last election, a boy came up to me and said, 'We picked George Bush to win, and he didn't really win. Al Gore won the popular vote, so we were kinda wrong.' Quite an observation."

I find it interesting that so many American adults consider Bush's presidency to be legitimate -- I never have -- but that even a child can see that Bush's presidency is illegitimate.

While I'd love to see Kerry beat Bush by more than 10 percentage points on Nov. 2, I think that Kerry is going to beat Bush by fewer than 10 percentage points. I think it's going to be Bush 45 percent to 47 percent and Kerry 50 to 52 percent.

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 01:35:47 GMT

Who do you think would agonize more over instituting a military draft? Draft-dodger "President" Bush, whose family connections saved his precious rich white ass from having to go to Vietnam by getting him into the Texas Air National Guard -- from which he went AWOL -- or President Kerry, who volunteered to fight in Vietnam? "The best way to avoid a draft is to vote for me," Bush proclaimed today, and while no doubt he's a fucking expert on how to avoid a draft, in the early 1970s he was interested in protecting his own ass from the draft. Throughout his entire life Bush has gladly watched others go off to war for him, first in Vietnam and now in Iraq.

Draft under Bush a real possibility

A guest on Air America Radio (I don't remember his name) recently pointed out how the corporately controlled mainstream media love to be "fair and balanced" by reporting one of George W. Bush's many whoppers and then -- to be "fair and balanced" -- including a relatively minor inaccuracy of John Kerry's.

Usually, Kerry's inaccuracy is nothing compared to Bush's Great Big Fucking Lie, but apparently the reporter and/or the editor or editors are petrified that if they run a story only about Bush's Great Big Fucking Lie, Bush-lovin' AmeriNazis will pitch a fit about "liberal media bias." (They're probably right, but let the fucking fascists who are posing as patriots pitch their fucking fit.)

Here is an example of the phenomenon that the Air America Radio guest was talking about, a story from The Los Angeles Times today titled "Bush, Kerry Both Employ Fear to Get the Job Done":

SHEBOYGAN, Wis. -- With the campaign for president reaching the closing-argument stage, Republicans called Sen. John F. Kerry the most liberal candidate for president in history, while Kerry said President Bush's inept prosecution of the war in Iraq had left the "great potential" for a military draft.

The attempt by both sides [yesterday] to suggest that the other would put the country on risky ground seemed to fulfill what both sides had predicted: a harsh conclusion to an extremely close race.

Those messages promised to get plenty of airplay in the final 17 days of the campaign....

Kerry criticized Bush's military planning and raised the specter of a draft in an interview published [yesterday] by The Des Moines Register.

"With George Bush, the plan for Iraq is more of the same and the great potential of a draft," the Democratic nominee said.

Republicans accused the senator of "fear-mongering" for political gain, noting that the president had promised not to institute a draft. But Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry stood by the statement.

"The inevitable consequence of bearing the burden solely for protecting our vital interests and not working with our close allies," McCurry said, "is that you stretch the force almost to the point where you've got to do something."

The spokesman denied that Kerry was suggesting Bush had a "secret plan" for reinstituting the draft. But Kerry has been keeping the issue alive since he first raised it Sept. 22 at a town hall meeting in West Palm Beach, Fla.

A woman at the forum asked about rumors that the draft was coming back.

"If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, it is possible," Kerry said.

He went on to pledge to "not reinstate the draft unless the United States of America faced the kind the global attack or conflagration where everybody in America understood through an open, democratic process we needed to defend this nation in that means."

Voting officials have noted the high number of young people registering to vote, and some experts have speculated that fear of the draft could be driving those numbers.

"If you go and talk to any college kid on any campus, or report out what people are nervous about, you run into this," McCurry told reporters [yesterday]. "I mean, we get asked this all the time… This is something people are very worried about."

In an effort to dispel concerns of a draft, Republicans in the House of Representatives last week hastily arranged to have the idea voted down, which it did overwhelmingly, 402 to 2.

It was not only Kerry who was sowing doubts, as the Republican National Committee launched a new attack ad about the senator from Massachusetts.

A narrator in the 30-second spot calls Kerry "the most liberal man in the Senate. The most liberal person to ever run for president." He goes on to say Kerry has voted to cut military and intelligence agencies.

"We live in a dangerous world that requires strong and steady leadership," the ad concludes. "John Kerry is a risky choice for America, a risk we cannot take."
The new GOP ad cites no evidence to back up the contention that Kerry is more liberal than every other presidential contender in the nation's history. Bush previously has cited a magazine analysis that said Kerry had the most liberal Senate voting record in 2003, although the results of that analysis may have been skewed because Kerry missed many votes as he campaigned for president.
Although Kerry is generally in the Senate's liberal wing, he has cast several significant votes on trade, balanced budgets, welfare and other matters that indicate a centrist streak. He voted to cut military and intelligence programs at various points in his career -- along with some Republicans at the end of the Cold War -- but also supported defense and intelligence bills far more often than not.
Kerry's campaign [yesterday] called the liberal label "misleading and disingenuous."
"John Kerry opposed his party to vote for deficit reduction, supported landmark welfare reform, supports middle-class tax cuts, led the fight to put 100,000 cops on the street and supports increasing our military," the campaign said in a statement....

Note that Kerry is right: If the warmongering-for-war-profiteers BushCheneyCorp gets another four years in the White House, a military draft is possible.

Do you think for two seconds that the members of the Bush regime -- who didn't give a fuck that Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than half a million votes in 2000, and who then went on to prosecute a bogus invasion of Iraq against the world's wishes in March 2003 -- would lose a wink of sleep if they reneged on Bush's current campaign promise that there will not be a draft in his second term if he gets a second term?

"We will not have a draft. No matter what my opponent tries to tell people and scare them, we will have an all-volunteer army," Bush promised today.

If Bush is not outright lying, which is his usual mode, then at the minimum he is making a campaign promise that he cannot possibly know that he can keep.

As Kerry points out in the L.A. Times article, in extreme cases of war, such as a world war, the draft might be necessary. Unless Bush knows right now exactly what's going to happen in the world during the next four years, there is no way in hell that he can promise that he would never institute the draft.

And which scenario is more likely? President Kerry has to institute the draft because of a world war, or "President" Bush, in his second term, because he has decided to involve the United States of America in yet another bogus war of choice -- because hey, he's termed out and he and his henchpeople figure that they really can do whatever the fuck they want to do now -- overextends the U.S. military and thus institutes the draft?

