A good thing(tm)

New York Daily News - Analysis: See tape as boost for Prez:

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

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

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

Be very afraid... of the creeps in the GOP who seem to think that bin Laden being alive and threatening the U.S. is "a good thing(tm)".

Tora Bora: What Really Happened?

Peter Bergen, noted al Qaeda expert writes Tora Bora: What Really Happened?:

"Apologists for the US military failure at Tora Bora will no doubt provide several compelling reasons why this was the case, including a lack of airlift capabilities from the US base in neighboring Uzbekistan. However, such explanations are hard to square with the fact that scores of journalists managed to find their way to Tora Bora, a battle covered on live television by the world's leading news organizations. If Fox and CNN could arrange for their crews to cover Tora Bora it is puzzling that the US military could not put more boots on the ground to find the man who was the intellectual author of the 9/11 attacks. Sadly, there were probably more American journalists at the battle of Tora Bora than there were US troops. And in that sense, Sen. Kerry's charge that Tora Bora was a missed opportunity to bring bin Laden to justice isn't 'garbage', but an accurate reflection of the historical record."

OBL's video this afternoon should be a reminder that Bush completely failed in his promise to find him "dead or alive". Why anyone could possibly think that the asshole in chief is strong on terrorism is beyond me. He has done everything in his power to try to thwart the retribution for the 9/11 attacks.

- Initially opposed the 9/11 commission
- Bowed to pressure from the 9/11 families and "supported" the 9/11 commission
- underfunded the 9/11 commission
- missed opportunity at Tora Bora
- diverted resources from Afghanistan to Iraq
- allowed Afghanistan to drift back to Taliban control in most areas outside Kabul
- underfunded homeland security
- delayed publication of CIA IG report on administration response on 9/11

Repeat after me... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra... Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terra...

George W. Bush is a miserable failure. He has exploited a national tragedy to his own political gain and done nothing to improve the security of the nation. The fact that we have not been attacked since 9/11 is mere coincidence. al Qaeda takes years to plan for an attack. If OBL is to believed, he conceived of the 9/11 attack in 1982. That was twenty friggin years before the attck was carried out.

Think about it.

Missing the point

This WaPo article entitled: Munitions Issue Dwarfs the Big Picture (washingtonpost.com) misses the point on a number of grounds.

"There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."

Sure, the 377 tons of HMX and RDX is a drop in the bucket when compared to the vast quantities of munitions in Iraq, but that is besides the point. The point of this story is not the explosives themselves. Rather, it is the fact that we went into this war unprepared, ill-equiped and undermanned to fulfill the mission. Our senior military staff were ignored by the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. When Gen Shinseki insisted that to do the job right, would require 3-500,000 troops, he was effectively put out to pasture. This was all about Sec Def Rumsfeld proving his untested theories about doing more with less.

Kerry has seized on the incident to press his charge that Bush mishandled the invasion of Iraq, failing, among other things, to secure sites containing dangerous Iraqi munitions, some of which were stored in bunkers marked with International Atomic Energy Agency seals to designate particular international concern.

Bush administration officials have refused to accept a statement issued earlier this month by a senior official of Iraq's interim government that the munitions disappeared after the April 9, 2003, fall of Baghdad "due to a lack of security." Iraqi authorities have not offered any supporting evidence, and Bush administration officials have suggested the explosives may have been removed earlier by Iraqi forces.

Exactly. Bush refuses to accept reality. He is surrounded by synchophants who do nothing but echo his wet dreams that things are going according to plan in Iraq. He is an irresponsible buffoon masquerading as commander in cheif.

"The issue has been out there for a long time," said James Bodner, who helped formulate Iraq policy in the Clinton-era Pentagon. "Are we properly manned to carry out the specific military tasks that need to be accomplished? If the answer is, 'Yes, we have enough troops,' then why are these facilities unguarded?"

Exactly. Yet, Bush continues to insist that "if the commanders on the ground ask for more troops, they'll get them". From where is a mystery to any thinking person. Do you feel a draft? The facts are that any requests for more resources from the commanders on the ground are shot down before they get to the Pentagon, likely because there are unwritten orders to that effect that trickle down from on high.

Whatever the case, the military significance of the loss, in a country awash with far larger amounts of munitions, is open to question.

Really? How absurd. Had we NOT gone into Iraq on a pre-emptive strike against an enemy who posed no immediate threat, and has been proven to be nothing more than a toothless tiger ever since the Gulf War in 1991, then these munitions would not be in the hands of terrorists and/or insurgents. They would still be in their bunkers. The IAEA had them under seal, along with the other dual-use materiel that has also been looted because it went unguarded by coalition troops.

Matthew Bunn, a Harvard University expert in nuclear weapons and terrorism, said that although he is concerned by the removal of the explosives, he is far more worried by IAEA reports that large quantities of sophisticated equipment, such as electron beam welders, were looted and removed from Iraq's nuclear weapons program. "That material, which would be quite useful to a nuclear weapons program, was also well known to the United States, was not guarded and today is probably in hostile hands," with Iran being a likely recipient, said Bunn, who noted that he has been advising the Kerry campaign but does not speak for it.

