The Shock of the New

It occured to me a couple of weeks ago that this front page could do with some freshening up. It's not that I dislike what I'm writing about, it is that it feels lonely here when there aren't any comments, and I thrive on collaboration.

To that end, I've invited a guest poster. croten has filled the comments boxes and my email with things which have given me pause, much for further study and thought and I think he will do the same for you. He and I don't always agree and I think that having the odd argument or two on the front page isn't a bad thing. All of the other group blogs I read or participate in tend to tamp down differences. I want to celebrate those differences here, a corner where a good argument can have its day.

He's busy recovering from a computer crash right now and reconstructing his firewall, but I wanted to give you a heads up because this week is likely to have a lot of changes, and this will be the largest one. And of course, we all have to learn how to put on the post-Bush mindset and learn to be critical about real issues again. That'll take more than a little work.

4 and 20 Blackbirds

If it is even close on Tuesday (and I don't think it will be), here is what we are in for:

Karl Rove in a Corner

Karl Rove is at his most formidable when running close races, and his skills would be notable even if he used no extreme methods. But he does use them. His campaign history shows his willingness, when challenged, to employ savage tactics

by Joshua Green

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl called the next morning," says a former Rove staffer. "He said, 'We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper's election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.

As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, "We have endured lies in this campaign, but I'll be damned if I will accept outright thievery." The recount stretched on, and Hooper's campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby's lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren't notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a former employee, "was 'Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'"

Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters' intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had "substantially complied" with the law. Hooper's lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, "They steal elections they don't like." Public opinion began tilting toward him.

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby's legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove's closest race. "On the afternoon of October the nineteenth," Hooper recalled, "I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife's garden, and she hollered out the back door, 'Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you're the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow," he said.

The demonizing has already begun, which tells me Rove is scared. He's still running to his base and still extremely negative in the final weekend, which doesn't scream "strength" to me going into the election. The internal polling must be really scary. Karl, if you had a candidate who wasn't a blithering idiot, you would have a shot. Why you tied your fortunes to this particular moron is really beyond me.

Listen Up, This is Serious

World Unprepared for Avian Flu, Experts Warn
By REUTERS

Published: October 31, 2004

Filed at 2:48 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The current U.S. flu vaccine shortage shows perfectly how poorly the world is prepared to handle the next global epidemic of influenza, health experts said on Sunday.

There are few vaccines or drugs to fight the flu and it takes months to make them, so when the pandemic comes it could wreak havoc for a long time, the experts told a conference.

``We believe with the current influenza vaccine supply issues, it illustrates perfectly the message that we'd like to get across,'' said Dr. Kathleen Neuzil of the University of Washington School of Medicine.

To prepare for a pandemic, countries first have to be ready for the regular yearly epidemics of influenza. That means having vaccines, drugs and data on whom the disease sickens and kills, she told the joint meeting of the American Society for Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Dr. Klaus Stohr, influenza coordinator for the World Health Organization, believes the world is overdue for a pandemic that could kill millions, and he believes the H5N1 virus now killing off tens of millions of birds in Asia is the most likely source.

Flu pandemics -- global epidemics of new strains of disease that kill an unusually high number of people -- come on average every 27 years. The last one was in 1968.

``We are 36 years out. We believe that we are closer to the next pandemic than we ever were,'' Stohr told a news conference.

``There is this new subtype in Asia circulating in poultry. It appears it is only a question of time until this subtype moves into humans.''

FROM POULTRY TO PEOPLE

So far the H5N1 flu has infected 44 people and killed 32 of them, Stohr said. Other studies presented to the conference show the virus has not yet acquired the ability to move from human to human.

Once it does, experts agree, it could spread quickly and kill millions.

In an average year, influenza kills between 500,000 and a million people globally, Stohr said -- stressing that this is a low estimate. No figures are available from developing countries with poor health care.

Avian influenza could kill many more than that. Scientists believe most strains of influenza originate with ducks or poultry and mutate to move into people.

The best way to fight such a new flu would be to quickly vaccinate against it, Neuzil said. But only the United States is working on such a vaccine, through National Institutes of Health contracts to Aventis Pasteur Inc and Chiron Corp, under which 2.4 million doses will be produced.

Chiron's woes with standard influenza vaccine show just how badly wrong things can go. British regulators stopped Chiron from selling flu vaccine made at its plant in Liverpool earlier this month because of contamination.

This is serious, very, very serious people. Any vaccine which might be developed won't be available for this year's flu season, which means that preventive measures are critically important: handshaking should be kept to a minimum, use a viricide on your hands constantly throughout the day. Try to keep yourself adequately rested and hydrated to boost your own immunity. If you feel even slightly ill, stay home, ditto for your kids. This bug doesn't look to be highly infectious YET, but the flu has a genius for mutation.

If you are in one of the high risk groups, and I am, you should absolutely plan to get a pneumonia vaccine shot immediately: it's the pneumonia which is a sequela of influenza which kills. I'm making a doctor's appointment tomorrow.

Apocalypse Now

The coming war

Terrorism, climate change and world poverty are inextricably linked. We must conquer them before they destroy us, argues broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby
Jonathan Dimbleby
Sunday October 31, 2004

The Observer

For a moment forget about the charge sheet against Messrs Bush and Blair - the alleged lies about WMD or the illegality of the invasion of Iraq - and glance at the bigger picture. Global terrorism, global poverty and global warming form a toxic trio that promise a catastrophe that will make the horrors of 9/11 look like the Boston Tea Party.

Do I exaggerate? In the Middle East untold thousands of Arabs are being slaughtered by US warplanes and artillery, supported by the British, to impose Western democracy on Iraq at the point of a gun. In Beirut, once dismembered by civil war but now at ease with itself, the young parade through the squares with grace and elegance. But listen to what they say and you discover a coruscating sense of humiliation and a deepening rage against America, startling in this most genuinely Westernised Arab state.

Aliya Saidi, a young lecturer at the American University, was discomfited to be asked about Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld: 'I don't want to say I hate them but they are terrible people.' After an embarrassed pause, she added: 'I don't know if I should say that; my husband is American.'

The resentment against the US administration (not the American people who are pre sumed to have been duped) crosses all classes and backgrounds. 'If the US continues to despise the Arab nation in this way,' the owner of a sportswear shop, Hadi Baalbaki, warns, 'I fear the whole Arab nation will form itself into one big al-Qaeda.'

Richard Clark, Bush's former anti-terrorism coordinator who took charge in the White House on 9/11 and who retains close contact with intelligence agencies around the world, tells me that 'by almost any measure... the war on terrorism is being lost'. He cites the rate of terrorist atrocities, more than doubled since 9/11, and insists that the number of terrorists has risen to around 100,000 active 'jihadists' around the world. Chillingly, he believes these zealots are likely to be supported 'philosophically, politically, and perhaps with money' by upwards of 700 million Muslims - roughly half the global population of the Islamic faithful.

When I was first in Lebanon, some 30 years ago, the young Palestinians in the refugee camps were taught how to use Kalashnikovs. Now, two generations on and still without any escape from their humiliation, they live in an emotional swamp of resentment and anger. Ahmad Iskandar is in his early twenties, edu cated and courteous and speaks as if explaining the self-evident to a backward pupil: 'I am ready to explode myself in Israel.' Ready to be a suicide bomber? 'It is not suicide, sorry. It is a martyr operation.' And what about the innocents who will die? 'Our heart is now dead. They make us forget everything. Just to go and kill them.' And he shrugs his shoulders.

Already the poison of al-Qaeda is seeping into the Palestinian camps. Munir Maqhdar, a refugee, is holed up in south Lebanon where he leads a small band of gun-toting guerrillas who swagger around him as he says 'anybody who supports the killing of Arabs and Muslim people in Afghanistan and Iraq is a legitimate target. Any Arab or Muslim organisation is entitled to take revenge if the opportunity arises... the White House has to demonstrate that the historic injustice perpetrated against Palestinians matters every bit as much as the protection of the state of Israel.' According to the UN, 60 million Arabs live on less than two dollars a day, the population is growing rapidly, and unemployment is set to double in five years. The finance director of the Central Bank of Lebanon, Youssef el-Khalil, says that young people have a choice between corruption or fundamentalism. 'Fundamentalism is very much seen as the alternative to corruption... the war on terrorism has to address the war on poverty.'

The neocons who hold sway in Washington do not flinch under this kind of fire. For them, in the words of Richard Perle: 'We are winning the war on terrorism. We have killed a significant number. We have put terrorists in many parts of the world on the defensive.'

Try telling that to the two doctors I met in Ethiopia, who told me of impoverished young Muslims in the south-east of Ethiopia who 'are being indoctrinated under the coverage of religion with the beliefs and attitudes of al-Qaeda' and who, in some cases, are already in training for future operations. Try telling it to the American diplomat in Addis Ababa who gave me an 'off the record' briefing, holed up in the US compound which, like US embassies around the world, is protected from terrorist attack by armed guards, concrete barriers and razor-wire. He showed me a list of 'wahabi' clerics and business leaders in Ethiopia suspected of allegiance to al-Qaeda and volunteered that US special forces are now operating alongside Ethiopian soldiers in an effort to break up al-Qaeda cells in the Ogaden region. And how were they doing? He shrugged: 'We have already lost the war against terrorism in Africa.'

Try telling the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, that 'we' are winning the war on terror. 'Yes,' he confirms (for the first time), US forces are indeed engaged in military operations alongside their Ethiopian counterparts but this 'police work' is only part of the solution - 'the most important part is fighting poverty'. This is not so much an issue of morality but of urgent necessity in a country stricken by familiar but excruciating indices of misery. 'There is a very frustrated population that sees no light at the end of the tunnel and therefore is susceptible to all sorts of saviours, false saviours,' he says.
....
So what happens when the poor have their just deserts? Will we see the melting of the ice-caps, catastrophic floods that drown hundreds of thousands of people and turn millions into refugees and famished migrants? Will we all perish in some Siberian or Saharan Armageddon? Or find ourselves caught in a Malthusian end-game as we perish for lack of food and water? Or will we start to control our profligate use of carbon fuels and persuade whoever wins the American election that the resources of the planet must be more equitably shared?

As with winning the war on poverty, so with global warming: it is a matter of political will. Which is why a deeply frustrated president of the World Bank says: 'If someone came here from Mars and looked at the way we run the place, he'd get back in his spaceship and go back to Mars and say, "You don't have to worry about them, they are going to destroy themselves".' Which means, as I argue in The New World War , we had better get serious about global terrorism, global poverty, and global warming. Fast.

This is the Twenty-first Century we've inherited and we have very little time to get it right.

Incompetence of global proportions

Cutbacks Threaten Work Of Homeland Security Unit

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 31, 2004; Page A06

A key unit of the Department of Homeland Security has slipped into a state of financial turmoil that could endanger its ability to investigate terrorists, pay informants and perform wiretaps, some department employees and officials say.

All hiring and transfers at the department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division have been banned for two months, as have almost all training, purchases of supplies and equipment, and maintenance of vehicles. Top department officials say they are committed to protecting ICE's ability to perform investigations, but agents in the field say ICE's budget shortfall of perhaps $500 million may soon threaten its national security work.

The cause of the financial hole at ICE is a set of complex accounting maneuvers used when the Department of Homeland Security was established in 2003. Those procedures have led to financial disputes among several Homeland Security agencies, officials said.

ICE has a diverse mission that includes investigating immigration violations, international arms dealers, money launderers and child pornographers. It is participating in the government effort to disrupt possible terrorist threats during the election period. It is an amalgam of parts of the old Customs Service, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and other agencies.

Top Homeland Security officials are hiring outside accountants to help referee the disputes, which involve hundreds of millions of dollars, among the three Homeland Security agencies that include parts of the old INS: the 15,000-employee ICE; Customs and Border Protection (CBP), whose 41,000 employees guard U.S. borders, airports and seaports; and the 10,000-strong Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), which provides services for immigrants.

"These are very frontline agencies, and getting them healthy as fast as possible is what we're about," said Andrew Maner, Homeland Security's chief financial officer, who has overseen 10 months of intense negotiations among the three agencies. "We need to have very healthy agencies, given what they do."

One result of ICE's budget crisis is that it has been forced to release on bond 25,000 illegal immigrants over the past year because it lacked space to incarcerate them, said Rep. Jim Turner (Texas), the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. "That's a dangerous situation that needs management attention," he said.

Is there any part of the Bush administration which is not incompetent? Assuming that there are terrorists out there, these are the frontline troops to catch them. Instead, I get hauled out of line for additional security searches three or four times on every flight I take.

GOTV

When Did Voting Get So Intimidating?
The Dangers of Litigating the Election

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Sunday, October 31, 2004; Page B01

To understand where we are, we need to understand how we got here. The American electoral system has undergone two great changes in the last century, one democratizing and one not.

The democratizing change was to open voting to previously excluded groups, notably women and blacks. We often forget that while many Western states extended the vote to women beginning in the 1890s, all women didn't get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920 and African Americans didn't achieve full inclusion until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But we also forget the other major change: Restrictive registration rules. Roughly a century ago, many states began developing voting laws designed to limit the participation of the least powerful and least literate members of society, notably including blacks in the South. Michael McGerr, a historian at Indiana University, notes that in the post-Civil War years, before these restrictions came into force, the American system was remarkably open -- as long as you were a man. "There wasn't a cumbersome registration system," said McGerr, a proponent of the theory that we're now going through another political revolution.

Often, you didn't have to register at all. You just showed up on Election Day. Some jurisdictions, McGerr notes, even allowed immigrants then coming to America in droves to vote, as long as they declared their intention to become citizens. "The system was willing to risk a certain amount of corruption in order to make sure that anyone who had the right to vote did vote," McGerr said. "We've made a different tradeoff in the last 100 years. In order to protect against potential corruption, we've made it too hard for the less educated and less well-off to vote."

That's the whole debate in a nutshell. You will hear variations on it this election night if the contest is close. In our time, Democrats are primarily concerned with expanding the vote -- particularly in the inner cities. Republicans worry more about voter fraud, particularly in those traditionally Democratic strongholds.

So we have the spectacle of a Republican secretary of state in Ohio telling local officials to enforce a state law requiring registration applications to be made on 80-pound paper stock (he later relented). We have had allegations and lawsuits over the validity of tens of thousands of new registrations in Florida, Michigan, Ohio and other battleground states. We have GOP challenges to the eligibility of students registered where they attend college, battles over the fate of provisional ballots, arguments over the purging of voter rolls.

And that's before Election Day.

Democrats see a specific strategy in the Republican focus on fraud in urban areas. Dan Trevas, the communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party, said the idea is "to slow up the system so people are back in line, looking at their watches and saying, 'Do I have time?' "

One would like to hope that a president whose central foreign policy claim is that he wants to spread democracy around the world would think twice before winning reelection through complicity with such tactics. Republicans insist that fraud suppression, not voter suppression, is their intention. Shrewd conservatives are already preparing the intellectual groundwork for such arguments. If the election's outcome is in doubt, count on seeing a lot of Republicans brandishing the book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," by John Fund, the Wall Street Journal opinion writer.

With party feelings running so high, we just can't afford the sort of mistrust that's created when one party or another is seen as being in effective control of the electoral machinery in a given state or locality. It was a scandal in 2000 that Florida's top election official was a partisan Republican -- chosen by a GOP governor whose brother was one of the candidates -- and that she made all the critical decisions in her party's favor. This did nothing to inspire confidence among non-Republicans. The same critique would apply to a Democratic official in a comparable situation.

Running elections is not one of those sexy subjects in public management schools. I mean no disrespect to hard-working election officials around the country. On the contrary, I have strong affection for them -- my late uncle was a longtime city clerk who cared passionately about accurate results. A number of local election administrators have tried for years to improve the process. But let's face it: Except in places where local political machines wanted to be sure the vote got counted "right," election management has never been a high priority for city, county or state governments -- or their taxpayers.
....
Take the case of "provisional" ballots. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 created these ballots to prevent legitimate voters from being turned away because of an administrative glitch. If a voter proved later to be eligible, the provisional ballot would be counted. If not, it would be discarded. But eligible exactly where? Some states have said they would throw out all provisional ballots not cast in the proper precinct. Is that fair to a voter who was eligible, but whose specific polling place was a few blocks away, perhaps because it was moved between elections? Can you imagine the brawl we'd have if this election were decided by provisional ballots counted differently in different states?

And what if legitimate voters, because of partisan challenges, find themselves forced to cast provisional ballots that might be litigated after the election? Democrats especially are worried that Republicans will try to create huge piles of provisional ballots in inner-city precincts, taking them out of the broader count in order to fan doubts about their legitimacy.

Surely the rules on provisional ballots cry out for clear national standards. And surely the GOP should want to fight, not foster, the suspicion that it is unduly interested in challenging votes in African American districts.

It is for the reason of Dionne's last point that I'll be spending Tuesday night live-blogging the election from the first American branch of Hausbrandt in Philadelphia with Corrente blogger Lambert Strether. My colleague, Big Tino, is poll watching in Philly and will be phoning in reports. Additionally, this week I got the chance to meet Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum, Deputy Director of Just Democracy, which has mobilized an army of law students across the nation for election protection in the precincts deemed most sensitive to vote fraud and suppression. She will be in the national field center in Boston on Tuesday, emailing me reports from the field. You'll be able to get the first field reports from Lambert and I starting at around 7 PM Tuesday. This year blogs will be breaking news.

With My Morning Coffee

Here is what is on my World Wide Web this morning:

via American Street colleagues Chuck Currie and Barbara O'Brien, some interfaith observations.