Who do you think would think twice or thrice about instituting the draft? President Kerry, who volunteered to go to Vietnam and saw the horrors there and who was injured there in combat? Or "President" Bush, whose politician papa got his precious rich white ass into the Texas Air National Guard above the 500 others who were above him on the waiting list so that he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam -- and who then went AWOL even from the Texas Air National Guard?

So the L.A. Times article, in an apparent attempt to be "fair and balanced," equates the BushCheneyCorp "re"-election campaign's baseless, unsupported notion that Kerry is "a risky choice for America" -- along with its tired, meaningless "liberal" label (the Republicans really need to get some new material) -- with Kerry's very correct assertion that if Bush gets another term, a military draft is possible. With its headline alone -- "Bush, Kerry Both Employ Fear to Get the Job Done" -- the L.A. Times, which is usually much better than this, makes its false comparison.

The Times grievously fails its readers by leading them to believe that Kerry's accurate assessment that a military draft is a possibility in a second Bush term is the equivalent to the Bush regime "re"-election team's juvenile, hackneyed use of the word "liberal" as a put-down.

That's neither fair nor balanced. Nor accurate.

P.S. Demonstrating that the phenomenon I described above exists, today The Washington Post also ran a "fair and balanced" story on Kerry and Bush titled "Bush and Kerry Address Voters' Anxieties on Stump":

XENIA, Ohio, Oct. 16 -- The presidential candidates spread messages of anxiety in Ohio and Florida [today], as John F. Kerry accused President Bush of putting American lives at risk by failing to prevent the flu vaccine shortage and as Bush again said that his Democratic opponent cannot be trusted to protect the country from terrorists.

Speaking at a packed rally in a high school gym here, Kerry told Ohioans that Bush is to blame for the loss of half the nation's expected vaccine inventory for this flu season. He said the administration has forced health officials to make life-and-death decisions in dispensing dangerously tight supplies.

"We've got people standing in lines for hours on end -- some of them in their seventies and eighties -- hoping to be among the lucky ones," Kerry told the largely partisan crowd. "And every day, our health care workers struggle to make what could be life-or-death decisions as to who is going to get a shot." The Kerry campaign also released a new TV ad trumpeting this warning.

In Sunrise, Fla., meanwhile, Bush noted that this weekend marks the first anniversary of Kerry's vote against $87 billion for military and reconstruction spending in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a reminder of what the GOP calls the Democratic candidate's shifting positions on ousting Saddam Hussein. "In a time of great threat to our country, at a time of a great challenge in the world, the commander in chief must stand on principle, not the shifting sands of political convenience," Bush said.

With three new national polls, including a Washington Post tracking poll showing Bush making gains but the race still virtually tied, the two candidates have zeroed in on these two populous states as the most important battlegrounds for Nov. 2. Florida is the bigger prize, with 27 electoral votes, or 10 percent of what is needed to win the election; Ohio, historically a reliable GOP state, has 20 electoral votes. But that state has serious unemployment problems that make it too close to call.

Polls show that both candidates have a chance of winning Ohio and Florida. If one of the candidates captures both, he will likely win the White House, political strategists from both parties say.

After the rally here, Kerry took a winding bus tour of Ohio, stopping at a pumpkin patch in Jeffersonville, picking up a hunting license in Buchanan, attending a Roman Catholic Mass at St. Mary's church in Chillicothe and concluding his day at a family farm in Wakefield in the foothills of Appalachia.

Throughout the day, Kerry continued to batter Bush over the economy -- a stark reminder of how Kerry's political strategy differs greatly from Bush's focus on national security concerns. Showing a recent front-page story in a local newspaper quoting Treasury Secretary John W. Snow as saying job losses are a "myth," Kerry said the president is oblivious to reality. "Mr. President, the people who have lost jobs on your watch are not 'myths.' They are our neighbors; they are middle-class Americans," he said.

The only new twist in Kerry's speech was his attack on Bush over this season's flu vaccine, an issue grabbing headlines in newspapers across the country.

The government announced less than two weeks ago that nearly half of the country's anticipated supply -- 46 million to 48 million doses -- was contaminated, and rendered unusable, at a plant in Britain. During last week's final presidential debate, Bush said healthy Americans should forgo shots for the flu, which kills an estimated 36,000 Americans each year, to help ease the shortage. Neither Bush nor Kerry has received a flu shot this season.

According to Kerry, Bush was first tipped off about the impending crisis three years ago but refused to act. "It's just business as usual with George W. Bush: You got to ignore it, deny it, then try to hide it, and then say you would do it the same way," he said. Various groups have warned of potential shortages for years; British officials say the U.S. government was warned in mid-September of possible disruptions at the Liverpool plant.

The cause of the public health crisis is much more complicated, some experts say. Most pharmaceutical companies refuse to manufacture the flu vaccine because sales are unpredictable, profits are often minimal and costly consumer lawsuits are always possible. The United States once had multiple sources of the vaccine, but today the country has only two major suppliers, leaving Americans vulnerable to dangerous disruptions like the current one....

At the rally, Kerry offered little detail as to how he would prevent future shortages, other than promising a new strategy. The Democratic nominee had not addressed the flu vaccine issue as a presidential candidate until the shortage was announced on Oct. 5, according to Stephanie Cutter, a Kerry spokeswoman. Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), Kerry's running mate, spoke in December 2003 about the importance of maintaining adequate supplies....

Bush continued his aggressive appeal to his most conservative supporters, using the word "liberal" four times at a rally outside Fort Lauderdale, where his star-spangled campaign bus, with red and blue lights flashing, pulled into a darkened arena.

A Washington Post poll shows the candidates even in Florida, where early voting will begin on Monday. Bush made three stops there [today], and planned four more stops on Monday and Tuesday in hopes of winning the state by more than his 537-vote margin in 2000. The president was accompanied at each stop by first lady Laura Bush and by his younger brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who said he was "proud of my commander in chief, and my brother."

Edwards was in suburban Miami [today], kicking off the Democratic ticket's 12-city, five-day tour of the state. At a rally in Miami Gardens, he stepped up his rhetoric, saying that Republicans will be "up to their old tricks" and potentially engage in voter fraud to win the state's 27 electoral votes.

"We know what's coming. Republicans are already up to it," Edwards said to the largely black crowd, prompting a wave of boos. Edwards was responding to news reports here that suggested that Jeb Bush ignored advice to abandon a flawed election voter list before it went out to county election offices, even after he was warned by state officials that some voters, mostly black, could be disenfranchised.