So, we went into Iraq on the premise that Saddam would give the material and know-how for WMD to terrorists or terrorist-sponsoring nations (yeah, like he just might have helped Iran with nukes!) and in the process, fulfilled that worry because we didn't adequately secure the weapons and munitions that were there. Explain to me how that is a good thing!

Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokeswoman, said yesterday that the IAEA warned the United States in April 2003 of concerns about security at Qaqaa. Other U.N. officials said repeated efforts were made for more than a year to get answers from the U.S. government about the explosives and other weapons-related materials that had been under U.N. seal before the war.

A fresh request to the Iraqi government generated the Oct. 10 reply that the explosives were no longer at Qaqaa.

There you have it. The Bush administration engaged in a cover-up. They screwed up and refused to let that little secret out of the bag. They refuse to accept responsibility for their screw-ups. The US had a responsibility to inform the UN about the dual-use material and the adminitrsation used every trick in the book to keep this story from getting out into the public domain.

Feel safer now?

Ouch!

via AmericaBlog: Times Online - Opinion - Reject this failed statesman

The primary function of democracy is not to elect good leaders, since nobody can predict in advance how a politician will perform. It is to eject leaders who have manifestly failed. The ability to remove leaders who turn out to be corrupt, dangerous, outrageously dishonest or manifestly incompetent is the primary privilege and duty of any democracy. And if any leader in our lifetime deserved to be ejected by voters, regardless of their ideology or political persuasion, it is surely President Bush.

...

Four years later, he presides over a struggling economy, the steepest four-year loss of jobs since the Great Depression, and now has the biggest budget deficits and trade imbalances on record. Far worse, he started an unnecessary war on false pretences and mismanaged it so disastrously that the instability of the Middle East is probably now a greater danger to world peace than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. The President has failed in his primary military mission of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda.

...

To make matters worse, Mr Bush has failed in all these tasks, while breaking every promise he made about his character and leadership style. Instead of running a bipartisan government of national unity, he has been the most ideological, divisive and extremist leader America has ever seen. Instead of showing humility in his international dealings, his punitive and aggressive foreign policies — not only against Iraq but also against North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and even Germany and France — have transformed America into the most hated country on earth. Instead of respecting the primacy of the US Constitution, he has imprisoned thousands of people without trial or charge — many no doubt dangerous terrorists, but some presumably just ordinary people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If Americans cannot bring themselves to vote against the President after this record, we must ask whether American democracy is capable of performing its primary function. Can voters no longer remove a failed leader from power? The answer is even more troubling than the question: American voters are very reluctant to turn against their president at a time of war. This is a truly terrifying idea. It implies that a president can virtually guarantee his re-election by keeping his nation in a permanent state of war.

I recommend you read the whole article.

Dept. of Planning and Following Up

From an editorial in this mornings NYT discussing the state of affairs in Iraq comes this quote:

"The disastrous theft was revealed in a recent letter to an international agency in Vienna. It was signed by the general director of Iraq's Planning and Following Up Directorate. It's too bad the Bush administration doesn't have one of those."

Sha-wing!

Cheney: 'On the big issues, I think we got it right'

Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cheney R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!!

I...can't...take...much....more... must...get...a...grip...on...reality...

Cheney: 'On the big issues, I think we got it right'

Yeah, raaaahhhhhiiiiiight.

Aug 6, 2001 PDB ignored
9/11
"My Pet Goat"
Camping out in an undisclosed underground bunker for weeks if not months
Patriot Act
Thousands of muslims detained without being charged for indefinite periods
Zero convictions
Lie about WMD
Scare country with imagry of mushroom clouds
Losing bin Laden in Tora Bora
Abandon Afghanistan
Ignore warnings of military and civilian experts of insurgency
Ignore State Department post-war planning in favor of no planning at all ("we'll be greeted as liberators", "we won't have casualties")
Ignore General Shinseki's warning that occupation would require ~300,000 troops
Unfettered looting in the immediate aftermath of the invasion
Insufficient troops to secure the borders
Mission accomplished
Uprisings in Fallouja, Najaf, Sadr City, ...
Weekly beheadings
Daily suicide bombings and IED attacks on transports
Green Zone mortar attacks
1106 coalition forces killed, 90% US
$200 billion USD wasted in search of non-existant WMD
$340,000/month to Chalabi and his gang of Iranian spies
Inability to get the oil flowing
A Q Khan nuclear proliferation network
Halliburton overbills for no-bid contracts worth billions (that weren't at all influenced by the fact that Cheney was former CEO and has oodles of stock options)
$55.67/bbl oil and rising
Afghan opium production surges by 400%
Taliban back in control of much of Afghanistan despite successful elections
Abu Ghraib
Possible war crimes sanctioned by DoJ "prisoner transfer" and "torture" memos
377 tons of HMX and RDX looted at Al Qa Qaa
A "handful of troublemakers" becomes 12,000 insurgents (by the latest DoD reconning)
Flushed decades of diplomatic goodwill down the toilet in less than a year
500 billion dollar surplus becomes a 2.3 trillion dollar deficit (4.5 trillion if the tax cuts are made permanent)
While we're at it, might as well burn the Geneva Conventions... they're worthless at this point.
Did I mention 1,106 coalition forces killed?