Chuck brings word of the new blog of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. I've bookmarked it.

Barbara has a Buddhist meditation on our election. She writes:

This New York Times article referencing the Daily Show "Moment of Zen" made me think of the ways elections are (and are not) like koans. This is not to say that the writer, A.O. Scott, knows what he's writing about --

Good words to meditate on today.

I read Barbara's The Mahablog daily for her thoughts on The Big Questions.

Pirate Nation

Here is the world in which we hold our presidential election: the war in Afghanistan has become invisible, but it is going the way of the British and Soviet wars there. We will lose to the opium growers and war lords. Bush and Rummy never treated this as a serious effort against "terrorism," which is an intel and political war. We are not much better in Iraq: without a massive infusion of troops--which we don't have--we are quagmired. I am at a loss to explain what "winning" would look like in this theater.

You don't defeat Fourth Generation Warfare using WWII tactics. Whoever wins, the road ahead in Iraq is rough. Both Bush and Kerry have plans that depend on newly trained Iraqis. But insurgents are killing recruits, and infiltrating the forces. A report from the front
By Rod Nordland, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek International

Nov. 8 issue - Sgt. Jonathan Scarfe, a broad-shouldered U.S. Marine with a square jaw and a 5 o'clock shadow, is trudging through a small town near Fallujah. On the opposite side of the street, taking his cues from Scarfe's movements, is Hussein Ali Jassim, who commands a small unit of the new Iraqi Special Forces. Scarfe says he trusts Jassim implicitly—which is more than he can say for most Iraqi National Guardsmen, less-trained locals thought to be collaborating with the insurgents. "The ING guys usually slept outside during the summer," says Scarfe. "When they slept inside, you knew a mortar barrage was coming." At one intersection, children laugh and shout as Jassim, who sports a small, well-trimmed mustache, distributes candy.

Most overseas attention has focused on the 160 or so foreigners who have been kidnapped, many of them representatives of Coalition countries. But militants and criminal gangs have also kidnapped thousands of Iraqis, most of them held for ransom. As a result, Iraqi elites are fleeing by the thousands, many to neighboring Jordan. "Iraq is there for the bandits now. Anyone with the financial ability to do so has left," says Amer Farhan, who departed last summer with his father, Sadeq, a factory owner, and all of their family.

Iraq is there for the bandits now. Bush turned a secular, brutal dictatorship into the rule of bandits, that's his idea of peace and freedom. I am appalled and angry.

Tuesday

Bush is selling his version of '1984'

October 31, 2004

Will the Tuesday election duly mark the efficacy of the Big Lie? Has George Orwell missed his dooms-date for reality by these past 20 years? The voters will get the last word.

If George W. Bush is indeed elected for real this time around, it would signal the triumph of White House falsehoods continuously told. The prime lie, for those who yet believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, took a country to war under false pretenses that Saddam Hussein posed a nuclear threat to the continental U.S. A corollary, that 41 percent still believe, held that the Iraqi dictator supported the al-Qaida consortium that brought down the World Trade Center towers.

So weak was the evidence on the eve of the U.S. invasion that even this space doubted Bush would strike. "The war against Iraq cannot be," I wrote against the advice of our Washington bureau chief, who knew better. "Such criminal activity is ill-advised and should be illegal in a civilized world. Nor should America target for extermination those heads of state who displease the ruling circle of this republic . . . under the skeletal pretense spelled out so far, this war just cannot be." It was, of course, and still is..

I lost two nickels wagering that the astronomic costs and the waste of American lives would be prohibitive even to this swaggering, ice-blooded, Bible-thumping, cold-turkey drunk gone zealot in the White House. It has since been revealed that Bush's disdain for evidence, once he makes up his mind, is matched only by his disdain for syntax. Those evildoers who rely on facts and science for answers are dismissed at home and abroad as "reality-based" by this current commander-in- chief of the nuclear trigger.

Installed reportedly by a Higher Power, the president expects another four years.

Such a victory, according to pollsters and thus the media, is a lively possibility. I doubt this but that is getting ahead of the story.

A Bush victory left to the voters this time would be a national decision fraught with ominous, almost Orwellian overtones. In his satiric 1949 novel "1984," George Orwell warned against the massive intrusion into our lives represented by the bureaucratic rule of Big Brother. "On each landing, opposite the lift shaft," Orwell wrote, "the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran."

In a case of life mimicking art, the U.S. Homeland Security Act is headed toward an Orwellian nightmare blanketing the nation around the clock with spying ears and eyes. Some lay blame to the terrorists of 9/11. But it is clear that, in wake of the Trade Center attack, the Bush administration had only to dust off the handy Patriot Act to sketch in the outlines of Orwell.

Still, the more unbelievable enactment of "1984" has evolved during the presidential campaign. Newspeak, the language Orwell created, is thrown around far too loosely to traffic in here. The gist of Newspeak, as described by a "1984" character, was "to narrow the range of thought." Herein lies the success of the administration's "Big Lie" as engineered by the president's chief manipulator, Karl Rove.

Rove's sweet-crude-oiled PR machine bears a potential resemblance to the depiction of Orwell's Big Lie to create its own reality. The buildup to the Iraq invasion and its aftermath in opinion polls appear to mark a success for White House agit-prop in the new millennium.

Some 38 percent of Americans, according to the latest Harris poll (Oct. 21), still believe the discredited Bush invasion rationale that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded." So too, some 41 percent believe the disproved administration falsehood that there were direct terror links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. The foundation of this reality is grounded not on facts but on evidence hoped for but never realized, evidence proven to be unrealizable.

This IS the question. The rest of the world is watching to see if we capitulate to The People of the Lie, or if we stand up and act like grownups. I'm predicting the latter, but I don't pretend to be good at futurizing.

Democracy Now

Why 'This Is About Bush'

His narrowly focused 'hedgehog presidency' cements the allegiance of conservatives and galvanizes his foes. The result is bitter division.

By Ronald Brownstein, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — More Americans than ever may participate in Tuesday's presidential election — as volunteers and, on Tuesday, voters. But in its tone, its agenda and its fervor, the marathon race for the White House bears the unmistakable imprint of one man: President Bush.

As much through his unflinching style as his aggressive policies, Bush has powered a campaign that has engaged, motivated and divided Americans — and much of the world — like none in recent times.

The Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry, has his admirers and his critics. But the unprecedented sums of money raised by both parties, the long lines of early voters already crowding polling places in many states and the anticipation of a sharply higher turnout Tuesday are all primarily reflections of the passions Bush has stirred in four turbulent years, especially by invading Iraq, analysts agree.

"This is about Bush," said Andrew Kohut, executive director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Half a century ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously separated intellectuals and artists into two categories: the fox, who is clever, creative, committed to many goals; and the hedgehog, a creature driven by a single unwavering conviction. By Berlin's standards, Bush has produced one of the purest examples of a hedgehog presidency.

With his repeated tax cuts, his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and the war in Iraq, Bush has consistently pursued goals that generate strong support among Republicans and conservatives, but at the price of provoking antipathy among Democrats and liberals.

In his policies, Bush has sought to advance his ideas mainly by holding to sharply defined positions — and attempting to shift the debate in his direction almost by magnetic force.

In his political strategy, he has sought more to deepen his support among groups that lean in his direction than to broaden his appeal among groups that have resisted him.

Bush and his brain trust "have decided that rather than trying to expand their coalition and possibly water down their agenda, they would rather push for their agenda, even if it meant having to govern in a very partisan way," said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Atlanta's Emory University. "Bush's strategy has focused primarily on energizing the Republican base rather than reaching out to swing voters."

The culmination of this hedgehog presidency is a campaign that has become a crusade, both for Bush's supporters and his opponents.

Massive advertising, voter registration efforts and get-out-the-vote campaigns from the left and right are crunching against each other like armies from the age of the sword and ax. Bush, Kerry and their allies have spent at least $1.2 billion on the presidential race, the most ever, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

"This is the most hard-fought and well-funded race that we have seen in modern history," said Anthony Corrado, an expert on campaign finance at Colby College in Maine.

In the final 48 hours, a late surge might carry either Bush or Kerry to a relatively decisive victory. But most polls point toward a razor-thin race that threatens to leave America divided about as narrowly — and perhaps even more bitterly — than it was after Bush's disputed victory over Democrat Al Gore in 2000.

"If Bush wins, he is going to be reviled by the left for another four years, and if Kerry wins it is going to be the same thing on the right," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee.

"It's not like this election is going to resolve anything, because whoever wins is going to win by a percentage point or two and whoever loses is going to spend four years trying to destroy the other side. Don't think this is over" Tuesday.

It won't be over on Tuesday, and that is the thing which worries me the most. I don't know that this country is a governable democracy anymore. When I watch Fox News Sunday this morning I'll be looking for clues that it is.

Democracy works when everyone respects the process. This year, with the process in question and a president who doesn't care about process presiding, I've got one more layer of worry on my face.

National Treasure-Book TV

I'm watching an amazing debate between Dr. Justin Franks (Bush on the Couch) and Dr.Stephen Renshon (In His Father's Shadow), the first a psychiatrist, the second a psychoanalyst, held at GWU earlier this week. I haven't read Franks' book yet and hadn't planned on it until I saw this: the idea of a psychiatrist diagnosing a public figure ala Charles Krauthammer is kind of creepy. That said, Franks observations track to similar to my own that I think I'll have to read it for his clinical judgement. I'm not a clinician, I'm a spiritual director, but Franks and I arrive at similar conclusions by different routes.

The program is being aired on BookTV-CSpan this weekend. Franks psychiatric analysis of Bush is devastating. Renshon is a Bush apologist. The program is fascinating. I checked the schedule and don't see it being repeated this weekend so go to BookTV and watch on-line or, if you've got a couple of books, order a tape. This is a fascinating piece of the political puzzle, and one that isn't much treated in the media.

Those Darned Internets

Voters Checking Out Other Sides' Sites
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: October 29, 2004

Filed at 12:17 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Are right-leaning voters spending all their online time on Rushlimbaugh.com? Are left-leaning voters locked into the like-minded Talkingpointsmemo.com?

Actually, no. They're checking out the other sides' sites, surprising researchers who expected to see ``selective exposure'' among Internet users.

Researchers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the University of Michigan's School of Information found Internet users were more knowledgeable than non-users about arguments that challenged their point of view.

``They were extremely aware of the arguments for their guys, but they are no less aware of arguments challenging their guys,'' said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew group. ``They are not building walls, not screening out the other stuff.''

Rainie said political activists may want to hear the other side so they can respond to political challenges at the watercooler or from friends.

Television remains the primary source of news information for all groups -- about 74 percent got news that way, according to the study. More than half of survey respondents say they use radio and a similar number read newspapers.

Thirty-four percent of all respondents got news via e-mail or the Web, but the figure increases to 43 percent for dial-up Internet users and 64 percent for those with high-speed connections at home.

The study was based on telephone interviews with 1,510 adults, including 1,036 Internet users, conducted June 14 to July 3. Its margin of error is 3 percentage points.

One of the stories of this election will be the rise of the Internet as political force. I hope Richard Ben Cramer writes the book on it (my favorite political journalist) but the early drafts of that work and many others will be written here in cyberspace. We are the first drafts of the first draft of history. The troops at The Blogging of the President will be picking apart the signals and I'm glad to see that Billmon appears to be back to add his reflections on this historical development. I'll be speculating, too, and listening to those voices I've learned to respect from a couple of years spent in the blogosphere. I know Josh Marshall will be thinking about this and doubtless writing about it, and I suspect Markos Moulitsos and Jerome Armstrong will be looking for new strategies to immediately put into place. I'm already looking at new Web based techniques I can use to improve knowledge sharing at work.

We are going to be learning a lot about the human/internet/human interface from this campaign. Your observations, as always, are not just welcomed but openly sought.

Impending Disaster

Big Arctic Perils Seen in Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: October 30, 2004

A comprehensive four-year study of warming in the Arctic shows that heat-trapping gases from tailpipes and smokestacks around the world are contributing to profound environmental changes, including sharp retreats of glaciers and sea ice, thawing of permafrost and shifts in the weather, the oceans and the atmosphere.

The study, commissioned by eight nations with Arctic territory, including the United States, says the changes are likely to harm native communities, wildlife and economic activity but also to offer some benefits, like longer growing seasons. The report is due to be released on Nov. 9, but portions were provided yesterday to The New York Times by European participants in the project.

While Arctic warming has been going on for decades and has been studied before, this is the first thorough assessment of the causes and consequences of the trend.

It was conducted by nearly 300 scientists, as well as elders from the native communities in the region, after representatives of the eight nations met in October 2000 in Barrow, Alaska, amid a growing sense of urgency about the effects of global warming on the Arctic.

The findings support the broad but politically controversial scientific consensus that global warming is caused mainly by rising atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that the Arctic is the first region to feel its effects. While the report is advisory and carries no legal weight, it is likely to increase pressure on the Bush administration, which has acknowledged a possible human role in global warming but says the science is still too murky to justify mandatory reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The State Department, which has reviewed the report, declined to comment on it yesterday.

The report says that "while some historical changes in climate have resulted from natural causes and variations, the strength of the trends and the patterns of change that have emerged in recent decades indicate that human influences, resulting primarily from increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, have now become the dominant factor."

The Arctic "is now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth," the report says, adding, "Over the next 100 years, climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social and economic changes, many of which have already begun."

Scientists have long expected the Arctic to warm more rapidly than other regions, partly because as snow and ice melt, the loss of bright reflective surfaces causes the exposed land and water to absorb more of the sun's energy. Also, warming tends to build more rapidly at the surface in the Arctic because colder air from the upper atmosphere does not mix with the surface air as readily as at lower latitudes, scientists say.

The report says the effects of warming may be heightened by other factors, including overfishing, rising populations, rising levels of ultraviolet radiation from the depleted ozone layer (a condition at both poles). "The sum of these factors threatens to overwhelm the adaptive capacity of some Arctic populations and ecosystems," it says.

Prompt efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions could slow the pace of change, allowing communities and wildlife to adapt, the report says. But it also stresses that further warming and melting are unavoidable, given the century-long buildup of the gases, mainly carbon dioxide.

Several of the Europeans who provided parts of the report said they had done so because the Bush administration had delayed publication until after the presidential election, partly because of the political contentiousness of global warming.
....
The retreat of sea ice, the report says, "is very likely to have devastating consequences for polar bears, ice-living seals and local people for whom these animals are a primary food source."

Oil and gas deposits on land are likely to be harder to extract as tundra thaws, limiting the frozen season when drilling convoys can traverse the otherwise spongy ground, the report says. Alaska has already seen the "tundra travel" season on the North Slope shrink to 100 days from about 200 days a year in 1970.

The report concludes that the consequences of the fast-paced Arctic warming will be global. In particular, the accelerated melting of Greenland's two-mile-high sheets of ice will cause sea levels to rise around the world.

I've been writing about this for years. We are seeing dramatic changes in cycles of drought and flooding rains, not just in North America but globally. Storms of all kinds are likely to become fiercer. Melting ice the size of Greenland's glaciers will change the salinity of the worlds oceans, in addition to causing them to rise. How quickly these changes will affect us is impossible to tell, but I do know that my part of the mid-Atlantic has more and more severe summer storms than we did when I moved here 20 years ago. The cycle of drought in the American west is going to precipitate (if you will) a water crisis, one which was inevitable as long as current population growth trends continue. The hurricanes and tropical storms that traversed the east coast this year broke the back of the multi-year drought here, but often with catastrophic results.

There are immediate economic risks in all of this, which is why I brought you the report on global climate change commissioned last winter by the giant re-insurer Swiss Re. It read, in part,

Geneva(Reuters) - The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.

"There is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic systems in time," Swiss Re said in the report.

Seen in that light, the Kyoto accords seem downright business friendly. Bushco and his corporate buddies seem to prefer short term profits to long term stability, however.

What Part of "Disaster" Does Bush Not Understand?

Along With Prayers, Families Send Armor
By NEELA BANERJEE and JOHN KIFNER

Published: October 30, 2004

When the 1544th Transportation Company of the Illinois National Guard was preparing to leave for Iraq in February, relatives of the soldiers offered to pay to weld steel plates on the unit's trucks to protect against roadside bombs. The Army told them not to, because it would provide better protection in Iraq, relatives said.

Seven months later, many of the company's trucks still have no armor, soldiers and relatives said, despite running some of the most dangerous missions in Iraq and incurring the highest rate of injuries and deaths among the Illinois units deployed there.

"This problem is very extensive," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former infantry platoon leader with the Florida National Guard in Iraq who now runs an organization called Operation Truth, an advocacy group for soldiers and veterans.

Though soldiers of all types have complained about equipment in Iraq, part-timers in the National Guard and Reserve say that they have a particular disadvantage because they start off with outdated or insufficient gear. They have been deployed with faulty radios, unreliable trucks and, most alarmingly for many, a shortage of soundly armored vehicles in a land regularly convulsed by roadside attacks, according to soldiers, relatives and outside military experts.

As Iraq Elections Near, Pentagon Extends Tours of Duty for About 6,500 U.S. Soldiers
By THOM SHANKER

Published: October 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - The Pentagon has ordered about 6,500 soldiers in Iraq to extend their tours, the first step the military has taken to increase its combat power there in preparation for the January elections, senior Defense Department officials said Friday.

About 3,500 members of the Second Brigade of the First Cavalry Division will stay in Iraq two months longer than initially ordered, and about 3,000 soldiers assigned to headquarters and support units of the First Infantry Division will have their tours extended by two and a half weeks.