Again, the flu vaccine shortage is a serious, real issue, but because the Post lumps it together with the Bush campaign's tired rhetoric that Kerry can't be a good commander in chief (this coming from the commander in chief who presided over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) -- and slaps the headline "Bush and Kerry Address Voters' Anxieties on Stump" on it -- the importance of the flu vaccine shortage is lost, because, under the reporters' interpretation of events, the story becomes just about presidential candidates trying to spook voters. Because the Post reporters were so damned bent on being "fair and balanced," they deemed both Bush and Kerry fear-mongers -- whether that is the case or not.

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 05:11:51 GMT

Reuters photo

Dick Cheney, wife Lynne Cheney (center) and their lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney (left), are pictured at the Republican Nazi Convention in August. In 1981, Lynne published a lesbian-themed novel called Sisters. Maybe Mary read it and that's why she's the way she is.

Dick's daughter's a dyke!

Shout it from the rooftops.

Dick and Lynne Cheney are pissed off that our next president, John Kerry, when asked during the presidential debate last night whether he believes that homosexuality is a choice, mentioned in his response that Dick and Lynne's daughter Mary is a carpetmuncher.

"You saw a man who will do and say anything to get elected," Dick huffed and puffed about Kerry. "And I am not just speaking as a father here, although I am a pretty angry father."

A man who recently told us that there will be another 9/11-level terrorist attack on the United States if Americans elect John Kerry instead of "re"-elect George W. Bush says that John Kerry is "a man who will do and say anything to get elected." That's pretty fucking funny.

"[John Kerry] is not a good man," sniffed Lynne, from whose lesbian-themed novel Sisters excerpts are read regularly on Air America Radio. (Maybe the lesbian gene is passed on by the mother?) "Of course, I am speaking as a mom, and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick."

Um, I'll tell you what's "a cheap and tawdry political trick": Pushing for a hateful amendment to the sacred document that is the U.S. Constitution, an amendment that would forbid same-sex marriage, during a presidential election year.

The BushCheneyCorp has tried to use hatred, prejudice and bigotry directed at gay men and lesbians for political gain, just as Adolf Hitler's regime used hatred, prejudice and bigotry directed at Jews for political gain. The BushCheneyCorp's proposed amendment to the Constitution to deny a group of people equal rights has been a centerpiece of its hate-filled "re"-election campaign.

So John Kerry and John Edwards were perfectly within bounds to mention, during a presidential debate and during the vice presidential debate, that Dick Cheney's daughter is a dyke.

I might feel sorry for Mary Cheney that her name has been dragged into the presidential campaign -- except that, The Associate Press reports, "Mary Cheney, who is openly gay, runs operations in the vice president's campaign office." So it's not like she's a closet case or is trying to avoid the limelight.

Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, had this to say about Lynne's tiff: "She's overreacted to this and treated it as if it's shameful to have this discussion. I think that's a very sad state of affairs. I think that it indicates a certain amount of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences."

Yup. And after having written a lesbian-themed novel, God knows what issues surrounding her own sexuality Lynne has.

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 05:16:27 GMT

Associated Press and Reuters photos

I'd kill to know what John Kerry said in "President" Monkeyboy's ear tonight after their third and final presidential debate at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. "You're sooooooo toast," maybe?

Campaign shocker!

Smart guy pummels dumb guy -- again!

That pretty much sums up tonight's third and final 2004 presidential debate, which I watched with a roomful of people at the Sacramento County Democratic Party headquarters.

I don't need no fucking polls to tell me who the fuck won the debate: John Kerry was the clear winner. (The second debate was Kerry's weakest performance in the debates, but he won all three, especially the first debate and tonight's debate.)

I think that on Nov. 2 we're not going to have a presidential election as much as we're going to have a national I.Q. test:

Do the largest number of Americans think that their president should be intelligent, or do the largest number of Americans think that it's perfectly OK that the so-called leader of the free world is a dumbfuck? Whom do we want to protect us from the freedom-hatin', terror-lovin' sand monkeys? Sheriff Andy Taylor or Deputy Barney Fife?

(Of course, we can't rule out Democratic-vote-eating, Republican-manufactured Diebold voting machines as a factor in the election's outcome, even if the most number of Americans vote for Sheriff Taylor for president.)

I could write about tonight's debate -- how "President" Bush surrealistically, retardedly repeated the non-word "paygo" not once, not twice, but three times when he should have said "pay as you go" (is that what he means by "stay the course"?); how at least every other answer that Bush gave came in the form of a cute little story about Texas; how Bush apparently sees teaching our children how to add and subtract as the solution to all of our nation's problems (corporate weasels like those at energy-price-gouging Enron and war-profiteering, price-gouging Halliburton have nothing to do with our nation's problems); how Bush kept referring to his record as governor of Texas when he isn't running for governor of Texas but was supposed to be defending the last almost four years of his failed presidency; how when he was really flustered, Bush broke out into a spontaneous comparison of Kerry to Sen. Ted Kennedy and reminded us that both Kerry and Kennedy are from evil, liberal Massachusetts; how the reason the BushCheneyCorp "re"-election campaign is fumbling right now (Bush's approval rating is below 50 percent, which is ominous for an incumbent) is because the Bush regime never felt the need to be accountable to the American people (which can't be too fucking surprising, as they didn't even feel the need to fucking win the 2000 presidential election), and you can't make up for more than three years of blowing off all accountability to the American people within the last few months of a presidential election campaign -- but I won't. (I won't even talk about the spit that was accumulating in the right corner of Bush's mouth.)

I won't because, at this point, so close to the Nov. 2 presidential election, it's pretty much pointless.

At this point, you either realize that Bush is, at best, a dangerous dumbfuck, and at worst, one evil man. Or you don't.

Anyone who, like pop ho Britney Spears states that she does in "Fahrenheit 9/11," thinks that George W. Bush is a great man, I can't convince otherwise.

It's too late. The final exam, the national I.Q. test, is on Nov. 2, and if you haven't been studying these past almost four years, well, good luck on the exam.

(If you're a cheater, though, I'll give you the right answer: John Kerry.)