Yeah, I'd say that's about right.

Burn in hell, asshole!

The Choice

The New Yorker: The Choice Read it. 'nuf said.

[Update: Apparently, The New Yorker hasn't endorsed a candidate for president in all of its 80 years in publication... until now.]

We'll be greeted as liberators

USATODAY.com - Prewar intelligence predicted Iraqi insurgency

As the insurgency has intensified, so has the scrutiny of the White House over warnings it received before the war that predicted the instability. An examination of prewar intelligence on the possibility of postwar violence and of the administration's response shows:

• Military and civilian intelligence agencies repeatedly warned prior to the invasion that Iraqi insurgent forces were preparing to fight and that their ranks would grow as other Iraqis came to resent the U.S. occupation and organize guerrilla attacks.

• The war plan put together by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks discounted these warnings. Rumsfeld and Franks anticipated surrender by Iraqi ground forces and a warm welcome from civilians.

• The insurgency began not after the end of major combat in May 2003 but at the beginning of the war, yet Pentagon officials were slow to identify the enemy and to grasp how serious a threat the guerrilla attacks posed.

emphasis mine.

The Bush administration is the worst, ever. Period. They have broken every world record for incompetence, irresponsibility, malfeasance, prevarication, sliminess, and arrogance.

What the f*** were they thinking?!?! Oh, right, I must be living in that reality-based world. We're an empire now, we make our own reality... NOT!

Maybe I've just been having a bad dream. Someone pinch me. This can't be real... people can't honestly be serious about voting for these idiots?! Four more years of this shit?

Let's see who we can blame for this...

Josh Marshall rants on the whitehouse's response to the missing HMX from Iraq.

Look at the latest from Scott McClellan on Air Force One. This from CNN ...

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush wants to determine what went wrong.

McClellan, on Air Force One, stressed that the missing explosives were not nuclear materials, and said the storage site was the responsibility of the interim Iraqi government, not the United States, as of June 28, when the United States turned over the nation's administration to the Iraqis.

The president wants to determine what went wrong.

As Josh so correctly points out, this happened well over a year ago and Paul Bremer was notified as far back as May 2004. Of course, Bremer is hiding, or being hidden, from the press.

What really pisses me off is how inane the press is... they have been asleep at the switch for so long it isn't funny, and the country is going to hell in a handbasket as a result because half the population is dumber than dirt. I wonder if Bush supporters would know enough to stop looking up in a rain-storm, or if they would drown like a bunch of turkeys. Probably the latter.

But based on past inanity of what passes for news, maybe the Dems should decry Bush's blaming the Iraqis for something that wasn't their responsibility. "You forgot Poland!" or maybe "How can one be commander in chief when you blame your coalition partners for things that weren't their responsibility"

How anyone can think that this incompentent and irresponsible dipshit deserves another four years is beyond me!

If Bush really wants to know what went wrong, here's a clue: I think it started with the Supreme Court in December 2000 when the picked the wrong man for the job. Maybe it was picking Donald Rumsfeld for SecDef. Maybe it was not listening to his generals when they told him they needed more troops. Maybe it was in allowing the Pentagon to over-rule the post-war plans developed by the State Department experts on post-war restoration. Maybe it was in taking the word of his vice-president, that there would be no casualties, that we would be greeted as liberators. Maybe all of the above. Maybe, just maybe, it's his friggin' responsibility!

I don't think that this country can survive four more years of this incompetent dirtbag.

Kerry applies the full-court press

Kerry Chides Bush on Missing Explosives

Kerry has started to pound the Bush administration for its "catastrophic success" in Iraq. You go girl.

He needs to keep this issue in front of the electorate every day for the next 8 days. Unrelentingly. He needs to pound the points that a) this failure is a direct result of the lack of planning for the post-war phase and b) that this failure has resulted in the deaths of our troops in harms way and c) that it is yet another failure that the Bush administration wanted to keep secret from the American public and the world (can you say cover-up?). This issue is not something that can be papered over with excuses that it is Clinton's fault, or that it was unanticipated. This happened on his watch. This happened because he failed to heed the advice of his top generals in the Pentagon (Shinseki). This happened because the Bush administration had the wrong priorities.