While Pentagon officials and military officers previously had left open the possibility that additional troops would be required to battle a tenacious insurgency ahead of the elections, they had also expressed hopes that new Iraqi security forces or foreign units might fill the need. The decision to extend the stay of American forces in Iraq at a time when replacement troops also are arriving means a significant increase in the overall American combat presence for the first time since the summer.

No other extensions have been approved, and no units now preparing for Iraq duty have been ordered to speed up their departure, according to Pentagon and military officials.

But senior Defense Department officials said they had considered plans that would allow the American military in Iraq to quickly increase its forces by as many as three brigades - a total of as many as 15,000 troops, the combat power of a traditional Army division - but that no steps had been taken other than the extensions discussed Friday.

Army Guard to fall short of recruiting goal this year

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Army National Guard will fall short of its recruiting goal this year, in part because fewer active-duty soldiers are opting to switch to part-time service, the Guard's top general said Thursday.

It will be the first time since 1994 that the Guard has missed its sign-up goal.

Army Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview at his Pentagon office that the shortfall for the budget year ending Sept. 30 is likely to be about 5,000 soldiers. That is a little more than 1% of the total Army Guard force of 350,000.

"This is something that can't be ignored. I've got to watch it every day," he said. "But it's not something that I would say indicates that we're breaking. I think it indicates that the recruiting climate has gotten tougher, and that means we need to adjust to a tougher market."

The Guard had set a goal of 56,000 recruits for the year but is likely to end up with about 51,000, he said.

As a result, Blum said he will increase the number of recruiters and put more effort into targeting young people in high school and college who have not previously served in the military.

Flaming incompetence, utter failure, however you name it, it is FUBAR. This new round of extended deployments is a direct result of the recruitment shortfall. The lack of adequate equipment over a year and a half into this war is criminal negligence.

UPDATE: This just in from Salon:

Letting down the Guard
With 200 dead in Iraq, morale in the tank and reenlistments threatened, the Army National Guard and Reserve are facing a crisis.

By Jeff Horwitz

Oct. 30, 2004 | Kenneth Woodring, a 15-year veteran of the military, dropped out of the North Carolina National Guard a few months after returning home from a year-long deployment to Baghdad's Green Zone. The deployment wasn't what he and his fellow soldiers had been expecting. "It wasn't supposed to last very long and we were told it was a peacekeeping mission," Woodring says. "It turned into more than that."

To forestall a drop in retention, the Army now entices soldiers with increased pay, bonuses and benefits -- and resorts to more forceful tactics when necessary. After more than a third of the former soldiers called up from the Individual Ready Reserve failed to report, the Army went so far as to classify some as deserters. In September, the soldiers of a Fort Carson, Colo., combat unit claimed the Army had given them the choice to reenlist or be transferred to another unit, which, they were told, would be headed to Iraq. Thousands of other soldiers never have such a choice because the military places their units under "stop-loss," preventing soldiers who had fulfilled their military contract from receiving a discharge.

Reality Based Mind Set

A Post-Bush Mind-Set

By Ellen Goodman
Saturday, October 30, 2004; Page A19

But three years and one Iraq war later, what exactly does the president mean when he talks about the lessons of Sept. 11 and how his opponent didn't learn them?

"First of all," he says, "we face an enemy which has no conscience. They are cold-blooded. Therefore, you can never hope for the best with them. You cannot negotiate with them. . . . The only way to secure America, to keep us safe, is to find them and bring them to justice before they hurt us again."

Of course you cannot negotiate with zealots who fly planes into buildings. You cannot reason with people who kill and die in the name of heaven and the hope of 72 virgins. You can only stop them.

But the central lie of this campaign is in the way the administration has conflated the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. It's the way Bush morphed Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the religious fanatic and the secular dictator, Sept. 11, 2001, and March 19, 2003. It's the way he has drawn a composite of one intractable "enemy": the jihadist in the cockpit.

The lesson of Sept. 11, says Bush repeatedly, is that "we must take threats seriously before they come to hurt us." His punch line is: "And I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein."

Bush no longer claims directly that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He tells us rather that he "saw" a threat. This is the Bush doctrine. And anyone who doesn't accept his vision -- even when it clashes with reality -- is dismissed as "soooo September 10th."

All year, I have been ranting over one piece of polling data. As recently as two weeks ago, the Harris Poll showed that 41 percent of Americans still link Saddam Hussein with the hijackers. What's more disheartening is the gender gap of misinformation: 51 percent of women compared with 29 percent of men connect Iraq and al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda was a uniter, not a divider, of Americans. We took the war to the Afghan rulers who hosted al Qaeda. But Iraq?

Now, using his Sept. 11 lens, the president says, "we are fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here." But Iraq became a magnet after March 19, 2003. If Baghdad is now purposeful bait to lure terrorists, have we told that to American soldiers or Iraqis? For that matter has this hapless war just attracted terrorists or recruited them?

There is no item in the dictionary for "September 12th," but I remember the day. In one voice and many languages, the world said, "Today we are all Americans." What happened to the Sept. 12 mind-set?

On Sept. 12 the world was divided into us and them, the community of nations against the terrorists. Today, the world is divided into the United States and them. After all the bungling and arrogance, we are nearly isolated.

I have an entire Rolodex of reasons why I would not vote to keep this president in office. But none of them trumps my sense of danger at being led by a man who tailors the facts to fit the mind that is indeed set.

My pre-Sept. 11 mind-set was never that sunny. I grew up under the threat of a mushroom cloud and remember the Cuban missile crisis. Now we are led in a dangerous time by a man who calls chaos "freedom on the march," a president who uses Sept. 11 as his cover story.

And that is my November 2nd mind-set.

Exclusive: Bush Wanted To Invade Iraq If Elected in 2000
Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:59:47 -0700

By Russ Baker

Two years before 9/11, candidate Bush was already talking privately about attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

1,100 American dead, 100,000 Iraqi, all for "political capital."

Kulturkampf

In Pakistan, U.S. Policies Foster Suspicion and Hatred

By Evelyn Iritani, Times Staff Writer

"We have failed to listen and we have failed to persuade. We have not taken the time to understand our audience and we have not bothered to help them understand us. We cannot afford such shortcomings."

— White House Advisory Group

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As he watched the collapse of the World Trade Center on his television screen, Imran Hamid's mind raced. What was happening to the Indian friend who had lent him a New York apartment a few months earlier? Classmates from the United Nations high school he attended in the 1960s? The Jewish butcher he befriended while studying at Columbia University?

In the weeks that followed, Hamid traded e-mails and phone calls with friends in America, confirming their safety and sharing their anguish.

"I'm as much a New Yorker as anything else," said the 53-year-old development consultant, sipping a cappuccino in his Islamabad living room, where he surrounds himself with American jazz and classical records and English-language books.

But with each passing day, Hamid's empathy is eroding. He believes that the Bush administration, by pursuing a foreign policy fixated on security, is turning a legitimate battle against terrorism into a campaign of hatred against Muslims.

Take a look around, he says, and you will see the evidence: In the mountains of Afghanistan, where U.S. troops pursue the remnants of the Taliban; the limestone hills of the West Bank, where Palestinians battle America's ally, Israel; at U.S. consular offices and airports where Muslims are subject to extra scrutiny before being allowed into the country. And at prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

Many Americans might find it hard to recognize their country in the portrait that emerges across the Muslim world. Bush administration officials argue that their military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the security crackdown at home — though certain to anger many Muslims — are a necessary part of fighting terrorism and protecting the United States. In an effort to improve its image among Islamic nations, the U.S. government has offered increased aid and trade privileges. Officials say that they are working out kinks in the visa-processing system and that they have launched new broadcast services to reach out to the Muslim world.

But even U.S. officials acknowledge that Washington has done a poor job explaining its policies, particularly to Muslims. The struggle for hearts and minds is more than a public relations war, and the stakes in Pakistan are among the highest.

Pakistani politicians and business leaders who once looked to America for ideas and support are strengthening ties with the Muslim world and China. Anti-Americanism has become a powerful tool for religious militants. Even well-meaning U.S. efforts, such as aiding schools, are viewed with suspicion.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, one of the Bush administration's strongest allies in its war on terrorism, has been rewarded with a $3-billion aid package. Though deeply divided by religion and ethnicity, Pakistan — one of the world's most populous Islamic countries — has maintained democratic aspirations that set it apart from many other parts of the Muslim world.

But Pakistan also is home to a strong, militant Islamic movement that has tried to assassinate Musharraf and other high-ranking officials. Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding along its border with Afghanistan, and several leading Al Qaeda figures have been captured here.

The South Asian nation, which has engaged in three wars with neighboring India since 1947, also possesses nuclear weapons. A leading scientist has acknowledged selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Hamid said that in a country squeezed between Musharraf, a general who seized power in 1999, and Islamic extremists, there is little room for Western-educated moderates. He acknowledged with colorful hyperbole that his attitude toward the bearded militants had changed.

"A few years ago, if I answered the door and saw a man with a beard, I would have grabbed a shotgun and chased him away," he said. "Now I would have to hide him under my bed so he wouldn't be dragged away to Guantanamo Bay and be tortured."

In this environment, building bridges to the United States is unpopular and politically risky.

"I personally feel Americans are losing friends in Pakistan very, very rapidly," said Shah Mahmood Qureshi, deputy parliamentary leader of the Pakistan People's Party, whose exiled leader, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was a close U.S. ally. "When the realization finally comes, it'll be too late."

It is already far too late when stories like this make it into the paper. When we have alienated the moderate, affluent Pakistanis, natural US friends, the culture war is lost.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

I think I've fallen in love with the economists. This is via the ever valuable John Irons at Argmax who is newly in my metro area. Welcome to Washington, John. Don't forget to join DC Bloggersafter you get settled at The Center for American Progress.

John says:

Uh, OK. So starbucks is now 'manufacturing'
Posted by John Irons at 06:52 PM

No, I'm not making this up. Apparently, coffee roasting is now "manufacturing."

Correcting the Record on Starbucks
By Matthew Mors
Oct 25, 2004, 12:25

I wish to draw your attention to an error in a column written by the Honorable Senator Susan M. Collins that you published Friday (“Taking a Stand Against Tobacco and Special Interests”). In her column about the Congressional manufacturing-related tax legislation (FSC/ETI), the senator writes, “... the bill includes a generous tax break for coffee brewers, allowing corporations like Starbucks to define themselves as ‘manufacturers.’”

Taxation on brewing coffee is not affected by this bill. The activity defined within the context of the legislation is coffee roasting; precisely the kind of activity that Congress intends to encourage in the bill: manufacturing that generates hundreds of U.S. jobs in the production of products for sale domestically and overseas.

Starbucks Coffee Company searches for the highest-quality coffee beans in the world, which are shipped to one of our four roasting plants. Three of these plants are in the U.S: Kent, Washington; Carson City, Nevada; and York, Pennsylvania. These U.S. plants employ hundreds of workers, who transform the raw material—green coffee—into roasted coffee that is then sold at Starbucks stores and other outlets around the world.

The members of Congress recognized that coffee roasting is true manufacturing in the value it adds to coffee beans, unlike restaurant food processing or brewing, provisions excluded in this bill.

Thank you for the opportunity to present these facts.

Regards,

Matthew Mors
Media Relations
Starbucks Coffee Company

My brother repairs furniture. I guess that makes him a manufacturer, too. I create computer code, so I guess I am one, too. I had no idea. What tax breaks are there for manufacturers such as we?

Sun up

Our world this morning:

Thanks to Paul Woodward:

Civilian death toll in Iraq exceeds 100,000

18:44 28 October 04
NewScientist.com news service

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by coalition forces has lead to the death of at least 100,000 civilians, reveals the first scientific study to examine the issue.

The majority of these deaths, which are in addition those normally expected from natural causes, illness and accidents, have been among women and children, finds the study, released early by The Lancet on Thursday.

The most common cause of death is as a direct result of violence, mostly caused by coalition air strikes, reveals the study of almost 1000 households scattered across Iraq. And the risk of violent death just after the invasion was 58 times greater than before the war. The overall risk of death was 1.5 times more after the invasion than before.

The figure of 100,000 is based on "conservative assumptions", notes Les Roberts at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, US, who led the study.

That estimate excludes Falluja, a hotspot for violence. If the data from this town is included, the study points to about 200,000 excess deaths since the outbreak of war.

Public health

“These findings raise questions for those far removed from Iraq - in the governments of the countries responsible for launching a pre-emptive war,” writes Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet in a commentary accompanying the paper.

“In planning this war, the coalition forces - especially those of the US and UK - must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians,” he writes.

He argues that, from a public health perspective, whatever “planning did take place was grievously in error”.

“The invasion of Iraq, the displacement of a cruel dictator, and the attempt to impose a liberal democracy by force have, by themselves, been insufficient to bring peace and security to the civilian population. Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths, not fewer,” he asserts.

He also praises the “courageous team of scientists” for their efforts, and notes the study’s limitations.

The Road to Abu Ghraib
The biggest scandal of the Bush administration began at the top.

By Phillip Carter

A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq. On that date, “CBS News” broadcast the first ugly photographs of abuses by American soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. There were images of a man standing hooded on a box with wires attached to his hands; of guards leering as they forced naked men to simulate sexual acts; of a man led around on a leash by a female soldier; of a dead Iraqi detainee, packed in ice; and more. The pictures had been taken the previous fall by U.S. Army military police soldiers assigned to the prison, but had made it into the hands of Army criminal investigators only months later, when a soldier named Joseph Darby anonymously passed them a CD-ROM full of prison photos. The images aroused worldwide indignation, and illustrated in graphic detail both the lengths to which the United States would go to get intelligence, and the extent to which those efforts had been corrupted by the exigencies of the difficult war in Iraq.

Two days later, The New Yorker published a report on Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the U.S. Army's atrocities in Vietnam; now he had come full circle, documenting the full extent of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Army's initial efforts to investigate them. Hersh's reporting—which forms the nucleus of his new book, Chain of Command—helped launch nearly a dozen different criminal investigations into what former vice president Al Gore dubbed “the American Gulag,” the extraterritorial chain of prisons and detainment centers, stretching from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan, set up by the Bush administration to hold suspected terrorists. More than 300 instances of abuse in those facilities, from November 2001 to as recently as March 2004, have been alleged since then. To date, eight out of 11 investigations have been completed. They have produced thousands of documents, witness interviews, military orders, emails, and PowerPoint briefings, with each one telling a small piece of the story of how America's vaunted all-volunteer professional military lapsed into some of the most unprofessional and despicable conduct of its history. Forty-five soldiers have been recommended for courts-martial, and 23 others for summary discharge. Nearly one year after the first sadistic acts took place, the extent of the abuses remains unknown. But by all indications, the worst revelations are yet to come. In closed-door presentations before Congress, Pentagon officials revealed evidence of crimes ranging from the rape of female detainees to the sexual abuse of minors held at Abu Ghraib.

Black Watch senior officers question No 10 Iraq strategy
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 29/10/2004)

Senior officers with the Black Watch battle group sent north to replace American soldiers believe that the Government agreed to send them there without properly understanding the risks the troops face.

They said the United States marines they were replacing had suffered more than 200 casualties, including nine dead, since July.
Black Watch soldiers and medics at Basra airport

"We expect every lunatic terrorist from miles around to descend on us like bees to honey," a high-ranking officer said in an e-mail home this week.

"I hope the Government knows what it has got itself into. I am not sure it fully understands the risks."

Sources close to the Black Watch said that that view was representative of most of the regiment's senior officers.

"The troops are well and coming at it with their usual humour," the e-mail said.

But while the officers retain undiminished faith in their men's ability, they are worried that the atmosphere created by the more aggressive tactics of the American troops will leave the British soldiers with a difficult task in picking up the pieces.

An e-mail seen by The Daily Telegraph said: "The marines we have taken over from have taken nine dead and 197 wounded since July. Hope we do better."

The officer also expressed concern over the way in which the troops were being sent hundreds of miles north of their commanders back in Basra, effectively leaving them isolated with supplies and rapid reinforcements possible only by aircraft.

Another e-mail said: "The task looks quite challenging - a 500-mile line of communication to sustain 800 men and over 100 armoured vehicles largely from the air."

A former Black Watch officer said there was an acceptance that the troops might suffer up to 20 per cent casualties.

He added: "They are very happy to do what they are paid to do."

The concerns of the senior officers were reflected in comments yesterday from ordinary soldiers who were flown north while the first convoy of armoured vehicles travelled by road.

Speaking at Basra before boarding an aircraft, 19-year-old Pte Manny Lynch, from Fife, admitted that he was nervous.

He said: "We have heard a lot about the triangle of death, which makes everyone nervous because it seems much worse up there than it has been down here.

"We have controlled the situation down here while the Americans seem to have ruined it up there."

Read Juan Cole's overview.

Friends

Friday catblogging.

I now have access to a digital camera. We'll see what happens.

The Future--Open Thread

I'll be Internetless for another day tomorrow: the new office laptop hasn't arrived yet and the boss's wi-fi connection doesn't work. Believe me, I've been in withdrawal all day. I'm also feeling starved for information: if you've seen stories today that deserve some exposure (and haven't already been beaten to death by the left wing echo chamber--we have one, too,) post the links in comments.

This is a think piece that's been welling up in me since yesterday and just wasn't ready to be written last night. You'll probably get another one tomorrow night, my responsibilities at our annual conference are registration and problem solving which doesn't take a lot of work in my frontal lobes, so I'm thinking about other things.