The most poignant thing I saw during the debate tonight wasn't on the large television screen on which I watched the debate in the room full of people. It was two young males, who appeared to be in their late teens, perhaps in their early 20s, who were unabashedly holding hands as they watched the debate. Wow, I thought. This election is about them. This election is about the future, this election is about hope, this election is about our young people and what kind of world we're going to create for our young people and for the generations that come after them. This election is about making things better for future generations than things have been for us, from changing bigotry to acceptance to cleaning up the environment (in part by breaking our addiction to oil) to repairing the social safety net that the Bush regime has left in tatters.

(I really did think that. When I report that I thought that, it's not like when former New York City Rudy Giuliani nauseatingly reported during the Reptilian National Convention that his first thought on Sept. 11, 2001, was how fucking giddy he was that George W. Bush was our "president." Right...)

Anyway, it struck me when I saw them tonight that these two young queers certainly wouldn't have been holding hands at a fucking Republican Party event. And that's because the Repugnican Party represents the oppressive, cold, dead hand of the past. The Republican Party represents ignorance, fear, hatred, intolerance and bigotry. It represents regression. And division. Just like the members of al-Qaeda and other extremist whackjobs, the Republican Party represents the Dark Ages, to which they'd love to bomb us back.

If you can't think of Nov. 2 as a national I.Q. test, think of that.

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 02:19:24 GMT

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 18:37:41 GMT

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 02:58:58 GMT

Associated Press and Reuters photos

John Kerry takes notes while "President" Dumbfuck tries (and fails) not to look too fucking stupid during the second 2004 presidential debate tonight in St. Louis, Missouri.

Kerry 2 for 2

I'm watching the second presidential debate.

"President" Dumbfuck hasn't improved his delivery from the first debate. He's still coming across like a whiny, spoiled child. He's so fucking defensive and shrill. He's recycling a lot of the bullshit he uttered during the first debate and his attempts at humor are painful to watch. (You have to be intelligent to be funny.)

My favorite part of the debate so far is when "President" Dumbfuck called Sen. John Kerry "Sen. Kennedy." (He did not correct himself afterward.)

Bush is toast.

His supporters would claim that he gave a great debate performance even if he were to pick his nose, suck his thumb and have an episode of Tourette's on live national TV.

But it's not his sick supporters whose votes are critical on Nov. 2.

It's the undecided/swing voters'. And there's no way the majority of them are going to vote for "President" Monkeyboy.

Let's face it: The undecided/swing voters, if they don't know the issues by now, after almost four disastrous years with the Bush regime at the wheel, aren't going to know them any day soon. They're not going to make their voting decisions based upon the issues, but upon the images that Kerry and Bush are putting forth right now (and upon their own personal financial situations, of course, and few of us are better off now than we were four years ago).

Kerry is projecting a presidential image and Bush is putting forth the image of an overprivileged, not-very-bright frat boy who, because he has been too busy partying, just last night was cramming for his final exam tonight.

Kerry will finish Bush off at the next and final debate on Wednesday night, which will be about domestic issues (which means, I hope, that we won't have to hear Bush say, again, "wrong war, wrong time, wrong place").

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 05:52:51 GMT

Hope.

My friend and co-worker Charlotte, who is one of the most stylish and tasteful people I know (I call her a gay man trapped in a woman's body) -- and who also is one of the most apolitical people I know (we discuss men because she can't discuss politics) -- caught me by surprise today when she announced that she watched "Fahrenheit 9/11" on DVD and that the film moved her so much that she is going to vote on Nov. 2.

She said she was heartbroken over the images of the Iraqi who were children maimed in the Bush regime's invasion of Iraq and was furious that the Bush family has a history of doing business with the bin Laden family. (I informed her that the Bush family also has a history of doing business with Nazi Germany, that the Bush family has a long history of doing business with America's enemies.)

Charlotte also said that she figures that as a thirtysomething mother of two children, she thinks it's time that she starts to pay attention to what is going on.

This is a brand-new Charlotte.

Wow. I had figured that Michael Moore would get some people to the polls, but I'd never expected to hear a testimony like Charlotte's. Not from anyone I know.

As I told Charlotte, most or all of the main points in "Fahrenheit 9/11" were reported somewhere in the media during the past few years -- it's just that most Americans don't pay attention to what's going on in their nation and in the world, to what their (mis)leaders are doing in their name. Moore does a wonderful job of packaging it, of tying all of it together, but to those of us who have been paying attention, little of "F9/11" came to us as news.

SfGate.com columnist Mark Morford talks about this in his latest column, titled "Why Don't Americans Care? Do you know who Halliburton is? Dick Cheney? How about Karl Rove? Alas, most Americans don't":

Let's be honest. Percentage-wise, few people in America really give much of a crap about what's going on in the hallowed halls of politics and power.

This is what we in the media and maybe you in the media-consuming audience tend to forget far too easily: This country is simply jam-packed with millions of people who have no time for, or interest in, politics, or media, or environmental policy, or education, or global issues, or which presidential candidate lied his ass off about which aspect of his military career and which Orange Alert is totally bogus and how many soldiers are dying for what imbecilic war.
It seems hard to believe. But the general rule of thumb is that major cities are slightly more attuned due to aggressive media saturation and how issues tend to make themselves known more urgently, more immediately, whereas Middle America is a scattershot conglomeration of the politically apathetic and the actively disenfranchised, full of people far too busy with their lives and kids and jobs and zoning out on "Fear Factor" and "Monday Night Football" to care about following the elitist, ever dire dramas playing out on the nation's gilded stages.
Most Americans, in other words, have no idea what the hell a Halliburton is. Or a Karl Rove. Or a Donny "Shriveled Soul" Rumsfeld. Or a Lockheed Martin. Or a Carlysle Group. Or have any idea that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Or that WMDs were never found. Or that President Bush has taken more vacation time than any president in U.S. history. Or that Jesus thinks Dubya is "sort of a dink." Or where Iraq is on a map.
Fact is, in the past decade, TV-news ratings -- cable and network, combined -- has shrunk to a fraction of its former numbers. Newspaper subscriptions have been either flat or dropping for just about as long. Newsmagazines, radio, historical nonfiction: flat or dropping fast. Even the Internet, that vast teeming customizable firestorm of news and info streaming in from all over the planet, even the awesome 'Net draws far more people to its porn and gossip and shopping departments than any e-news joint could ever wet dream.
Is this unfair? Does it sound elitist and biased? It's not. There have been studies. And reports. And alarming indicators of all kinds telling us time and again that, for example, fully 50 percent of eligible Americans don't even bother to vote (a 15 percent drop since 1964), and many have no idea who's on the Supreme Court or what Congress does, and many can't even point to France on a globe.
Voter turnout, comparatively, in Italy, Spain, the U.K., or Germany? Anywhere from 75 to 92 percent, every time. The sad fact is, the United States ranks 139th out of 172 countries in voter turnout. Wave that flag proudly, baby.
You've seen the headlines. Alarming numbers of American high school students can't even identify the current vice president, much less name a half dozen presidents from history. Far too many citizens can't name the capital of their own home state or recognize their own senators, much less discern how Bush's environmental policy is poisoning their water or how Ashcroft wants to scan their email and tap their phones and suck the pith from their souls. A whopping 49 percent of Americans aged 18-25 can't find New York on a map, and 11 percent can't even locate the United States. Now that's patriotism.
A recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development states that upward of 60 percent of Americans ages 16-25 are "functionally illiterate," meaning they can't, for example, fill out a detailed form or read a numerical table (like a time schedule). A recent Florida study shows at least 70 percent of recent high school graduates need remedial courses -- that is, basic reading and math -- when they enter community college. These are kids who, you can be assured, think Colin Powell is that nasty British dude on "American Idol."
And everyone you know seems to have a parent or a sister-in-law living somewhere conservative and podunk for whom politics and news media is like some sort of impossibly dense morass, alien and strange and vaguely threatening, like a nasty, painful growth on their big toe, best ignored in hopes that it will just dry up and go away.