Kerry needs to tie this failure back to the Bush/Cheney campaign theme that the war in Iraq was necessary to keep Saddam's weapons out of terrorist hands and that Bush would keep us safer. Bushco has done neither. Bush has done more to arm and energize the terrorists than Saddam could possibly have achieved had we simply kept him contained and left the IAEA to guard over his dual-use material. The Bush administration and the Pentagon civilian leadership have basically given the material to the terrorists on a silver platter through their incompetence.

Sigh

Senators McCain and Biden Question U.S. Treatment of Iraqi Prisoners. The jist of this story is that the Justice Dept, headed by that paragon of jurisprudence himself, John Ashcroft, wrote a memo back in March that authorized the transfer of detainees out of Iraq by the CIA, a practice which could possibly be considered a serious violation of the Geneva Convention and which could be treated as war crimes.

McCain nails it:

"These conventions and these rules are in place for a reason, because you get on a slippery slope and you don't know where to get off," McCain, who was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, said.

"The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights."

Clearly, by "us" he is not referring to the present administration, but to the American people as a whole. This administration has clearly taken a head-first dive down that slippery slope. I wouldn't expect many nations to come rallying to our defense should the Bush administration win another term in office. Bush has squandered nearly all of our alliances and goodwill within the international community with his "you're either with us, or against us" attitude. Well, rightly or wrongly, most are now against us (well, his administration anyway) because of his arrogant foriegn policy decisions.

War crimes... As if things weren't already FUBAR, now we have this.

The next 9 days can't go by quickly enough for me.

Go Pats!

New England's Winning Streak Reaches 21.

Once again, a real nail-biter, but the Pats closed the deal with their defense shutting down a late Jets drive with just over 2 minutes to go. The Patriots now lead the AFC with a 6-0 record. Only New England and Philadelphia remain undefeated. Could this be the next Superbowl match-up?

Feel safer yet?

Josh Marshall has the scoop on a story that will not play well for the administration's handling of Iraq.

Some 350 tons of high explosives (RDX and HDX), which were under IAEA seal while Saddam was in power, were looted during the early days of the US occupation. Like so much else, it was just left unguarded.

Not only are these super-high-yield explosives probably being used in many, if not most, of the various suicide and car bombings in Iraq, but these particular explosives are ones used in the triggering process for nuclear weapons.

I think that this fits the classic definition of what is known as a cluster-f*** in military parlance. We didn't have enough troops on the ground to secure Iraq. General Shinseki was right. Rumsfeld should be drawn and quartered for his arrogance and utter incompetence as Secretary of Defense.

As with most cases like this, the cover-up is what is going to become the real story here. Yet another in a series of things that the Bush administration tried desperately to conceal until after the election.

Feel safer yet?

Mr. President, you're fired

Well, I've done my part in support of democracy and cast my absentee ballot (I'll be in Miami on election day).

As The Donald would say "Mr. President, you're fired".

Feels good to get that off my chest. :-)

Ouch! That's gotta hurt the GOP GOTV in MI

The Detroit News, a bastion of Republican press in Michigan has endorsed For President: None of the Above - 10/24/04. They basically refuse to stoop so low as to endorse a Democrat (they have never done so previously), but have given Bushco a scathingly negative report card, ending with:

The president's record does not recommend him for re-election.

Their treatment of Kerry is a pretty tame non-endorsement, basically pointing out that he is no friend of the Auto Industry because he favors higher CAFE standards (how is this anti-Auto Industry is beyond me, it just means that they need to work harder to reduce our dependence on the increasingly scarce commodity: Oil!). They also make a point of calling out the BC04 estimates on the KE04 campaign promises ($2B in new spending, a figure widely disputed, but also one which Kerry himself said would be scaled back to ensure fiscal responsibility). Basically, they just couldn't bring themselves to endorse a Democrat, but have in the process left the door wide open for people to draw their own conclusions.

They tore Bush a new one, and made a strong case for voters to deny him a second term. This non-endorsement from a GOP stronghold press organ does a good job of undermining the Rove strategy for winning the election; energize the Republican base to ensure that they come out in full force and tear down the opponent such that the Democrats are unmotivated to show up on Nov 2nd.

The Democrats are as motivated as one could possibly hope for. Whether it is because they simply hate the Preznit and his orcish administration with a "vociferousness" that knows no bounds, or because they feel good about their candidate makes little difference.

Kerry has garnered 17 editorial endorsements from papers that endorsed Bush in 2000 and a total of 70 with a circulation in excess of 11 million. Bush has only 58 and only one steal from a Gore supporter in 2000. That speaks volumes.

[Update: Today's tally has Kerry stealing 31 endorsements that had gone to Bush in 2000. Kerry endorsements: 118 with circulation of about 14.9 million. Bush endorsements: 69 with circulation of about 8.9 million. Full details of the endorsements tally can be found here. Other notables: Kerry picked up the Orlando Sentinel, which had backed Bush in 2000, completing a sweep of major papers in Florida. Three papers in Illinois, including the Chicago Sun Times, which had previously endorsed Bush in 2000. My local paper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which had endorsed Bush in 2000 (maybe my letter to the editor helped!). Four in Washington, including the Seattle Times, that had supported Bush in 2000. Finally, Kerry received the endorsement of the Billings Gazette in Montana of all places, while Bush got bupkiss. I mean really, how many states are as red as Montana!]