I'm a pretty lousy predictor of the future and don't do it much, but I seem some trends right now that I think are worth a post and some follow up. I've been musing for a couple of days on "what's next?" after we get past Nov. 2 and the resulting litigation/House fight/Supreme Court fight. As of tonight, I think there is a very good chance that Kerry's margin of victory Tuesday night will be so unquestionable that lengthy litigation by BC04 will be pointless (which isn't to say they won't do it.) I believe Kerry will come into office in January with a clear mandate, the Republicans in Congress unrepentent and obstructive and a Dem majority, a slim one, in the Senate.

I'm really, really glad that Kerry is a smart guy who agonizes over important decisions, because what's going to be on his plate isn't something I'd willing eat. The Repubs in Congress are going to work to try to preserve the glorious W legacy in the War on Evil in Iraq and fight over everything Kerry will try to do to reform the highly politicized intel establishment, try to sort out the military without re-instituting the draft as Senate Dems start investigations of everything and everyone that W didn't pardon on his way out the door (these guys are still incompetent, they'll forget someone since I don't think they are any better at keeping track of their scandals than they are at keeping track of billions of dollars, body armor or "transfer tubes.") If the election is close, the rest of the world is going to lost its collective mind: Europe and the far East will continue to pursue their own paths to economic hegemony, France will court China, the rest of the English language press will worry over everything. And Americans abroad will continue to get searching looks from the natives of the countries they visit or live in. I'm going to have more on this in a moment, along with some breaking news: yes, blogs can break news.

We need to understand this: in the eyes of world opinion, failure to turn Bush out, and by a healthy margin, makes this a referendum on us. They are already appalled by our low voting rate, and wonder if our population is so credulous and uncurious that we can be swayed by a candidate of such obvious mendacity as George W. Bush. Right now, they hate Bush. According to the report I heard on NPR's "Marketplace" this evening that a more generalized American hatred is hurting US businesses and brands abroad (this may be an echo that shocks the Bush campaign) but for the most part, the rest of the world sees the problem as Bush. If he wins, or the next election is seen as illegitimate, the US will be seen as a bully completely out of control.

If you've been reading this site regularly, you know that we are outsourcing the budget deficit to the bond market for foreign investors to finance, and you and I pay that interest. What you may not know is that the September bond auction was a complete bust: the Chinese and Japanese have been willing to pick up our debt for quite a while. No longer. The market itself no longer considers us a good risk, something that Paul Krugman warned about months ago. When our Argentine budgeting and debt becomes exposed to world investors and they grade it down, we are in real trouble.

Consider: our domestic economy is not in good shape as consumers have graded it down in the consumer confidence index for seven straight months. Oil is up as we go into the heating season, far too many Americans have been out of work for more than six months or have had to take jobs that paid less than their previous positions or lost their benefits. Health insurance is 'way up again. Personal debt and foreclosures are at modern highs. The economy is robust only for those who get paid bonuses for corporate returns. The rest of us are struggling. My salary is flat since 1999 in real dollars and the problem isn't education: I have two master's degrees and I'm hardly the only professional in the same boat.

A number of economists I study are issuing opinions which are flashing red: the odds of a global recession or even depression are higher than they have been in a long time. What can a president do about that, given that a president's effect on the economy is limited? Take a look at FDR: massive debt and unemployment are going to make legislators responsive to their districts rather than their ideology. If we need to bring back the CCC to break the back of a drop in consumer spending, corporate support will be there. It will take a massive political campaign to put this into place, unless the real pain in the economy is really deep. If it is more like the flu than pneumonia, it will be another political football.

Kerry will inherit a failing war on terror and War on Evil in Iraq, an economy which is in more than poor shape, one that is in the middle of structural change and quite ill, and a Congress which is contentious, at best. If a Dem majority takes the Senate, it will help with judicial appointments, but the power of the purse is in the House, and I don't see the Repub majority being replaced this cycle. Kerry can veto, but that negative capability doesn't create a positive agenda.

In other words, if Kerry can pull off positive social change in this climate, he's even smarter and savvier than even I think he is, and I think he's really smart. He's being handed the Jimmy Carter scenario: energy emergency, sick economy, beheadings overseas. Why would anybody take this on?

I'll let John Kerry's motives remain out of play. His history suggests that he is an altruist with the mind of a prosecutor. Given the criminals in high office right now, that might make him exactly the right man for the job. He's an internationalist who speaks foreign languages (imagine that! I spent part of one cigarette breaking talking with the Lufthanse crew waiting for pickup outside of the hotel where my conference was today. In the rest of the first world, speaking another language or three isn't that big a deal, only Americans think the rest of the world should be American.) and consults widely. Bush talks to God, Rove and the people who tell him what he wants to hear. In every empire where the emperor was that isolated, the empire ended.

I think that Kevin Drum is right, and that a Bush win with a Dem senate will be endless investigations, but I don't know where that will go: after Clinton, the American people are so burned out on investigations that I wonder if even the deepest sins, and there are so many, of this administration would elicit anything other than a sigh. The impeachable offenses have been going on since day one. The day that Richard Clarke got demoted, the day that the PBD of August 6 was dismissed, the president violated his oath. In the corruption department, W makes Ulysses Grant look like an amateur, and that's saying something.

It is in the area of the legitimacy in the eyes of the world community that I have the greatest concerns: the world is small and getting smaller. We can hardly afford to be seen as an out of control idiot, the costs are too high. I'm certain that a President Kerry will consult widely, but if the election is close, his legitimacy will be questioned.

Domestically, whoever wins, we run the risk of a civil war carried out by other means: the 527s of either side aren't going away. Whoever wins, the politicization of the general culture and the media aren't going away and I think that this campaign isn't the end of it, but the beginning of the media wars. Consensus is in the interest of a governing Democratic party, but not of the neocons, who are best served by ever-deepening divisions. Whatever happens, the next four years are going to be exceedingly ugly and show the shadow side of America. If Kerry can negotiate that, he will be the finest politician in American history. And I pray for him.

Here is the news I promised earlier: I'll be blogging election night from the Haustadt in Philly with a bunch of the Philly bloggers, so we can divide up the tasks and cross link, a smart way to blog breaking news. In addition, today I met the deputy director of an organization, a big one, which will be providing "election protection"--lawyers at the polls--and poll monitoring by law students all over the country. They have enlisted thousands for this effort, are non-partisan and are experts in the field. The contact I met today will be in their national field center, collecting the reports on voter suppression from around the country and emailing them to me. A colleague in my office will be in Philly to bring direct reports from the field in a city targeted for voter suppression by the Republicans. He promises his journal from the day after the polls close, and I'll link to his blog when the reports come in. Those of us blogging in Philly will have reports for you that aren't like to make it into whatever idiocy Judy Woodrug is spewing on CNN that night.

I'm excited about this, and about having the opportunity to meet some esteemed colleagues in Philly. This will be an epic election struggle. I look forward to being with the colleagues to bring it to you.

This is an open thread.

Download Leonard Cohen's "The Future"

Bumpers, I've not been around much for the last few days. I can't help that. My organization is preparing for its annual conference and the work has been utterly nuts and it is going to stay like that until the weekend. Posts will be infrequent until Saturday. I hope you will investigate my blogroll, these are the writers and researchers that I consider indispensible for internet journalism in this day and age, my daily stops. The list will grow.

Here is what is going on: I'm borrowing a laptop, my boss's personal machine, for the conference day tomorrow. I'll have limited Web access when I can get to the free web-access at the hotel's wi-fi in the lobby (our event takes place two floors down and I doubt that my cell will work there.) I have to be outa here at about 5:30 in the morning for the next two days, but I won't be working nights and hope I can post something then, I have a batch of essays, original content, waiting to be written.

I've got to spend the weekend working on taxes and home repair, the deferred maintenance is starting to eat me. I can blog around the edges, but when some guy has got his nose in your disposer, you pay attention to that (he's going to be fishing out my grandmother's diamond ring.)

In short, it is going to be slim pickings around here until Monday. I have the day off, but a lot to do if I'm going to head to Philly.

But on Tuesday: I'll be in Philly, collective blogging with those wild Philly Liberals (say it loud, I'm proud) and this will be so cool that I hardly know how to think about it. I'm working on blogging from the poll watchers, our guys, and I'll let you know what I find.

Coup D'Etat

The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A25

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own.

Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was all but drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black ministers to keep their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey election came to light.

For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however, universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm.

In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned them disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland, where Democratic "527" groups have registered many tens of thousands of new voters. "The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters -- I call them ringers -- have created these problems" of potential massive vote fraud, Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman James P. Trakas recently told the New York Times.

Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a liberal group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word "ringers."

Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate that roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this year. Who does Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of African Americans been sneaking over the state lines from Pittsburgh and Detroit to vote in Cleveland -- thus putting their own battleground states more at risk of a Republican victory? Is Shaker Heights suddenly filled with Parisians affecting American argot? Or are the Republicans simply terrified that a record number of minority voters will go to the polls next Tuesday? Have they decided to do anything to stop them -- up to and including threatening to criminalize Voting While Black in a Battleground State?

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America, there's a war on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we can ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set still believe in voting rights.

Signs of Voter Fraud Appear
* Registrations that are faked or tossed out have emerged in key states struggling to comply with ballot reform and a flood of new signups.

By Richard Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writers

LAS VEGAS — Broke, disabled and living at the Daisy Motel in downtown Las Vegas, Tyrone Mrasek Sr. took a temporary job late this summer registering voters here.

The employer primarily wanted President Bush supporters, but they were not easy to find. So Mrasek handed out cigarettes to drunks and ex-felons at a homeless shelter in exchange for signatures. Later he found a stack of signed registrations for Democratic voters in a trash can outside the company's office, he recalled.
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Liberal groups such as America Coming Together, formed in 2003 with 300,000 donors, amassed a $125-million budget for registering voters, spokeswoman Sara Leonard said. Much of the money flowed down to local organizations that hired temporary workers. Another liberal group, America Votes, a coalition of 33 organizations led by powerful unions and environmental groups, built up a $400-million budget, part of which went to registrations.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has funded one company at the center of allegations, Voter Outreach of America Inc., which is active in Las Vegas and across the nation. It was set up by Nathan Sproul, former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.

Mrasek, who is disabled with emphysema, said he and his son spotted a newspaper ad for the Sproul group. The younger Mrasek, who also is disabled and lives with his father at the Daisy Motel, bowed out when he learned the emphasis was to register GOP voters.

His father took the Sproul job, which paid about $8 an hour and allowed workers to go home early with full pay on days they managed to register 18 Republicans.

Mrasek said he was given a written script to ask people whether they favored Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry. To those favoring the Massachusetts senator, Mrasek replied that he was just taking a poll and thanked them for stopping.

But for those who liked Bush, Mrasek offered to register them. "George Bush really needs your help this election," he said he was told to say.

In predominantly Democratic Las Vegas, however, Mrasek had a hard time finding unregistered Republicans, he said. One day, he registered himself and his son as Republicans to meet his quota, though he opposes Bush's Iraq policies and plans to vote for Kerry.

Eric Russell, another temporary employee for the project, also alleged that he saw Democratic Party registrations thrown in the trash. With legal assistance from the Democratic Party, he went to court and tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen registration.

Russell, a Republican who now plans to vote for Kerry, also gave authorities a copy of the written sales pitch, which said, in part, "Use your training to find likely Republicans."

Sproul denied the allegations. He said he fired Russell and then sued him, alleging he and the company had been slandered.

"Our goal was to register as many supporters of President Bush as we could. However, we gave very strict instructions to everybody associated with us that we had a zero tolerance policy if anybody was destroying, tampering or altering registration forms," he said, adding that his project turned in more than 500 Democratic registrations in Nevada.

Meanwhile, Republicans say the Democratic registrations submitted by liberal groups are tainted.

Brian Scroggins, chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, said his organization spot-checked some of the new Democratic registration forms and found that "the first three we looked at" carried home addresses that actually were vacant lots.

"Sure we're upset," Scroggins said.

But Sproul also has run into trouble in Oregon, where Secretary of State Bradbury opened an investigation this month into allegations from three Sproul employees that the organization had destroyed Democratic registrations, a felony.

And in West Virginia, Lisa Bragg, the mother of two teenagers desperate for a job, decided against working for Sproul after seeing a written sales script that flatly declared, "The goal is to register Republicans."

"It was dishonest," said Bragg. "I didn't want to hide in the bushes and not sign up Democrats."

An admitted Democrat, she called the pay "dirty money."

With so much acrimony among party officials across the country, local elections officials feel the heat.

"Government officials are certainly under the gun," said Lomax, the Clark County registrar. "Nobody wants to be the next Florida. If you are in a swing state like we are and there is a close vote, there will be litigation."

Come Tuesday, I may be in Philly to poll watch in heavily black precincts. There's word that the Republicans have a voter suppression effort out for the city. If I'm there, I'll be live blogging with a bunch of Philly bloggers assembled by the irrespressible Lambert Strother of Corrente. (Looks like Blogger is down this morning.) (Hey, Bump just hit 7,000 comments!)

Chill Wind

Small Minority Says Draft Could Happen
New Conflict Would Further Strain Troop Levels

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A03

Many military experts believe that reviving some sort of military draft is extremely unlikely, even impossible -- but not all of them.

The issue has taken on urgency because of the dynamics of the presidential campaign, with Democratic operatives using the prospect of a draft to drive the youth vote, and the Democratic nominee himself raising the possibility on the campaign trail.

Neither presidential candidate supports resuming conscription. President Bush, responding to John F. Kerry's assertion that there is a "great potential" that a reelected Bush could restart a draft, insists that it will not happen. And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week: "The truth is, we do not need a draft. We're not going to have a draft."

Overwhelmingly, military insiders agree with both of Rumsfeld's points. "Very simply and strongly, I do not foresee a need nor a desire for a draft," retired Army Lt. Gen. Joseph K. Kellogg Jr. said in a comment typical of those heard across the armed forces. "The all-volunteer military is a thing of true magnificence and should not, and need not, be changed." Resuming conscription, he added, has become one of the lethal "third rails" in American politics, akin to fiddling with Social Security.

But a small minority of defense specialists say that, given the strains placed on the U.S. military over the past three years, they can imagine scenarios in which a new conflict would require significant numbers of new troops -- and in which the draft would be reinstituted.
....
Army Maj. Donald Vandergriff, author of two influential books on military personnel policy, said that if current strains on the armed forces continue, especially the need to keep 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, he could see the need for a draft.

"If the force is stretched and the same people are always rotating with little breaks in between, they become worn out, tired, start becoming bitter, start making mistakes," he said in an e-mail interview. The Army's recent moves to restructure itself to have more deployable brigades, and to keep soldiers in one unit longer, are steps that promise to lessen that strain, he said.

Even so, Vandergriff said: "We either have to come up with a plan that details how we are going to sustain the long-term effectiveness of our force for a decades-long war that says we can continue to do it with the volunteer force, or have to look at other alternatives like the draft."

This is old news in the blogosphere but it is refreshing to see it hit the secular press before the election.

The reality is that if a real threat emerges in the coming months, we're screwed. The Army and Marines are in deep trouble for the next 5-7 years. A draft would be only marginally helpful in the short term.

Real reform of the volunteer armed forces need to include an increase in base pay for enlistees. We pay our grunts about half of what the Brits do, for example. With a better pay scale and better benefits, we could keep the all volunteer army and increase the Army a couple of divisions, as Kerry wants to do, without having recruiters lie through their teeth to get sign-ups.

Ex-Pat Watch

A friend forwards this:

Here in Paris, I am bombarded with emails from Democrats Abroad, but haven't heard a peep from Republicans Abroad. In fact, finding any representation of them is difficult. In an article by Elisabeth Eaves on the Web site Slate from October 5th titled "Hunting for Republicans in Paris" (http://slate.msn.com/id/2107793), Eaves writes, "While Americans who go abroad to kill people vote Republican, Americans who go abroad to do just about anything else vote Democratic."

I'm not so sure I'll be able to make it through the night, but it is sure to be an election we will never forget and the reverberations will be felt world wide.

My mail from abroad is off the charts. The rest of the English-speaking world wonders what is wrong with Americans that more than 45% of the public are probably going to vote for Bush. I have no answers.

From the International Herald Tribune this morning:

One would think it was their leader being elected - and many Europeans believe it is, in a way. In a tremendous show of interest unseen in previous U.S. presidential campaigns, Europeans on both sides of the Channel have been riveted by the coming American vote, obsessing about the future of the United States as if it were their own.
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"Because of the war against terror and the war in Iraq, people feel it's much more than a U.S. election," said Kay van de Linde, a communications consultant at The Hague. "They feel it's a world election, because the U.S. president decides not only what's good for the U.S., but also what's good, and bad, for Europe."
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Judging from opinion polls, media reports and conversation on this side of the Atlantic, the overwhelming sentiment on what would be bad for Europe is another four years with President George W. Bush. In Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, Europeans appear to be united by an overwhelming antipathy toward Bush.
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"He has the ability to provoke incredible animosity," said Alain Frachon, a senior editor at Le Monde, one of several French newspapers running extensive coverage of the American campaign. "And this gives us even more incentive to be interested in the U.S. election, because Bush is probably the least liked of all U.S. presidents since World War II."
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Said Martin Fletcher, foreign editor of The Times of London, which also has devoted much coverage to the election: "There's just something about the president that grates on the foreign viewer - it just doesn't play well here. I cannot remember an issue that has ever aroused such intense interest."