Maybe this, then, is the most pressing question of our time: How to get the vast majority of Americans to care? To pay attention? To read? To effect change and demand accountability from bumbling spoon-fed leaders who count on voter apathy and force-fed ignorance to cram through their environmental rollbacks and homophobic laws and draconian Patriot Acts? Is it even possible? Are we too far gone?
How to make America more like, say, Europe, where knowledge of current events and political intrigue is not only hugely important to the vast majority of citizens but is also deeply woven into the very fabric of daily life, an integral part of the educational system and the café conversation and the workplace water-cooler chats, and to ignore it is considered, well, irresponsible and even a mite traitorous?
True, part of why they care so much is because America is the foremost bully on the block and it pays to know what makes the bully tick. And whine. And kill. In short, as the theory goes, most Americans don't give a damn because we're on top and we own everything and have more nukes than anyone and we're never the ones getting invaded. It's our unofficial motto -- America: We Don't Have to Care.

And this very column is frequently slapped with the accusation that it merely "preaches to the choir," and if I really want to affect minds I should consider tempering or sanitizing my opinions for a more "moderate" mainstream readership, as if the nation was chock-full of opinionated, well-read, temperate thinkers ready to be gently informed of new ideas, when in fact this group is but a fraction, a sliver, far overshadowed and overpowered by the real majority in America: The detached. The disinterested. The intellectually lazy.
So, what's the solution? It is as simple as dramatically changing the way we educate our children, our population? Is it desanitizing our vacuous history textbooks and making media studies and political science and current events as mandatory to the educational diet as macho sports and bad lunches and playground kickball?
Or maybe it's a new national draft? Will that galvanize the rest of the populace sufficiently? How about Iraq devolving even faster into Vietnam 2.0? Is it 10,000 dead U.S. soldiers and nary an imprisoned terrorist or fresh barrel of oil to show for it? How about five bucks a gallon? Ten? Is it legalizing pot and banning guns? What will it take?
Maybe another massive national catastrophe? Maybe a 9/11 cubed, and cubed again, something unthinkably horrific and unleashed upon the innocents and the children and the puppies, something that so jars and infuriates and undermines our desperate empire that even the cold-blooded neoconservative Right can't possibly leverage our sorrow and pain for its own political gain? Very possible. After all, nothing like a little hard-earned apocalypse to make you consider voting independent.
Or maybe it's something entirely different, maybe some sort of potent, unimaginable spiritual enlightenment that looks like revelation and smells like Vishnu and sounds like harmonic convergence and tastes like Buddha and has nothing whatsoever to do with fundamentalism or Christianity or Bush's angry homophobic flag-wavin' God. The mystics say we're very close. They claim the next decade will offer, to those who care to participate, one helluva transformational vibrational wallop. Possible?
Whatever it looks like, we can rest assured we're still not out of the dark, dank woods just yet. Our national apathy is well protected, our intellectual ignorance secure and our fears well fed and carefully, perpetually reinforced by the Powers That Be and the fact that the overall 50 percent voter turnout never moves by more than a point or two, usually downward.
And the Establishment, it only smiles knowingly, and nods, and says there there now. It'll be all right. Just go back to sleep.

Well, if my "F9/11"-inspired friend Charlotte doesn't go back to sleep -- if she makes it to the voting booth on Nov. 2 and makes an effort to keep herself better informed -- I will feel that there is some hope.

After all, we're talking about Charlotte.

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 06:23:51 GMT

My friend e-mailed this to me today. It was new to me, so maybe it will be new to you. (I modified it a little bit.)

Q: How many members of the Bush regime does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Ten:

1. One to deny that the light bulb needs to be changed.

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says that the light bulb needs to be changed.

3. One to blame Bill Clinton for burning out the light bulb.

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for darkness.

5. One to give a billion-dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb.

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a stepladder under the banner "LIGHT BULB CHANGE ACCOMPLISHED."

7. One to resign and then publish a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally "in the dark."

8. One to viciously smear No. 7.

9. One to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George W. Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along.

10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 05:51:10 GMT

I hate this shit.

I just got this e-mail from the Kerry-Edwards campaign:



			Fight the Republican spin. Tell the media how John Edwards won the debate tonight.

Dear Robert,

We're two for two. Tonight, in Cleveland, John Edwards showed real strength and conviction -- he was in command of the facts and in control of the debate and a powerful advocate for John Kerry. The American people saw John Edwards as somebody who is ready, if neccessary, to be president of the United States.

Dick Cheney is totally out of touch with reality in Iraq and totally out of touch with the struggles of the middle class. This is nothing new to a man with a lifetime record of protecting the powerful and well-connected. He came across as smug, arrogant, mean and defensive -- but his trademark distortions and scare tactics didn't work. John Edwards refused to let him play the politics of fear and forced Dick Cheney to confront his administration's record of failure.

Americans are tired of growls and scowls from our leaders, and John Edwards and John Kerry offer America hope and optimism.

The Bush-Cheney campaign is already trying to spin the debate. I am here in Cleveland, right now, working to make sure that doesn't happen. Tonight my job is going to be a lot easier than my Republican counterparts for three reasons. First, John Edwards is our candidate for vice president, second Dick Cheney is theirs, and third I know that you are going to join me in this critical fight.