Do newspaper endorsements make a difference? Probably not as much as they once did when the newspaper was the principle source of news and opinion, but I believe that it does still provide people with food for thought. It probably won't change any Bush supporters into Kerry supporters, but a non-endorsement such as this does not give a Bush supporter motivation to get out and vote and will certainly give those remaining undecideds leaning towards Kerry plenty of ammo to close the deal and vote for Kerry.

The boy who cried wolf

Reuters reports that "U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Saturday they have found no direct evidence of plans for a terror attack tied to the upcoming U.S. election.". This, after the recent scare that terrorists would attack our schools and every alert before that. These alerts are nothing more than a gimmic to boost the Preznit's standing in the polls. Seems fitting that they would choose a pack of wolves as their "scary" and completely misleading campaign attack ad.

The administration has cried wolf too many times now. At this point, no one is likely to take a real threat warning seriously.

Who ya going to believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?

Josh Marshall sums up Bushco's latest series of outright lies in this years presidential campaign: the contention by Bush and Cheney that Kerry's claim, that the administration's folly in Iraq proved a distraction on the war against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, is "absolute garbage". He provides compelling arguments and cites contemporary reporting by the WaPo that, in fact, we did have OBL cornered in Tora Bora, that we "outsourced" the job of ferreting him out to the Afghan warlords who had other alleigances and probably did more to help OBL escape than they did to capture or kill him.

Gen. Tommy Franks writes in his recent NYT op-ed piece that Kerry's "understanding of events doesn't square with reality". Gen. Franks is a zellout. A shill for a pack of liars. I wonder what Rove managed to dig up on Gen Franks to get him to write a NYT op-ed piece that is, for lack of a better term, full of shit.

First, take Mr. Kerry's contention that we "had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden" and that "we had him surrounded." We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.

Josh points out, while there was some debate in the intellegence community as to OBL's whereabouts at the time, it became increasingly clear after-the-fact that he had in fact been in Tora Bora at the time. What's more important though is that Gen Franks doesn't cite specific intellegence to state categorically that OBL was not there, yet he finishes the point by stating as fact that "Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp". (and what is with the Mr.?)

Second, we did not "outsource" military action. We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora, a mountainous, geographically difficult region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is where Afghan mujahedeen holed up for years, keeping alive their resistance to the Soviet Union. Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels.

Here I simply have to laugh at the sheer cognative dissonance of the statement. He says "we did not "outsource" military action" and in the very next sentence, says the opposite "We did rely heavily on Afghans ...". Huh. He goes on to refute his own statement with "Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels.". (scratches head) Isn't that the very definition of "outsourcing"?

Third, the Afghans weren't left to do the job alone. Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes. Pakistani troops also provided significant help - as many as 100,000 sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

So, we didn't "outsource" to the Afghans because we had a few special forces troops, left behind from the redeployment of the bulk of their number to Iraq, providing "tactical leadership and calling in air strikes". Oh, and for good measure, he mentions the fact that we had our friendly neighborhood Pakistani troops who "sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters". Still sounds like outsourcing to me. Maybe Kerry is guilty of not mentioning the Pakistani troops, but his point is still valid. The job of finding, capturing or killing OBL was left to surrogates while the administration pursued its folly in Iraq.

The WaPo also has a compelling, but long, piece entitled: "Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide" which I would heartily recommend reading in full.

The fact is that there's a good reason that 72% of Bush supporters believe that Iraq had WMD and 20% still believe that Saddam was behind 9/11. It has nothing to do with reality. It has everything to do with the fact that Bush and Cheney are running around the country spewing lies and distrortions of the truth, and that these distortions and lies are being echoed ad nauseum by the Humes, Limbaughs, Coulters and Hannitys of the right-wingnut talk radio spectrum and GOPTV (Fox News and most recently MSNBC). Worse, the lies and distortions are not being properly challenged by the traditional press.

Not only could we use a new administration, but we would be well served if the press would grow a set of balls and do its job for a change. The press should be asking itself: why is it that there are so many misinformed Americans?

No Iraq Draft

Sign the No Iraq Draft petition and turn the country red!

Nothing to see here, move along...

The LA Times reports that The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket. Basically, the administration as applied a full court press on the CIA Inspector General to delay release of its report on 9/11... It is said that the report names names.

"the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

The same people who are running on "their record" of "fighting terrorism" are in fact a bunch of irresponsible dirtbags who are "gaming the system" to improve their chances for re-election by withholding information that the American public has every right to know in order to make an informed decision.

The third rail

This article by James K Galbraith on Salon.com | Schieffer was wrong, Kerry was right is a must read.