European media are sending correspondents all over the United States in an effort to delve into the American psyche.
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"We want to understand why so many people are still on Bush's side; it's a kind of mystery to us," said Peter Frey, Berlin bureau chief for ZDF television in Germany. "We are asking the American people, 'Why are you voting for Bush?' We want to understand why he has this support."
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A poll last month by the German Marshall Fund, a research organization with headquarters in Washington that studies trans-Atlantic relations, showed that 75 percent of Europeans disapprove of how Bush handles foreign affairs and 73 percent believe the war in Iraq has increased the global risk of terrorism.
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A poll this month by 10 newspapers around the world, including Le Monde, The Guardian in Britain and Spain's El Pais, showed far more support for Senator John Kerry, Bush's Democratic challenger, than for Bush and his administration.
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"If Bush remains, American troops may stay longer in Iraq and this will immediately impact our internal politics," said Jean-Gabriel Fredet, an editor at Le Nouvel Observateur, a French weekly that recently carried on its cover, "Why We Must Beat Bush."

Once-Born is Enough

Conflicted Evangelicals Could Cost Bush Votes
Conservative Christians are still in his camp, but some are troubled by Iraq and other issues.

By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer

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

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

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

Moore reflects a potential problem for Bush in Wisconsin and other closely contested states, where the GOP and conservative groups have invested heavily in turning out a record conservative Christian vote through mailings, voter guides, targeted phone calls and announcements by prominent evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson aired on religious radio stations.

Some of these targeted voters remain conflicted — torn between their religious convictions on so-called values issues, and concerns typical of suburban moms and dads, such as jobs, healthcare, the Iraq war and the environment.

Some, such as Wendy Skroch, a 51-year-old mother of three who prays regularly at the evangelical Elmbrook Church in this heavily Republican Milwaukee suburb, blame Bush for failing to fix a "broken" healthcare system and for "selling off the environment to the highest bidder."

Others are like Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, where more than 2,000 people worship each Sunday. He is undecided, troubled by the bloodshed in the Middle East.

"It's hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there," Urcavich said.

"I'm very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion," he added. "If I'm a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war."

That kind of talk, coming from a conservative Christian who might ordinarily be inclined to vote Republican, could portend trouble for Bush.

An estimated 80% of the evangelical vote went to Bush in 2000. But Bush's senior political strategist, Karl Rove, said after the 2000 election that the president might have won the race against Democrat Al Gore by a comfortable margin had 4 million more evangelicals gone to the polls rather than sitting out the election.

This year, the Bush campaign and conservative groups have made enormous efforts to mobilize evangelicals, a group that includes more than 70 denominations, and which generally sees the Bible as the authoritative word of God, emphasizes "born again" religious conversion, and has committed to spreading its faith and values. Evangelicals are thought to make up about a quarter of the electorate.

In appeals to evangelicals, the president's supporters have pointed to Bush's stance against abortion, his appointment of conservative judges and his support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. And yet a recent poll found a slight slippage in the president's support.

A poll published last week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 70% of self-described evangelicals or born-again Christians planned to vote for the president, down from 74% in the same survey three weeks earlier. That was not only a slight decline, but lower than the 80% to 90% support that Bush campaign officials had been forecasting.

This is W's critical wedge of voters. If he loses them, the "base" is gone.

Loathing for Liberals--The Compleat Guide

I have been reading, enjoying and, sometimes, smarting from the work of Hunter S. Thompson for nearly forty years. He hasn’t lost a step. This is an hors d’oeuvre from his long piece in the Rolling Stone this week. You will want to read the whole thing, trust me, you will laugh, you will gasp and you will nod in agreement and hope he is right. The life-long, cold-eyed gambler (yes, for real money,) he’s calling it Kerry by five points.

Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson sounds off on the fun-hogs in the passing lane

By DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him “Mister President,” and then I felt ashamed.

Karl Rove, the president’s political wizard, felt even worse. There is angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe – and that is Rove’s problem: His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 60 million voters.
….
Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that he couldn’t come to the phone. “The debate really cracked him up,” he chuckled. “The champ loves a good ass-whuppin’. He says Bush looked so scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down.”

Ali has seen that look before. Almost three months to the day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the “Louisville Lip” – then Cassius Clay – made a permanent enemy of every “boxing expert” in the Western world by beating World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston so badly that he refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round.

This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS.
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Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a “liberal” candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today – and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected “American people") don’t rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for – but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.

With Hunter, you never know if the stories are made or literally true, but I’m more than willing to believe this one. Hunter actually does know where all the bodies are buried. I’m no longer chewing my finger nails. Good thing, too, because I don’t have any left.

Sunshine: The Best Disinfectent

Beneath the cover of Bush's secrets:

A Culture of Cover-Ups
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 26, 2004

Yesterday we got two peeks under that shroud. One was The Times's report about what the International Atomic Energy Agency calls "the greatest explosives bonanza in history." Ignoring the agency's warnings, administration officials failed to secure the weapons site, Al Qaqaa, in Iraq, allowing 377 tons of deadly high explosives to be looted, presumably by insurgents.

The administration is trying to play down the importance of this loss, arguing that because Iraq was awash in munitions, a few hundred more tons don't make much difference. But aside from their potential use in nuclear weapons - the reason they were under seal before the war - these particular explosives, unlike standard munitions, are exactly what a terrorist needs.

Informed sources quoted by the influential Nelson Report say explosives from Al Qaqaa are the "primary source" of the roadside and car bombs that have killed and wounded so many U.S. soldiers. And thanks to the huge amount looted - "in a highly organized operation using heavy equipment" - the insurgents and whoever else have access to the Qaqaa material have enough explosives for tens of thousands of future bombs.

If the administration had had its way, the public would never have heard anything about this. Administration officials have known about the looting of Al Qaqaa for at least six months, and probably much longer. But they didn't let the I.A.E.A. inspect the site after the war, and pressured the Iraqis not to inform the agency about the loss. They now say that they didn't want our enemies - that is, the people who stole the stuff - to know it was missing. The real reason, obviously, was that they wanted the news kept under wraps until after Nov. 2.

The story of the looted explosives has overshadowed another report that Bush officials tried to suppress - this one about how the Bush administration let Abu Musab al-Zarqawi get away. An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on an "NBC Nightly News" report from March that asserted that before the Iraq war, administration officials called off a planned attack that might have killed Mr. Zarqawi, the terrorist now blamed for much of the mayhem in that country, in his camp.

Citing "military officials," the original NBC report explained that the failure to go after Mr. Zarqawi was based on domestic politics: "the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq" - a part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein - "could undermine its case for war against Saddam." The Journal doesn't comment on this explanation, but it does say that when NBC reported, correctly, that Mr. Zarqawi had been targeted before the war, administration officials denied it.

What other mistakes did the administration make? If partisan appointees like Mr. Goss continue to control the intelligence agencies, we may never know.

This isn't speculation: Mr. Goss is already involved in a new cover-up. Last week Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times revealed the existence of a devastating but suppressed report by the C.I.A.'s inspector general on 9/11 intelligence failures. Newsweek has now confirmed the gist of Mr. Scheer's column.

The report, the magazine says, "identifies a host of current and former officials who could be candidates for possible disciplinary procedures." But although the report was completed in June, Mr. Goss has refused to release it to Congress. "Everyone feels it will be better if this hits the fan after the election," an official told the magazine. Better for whom?

What really happened on 9/11, or in Iraq? Next week's election may determine whether we ever find out.

I suspect that Kerry's administration will be so busy trying to keep the economy from tanking, re-assembling alliances with historic friends, containing Iran and North Korea, that siccing prosecutors on the criminals at the top of this administration will be a 'ways down the "to do" list. Drawing up lists of indictments when the dollar is headed south just seems a tad, um, partisan.

Safer?

Increase In War Funding Sought
Bush to Request $70 Billion More

By Jonathan Weisman and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 26, 2004; Page A01

The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the invasion of Iraq early last year, Pentagon and congressional officials said yesterday.

White House budget office spokesman Chad Kolton emphasized that final decisions on the supplemental spending request will not be made until shortly before the request is sent to Congress. That may not happen until early February, when President Bush submits his budget for fiscal 2006, assuming he wins reelection.

But Pentagon and House Appropriations Committee aides said the Defense Department and military services are scrambling to get their final requests to the White House Office of Management and Budget by mid-November, shortly after the election. The new numbers underscore that the war is going to be far more costly and intense, and last longer, than the administration first suggested.

The Army is expected to request at least an additional $30 billion for combat activity in Iraq, with $6 billion more needed to begin refurbishing equipment that has been worn down or destroyed by unexpectedly intense combat, another Appropriations Committee aide said. The deferral of needed repairs over the past year has added to maintenance costs, which can no longer be delayed, a senior Pentagon official said.

The Army is expected to ask for as much as $10 billion more for its conversion to a swifter expeditionary force. The Marines will come in with a separate request, as will the Defense Logistics Agency and other components of the Department of Defense. The State Department will need considerably more money to finance construction and operations at the sprawling embassy complex in Baghdad. The Central Intelligence Agency's request would come on top of those.

"I don't have a number, and [administration officials] have not been forthcoming, but we expect it will be pretty large," said James Dyer, Republican chief of staff of the Appropriations Committee.

Bush has said for months that he would make an additional request for the war next year, but the new estimates are the first glimpse of its magnitude. A $70 billion request would be considerably larger than lawmakers had anticipated earlier this year. After the president unexpectedly submitted an $87 billion request for the Iraq and Afghanistan efforts last year, many Republicans angrily expressed sticker shock and implored the administration not to surprise them again.

This request would come on top of $25 billion in war spending allocated by Congress for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The two bills combined suggest the cost of combat is escalating from the $65 billion spent by the military in 2004 and the $62.4 billion allocated in 2003, as U.S. troops face insurgencies that have proven far more lethal than expected at this point.

"We're still evaluating what our commitments will be, and we will submit a request that fully supports those commitments," Kolton said.

The senior Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said final figures may be shaped by the outcome of the presidential election and events in Iraq. But assuming force levels will remain constant in Iraq at about 130,000 troops, the final bill will be "roughly" $70 billion for the military alone, he said.

In making cost estimates for the supplemental budget request, Pentagon officials have distanced themselves from the Bush administration's public optimism about trends in Iraq. Instead, they make the fairly pessimistic assumption that about as many troops will be needed there next year as are currently on the ground.

How much is this going to cost and why are we doing it again? What's the final price tag for "the world is safer with Saddam in a prison cell?"

In the run up to the war, those were the questions I put to pro-war friends. The brave face they put on it was bear any burden, pay any price.

When I asked further, what is it worth to you, I was reminded that they weren't the ones who would be paying.

No, all of us are.

Soft Paws, Geeky and Otherwise

A question for my geeky infotech readers (and anyone else who wants to chime in):

What should I be reading these days as the IT manager of a big non-profit and admin of a large and expensive data base built on SQL and Visual Fox Pro? In the tech press, The Register is still about two layers deeper than I'm able to understand right now, but I want to be there in a couple of months. But I'm loving the attitude.

Developers and DBA's: what are your best sources of real, results-oriented information? VFP has some virtual users' groups and FAQ sites, SQL has bazillions, of course. How do you sort to mine the gold? Where do I start?

If you were my boss, what would you be putting in my hands? Reply in comments or to the email address on the right sidebar.

Other readers, the regularly scheduled news and comment program will return in the morning, I'm working on a particularly thorny query this evening. Infotech types often keep very strange hours. Actually, as an admin type, most of my work is people work, and I work the hours they do.

Thanks to all who sent in replies on the catfood question, which remains open for more comments over there on the right sidebar. I'll be off to the premium pet stores to search out some of your finer sources. The kids are 9 now, and watching their kidneys, livers, pancreases and thyroids is part of the diet police. I've managed sick old cats in lives past, and I'd just as soon not do it again. Ounce of Prevention>pound of cure. I'm working again, so the kids should get the good stuff, not the nutritional equivalent of the Ramen noodles I lived on for so many months.

When I finish getting my life patched together, the kids will be getting human level nutrition culled from my leftovers and a babyfood grinder. We aren't there yet, there is too much to be fixed before I can do this, but this is the goal. Feline nutrition at the highest level and human nutrition at a much higher level than I'm managing right now (the kitchen! the kitchen! Appliances need to be replaced, the floor redone and some new wiring, not to handle a new load, just to meet code.)

So little time....

Back to the Base

ABC News The Note this afternoon:

The president speaks in Greeley, CO at 12:10 pm. He later flies to Iowa for rallies in Council Bluffs and Davenport at a 3:35 and 6:20 pm ET, respectively.

Greeley, CO? Really? In that case, Markos was correct the other day when he said W's polling internals must be terrible. Greeley is one of the reddist of red cities in a generally red state (tho' we make pick up a senator this year,) which means that Rove is still trying to energize his base and pray for turnout. He's given up on the undecideds.

Global Recession 2005

Steve Roach says what I've been telling you for months:

Cutting our global forecast. As the odds of a full-blown oil shock rise, we have little choice other than to cut our global growth forecast; our first revision is a relatively small one -- we are reducing our 3.9% estimate of world GDP growth for 2005 by 0.3 percentage point to 3.6%.

Downside risks. Our forecast revision is consistent with linear rules of thumb regarding the impact of higher oil prices; however, for an unbalanced and increasingly vulnerable world, shock effects could well be nonlinear -- underscoring the downside risks to our downwardly revised global forecast.

Crude Oil Prices Surge to New High
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: October 25, 2004

Filed at 10:31 a.m. ET

LONDON (AP) -- Crude futures prices rose Monday on concerns about tight heating oil supplies ahead of winter, strong oil demand in China and fears about a planned petroleum-industry lockout in Norway.

Crude futures for December delivery surged as high as $55.67 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 50 cents from their record close Friday. But prices pulled back to $55.26 as Norwegian officials said the government would enforce compulsory arbitration, preventing any more cuts in production.

In trading on London's International Petroleum Exchange, the price of December Brent crude futures reached $51.70, before easing to $51.35 per barrel.

November heating oil traded at $1.5950 per gallon Monday afternoon in Europe.

New on the watch-list of supply worries was an announcement by the Norwegian Shipowners Association of a lockout affecting workers on nearly 100 offshore service vessels and shuttle tankers on the Norwegian continental shelf. The move is set to take effect Nov. 8.

Dollar slide accelerates on rising oil prices
By Steve Johnson in London
Published: October 25 2004 11:32 | Last updated: October 25 2004 11:32

The dollar fell to fresh lows in European morning trade on Monday as another jump in oil prices added to fears that the US economy will not grow fast enough to attract sufficient capital inflows.

With the US trade deficit having ballooned to $600bn a year, the US needs to attract portfolio inflows of at least as much to avoid further weakening of the dollar. If high oil prices slow growth, this process may become harder still.

Rising oil prices also engendered an atmosphere of risk aversion across all asset classes, with equities marked sharply lower, benefiting lower risk currencies such as the Swiss franc and euro.

The dollar’s slide against the euro was further fuelled by an unexpected uptick in Germay’s influential Ifo business sentiment survey to 95.3 in October, from 95.2, confounding expectations of a decrease. Retailing and construction led the move higher.

As a result the euro rose to a fresh eight-month high of $1.2817 against the dollar, a rise of 1.5c since Friday’s close, and approaching February’s seven-year high of $1.2930.

The dollar’s renewed slide was also fed by the breaching of some key technical support levels, encouraging momentum-driven investors to short the dollar still further. The dollar fell through its February low of SFr1.2035 against the Swiss franc to sit at an eight-year low of SFr1.1946, a fall of 1.5 centimes since Friday’s close.

The greenback also breached key technical levels against the yen in the process of tumbling to a six-month low of Y106.41.

The Dam Breaks

Bush’s War Against the Military
By Ian Williams

Bush has failed the military on almost every level. While Halliburton and Boeing went to the bank this year with about $10 billion each, undermanned U.S. forces went into Iraq without armored vests and driving unarmored vehicles. The fatal results were hidden from public view as the dead were secreted home and the Department of Defense (DOD) obscured and juggled the numbers of maimed and wounded.

Once back in the United States, veterans found no federal welcome mat laid out for them. By April this year, one in six veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan had filed benefits claims with the Veterans Administration for service-related disabilities. These figures do not include those troops still serving and are twice the number the DOD Web site says suffered “Non-Mortal Wounds” in those conflicts. Today, one-third of those claims, almost 10,000, have yet to be processed. Further, Bush’s 2005 budget will cut 540 staff members of the Veterans Benefit Administration, which is the office that handles the claims. The outreach department that lets vets know of available services also was instructed in a 2002 memo by a deputy undersecretary in the Veterans Health Administration to run in silent mode to flush out people who had not made claims out of ignorance.

Even if the war wounded succeed in getting disability pay, in 2003 Bush threatened to veto a bill that allowed veterans to collect disability pay and pensions simultaneously.

In 2003, his administration also tried to cut combat pay from $225 to $150 a month and the family separation allowance from $250 to $100. And most callously of all, the frat brat who ducked a war that killed 48,000 American troops threatened to veto a proposal to double the $6,000 payment to relatives of soldiers killed in action.

That is typical of the way in which President Bush, who loves to dress up in uniform, treats those who actually wear one. As a June 30, 2003, Army Times editorial concluded: “President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap and getting cheaper by the day, judging by the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately.”

In his ghostwritten 1999 biography A Charge to Keep, an indignant Bush wrote: “Nearly twelve thousand members of the armed forces are on food stamps. I support increased pay and better benefits and training for our citizen solders. A volunteer military has only two paths. It can lower its standards to fill its ranks. Or it can inspire the best and brightest to join and stay.” Despite four years to do something about it, more than 250,000 military families did not get Bush’s much-vaunted child tax credit because their breadwinner earned less than $26,000 a year. And in his 2005 budget, Bush proposes only that combat pay not count toward eligibility for food stamps—for which no less than 25,000 military families are eligible.