Here is what you can do:

1) Vote in online polls

The Bush-Cheney campaign has asked their supporters to vote in online polls. Don't let them distort the polls like they distort their record.
CNN
http://www.cnn.com

MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com

ABC News
http://www.abcnews.com

CBS
http://www.cbsnews.com

Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com

Also check you local newspaper and TV station's websites for online polls.

2) Call into talk radio

http://volunteer.johnkerry.com/speakout

3) Write local newspapers

http://volunteer.johnkerry.com/speakout

John Edwards clearly won on stage tonight -- let's make sure he wins against unrelenting Republican spin.

Sincerely,

Joe Lockhart
Senior Advisor


	Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.

Look, I wholeheartedly agree that Dick Cheney is a world-class asshole and that John Edwards could do the job of president if he had to. (Shit, after George W. Bush, who couldn't be president? Has the presidential bar not been lowered to somewhere beneath the ground?)

But I wholeheartedly disagree that Edwards was the clear winner of the mostly lackluster vice presidential debate (in the minds of the average viewer, anyway), and it's a bit hypocritical to send out an e-mail to Kerry-Edwards supporters within just a few hours after the end of the debate and to ask them in that e-mail to participate in the creation of spin -- and to say in that e-mail, "The Bush-Cheney campaign is already trying to spin the debate."

As for the e-mail's suggestions:

What the fuck is the point of the online polls as to who won the debate? They're totally unscientific, so why participate?

Calling in to talk radio shows is an OK idea if you have something intelligent to say and if you're not just parroting talking points that you've been given.

Writing a letter to a newspaper is an OK idea if you have something intelligent to say and if you have written it yourself, but overtly partisan letters are a dime a dozen, so don't expect your overtly partisan letter to get published. If you're participating in a letter-writing campaign and you write what you are told to write, especially don't expect your letter to get published; after two identical or nearly identical letters are received, if the editor is competent at all, none of the cloned letters will be published. (My bachelor's is in journalism, so I know what I'm talking about. Most press releases and most letters that newspapers receive never see newsprint.)

And what I really love about these spin campaigns, whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats or another group that is orchestrating them, is the apparent belief that the media outlets won't fucking recognize that it's a campaign. They're suddenly hit with a ton of calls or faxes or e-mails or letters all at once, the message in them is indentical or very similar, but nooooooooo, they'll think that all of these people are acting independently.

So these campaigns are just a nuisance to the media outlets. A bunch of zombies repeating the same talking points that someone has spoon-fed them doesn't do much for democracy, for independent thought or for improving the world. It seems to me that we already have enough sheeple in the United States of Amnesia and thus we don't need to encourage even more lemming-like activity.

While I expect such tactics as outlined in the e-mail above from the Repugnican Party, I expect more from the Democratic Party. Telling people what to think and what to do to the extent exhibited in the e-mail above is condescending and indicates a certain amount of contempt and disrepect for those people.

And do the people exist to do what the parties tell them to do or are the parties supposed to take direction from the people?

Shit like this makes me want to run, not walk, back to the Green Party after Nov. 2...

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 03:26:05 GMT

Associated Press photos

Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate tonight in Cleveland, Ohio. I would call the debate mostly a draw, in terms of swaying undecided voters, in that Cheney lies so much and so few people have the time to check out his lies that he is probably fairly successful among the undecided in neutralizing valid criticisms of him and the Bush regime with his lies.

Captain Hook vs. Peter Pan

I'm watching the vice presidential debate. John Edwards' and Dick Cheney's dynamic is not unlike that of Peter Pan's and Captain Hook's, respectively.

So far, Cheney has recycled at least two of the things that "President" Bush used in his debate with John Kerry on Thursday night: The criticism that Kerry has called the Bush regime's quagmire in Iraq "the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place" (um, it is all of those things) and the false charge that Kerry's criticism of the Bush regime's bullshit "coalition of the willing" denigrates those nations that the Bush regime did succeed in coercing and bribing into supporting its illegal, immoral, imperialistic and unprovoked invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

To Edwards' pointing out the corruption surrounding Dick Cheney's Halliburton, Cheney countered that -- Edwards has had poor attendance in the U.S. Senate. OK...

I don't give a fuck about Edwards' attendance record. (This is probably yet another Cheney lie, but since I don't care whether it is true or not, and since it's obviously a deflection of the Halliburton issue, I'm not going to bother to research it.)

However, I am very concerned that the vice president of the United States would help push a bogus war so that the corporation of which he was CEO before he became vice president could war profiteer. And that's exactly what happened: Cheney was instrumental in the awarding of no-bid federal government contracts to Halliburton, from which he still receives more than $100,000 a year. However, Halliburton, which specializes in war, can't profit unless there is a war. So Cheney helped provide it with one in Iraq.

It's pointless to write more about the debate, which continues as I type this sentence.

Cheney is such a colossal fucking liar -- he was, for instance, still asserting the false 9/11-Iraq connection long after the other members of the Bush regime backed away from it -- that this debate cannot afford us much insight. Cheney is the member of the Bush regime whose image is so negative that it doesn't matter much what he says, such as his recent assertion that if the American voters choose John Kerry over George W. Bush, there will be another 9/11-level terrorist attack upon the United States.

However, the contrast between the lying, corrupt, toxic Cheney and the peppy Edwards can only sway the undecideds more toward the Kerry-Edwards ticket than to the BushCheneyCorp ticket, even if only just a tiny bit.

P.S. OK, one last thing. Cheney just stated that the most important quality of a vice president is the vice president's ability to assume the presidency if need be. OK, Dick, then please explain former Vice President Dan Quayle.

P.P.S. Oh my God. I really thought that I was done with this post, but Cheney just used "Democratic" turncoat and nutjob Zell Miller's rabid appearance at the Republican Nazi Convention as "evidence" that the Bush regime has tried to reach out to Democrats, that "President" Bush has tried to be a uniter, not a divider. Fucking Cheney will fucking utter any fucking lie. Wow.

Update (Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2004): Proving my point that "Fucking Cheney will fucking utter any fucking lie," the media reported today that although Cheney claimed during last night's veep debate that Edwards' Senate attendance was so poor that last night was the first time that Cheney had ever met Edwards, Cheney and Edwards had met at least three times before last night's debate. Reports The Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON -- It was perhaps the most surprising tidbit of new information during the debate -- that Vice President Dick Cheney had never met Sen. John Edwards until Tuesday night.