It always amazes me that polititions and press pundits alike who should, and in many cases do, know better use Social Security to scare people. Galbraith sets out the facts and chastises "Mrs. Greenspan" in the process (if anyone should know better, it is she!)

I can remember the panels following the debate all a twitter about the fact that Kerry said that we could leave Social Security alone. Yet, the pundits like "Mrs. Greenspan" on MSNBC had no problem fawning over the Bush privatization plan that no one outside the whitehouse has seen! In fact, it is highly likely that no one on earth has seen this plan since it may not even have been thought through beyond some very high-level ideas.

Here's what Kerry said recently:

Senator John Kerry released the following statement today in response to reports that the president said he will “come out strong” for social security privatization should he be sworn in for a second term:

“Just yesterday, we found out that the president told his biggest and wealthiest donors about his big ‘January surprise.’ He’s going to ‘come out strong’ to fight for his plan to privatize Social Security. This might be a good surprise for the wealthy and well-connected, but it’s a disaster for America’s middle class. The president’s privatization plan for Social Security is another way of saying to our seniors that the promise of security will be broken.

“Once again, George Bush is out of touch. He just doesn’t get it. According to the bi-partisan Congressional Budget Office, his risky plan will force benefit cuts for seniors of up to 45 percent – that’s up to $500 a month less for food, clothing, and the occasional gift for a grandchild.

“Even the president’s own economic advisors say his plan will blow a $2 trillion hole in Social Security. And guess who will pay for it? You will. America's seniors are already facing higher prescription drug costs, record high Medicare premiums, and higher gas costs. With family budgets being stretched to the limit, the last thing seniors need is the president's ‘January surprise.’ That's a surprise we can all live without.

“When I am president, I won’t cut Social Security benefits, and I won’t raise the retirement age. I will restore fiscal responsibility so we can reduce the deficit and strengthen Social Security.”

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

None of the pundits will have to worry about Social Security benefits for them, their parents or their children because they are all F***ing millionaires. None of these pucilanimous twits will need their Social Security benefits to get by in their retirement. So what if Bush intends to gut Social Security by pursuing his "ownership society" (which is just a nicer way of saying: "f*** you, America. You're on your own. If you make the wrong decisions in investing your retirement monies, tough nuggies. If you get screwed by some corporate malfeasance such as happened to the Enron employees and investors, that's too friggin' bad. Better luck next time, bub.").

Privatizing Social Security is the rightwing nutjob response to address the lack of (GOP controlled) congressional and executive responsibility. If they could go cold-turkey on pork and pandering to corporate lobbyists and operate the government within its means, then none of these hairbrained schemes such as the "plans" offered by the Bush administration would be necessary.

Sure, it is quite true that after 2018, the FICA receipts will not equal the payments to beneficiaries, but that could be addressed in any number of ways. It shouldn't be necessary to raise the retirement age as Greenspan constantly suggests. How about raising the limit on contributions? For that matter, if they were really serious about the issues, then instead of spending the surplus on pork, they could pay down the national debt which over the long term is actually an investment.

Personally, I don't think that this is a case of "George Bush being out of touch". In fact, I think that Kerry should have expressed it as "George Bush doesn't have the best interests of the majority of Americans, the middle class, at the top of his agenda."

It scares me to think what a disaster a second Bush term would be for the nation and the world. King George would think that a win, even if stolen as last time, was a mandate for his misguided and dangerously inept policies, both domestic and foriegn.

They Live (1988)

I feel like Rowdy Roddy Piper's character in They Live (1988).

The polls still have the presidential race in a statistical dead heat. Half the population has been distributed the special sunglasses that let you see that the Bush administration is really a bunch of aliens (well, maybe not aliens but certainly a bunch of lying, deceitful, inept, irresponsible, over-zealous, and corrupt shitheads) bent on destroying the earth, and the other half is still brianwashed by a network of mind-control beams into believing that everything is normal.

I want to find the central computer that controls the mind-control beam and turn it off so that everyone can see the Bush administration for what it really is, rather than the alternative reality that the BC04 campaign would have you believe.

Bush says Kerry has raised taxes 98 times, in his 20 years as a Senator, on a daily basis. Yet by the same measure, Cheney voted to raise taxes 144 times during his career as a congresscritter from Wyoming and Bush will surpass Kerry's rate handily when he approves the Corporate Tax bill as it contains no less than 63 tax increasing measures.

Bush has yet to veto a spending bill, even those he doesn't like. The budget deficit is at an all-time high, to the point that conservative pundit David Broder is starting to sound shrill. Bush ran a >$200B per year surplus into a $430B per year deficit in four short years.

Who's the friggin' tax and spend "liberal"? Bush would have you believe it is Kerry... as in the Suskind article, they are creating their own reality by distorting the truth.