The U.S. Army pay scale is about half that of the British, which is why there is a major crisis in military recruitment. Senior officers talk about a “serious crisis” in recruitment for the regular forces. In addition, the Iraq war has put heavy demands on reservists and guard units. For the first time in 10 years, the guard failed to meet its recruitment target. In one Indiana unit, for instance, the reenlistment rate has dropped from 85 percent to 32 percent.

You would think that the Bush administration would be solicitous of the foot soldiers who carry out its imperial ambitions. But this administration is militaristic, not pro-military. Most of its members sedulously avoided combat and uniformed service of any kind in previous wars and most current enlisted personnel come from small town, blue-collar America, precisely the people whose voices are among the least heard. It is no surprise that Labor Secretary Elaine Chao’s proposals for cutting back legal entitlement to overtime pay this year included all those who had learned their skill in the military.

All of this penny-pinching may seem strange in light of Bush’s desperate attempts to associate himself with the military. But when he dons a flak jacket, the president is not looking to win over those GIs who have just had their term extended on stop-loss orders, but those TV-viewing voters who put the military on a pedestal as the guarantor of American virtues.

Poisonous Fogs of War

Whether one looks back to soldiers exposed to radiation in World War II, to Agent Orange in Vietnam or to possible environmental poisons in the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. government hasn't always given military veterans the healthcare and attention they deserve. Two recent studies show that the problem continues.

The first, released by Harvard Medical School researchers last week, found that the percentage of uninsured non-elderly veterans rose from 1 in 10 in 2000 to 1 in 8 in 2003.

The second, a draft report by a presidential panel of medical experts studying Gulf War illnesses, concluded that stress, the conventional explanation for the poor health of many veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, probably ranks far behind brain abnormalities caused by exposure to sarin gas, pesticides or some other battlefield poison.

Both studies have their problems.

The Harvard analysis used solid government data to conclude that nearly 1.7 million veterans lacked health coverage last year, but the results were quickly politicized. Just weeks before the presidential election, the study's authors tried to pin the problem on the Bush administration's January 2003 decision to end enrollment in VA-run hospitals and clinics for veterans with the lowest of eight priorities for treatment: Their illnesses aren't defined as service-related and their median incomes exceed $25,200 a year.

It's hard to stomach, particularly in time of war, that U.S. veterans in need of care would be turned away. But the solution taken up by congressional Democrats — to pay for more care by raising the VA's budget by $3.1 billion this year — doesn't dig very deep. The Department of Veterans Affairs should first try a lot harder to recover the hundreds of millions of dollars that Medicare HMOs and other insurers owe it for care provided to their members at VA hospitals.

Top Army Official Calls for a Halliburton Inquiry
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: October 25, 2004

The top civilian contracting official for the Army Corps of Engineers, charging that the Army granted the Halliburton Company large contracts for work in Iraq and the Balkans without following rules designed to ensure competition and fair prices to the government, has called for a high-level investigation of what she described as threats to the "integrity of the federal contracting program."

The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, said that in at least one case she witnessed, Army officials inappropriately allowed representatives of Halliburton to sit in as they discussed the terms of a contract the company was set to receive.

Her accusations offer the first extended account of arguments that roiled inside the military bureaucracy over contracts with the company.

In an Oct. 21 letter to the acting Army secretary, Ms. Greenhouse said that after her repeated questions about the Halliburton contracts, she was excluded from major decisions to award money and that her job status was threatened. In response, Army officials referred her accusations to the Pentagon's investigations bureau for review and promised to protect her position in the meantime.

Ms. Greenhouse, 62, is a veteran of military procurement and serves the Corps of Engineers as the principal assistant responsible for contracting - the top civilian overseeing the agency's contracts. She also has chief responsibility for reviewing adherence to Pentagon rules intended to shield awards from outside influence and promote competition.

The traditional media are finally getting a clue. This constitutes all but an obit for Bush.

The Blessing

The New Yorker offers its first endorsement in the history of the magazine:

THE CHOICE
by The Editors
Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25

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.

Amen.

Webspinning

The Creaky Coalition
Allies are getting balky about following America's lead
By Stryker McGuire
Newsweek

Nov. 1 issue - America's 138,000 troops in Iraq were asking for a little help from their British friends. Could an 850-strong armored battalion of Scotland's Black Watch Regiment please be redeployed from Basra, in southern Iraq, to the outskirts of Baghdad? The request seemed straightforward enough. Yet it triggered another political crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair last week. As British commanders weighed the American request, London editors wrote scaremongering headlines about the Black Watch's walking into a "Triangle of Death." Blair's critics charged that acceding to the U.S. request would amount to an election-eve boost to Bush's presidential campaign. Is it not time "to say 'no' to the Americans?" one Labour Party M.P. demanded of Blair.

The prime minister didn't cave. But a new conventional wisdom is taking hold among Britain's military and foreign-policy elite: even if John Kerry defeats Bush, any British government will find it difficult, if not impossible, to muster popular support for a future American-led military intervention. A senior British diplomat put it bluntly to NEWSWEEK: "Never again."

Other members of Bush's Coalition of the Willing are getting balky, too. A total of 29 countries now have troops in Iraq, including Britain's 8,300. After pro-war Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was voted out of office earlier this year, the new government withdrew all of Spain's 1,300 troops. Honduras and the Dominican Republic then brought home their small contingents. Under mounting domestic pressure, Italy (2,700 troops), Poland (2,500), Ukraine (1,600), the Czech Republic (100) and Slovakia (105) have hinted at troop reductions next year. The Coalition's Potemkin-village quality is perhaps best illustrated by Japan's contribution: 600 Self-Defense Force troops. By law, they cannot instigate combat, and have not fired a single shot in anger. In fact, troops from the Netherlands' 500-strong contingent are deployed around the SDF compound in southern Iraq to provide an extra layer of security for the Japanese.

Blair's fealty to Bush barely masks serious disagreements between the American and the British governments. In private, senior British military commanders have strongly criticized the United States' "overwhelming force" tactics in Iraq. Senior British Foreign Service officers have despaired at the post-9/11 collapse of American diplomacy. For Washington, it's one thing to see Thailand and New Zealand pulling troops out of Iraq. It's quite another to have Britain questioning its "special relationship" with the United States.

Iraq coalition vanishes from White House website

Fri Oct 22, 2:26 PM ET

U.S. National - AFP

CANTON, United States (AFP) - The "coalition of the willing" in Iraq (news - web sites) has vanished -- from the White House Internet site, at any rate.

US President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s list of about 50 countries that openly backed the March 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was once easily found by following a link from www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/coalition.html.

No more: A visit to the White House web site Friday found that the list has disappeared, and that the link that led to it -- "Who are the coalition members?" -- is gone as well.

"This is not unusual. If there is incorrect, or out of date information, we take it down," White House spokesman Jimmy Orr told AFP. "What we're doing right now, with the entire Iraq site, is we're updating the information."

Orr said the list was taken down "a couple of weeks ago" and would not say when it would return.

Some Bush critics have suggested an election-year motive for the move, citing a tense exchange two weeks ago between Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) and his Democratic rival, Senator John Edwards (news - web sites), about coalition casualties.

After Edwards charged in their October 5 debate that US troops had suffered 90 percent of the casualties, Cheney angrily retorted that the statistic was "dead wrong" because it omitted deaths and injuries suffered by Iraqis.

"When you include the Iraqi security forces that have suffered casualties, as well as the allies, they've taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the US with 50 percent, not 90 percent," Cheney said.

But Iraq was never considered a coalition member, and was never on the official White House list of coalition nations, leading some critics to charge that the list was pulled down to protect Cheney.

As someone who codes multiple HTML updates for websites every day, I can tell you that this isn't something that the webmaster hasn't had time to get around to.

Since no one other than the Bush true believers reads the White House web propaganda for anything other than entertainment, this is of no importance other than the fact that even the spinmeisters are embarrassed by their lies.

Safe?

Hey, undecided voters! What part of "incompetent" do you not get? Remember how W told us that Saddam was going to let terrorists get those WMDs? Guess what Bush did?

This particular piece of news actually scares the crap out of me. If you live in DC or New York, you might feel likewise.

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 25, 2004

This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

Mmmm, so Bush is keeping us safer, eh? I'd say that the idiot downtown is leaving us completely vulnerable because he doesn't have a clue about Iraq, a real foreign policy or any economic policy beyond tax cuts and government contracts for his wealthy buddies. Oh, by the way, did I mention the economy is in the toilet? I'll get to that in a moment.

The Cat in the Hat

needs dinner....

I'm soliciting recommendations, cat people. The Owners, Eddie and Rosa, have been turning their collective noses up at my latest offerings from 9 Lives. I frequently mix in some botanicals and vitamins but neither of these cats are going to get slender anytime soon while I mix and default to tuna when I need to have my ankles free. Have any of you got favorite formulas for really great cat nutrition? I've got a bunch of books, but if you have real world stories of happy cats at the feed trough, I'd like to hear about them. Please share. I don't trust that the commercial product feeds them any better than crap from the frozen food producers feeds me. What do you do?

The Rise of the Blogs

The Big Winners

By Richard A. Viguerie and David Franke
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page B01

By the time Election Day arrives, millions of Americans will have contributed to a presidential candidate this year. Hundreds of political organizations -- from the Sierra Club to the NRA, from MoveOn.org to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- will have taken an active part in the campaign, supported by Americans from every part of the political spectrum. All of this is democracy in action, and it is so commonplace that we take it for granted. Yet this kind of mass citizen involvement in the political process is a relatively recent phenomenon, spanning less than a half-century of our nation's history.

How did it happen? And what does it suggest for this election, and for presidential elections to come?

The answers can be found in the rise of what we conservatives call the "alternative" media -- beginning with the conservative movement's development of political direct mail in the 1960s, followed by the growth of talk radio and cable TV news in the 1990s and, since then, by the remarkable role of the Internet in the political process. In this year's presidential election, it is the alternative media that are largely framing the issues, engaging the public, raising money and getting out the vote.

Whatever the outcome on Nov. 2, this election will be remembered as the year when these alternative media all came together to change how politics in America is practiced.
....
But as powerful as each of these three alternative media are, none empower the individual voter as effectively and as forcefully as the Internet does. Your modem is your equalizer, your cyber-Colt .45. You have a direct line -- with no intermediaries or filters -- to any publication or Web site around the world, to other citizens who share your interests and viewpoints, to government bureaucrats, to your political representatives, to the stores you want to do business with -- you name it.

Conservatives were quick to see this potential. As a result, Joe and Elizabeth Farah, with a staff of about 25 at WorldNetDaily, and Chris Ruddy, with a staff of about 50 at NewsMax, each publish an online newspaper that draws a larger Internet audience than the Web sites of the Dallas Morning News or the Philadelphia Inquirer, according to several online rating services. Matt Drudge, essentially all by himself, gets more daily Internet traffic than CBS News does. Incredible! Drudge wasn't so wacky, after all, when he proclaimed this the age when "every citizen can be a reporter."

The story as we've told it so far has been a tale of one conservative success after another in the realm of alternative media. That may now be coming to an end. Conservatives were unbeatable in alternative media when they were underdogs or perceived themselves as underdogs. Now conservatives pretty much are the establishment, and are demoralized trying to defend their party's big-spending record of the past four years, not to mention the quagmire in Iraq. Meanwhile, Democrats and liberals are united in their passion to unseat President Bush.

Whichever party wins, however, there's no doubt about the importance of the alternative media in driving this election:

• The Internet. The new kid in the neighborhood is also the rowdiest and least predictable. The greatest impact of the Internet this past year has been as a tool for political organizing and fundraising. This began when Democrat Howard Dean, managed by Joe Trippi, became the first presidential candidate to raise most of his money (more than $40 million) through the Internet. Some 60 percent of Dean's contributions were for $200 or less, compared with only 17 percent for Bush. Democratic nominee John Kerry has become even more successful, with a massive 7-to-1 advantage over the Republicans in that medium.

Conservatives have shown no ability or desire to match these liberal successes in using the Internet for political organization. This could be a critical mistake. Liberals woke up to the power of political direct mail when Reagan was elected. It could take a Kerry victory to awaken conservatives from their slumber.
....
The big news this year is the Democratic Party's burst of activity after years of lying comatose outside the post office. Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe has confirmed to us that the Democrats mailed more fundraising letters in the first four months of this year than they did during the entire 1990s.

DNC consultant Hal Malchow has told us that the results have been so good that they sent one fundraising mailing to every Democrat in the nation over the age of 40 whom they could locate on a list -- and came out with a profit. With all their experience and expertise in direct mail, the Republicans have never done that.

The result: Democrats have reached parity with the Republicans in direct mail. Adding in the Internet and phone banks, Kerry is out-raising Bush 2 to 1 in the alternative media, and three-quarters of his contributions are coming from small donors. Direct mail and the Internet are creating a new mass base for the Democrats.The growth of these four alternative media has profound implications. An elitist clique, no matter how large or powerful, cannot control the news today. The biggest, most powerful government in American history cannot control the flow of bad news from Iraq. The biggest, most powerful TV news department cannot control the instantaneous fact-checking by hundreds of bloggers.

We will see a spate of books this winter analysing the effect of the alternate media, particularly the Internet and the blogs, on this election. One of the things I can see already: websites and blogs appeal to those who are most fiercely partisan and have helped to fan the partisan flames, which is one of the reasons that this election season is so divided. The other factor is, of course, Bush himself. For those who clearly see what he is doing, he clearly comes across as a petulant, arrogant man who is doing everything he can to subvert our democracy. The "What's the Matter with Kansas" voters were swept into the Republican camp by Nixon's "southern strategy" thirty years ago and it is going to take tireless work by the left to re-educate them to their own self interest.

In the Eyes of Others

President Kerry and Europe
Revitalizing an Alliance Depends on Bush's Defeat

By Timothy Garton Ash
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page B07

This U.S. election will shape the future of Europe and the trans- atlantic West.

If President Bush is reelected, many Europeans will try to make the European Union a rival superpower to the United States.
....
Yet the Iranian regime, unlike Saddam Hussein, probably is close to developing a nuclear weapons capability -- and Europe's soft diplomacy has been no more effective in preventing it than U.S. huffing and puffing. Only combined action stands a chance.

Even more important, in the longer term, is China. Chirac has been pursuing a shameless policy of wooing China, for French economic advantage and to poke Washington in the eye. He has endorsed Beijing's position on Taiwan and said the E.U. embargo on arms exports to China should be lifted. This raises the grotesque prospect of European weapons being pointed at American warships in the Taiwan Strait. But of course it's not France that is calling the shots here. In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger played the China card against the Soviet Union. Today, China is playing the European card against the United States.

The Euro-Gaullist attempt to create a rival European superpower would be catalyzed by the advent of a second Bush administration. It would not, however, succeed. The forces of Euro-Atlanticism are still much too strong, especially in an enlarged European Union of 25 member states. A second Bush administration would find plenty of opportunities to do what it has done already in the past few years: divide and rule. The result would be a divided Europe in a still more divided West.

If, however, Americans choose Sen. John F. Kerry as their 44th president, we will have a chance of reconstructing the transatlantic West on a new basis. In Europe, Kerry will enjoy a huge opening bonus simply because he is not George W. Bush. His offer of working with allies will be greeted with open arms. Skeptics say the difference between the two candidates' approaches is style, not substance, but in this relationship, style is substance. The difference between unilateralism and multilateralism is all about how you do it, not what you do. Half the European objections to Bush's policy concern the how, not the what. Electing Kerry would encourage the silent majority of Euro-Atlanticists in Europe to speak up. Moreover, Kerry can credibly say he wants a united Europe as a strong partner of the United States, whereas no one in Europe would now believe Bush even if he said it.

The difficulties are still immense. Germany and France won't send troops to Iraq. On Iran, Europe needs to get tougher while America needs to get smarter. As the largest emerging market in the world, China will find many more chances for divide-and-rule between export-hungry Western democracies.

So we may still fail. But there is a chance.

I think it important to make clear the position from which I write. I love America, spend part of each year at a great American university and believe passionately that it is possible to be both pro-European and pro-American. I have never belonged to any British political party, let alone an American one. As a contemporary historian, I conclude that some Republican presidents have done great things for Europe.

Ronald Reagan's dramatic turn from arms race to detente, in response to the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev, was one such. The current president's father, George H.W. Bush, made the peaceful liberation of Central Europe possible by his wise and mature statecraft. But not this Bush, not this time.

In any sober analysis, the chances of the world's two largest assemblages of the rich and free being able to work together to confront the coming great global challenges will be better with a President Kerry. And only if America and Europe work together can we unfold, for the rest of the world, the transforming power of liberty.

I wrote to another blogger this morning that this is going to be a hard sell with a large part of the American electorate: a large swath doesn't really give a damn about what the rest of the world thinks and is, at best, suspicious of international treaties and laws. They are "go it aloners" like Bush. This is a dangerous state of mind. The Toronto Star had an op-ed this morning that lays out the thinking of the rest of the free west:

`Free world' not among Bush fans

RICK ANDERSON

The U.S. president is known as the "leader of the free world." Were his election up to that free world, George W. Bush would be a goner.

We'll know soon if punditry of the presidential race as "too close to call" is hype, evidence of Democratic media bias, prescience, or well-advised prudence. CNN generated fodder for conspiracy theorists with post-debate commentary that "it was a tie, so the Democrats won" logic, which would have the New York Yankees in the World Series instead of watching it on television.
....
Montreal's La Presse and nine other world newspapers produced a 10-country poll showing Canadians picking Kerry over Bush, overwhelmingly, 56 per cent to 23 per cent. Same story among Bush's Iraq coalition allies: British and Australians choose Kerry over Bush 2 to 1.