Except it wasn't true.

"I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session," Cheney said to Edwards. "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."

It seems, however, the vice president's memory was a little off. Or maybe Edwards didn't leave much of an impression.

Less than two hours after the debate ended, aides to Edwards and Sen. John F. Kerry distributed a photograph from the Feb. 1, 2001, National Prayer Breakfast showing Edwards and Cheney standing side by side.

"Congressman Watts, Sen. Edwards, friends from across America and distinguished visitors to our country from all over the world, Lynne and I are honored to be with you all this morning," Cheney said, according to a transcript.

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt described the prayer breakfast photo as evidence of an "inconsequential meeting."

Kerry-Edwards aides also pointed to news articles from January 2003, when Edwards escorted the newly elected senator from North Carolina, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, onto the Senate floor for her swearing-in by Cheney.

Although Cheney is the Senate's presiding officer, he actually sits in the chamber only on rare occasions, such as to break a tie vote and to swear in new senators.

He does attend the GOP senators' weekly luncheons to discuss party strategy. But only Republicans attend, and Cheney usually breezes into the building, goes to the meeting, then leaves without hobnobbing with Democrats.

In fact, Cheney was teased by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) for only associating with Republicans when, in an encounter on the Senate floor, Cheney cursed at Leahy.

A Cheney aide said after the debate that the vice president simply didn't remember meeting Edwards prior to Tuesday night -- and that he certainly had never seen the North Carolinian on the Senate floor.

Cheney sure was sure that he'd never met Edwards before when he stated during last night's debate, "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."

I submit that Cheney probably lied about never having met Edwards -- that is, he stated the falsehood knowing that it was a falsehood -- but that even if Cheney truly thought that he'd never met Edwards before, it is indicative of poor fact-checking to state that he'd never met Edwards before when there is photofuckingraphic evidence that he had:

This is a still from the C-SPAN broadcast of the February 2001 prayer breakfast referenced in the Los Angeles Times article.

Edwards did not correct Cheney's false assertion during the debate, so perhaps Edwards did not recall meeting Cheney. I guess that Cheney didn't tell Edwards to go fuck himself during the 2001 prayer breakfast.

Cheney's disregard for such basic truths as whether or not he had met Edwards before makes you wonder what hundreds, if not thousands, of other lies and falsehoods he has told publicly.

Speaking of fact-checking, you gotta love it that Cheney, trying to show the youngsters that he's Internet savvy, claimed during last night's debate that the Web site "FactCheck.com" exculpates him from the scandalous Halliburton. Cheney meant to say FactCheck.org. FactCheck.org, The Associate Press reports, is "a nonpartisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center." There is a Web site called FactCheck.com (it is "a for-profit advertising site based in the Cayman Islands," reports the AP); its server was inundated with hits, so FactCheck.com's owner redirected traffic from FactCheck.com to anti-BushCheneyCorp billionaire George Soros' anti-BushCheneyCorp Web site. Reports the AP:

[FactCheck.com] decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits -- about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said [today].

"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.

They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.

...Soros was not advised of the switch and did not know it had taken place until [today], said a spokesman, Jeremy Ben-Ami.

"We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events but certainly encourage voters to visit both of these valuable sites," Michael Vachon, a senior aide to Soros, said in a statement.

Soros' Web site's homepage carries this disclaimer: "We do not own the FactCheck.com domain name and are not responsible for it redirecting to GeorgeSoros.com. We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events. We believe that Vice President Cheney intended to direct viewers of the Vice-Presidential Debate to FactCheck.org."

On GeorgeSoros.com's homepage also is this message from Soros:

This is the most important election of my lifetime. I have never been heavily involved in partisan politics but these are not normal times. That is why I am sharing this message. I have been demonized by the Bush campaign but I hope you will give me a hearing.

President Bush ran on the platform of a ‘humble’ foreign policy in 2000. If we re-elect him now, we endorse the Bush doctrine of preemptive action and the invasion of Iraq, and we will have to live with the consequences. As I shall try to show, we are facing a vicious circle of escalating violence with no end in sight. But if we repudiate the Bush policies at the polls, we shall have a better chance to regain the respect and support of the world and to break the vicious circle.

Read More>
Download Soros’ personal message>

George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, is beginning a nationwide tour this week to talk about how the war in Iraq is making America less safe -- and why President Bush should not be re-elected. This is the speech he delivered at the National Press Club in Washington on September 28.

It's safe to say that this is not the message that Cheney wanted people to see...

Even if people go to the Web site Cheney meant, FactCheck.org, they will see this on its homepage:

Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts

10.06.2004

Getting it wrong about combat pay, Halliburton, and FactCheck.org

Bush Mischaracterizes Kerry's Health Plan

10.04.2004

Bush claims Kerry's plan puts "bureaucrats in control" of medical decisons, "not you, not your doctor." But experts don't agree with that.

Distortions and Misstatements At First Presidential Debate

10.01.2004

Bush and Kerry both have problems with the facts at their meeting in Coral Gables

Kerry Ad Falsely Accuses Cheney on Halliburton

09.30.2004

Contrary to this ad's message, Cheney doesn't gain financially from the contracts given to the company he once headed.

The "Willie Horton" Ad Of 2004?

09.28.2004

Republican group's ad shows Osama, Kerry. It appeals to fear, and twists Kerry's record on defense, intelligence, Iraq.

Bush Ad Twists Kerry's Words on Iraq

09.27.2004

Selective use of Kerry's own words makes him look inconsistent on Iraq. A closer look gives a different picture.

What does FactCheck.org say about what Cheney said they said? FactCheck.org says this:

Cheney got our domain name wrong -- calling us "FactCheck.com" -- and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton.

In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.

Probably not what Cheney wants people to see, either...

Cheney should stick to what he knows -- lying and war profiteering -- and leave the Internet to the youngsters.

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 05:15:26 GMT

Film review

GOING UPRIVER

A lot of people probably will dismiss the new documentary "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry" as pro-Kerry propaganda and won't see it.

It will be their loss.

"Going Upriver" is no more pro-Kerry than "Pumping Iron," the 1977 documentary also directed by George Butler, is pro-Arnold Schwarzenegger. In both movies, Butler presents his subjects and leaves it to us to decide what to make of them. (That said, the serious, studious, duty- and service-minded younger Kerry shown in "Going Upriver" is in stark contrast to the arrogant, duplicitous, dictator-praising, pot-smoking, frolicking-with-bimbos younger Schwarzenegger shown in "Pumping Iron.")