Bush would have you believe, by repeating his "Kerry voted for the $87B before he voted against it" claim ad nauseum (without the press constantly reminding voters that the bill did pass despite Kerry's vote of conscience against the Bush administrations fiscally irresponsible version of the bill), that Kerry is responsible for the inadequately prepared and equipped troops in Iraq. Yet, it is the Bush administration and Rumsfeld's inept mismanagement of the Pentagon that has left many of the troops (especially the Guard and Reserve units) in Iraq having to buy their body-armor on eBay because the funding provided by the $87B appropriation has either not been spent, or has in many cases been instead lining the pockets of Halliburton (charged with over-charging for its services).

There's a reason that 17 (or 19, depending on which accounts you read) troops refused a direct, and possibly illegal order. They don't have the resources to do the job they've been sent to do. Nor for that matter are they even clear on what the mission is. Yet, the BC04 campaign would have Americans believe that this is all Senator Kerry's fault for voting against the $87B. Complete and utter BULLSHIT. Yet, the Bush administration, taking a page out of the Nazi and Soviet handbooks knows that if you repeat a lie often enough, (especially when the media let's it pass without comment) eventually people believe it is the truth.

This, and the GOP-controlled media outlets, like FOX and Sinclaire, is the Bushco administration's version of the "They Live" mind-control beam. A never-ending stream of lies and deceit spewing forth from the President and Vice-President in their campaign speeches.

We need to get the special sunglasses to the voters before Nov 2nd.

File this under 'D' for Duh!

Knight Ridder Report Reveals Poor Planning for Occupation of Iraq:

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

'We've finally got our act together, but we're all afraid it may be too late,' commented one senior official still engaged daily in Iraq policy.

The Bush administration's failure to plan to win the peace was the product of many of the same problems that plagued the administration's case for war, the KR report continues, 'including wishful thinking, bad information from Iraqi exiles who said Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators and contempt for dissenting opinions. "

Couple this with my previous post reference to the Faith-based presidency article by Ron Suskind.

NYT rips Dubya a new one

The NYT endorses Kerry and in the process, provides a scathing review of the Bushco presidency.

Not that it will sway any swing voters in states other than say New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but a strong endorsement none-the-less.

Currently, Bush and Kerry are tied in terms of the number of newspaper endorsements, but Kerry has roughly a 3-1 lead in terms of total circulation. The NYT addition breaks the 13-13 tie, but we can expect many more to come over the next few days.

The Times also published this piece by Ron Suskind in this weekend's Times Magazine. Talk about scary, this will really raise the hair on your neck. Here's a taste:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Talk about being out of touch with reality, the shrubberies have gone off the deep end. I haven't read anything this scary since I last read Stephen King.

17 days and counting...

Say what?

KRT Wire Bush today on the stump:

"'I made it very plain. We will not have an all-volunteer army.' The crowd fell silent. "

Another Bushism? A deeper truth?

The fact is that you can't go around lying to people and then expect them to believe you when you say there are no plans to resurrect the draft.

Whoa!

Jon Stewart on Crossfire Watch it. or read the transcript.

Jon Stewart should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for standing tall and exposing the fraud that is cable TV news and talking head pundit panels like Crossfire, on the very show that he derides on nearly a nightly basis on Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

He closed the show by calling Tucker Carlson a "dick".

Jon Stewart is my hero!

Couldn't have said it better myself

The Washington Monthly -- THE FOREIGN POLICY CHOICE:

"Bush has simply made too many mistakes, and he's made them because of a deeply ingrained tunnel vision combined with a disastrously poor decision-making process. Neither of these things is going to change, and at some point you have to face up to the fact that this means he's almost certain to continue making disastrous decisions throughout a second term.

Kerry will certainly make mistakes, and he will likely learn the limits of diplomacy as well, but the alternative is far worse. Bush, after all, neither admits nor learns from his mistakes. Kerry does."

File this one under WTF!?

U.S. Orders Freeze on Zarqawi Network Assets

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Friday ordered a freeze on assets of the militant group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq.

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control added Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group to its list of suspected terrorists and terrorism financiers.

"Of course" Bush is serious about fighting terrorism... NOT! (see the article for details on Bush and "of course") I mean really! It took until today to put a freeze on the assets of the guy who is beheading people left and right and launching attacks on our troops and our citizens in the "green zone" and elsewhere for months!? We have known who he was, that he was performing and inciting terrorist acts throughout Iraq and they are only now freezing his bank accounts and assets!?

WTF took so long?

Hello!!! Anyone home? Yoo hoo... Mr "Strong on Terrorism"... anyone there?

Add to that the news this week that the U.S. "lost" the nuclear reactor materials in Iraq that were being protected by the U.N. because we neglected to secure them...

Feeling safer yet?

This is by far the most incompetent administration ever, period. They should be given the Olympic gold medal for incompetence and ineptitude.

Ashcroft is oh-for in prosecuting suspected terrorists. The detainees in Gitmo are likely to be let free without being charged because... well, most of them simply weren't terrorists, they were mostly kids with AK-47's fighting for the Taliban because they were told to do so. They have certainly yielded no useful anti-terrorism information thus far despite the fact that they have been abused to no end.