"We are not anti-American" said Australia's Sydney Morning Herald in its poll analysis. "Most Australians, like the bulk of people surveyed in the other countries, draw a clear distinction — we have a warm attitude to Americans, and think the U.S relationship is important, yet take a dim view of President Bush ... The U.S. president is still the leader of the free world, yet the free world is less inclined to approve of him."

Out of Sight

Nothing trumps the story of lives lost, but this is, arguably, the next most important story in today's papers. All of the big three are on it.

Memo Lets CIA Take Detainees Out of Iraq
Practice Is Called Serious Breach of Geneva Conventions

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A01

At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation -- a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions.

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

The draft opinion, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and dated March 19, 2004, refers to both Iraqi citizens and foreigners in Iraq, who the memo says are protected by the treaty. It permits the CIA to take Iraqis out of the country to be interrogated for a "brief but not indefinite period." It also says the CIA can permanently remove persons deemed to be "illegal aliens" under "local immigration law."

Some specialists in international law say the opinion amounts to a reinterpretation of one of the most basic rights of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians during wartime and occupation, including insurgents who were not part of Iraq's military.

The treaty prohibits the "[i]ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory . . . regardless of their motive."

The 1949 treaty notes that a violation of this particular provision constitutes a "grave breach" of the accord, and thus a "war crime" under U.S. federal law, according to a footnote in the Justice Department draft. "For these reasons," the footnote reads, "we recommend that any contemplated relocations of 'protected persons' from Iraq to facilitate interrogation be carefully evaluated for compliance with Article 49 on a case by case basis." It says that even persons removed from Iraq retain the treaty's protections, which would include humane treatment and access to international monitors.

During the war in Afghanistan, the administration ruled that al Qaeda fighters were not considered "protected persons" under the convention. Many of them were transferred out of the country to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere for interrogations. By contrast, the U.S. government deems former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military, as well as insurgents and other civilians in Iraq, to be protected by the Geneva Conventions.

International law experts contacted for this article described the legal reasoning contained in the Justice Department memo as unconventional and disturbing.

The Times covers it from a different angle:

After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
By TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON - In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.

Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.

The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.

White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.

But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists.

"We've cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet," said Richard L. Shiffrin, who worked on the issue as the Pentagon's deputy general counsel for intelligence matters. "They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory."

The story of how Guantánamo and the new military justice system became an intractable legacy of Sept. 11 has been largely hidden from public view.

But extensive interviews with current and former officials and a review of confidential documents reveal that the legal strategy took shape as the ambition of a small core of conservative administration officials whose political influence and bureaucratic skill gave them remarkable power in the aftermath of the attacks.

The strategy became a source of sharp conflict within the Bush administration, eventually pitting the highest-profile cabinet secretaries - including Ms. Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - against one another over issues of due process, intelligence-gathering and international law.

In fact, many officials contend, some of the most serious problems with the military justice system are rooted in the secretive and contentious process from which it emerged.

Military lawyers were largely excluded from that process in the days after Sept. 11. They have since waged a long struggle to ensure that terrorist prosecutions meet what they say are basic standards of fairness. Uniformed lawyers now assigned to defend Guantánamo detainees have become among the most forceful critics of the Pentagon's own system.

The two articles detail the actions of two separate executive agencies, Justice and the CIA, but this is actually one story: secretive executive branch actions which contravene international law. Human rights are an absolute, international standard, not something which can be decreed by the US president. No wonder we are despised around the world.

Abu Ghraib team bids to run UK prisons

Antony Barnett, Martin Bright and Solomon Hughes
Sunday October 24, 2004
The Observer

The American prison company whose director set up Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib jail for use by the US military is bidding to run a number of prisons in Britain.

The Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC) has set up a London headquarters and is in advanced negotiations to operate at least one prison in Britain. It is also planning bids to build and manage a number of other jails, including the extension of Belmarsh in south-east London, Britain's maximum security prison, where terrorist suspects are being held without trial.

The disclosure has provoked anger among MPs and prison groups. Brian Caton, general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association, said: 'Serious questions have to be asked about a British prison being run by a company whose director was in charge of setting up a system that led to the atrocities and torture of Iraqi detainees by prison personnel.'

Permanent Damage

Karl Rove: America's Mullah
This election is about Rovism, and the outcome threatens to transform the U.S. into an ironfisted theocracy.

By Neal Gabler, Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."

Rove, however, is more than a political sharpie with a bulging bag of dirty tricks. His campaign shenanigans — past and future — go to the heart of what this election is about.

Democrats will tell you it is a referendum on Bush's incompetence or on his extremist right-wing agenda. Republicans will tell you it's about conservatism versus liberalism or who can better protect us from terrorists. They are both wrong. This election is about Rovism — the insinuation of Rove's electoral tactics into the conduct of the presidency and the fabric of the government. It's not an overstatement to say that on Nov. 2, the fate of traditional American democracy will hang in the balance.

Rovism is not simply a function of Rove the political conniver sitting in the counsels of power and making decisions, though he does. No recent presidency has put policy in the service of politics as has Bush's. Because tactics can change institutions, Rovism is much more. It is a philosophy and practice of governing that pervades the administration and even extends to the Republican-controlled Congress. As Robert Berdahl, chancellor of UC Berkeley, has said of Bush's foreign policy, a subset of Rovism, it constitutes a fundamental change in "the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this country."

Rovism begins, as one might suspect from the most merciless of political consiglieres, with Machiavelli's rule of force: "A prince is respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy." No administration since Warren Harding's has rewarded its friends so lavishly, and none has been as willing to bully anyone who strays from its message.

There is no dissent in the Rove White House without reprisal.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki was retired after he disagreed with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's transformation of the Army and then testified that invading Iraq would require a U.S. deployment of 200,000 soldiers.

Chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster was threatened with termination if he revealed before the vote that the administration had seriously misrepresented the cost of its proposed prescription drug plan to get it through Congress.

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was peremptorily fired for questioning the wisdom of the administration's tax cuts, and former U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III felt compelled to recant his statement that there were insufficient troops in Iraq.

Even accounting for the strong-arm tactics of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, this isn't government as we have known it. This is the Sopranos in the White House: "Cross us and you're road kill."

Naturally, the administration's treatment of the opposition is worse. Rove's mentor, political advisor Lee Atwater, has been quoted as saying: "What you do is rip the bark off liberals." That's how Bush has governed. There is a feeling, perhaps best expressed by Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller's keynote address at the Republican convention, that anyone who has the temerity to question the president is undermining the country. At times, Miller came close to calling Democrats traitors for putting up a presidential candidate.

This may be standard campaign rhetoric. But it's one thing to excoriate your opponents in a campaign, and quite another to continue berating them after the votes are counted.

Rovism regards any form of compromise as weakness. Politics isn't a bus we all board together, it's a steamroller.

No recent administration has made less effort to reach across the aisle, and thanks to Rovism, the Republican majority in Congress often operates on a rule of exclusion. Republicans blocked Democrats from participating in the bill-drafting sessions on energy, prescription drugs and intelligence reform in the House. As Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) told the New Yorker, "They don't consult with the nations of the world, and they don't consult with Congress, especially the Democrats in Congress. They can do it all themselves."

Bush entered office promising to be a "uniter, not a divider." But Rovism is not about uniting. What Rove quickly grasped is that it's easier and more efficacious to exploit the cultural and social divide than to look for common ground. No recent administration has as eagerly played wedge issues — gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, faith-based initiatives — to keep the nation roiling, in the pure Rovian belief that the president's conservative supporters will always be angrier and more energized than his opponents. Division, then, is not a side effect of policy; in Rovism, it is the purpose of policy.

John Dean, who was present at the creation of political dirty tricks, Nixon-style, offers these observations:

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't merely the closeness of the tallying in what appeared to be unique circumstances in Florida that spawned litigation. To the contrary, suing is a standard operating procedure for Karl Rove when he is losing (or has lost) a race.

Make no mistake: If Bush loses, and it is very close, Rove will want to litigate as long as possible, going to the U.S. Supreme Court (again) if possible.

Dean concludes, as do I:

It may be days or weeks, if not months, before we know the final results of this presidential election. And given the Republican control of the government, if Karl Rove is on the losing side, it could be years: He will take every issue (if he is losing) to its ultimate appeal in every state he can.

It does not seem to trouble either Rove or Bush that they are moving us toward a Twenty-first Century civil war -- and that, once again, Southern conservatism is at its core. Only a miracle, it strikes me, can prevent this election from descending into post-election chaos. But given the alternatives, a miracle is what I am hoping for.

The idea that the Rove/Bush damage that has been done to us in four years may not be over anytime soon makes me literally sick. Dean's article isn't likely to be discussed on the chat shows, but it is one of the most important pieces of political writing I've read in recent months.

Peace and Freedom

Bodies of 49 Iraqi Troops Found Dead in Eastern Iraq
Member of U.S. State Department Killed in Separate Incident

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 24, 2004; 7:25 AM

BAGHDAD. Oct. 24--The bodies of 49 freshly trained Iraqi army recruits were discovered on a roadside about 75 miles northeast of Baghdad, lined up and executed by insurgents, Iraqi officials said early Sunday.

In a separate attack, a State Department security officer was killed when a rocket or mortar landed in a U.S. military base at 5 a.m., according to a spokesman for the American embassy.

The killings of Iraqi recruits occurred about 8 p.m. Saturday near the army's main training base in Kirkush, which the recruits had just left aboard three buses to begin a leave, according to officials and news service reports. The buses stopped at a checkpoint manned by insurgents clad in uniforms of the Iraqi National Guard, according to the al-Aribyia satellite news channel.

The recruits appeared to have filed off the buses, lined up in four rows and laid down before being shot. The first 37 bodies were discovered Saturday night. Another 12 were found after daybreak Sunday.

"After inspection, we found out that they were shot after being ordered to lay down on the earth," said Gen. Walid Azzawi, commander of the provisional police in Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.

It was unclear what kind of security, if any, accompanied the recruits, who apparently were unarmed. The victims were said to be largely from Iraq's southern provinces, and were traveling toward home on a road that hugs Iraq's border with Iran. The bodies were found near Mandali, a town on the road leading south and east from Kirkush.

Iraqi security forces have been the main target of insurgents who regard the interim government of Iraq as an illegitimate puppet of the United States, which has more than 130,000 troops in the country. Heavily armored U.S. forces may be attacked more often, but the Iraqis are substantially more vulnerable.

Car Bombings Kill 17 Iraqis; Attack Injures 6 U.S. Soldiers
Extremists Said to Behead Man Working With Americans

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A18

BAGHDAD, Oct. 23 -- Two car bomb attacks killed at least 17 Iraqi security officers Saturday in the Sunni Triangle north and west of the capital, and two foreign truck drivers were fatally shot in the northern city of Mosul. A video posted on an Internet site purportedly showed extremists beheading a man accused of working with the Americans.

Six U.S. service members were wounded in a separate attack on a military convoy shortly after dawn in Baghdad.

The deadliest incident took place in Baghdadi, a city on the Euphrates River about 140 miles west of the capital. A suicide bomber detonated explosives in his vehicle outside a U.S. base guarded by Iraqi police, killing 16 Iraqi officers. A U.S. military spokesman said about 40 people were injured, none of them Americans.

A second car bomb killed one Iraqi National Guardsman at a checkpoint in the village of Ishaqi, located about 12 miles south of Samarra, a city that U.S. and Iraqi forces reclaimed from insurgents on Oct. 1. The Associated Press and Reuters reported a higher death toll, quoting police as saying that four guardsmen were killed in the incident.

The two truckers, a Turk and a Yugoslav, were gunned down as they drove through the center of Mosul.

An Internet video, purportedly posted by a group calling itself the Ansar al-Sunna Army, showed the beheading of a man it called a "crusader spy recruited by the Americans." Before he was executed, the victim identified himself as Seif Adnan Kanaan and said he was employed to deliver drinks to U.S. soldiers based at the airport in Mosul.

"I am telling anybody who wants to work with Americans not to work with them," the man said. "I found out the mujaheddin have very accurate information."

The U.S. military convoy in Baghdad was struck by a roadside bomb on the freeway leading to the city's airport, which is ringed by American bases. The explosion echoed across the city at 7:15 a.m., and a column of black smoke smeared the horizon.

We seem to be having a little difficulty with that "peace and freedom" thing that W babbles on about. When being known to have cooperated with us is a death sentence for an Iraqi, I'd say we've pretty much lost the hearts and minds.

In Passing

This is sort of a blogiversary. I made my first post to the front page of DKos one year ago today. That first post is here.

This little Bump in the Beltway will begin its second year on November 15. Which is also the birthday of my mother and one of my brothers.

Friday Cat Blogging

Kevin Hayden, my colleague at The American Street, has taken on what can only be called the ultimate cat blogging post. He is also screamingly funny. Go and enjoy. This was a laugh when I needed one.

A Lighter Moment

Go to the Head of the Flu Line?

Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A22

Although nothing is funny about this flu vaccine debacle, the following incident made me smile as I waited for a shot in a long line outside a Giant Food store two days after news of the shortage got out.

Giant was a splendid host, especially given the unanticipated mob scene. Employees frequently appeared offering candy, cookies, water, orange juice and solicitude. But by our third hour, so much fluid had been proffered that the more private needs of the white-haired elders began to be a matter of the highest priority.

Could folks leave the line and make the trip to the distant restrooms without worrying about their place in line? How difficult would satisfying this urge be for the not inconsiderable number using walkers or wheelchairs?

As I pondered these questions, a remarkable sight hove into view. Two slightly red-faced Giant employees walking along the line, trundling a dolly upon which rested -- a toilet! My, I thought. Giant, I am yours for life.

But, of course, it was not a world-class demonstration of supermarket hospitality, only a broken toilet on its way to wherever they go to expire.

BERNARD RIES

Washington

Agent for Change

I wonder if he'll have some choice words for the so-called investigative unit at CBS.

Jon Stewart talks TV news on "60 Minutes"

Associated Press

Oct. 23, 2004 | NEW YORK -- After his outburst on CNN's "Crossfire," "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart will have a few words for "60 Minutes." The comedian will be profiled on this Sunday's broadcast of the CBS news program. Though taped before Stewart's harsh comments of "Crossfire'' and one its hosts, Tucker Carlson, he did have the subject of TV news on his mind.

"60 Minutes" airs on CBS Sunday at 7 p.m. (ET/PT).

60 Minutes stopped being compelling television or journalism a long time ago, but I'm wondering if Stewart isn't that most transformational of figures, the truth-teller.

Involuntary Ready Reserve

via yankee doodle at Today in Iraq, who is home after many tragedies and emergencies:

Army officer sues U.S. for deployment
Sat 23 October, 2004 06:13

By Gail Appleson

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. Army Reserves captain who resigned in June after completing his agreed-upon term of service has sued the government for trying to force him to return to active duty for deployment to Iraq.

Jay Ferriola, 31, of New York filed suit in Manhattan federal court on Friday seeking an injunction blocking the Army from enforcing an order returning him to active duty on Monday. The case names Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and others as defendants.

The suit charges that the Army's order, dated October 8, violates Ferriola's Constitutional rights against "involuntary servitude" and is a breach of his contract with the military. An emergency hearing was set in the matter for Sunday.

A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office had no immediate comment.

The suit said Ferriola received a letter dated October 8 that ordered him back to active duty on Monday for a period of 545 days. It give as the purpose as "Mobilization for Iraqi Freedom."

Barry Slotnick, Ferriola's lawyer, issued a statement calling the Army's order an illegal "back door" draft. At a media conference late in the day, he was asked by reporters if his client sued because he was afraid to go to Iraq.

"Not at all," Slotnick said. "He wants to continue his life as a civilian. He has a right to do that. He has served his country heroically and patriotically."

Ferriola had voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1993 for an eight-year period in exchange for an ROTC scholarship at the Virginia Military Institute.

After graduating, he served in various Army positions and was promoted to the rank of captain. In February 2000 he was separated from active duty and placed in the reserves.

Last year he was ordered back to active duty and was released to the reserves in June, 2003. He completed the eight years of service with the Army in February of this year.

In older days, this was called "impressment." Guard recruiting for the year is off by 5K, so the Army is building back in where ever they can.

I don't think this guy has a leg to stand on, legally, but, hey, I've been wrong before. This sounds like IRR call-up and about five thousand of his colleagues have already shipped out.

Fool Me Once, Shame on You

I thought that it was more than a little bit interesting that police resources could be stretched even further for our polling day, when Condi, Ashcroft and Ridge were spread out across the country on campaign speaking tours. I guess those terrorist threats aren't really all that compelling.

No Direct Evidence of Plot To Attack Around Elections

By Dan Eggen and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A01

On Sept. 15, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and John E. McLaughlin, then acting director of the CIA, brought a special note of concern to their daily briefing with President Bush.

Fresh intelligence had arrived pointing to plans for a mass-casualty terrorist attack before Election Day, bolstering previous indications that such an assault was possible on U.S. soil, according to accounts of the briefing provided to Mueller's and McLaughlin's subordinates. What's more, intelligence officials told Bush, there was reason to believe that the plotters may already have arrived in the United States, according to the accounts. The new information led the FBI and other agencies across the government to launch a well-publicized campaign aimed at foiling potential plots before the elections, including hundreds of interviews in immigrant neighborhoods and aggressive surveillance of suspected terrorist sympathizers.