More than it is about John Kerry, "Going Upriver" is about the Vietnam War and how things haven't changed much since the Vietnam War, how history repeats itself. While Butler draws no overt comparisons of the quagmire in Vietnam and the current quagmire in Iraq, it's difficult, as a thinking audience member, not to draw the comparisons.

In "Going Upriver," for instance, a younger Kerry, on Dick Cavett's television talk show and in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, relates how young American men in Vietnam continued to die not because the war was accomplishing anything, but because President Richard Nixon did not want to be the first U.S. president to go down in history as having lost a war. Saving face was more important to the Nixon regime than were the thousands of American lives -- and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives -- that were being lost in Vietnam .

If you think that Vietnam is just ancient history, let's revisit what "President" George W. Bush said just Thursday night, during the first 2004 presidential debate:

First of all, what my opponent wants you to forget is that he voted to authorize the use of force. And now says it's the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place.

I don't see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. What message does that send our troops? What messages does that send our allies? What message does that send the Iraqis?

No, the way to win this is to be steadfast and resolved and to follow through on the plan that I just outlined.

Note that Bush's argument -- which he thought was so fucking clever that he repeated the phrase "the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place" or a close variation of it throughout the rest of the debate -- is not whether or not the Iraq war is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place. His argument is that to acknowledge that the Iraq war is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place would be a public-relations problem for him and his regime.

So fuck the truth. Fuck the troops. Fuck the Iraqis, fuck the entire fucking world. This is all about saving face for the Bush regime. Let's all just pretend that the Bush regime's unprovoked, illegal, immoral, imperialistic March 2003 invasion of Iraq was not a colossal fucking mistake, because the United States of America and its leaders are incapable of making mistakes.

To answer Bush's rhetorical question of what message it would send to acknowledge that his regime's war in Iraq is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place, I imagine that many, if not most, of our troops, our allies, the Iraqis and the world would love it if the the Bush regime would actually fucking admit its many, many mistakes. (Hell, even just one mistake!)

Because only after a mistake is acknowledged can it be fixed.

We Americans need to acknowledge our mistake of having allowed the Bush regime to take over the White House without having been elected, and we can acknowledge that mistake on Nov. 2 by voting the lying, thieving, murderous Bush regime out of Washington. Our troops, our allies, the Iraqis and the rest of the world would be delighted to hear that message from the American people, that we acknowledge our mistake and that with legitimately elected President John Kerry we intend to fix what the Bush regime shamelessly, needlessly, criminally broke.

I won't rehash "Going Upriver" because it contains so many gems that to describe them all would ruin the surprise. You need to see it, and if you want to read more about it before you go see it, you can visit its Web site.

I will remark that "Going Upriver" thoroughly discredits so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ringleader John O'Neill -- who is a Vietnam veteran but who never served with Kerry -- for what he is: A deer-caught-in-the-headlights right-wing nutjob who was recruited by the Nixon regime to try to discredit Kerry.

Just as Butler does not tell us, but rather shows us what a true American hero Kerry is, Butler does not tell us, but shows us what a raging assbite O'Neill is. Television clips and film footage don't lie.

I had thought that "Going Upriver" would simply rehash images that I'd already scene, but the film shows mostly film and television clips and pictures that I'd never seen before (and made me wonder why I hadn't) and it fleshed out what I already knew about John Kerry.

Perhaps the most poignant part of "Going Upriver" is the film footage of Vietnam veterans tossing their medals over a fence in a symbolic act, an act to show that they believed that in Vietnam they fought for nothing, that their comrades were killed and were still being killed for nothing, and thus their medals meant nothing to them.

I've read about the medal-tossing, but no written account of it that I've read does it any justice; one has to watch the film footage to gain a real understanding of what happened. Rather than a spiteful, anti-American hatefest, as the Bush-lovin' AmeriNazis would have us believe it was, the medal-tossing was a cathartic expression of deep sorrow over young lives lost for nothing except for the pride of stupid white men and resentment that the federal government run by said stupid white men had lied about the war in Vietnam, just as the Bush regime has been lying about its war in Iraq. (That anyone should criticize the veterans for doing whatever the fuck they please with their own damned medals pisses me off, especially the fact that most of the critics of the medal-throwers would never put their own precious, hypocritical, chickenhawk asses in the way of a bullet.)

While I have long known that John Kerry, whom I have seen speak twice here in Northern California and whose hand I shook at one of those events, is a good man who will be a great president, I walked away from "Going Upriver" filled with a whole new appreciation for what Kerry has fought for and for what he still fights, and an unexpected appreciation of how vitally important the Vietnam War remains to this day, a deep understanding that it's not ancient history.

If Bush hadn't pussed out of Vietnam, if he had gone like Kerry went (Kerry volunteered to go) and had witnessed what Kerry witnessed, there is no way that he could so blithely suggest during Thursday's presidential debate that saving face for his regime is more important than saving Americans', Iraqis' and others' lives.

"Going Upriver" demonstrates that like the Vietnam War was, the Second Bush War in Iraq is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place -- and that John Kerry, like he was during the anti-Vietnam War movement, is the right man at the right time at the right place.

My grade: A

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 14:08:41 GMT

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 13:54:09 GMT

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 09:31:48 GMT

Reuters photos

The fact that John Kerry came off as presidential and "President" Bush came off like a petulant child during the first 2004 presidential debate couldn't have helped the BushCheneyCorp's "re"-election campaign. No wonder Team Bush wanted to make it only two debates instead of three.

Polls: Kerry won debate

CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll on who won the first presidential debate:

Kerry: 53
Bush: 37

CBS poll:

Kerry: 44
Bush: 26
Tie: 30

ABC poll:

Kerry: 45
Bush: 36
Tie: 17

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 07:20:07 GMT

Ted Rall's latest. It's funny, because I was just telling my friend Margie, a lawyer who lives in San Francisco, that if John Kerry wins on Nov. 2, as I expect him to, I will plan to move to the Bay Area within a year. But if "President" Bush gets a second term, I'll probably have to stay put in Sacramento -- it would be stupid to move to an even more expensive city if Bush gets another four years to continue to wage his class warfare on the middle class and the poor. It's pretty fucked up that our lives, in the United States and around the world, should be so influenced by the election of one person to one office.