But five weeks after the effort began, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials say they have found no direct evidence of an election-related terrorist plot. Authorities also say that a key CIA source who had claimed knowledge of such plans has been discredited, casting doubt on one of the earliest pieces of evidence pointing to a possible attack.

Intelligence officials stress that they continue to receive reports indicating that al Qaeda and its allies would like to mount attacks in the United States close to the Nov. 2 elections, and that such reports have been streaming in since terrorists blew up commuter trains in Madrid days before Spanish elections in March. Yet after hundreds of interviews, scores of immigration arrests and other preventive measures, law enforcement officials say they have been unable to detect signs of an ongoing plot in the United States, nor have they identified specific targets, dates or methods that might be used in one.

"We've not unearthed anything that would add any credence to talk of an election-related attack," said one senior FBI counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because authorities have been instructed not to talk publicly about the issue before the elections. "You can never say there is not a threat, but we have not found specific evidence of one."

Local cops and EMTs all over the country have had leave cancelled and they are already working overtime in massive amounts. But, move along, nothing to see here folks

The Ground Game

What part of you believed that this wasn't going to get really, really, dirty?

Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State
By MICHAEL MOSS

Published: October 23, 2004

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

Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.

Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.

Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.

Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks. Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid $100.

The Democrats, who tend to benefit more than Republicans from large turnouts, said they had registered more than 2,000 recruits to try to protect legitimate voters rather than weed out ineligible ones.

Republican officials said they had no intention of disrupting voting but were concerned about the possibility of fraud involving thousands of newly registered Democrats.

"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems," said James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County.

Both parties have waged huge campaigns in the battleground states to register millions of new voters, and the developments in Ohio provided an early glimpse of how those efforts may play out on Election Day.

Ohio election officials said that by state law, the parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable" justification for doubting the qualifications of a voter before asking a poll worker to question that person. And, the officials said, challenges could be made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.

Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the criteria would minimize the potential for disruption. But Democrats worry that the challenges will inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.

"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting, because challenging takes a long time,'' said David Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long lines causes our people to leave without voting.''

The Republican challenges in Ohio have already begun. Yesterday, party officials submitted a list of about 35,000 registered voters whose mailing addresses, the Republicans said, were questionable. After registering, they said, each of the voters was mailed a notice, and in each case the notice was returned to election officials as undeliverable.

In Cuyahoga County alone, which includes the heavily Democratic neighborhoods of Cleveland, the Republican Party submitted more than 14,000 names of voters for county election officials to scrutinize for possible irregularities. The party said it had registered more than 1,400 people to challenge voters in that county.

....
The preparations for widespread challenging this year have alarmed some election officials.

"This creates chaos and confusion in the polling site," said R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, an international association of election officials. But, he said, "most courts say it's permissible by state law and therefore can't be denied."

In Ohio, Republicans sought to play down any concern that their challenging would be disruptive.

"I suspect there will be challenges," said Robert T. Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. "But by and large, people will move through quickly. We want to make sure every eligible voter votes." He added, "99.9 percent will fly right by."

Challengers on both sides said they were uncertain about what to expect. Georgiana Nye, 56, a Dayton real estate broker who was registered by the Republicans as a challenger, said she wanted to help prevent fraud and would accept the $100 for the 13 hours of work and training.

For the Democrats in Dayton, Ronald Magoteaux, 57, a mechanical engineer, said he agreed to be a poll watcher out of concern for new voters. "I think it's sick that these Republicans are up to dirty tricks at the polls," Mr. Magoteaux said. "I believe thousands of votes were lost in 2000, and I want to make sure that doesn't happen in Ohio."

Democrats said they were racing to match the Republicans, precinct by precinct. In some cities, like Dayton, they registered more challengers than the Republicans, election officials said. But in Cuyahoga County, where the Republicans said they had registered 1,436 people to challenge voters, or one in every precinct, Democrats said they had signed up only about 300.

The parties are also preparing to battle over voter qualifications in Florida, where they had until last Tuesday to register challengers. In Fort Myers, Republicans named 100 watchers for the county's 171 precincts, up from 60 in 2000. But Democrats registered 300 watchers in the county, a sixfold increase.

You don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

Of course, if the reporters would do their job, we'd find out if this was different from 2000, and if so, by how much. This reporters little anecdotes don't tell us much.

Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

They just make shit up.

Pentagon Reportedly Skewed C.I.A.'s View of Qaeda Tie
By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: October 22, 2004

WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 - As recently as January 2004, a top Defense Department official misrepresented to Congress the view of American intelligence agencies about the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to a new report by a Senate Democrat.

The report said a classified document prepared by Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, not only asserted that there were ties between the Baghdad government and the terrorist network, but also did not reflect accurately the intelligence agencies' assessment - even while claiming that it did.

In issuing the report, the senator, Carl M. Levin, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he would ask the panel to take "appropriate action'' against Mr. Feith. Senator Levin said Mr. Feith had repeatedly described the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda as far more significant and extensive than the intelligence agencies had.

The broad outlines of Mr. Feith's efforts to promote the idea of such close links have been previously disclosed.

The view, a staple of the Bush administration's public statements before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, has since been discredited by the Sept. 11 commission, which concluded that Iraq and Al Qaeda had "no close collaborative relationship.''

The 46-page report by Senator Levin and the Democratic staff of the Armed Services Committee is the first to focus narrowly on the role played by Mr. Feith's office. Democrats had sought to include that line of inquiry in a report completed in June by the Senate Intelligence Committee, but Republicans on the panel postponed that phase of the study until after the presidential election.

In an interview, Mr. Levin said he had concluded that Mr. Feith had practiced "continuing deception of Congress.'' But he said he had no evidence that Mr. Feith's conduct had been illegal.

Mr. Levin began the inquiry in June 2003, after Republicans on the panel, led by Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, declined to take part. He said his findings were endorsed by other Democrats on the committee, but complained that the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency had declined to provide crucial documents.

In a statement, the Pentagon said the Levin report "appears to depart from the bipartisan, consultative relationship" between the Defense Department and the Armed Services Committee, adding, "The unanimous, bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report of July 2004 found no evidence that administration officials tried to coerce, influence or pressure intelligence analysts to change their judgments."

Senator Warner said, "I take strong exception to the conclusions Senator Levin reaches." He said his view was based on the Intelligence Committee's "analysis thus far of the public and classified records."

Among the findings in the report were that the C.I.A. had become skeptical by June 2002, earlier than previously known, about a supposed meeting in April 2001 in Prague between Mohamed Atta, a leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, and an Iraqi intelligence official. Nevertheless, Mr. Feith and other senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, continued at least through the end of 2002 to describe the reported meeting as evidence of a possible link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Levin's report drew particular attention to statements by Mr. Feith in communications with Congress beginning in July 2003 about such a link.

A classified annex sent by Mr. Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27, 2003, which was disclosed two weeks later by The Weekly Standard, asserted that "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990's to 2003,'' and concluded, "There can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans.''

In a Nov. 15 news release, the Defense Department said the "provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies, and done with the permission of the intelligence community.'' But Mr. Levin's report said that statement was incorrect, because the Central Intelligence Agency had not cleared release of Mr. Feith's annex.

The Levin report also disclosed for the first time that the C.I.A., in December 2003, sent Mr. Feith a letter pointing out corrections he should make to the document before providing it to Senator Levin, who had requested the document as part of his investigation.

Perhaps most critically, the report says, Mr. Feith repeated a questionable assertion concerning a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Qaeda ally whose presence in Iraq was cited by the Bush administration before the war as crucial evidence of Mr. Hussein's support for terrorism.

In his Oct. 27 letter, Mr. Feith told Congress that the Iraqi intelligence service knew of Mr. Zarqawi's entry into Iraq. In recommending a correction, the C.I.A. said that claim had not been supported by the intelligence report that Mr. Feith had cited, the Levin report says. Nevertheless, the report says, Mr. Feith reiterated the assertion in his addendum, attributing it to a different intelligence report - one that likewise did not state that Iraq knew Mr. Zarqawi was in the country.

A reassessment completed by American intelligence agencies in September concluded that it is not clear whether Mr. Hussein's government harbored Mr. Zarqawi during his time in Iraq before the war, intelligence officials have said.

Governance, war and taxes by making stuff up. This is Washington as Emerald City.

Geeks for GOTV

I just volunteered for this. If you have the computer skills and the time, this would be the place that you could put your geekiness to work for Our Guy without leaving your terminal (and you know you are going to be there, anyway.) I just put myself on call for every night through 11/2, so evening posts might be slim if there are a lot of questions. It's basic helpdesk work and I don't have a hard time doing that over the phone.

You don't even have to be a power user to do this, but it would help. Click on the link above to apply.

I got the link from bean at Alas, A blog.

If you can't do that, there are lots of other things you can do. GOTV will need drivers on Election Day and poll monitors. Lawyers looking for Pro Bono opportunities can call precinct captains or state Kerry committees for assignments, the need here is still huge. Between now and Nov. 2, you can flier, doorknock and phonebank. Find your local Kerry committee, it will take a bit of clicking here. But there is plenty to do and something everyone can do.

I cut my political teeth in 1968 with Humphrey and learned to do it all when I was still 14--envelope stuffing, phone banking, campaign appearances with the candidate as a go-go booted "Humphrey Girl" in a song and dance line. Who ever you are and whatever you can do, there is a place for you to do something more than wring your hands as we come down to the wire.

You don't want to wake up on Nov. 3 wishing you could have done something more. It is going to be close. Be the difference.

Siege of Fallujah

Looks like the American Army, Guard and Reserves aren't the only force being stretched thin.

1,000 Territorial Army soldiers failed gun test
By Nick Foley

22 October 2004

Nearly 1,000 Territorial Army soldiers were sent to fight in Iraq despite failing their weapons test, a court martial heard today.

A total of 949 part-time soldiers failed to achieve the required standard or were trained by instructors who had not passed the test themselves. But because the figures were only based on records over an eight-month period, the number could have been as high as 2,300, the court was told.

The figure was revealed during the court martial of reservist Lance Corporal Ian Blaymire, who is charged with the manslaughter of a colleague while serving in Iraq.

The Territorial Army is roughly equivalent to our Reserves. The British public is very unhappy that British troops are being sent to Baghdad to relieve Americans for the siege of Fallujah, of which William Lind says:

Unfortunately, our leaders do not understand the Fourth Generation, so it appears we are about to throw this opportunity away. We continue to bomb and shell Fallujah, which pushes our enemies toward each other. We seem to be readying an all-out assault on the city, which will have the usual result when Goliath defeats David: a moral defeat for Goliath. Many Iraqis will die, the city will be wrecked (as always, we will promise to rebuild it but not do so), and any losses the insurgents suffer will be made up many times over by a flood of new recruits. Never was it more truly said that, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Of course, we claim we are hitting only Mr. al-Zarqawi’s fighters, but anyone who knows ordinance knows that is a lie. The 500, 1000 and 2000-pound bombs we drop have bursting radii that guarantee civilian casualties in an urban environment. More, it appears we see those civilian casualties as useful.
....
The point here is not merely that in using terrorism ourselves, we are doing something bad. The point is that, by using the word “terrorism” as a synonym for anything our enemies do, while defining anything we do as legitimate acts of war, we undermine ourselves at the moral level – which, again, is the decisive level in Fourth Generation war.

So, we are moral midgets and want to ask the Brits to join us. Colin Brown of the Independent reports:

Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned over the war, last night warned Tony Blair that Britain will be associated with the blame if the assault on Fallujah resulted in heavy civilian casualties.

There are fears that the number of troops in Iraq is being increased under cover of the moves to replace the 1st Battalion, the Black Watch as the main reserve force, fuelling anxiety among Labour MPs that Britain will be sucked into a Vietnam-style war. Mr Blair denied on Wednesday in the Commons that the number of British troops in Iraq was being increased, but Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, refused to repeat that denial last night when challenged on BBC radio.

Patrick Mercer, the shadow Home Security Minister, accused ministers of "sneaking in the extra troops". He added: "Tony Blair has said he is prepared to pay the blood price. Let us hope that not too many of this battle group have to honour his words."

Mr Blair warned MPs to expect an upsurge in violence in the run-up to the January elections in Iraq. Dissident Labour MPs said last night they feared Britain would be asked again by the US to send more troops.

The role assigned to the Black Watch will also cause anxiety that British troops are being more closely associated than expected with the forthcoming assault on Fallujah. The Defence Secretary indicated on Monday that they would be relieving an existing US unit, but military sources said last night that was not the case. "The Americans are throwing a ring of steel around Fallujah, and are sending in Iraqi forces to do the close fighting. The British and American forces will be in an outer ring of steel," a military source said. "The Black Watch will protect an approach route to the city. They are not replacing an existing American force."

If the Black Watch sustains casualties or the British press gets wind of what is really going on in Fallujah, Tony Blair will be held accountable.

Blowing Smoke

Behind Bush's Rhetoric

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, October 22, 2004; Page A25

Begin with Bush's distortions of Kerry's record on terrorism. Here's Bush in Mason City, Iowa, on Wednesday: "Senator Kerry was recently asked how September the 11th had changed him. He replied, 'It didn't change me much at all.' And this unchanged worldview becomes obvious when he calls the war against terror primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation, rather than what I believe: a war which requires the full use of American power to keep us secure."

By taking seven of Kerry's words out of a much longer statement, Bush twisted his opponent's position beyond recognition. Here is journalist Matt Bai's account, in the New York Times Magazine article Bush was citing, of what Kerry actually said when he was asked how Sept. 11 had changed him:

"I mean, it didn't change me much at all. It just sort of accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing. I mean, to me, it wasn't as transformational as it was a kind of anger, a frustration and an urgency that we weren't doing the kinds of things necessary to prevent it and to deal with it." Bai added: "Kerry did allow that he, like other Americans, felt less safe after 9/11." Not exactly the guy Bush described.

But if Bush will say whatever it takes about terrorism to win reelection, what will he do with his victory? Bush often says that he wants to allow individuals to invest part of their Social Security tax payments in personal accounts. What he doesn't say is how he will cover the transitional costs of at least $1 trillion over a decade. He would guarantee current recipients and those near retirement what they are due under the present system, but he won't say how much he would cut the existing guaranteed benefit for future recipients. All privatization plans that claim to reduce the long-term costs of Social Security, as Bush says his would, are based on cuts in future government benefits.

Bush skimps on the details because he knows the details are the unpopular part of his idea. Those who say Bush will have to propose benefit cuts are accused of "scaring" people. But voters should be scared when politicians talk about the benefits of their grand schemes and don't level with them on the costs.

The same is true of Bush's promise of "fundamental tax reform." All the evidence -- from bills introduced in Congress and from ideas floated by the administration -- suggests that Republicans want to shift the tax burden away from investment and savings and toward wages and consumption. That's a recipe for putting even more of the total tax burden on lower- and middle-income people and less of it on the wealthy. In August, Bush even described a national sales tax as "the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." The White House quickly backtracked, and no one has done much since to pin Bush down.

Some conservative legislators have put forward detailed proposals for a national sales tax and Social Security privatization. I think these ideas are a mistake, but I admire the willingness of these politicians to open their plans to public scrutiny. Bush, on the other hand, hides the details. He wants to get himself reelected by talking about terrorism -- and he will inform the electorate only after Nov. 2 that they voted for a lot of other things that they never heard much about.

He did the same thing after his 2000 selection. I seem to recall that he promised no nation-building, among a bunch of other things. Compassionate conservatism turns out to be rapacious corporatism. But I hear he does give out hugs.

Can It!

I'm totally with Tom Beaudoin (via Holy Weblog! (Hi, MJ!):

Talk That Diminishes Faith

By Tom Beaudoin
Friday, October 22, 2004; Page A25

This may sound impolitic and even un-Christian, particularly coming from a Christian theologian, but I don't want to hear any more from the presidential candidates about their personal faith.

The candidates aren't going to heed me, of course. During the debates, President Bush proclaimed the importance of his Christian faith, saying, "Prayer and religion sustain me. I receive calmness in the storms of the presidency," and he even stated his belief that "God wants everybody to be free." John Kerry, in general more guarded about his Catholic beliefs but becoming more outspoken recently on matters of religion, pointed to his altar-boy past and recounted the "two greatest commandments" he's learned: "Love the Lord, your God, with all your mind, your body and your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself."

Now, I'm no Scrooge or atheist. The reasons I want Bush and Kerry to keep quiet about their faith are religious in nature. Why? It comes down to this: Today a public confession of faith by a presidential candidate is so deeply enmeshed in the calculating politics of manipulation that it simply should not be believed. Anyone who thinks a modern major-party candidate can talk about faith in a way that is not seen as angling for some political advantage, some movement in the polls, is asking the impossible.

Americans have been subjected to an outpouring of media investigation into both Bush's and Kerry's faith. We've learned that Bush moves in Episcopal, Presbyterian and Methodist circles; he feels close to Jesus and he prays; he is unafraid to talk in ultimate moral terms of good and evil; and the military struggles he is conducting have the bearing of providence for him. Kerry sometimes attends the Paulist Center in Boston, has a distant Jewish background, has a stance on abortion that might disqualify him from receiving Communion from some bishops and, notably, has not talked as easily as the president about his relationship with God.

It's so common on what is called the religious right to view Bush's statements as authentic insights into his heart that it would seem the Republicans are the sole party of faith-based campaigning. But there have also been calls for more political faith-talk from religious people who don't share the views of the right. Jim Wallis, for example, editor of Sojourners magazine and a tireless leader in progressive Christian activism, has passionately pleaded for the secular left not to prematurely pluck discussion of faith from the vocabulary of Democ