Rumsfeld has caused the situation in Iraq to go FUBAR because he refused (and still refuses) to send more troops despite the fact that the commanders on the ground have been asking repeatedly for more and despite the fact that Shinseki and other senior military personnel told him that it would take 2-300k troops to secure the peace. He has also been responsible for the Abu Ghraib (and other) abuses.

Condi has misread all of the intellegence she's been given and has not done her job.

Powell has caved to the neo-cons. He's been mostly ineffective and IMO a sell out.

The FBI can't read the intellegence it gets in Arabic because it keeps firing translators who either blow the whistle that there aren't enough or because they are gay.

The economy and the environment are both going down the tiolet.

The U.S. government needs adult supervision. Right now, the insane and the incompetent are running the asylum.

I can't wait to give Bushco the finger on Nov 2nd, despite the fact that my vote will be as a mote in a dust-storm being as I am registered in Massachusetts.

Tussle in Tulsa

This would have been a much better debate to watch.

3-0!

It was another clear Kerry win tonight. All of the Instapolls show Kerry winning clearly except ABC which had Kerry by 1% with more republicans (8% more) than democrats. CNN had it Kerry 52-39.

On substance, this was by far the lamest debate as far as the questions go. Sheiffer should be ashamed of himself. I mean, how can you have a debate on domestic issues and not ask a single question on the environment, unless the moderator thinks that it will disadvantage his good golfing buddy, Shrub? The last question took the cake for lameness!

Dubya really blew it when he said he had never said that he was not concerned about Usama bin Laden. This will be the flub that gets repeated ad nauseum (woo hoo!) over the next few days. CNN, NBC and ABC all had clips of the Preznit during a press conference saying he really wasn't concerned about UBL. Ouch! That's gotta hurt! All the king's spin meisters won't be able to put that genie back in the bottle. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

I also found it interesting that Dubya didn't really answer many of the questions. The worst example was the jobs question that he turned into a treatise on No Child Left Behind. WTF?! How is NCLB relevant to jobs for the +800k people who have lost theirs during his administration? Basically, the tone of his response was "if you lost your job, it's because you're stupid". That won't gain him any votes in the rust belt.

Kerry did himself a favor by tweaking his Iraq war cost point, saying that it is $120B so far and will be $200B next year and more before it's over. That addresses one of his fact-check faux pas and at the same time, makes the point that the number he used in the previous debates wasn't really wrong as has been positioned by some pundits.

Overall, Kerry was presidential, Shrub was defensive (and what was with the foaming at the mouth for the first 20 minutes?) Dubya did himself no favors pounding on the podium like Nikita Kruschev early on in the debate. I guess like the previous debate, his meds hadn't fully kicked in.

On a completely unrelated note...

GO YANKS! Woo hoo! 2 games to none over the Boston Red Losers:-)It ain't over til it's over, but 3-0 in the debates (4-0 if you count the VP debate) and 2-0 for the NY Yankees works for me. A good night for the good guys.

Me thinks thou dost protest too much...

The RNC is threatening the Rock the Vote organization over the issue of the draft rumors: rncrockthevote.pdf (application/pdf Object).

They are claiming that Preznit Prevaricat... er King Georg... er the President said that there were no plans for a draft, so they have an obligation to "cease and desist" their campaign.

Let's see, we can't meet our recruitment goals... we are stretched to the limit with our current forces... if something were to happen in say... Iran or... Syria... WTF!

Seig Heil!

Votergate

This story is going to be huge: Nev. Move to Block Some Dem Voters Fails. It goes well beyond this particular act. Check out the other documented acts of voter suppression.

The Republicans are so desperate, they are getting sloppy with their criminal acts of voter suppression.

Think aWol is "strong" on foriegn policy?

Think again. 650 foriegn policy experts say otherwise, in no uncertain terms, in an open letter to the American public. Their condemnation is pretty strong, and this from a group that rarely reaches consensus on anything. Read it.

We judge that the current American policy centered around the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period, one which harms the cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists.

(emphasis mine).

Sarah

If you have iTunes, watch this.

Bill de hOra gets it

Building off of Mark Nottingham's post on POST, Bill de hOra weighs in with his missive: Slab! Interoperation and evolution in web architecture. He says something I've been trying to get across for a long while, only he says it far more eloquently.

The problem with HTTP POST, and what makes it special, is that it is a semantic catchall. What makes POST a uniform speech act is ironically the absence of interesting semantics and lack of specificity. Although it has specifications that are helpful to people when dealing with caches and state management, there's no controlled means of defining what one is actually saying with it, without some further and prior agreement between client and server. The reality is that POST has been overloaded and abused to get systems talking even where such systems would have done better with an alternate verb - and the result is that in many systems the POST speech act is close to meaningless.

Exactly! I have often resorted to the use of the famous quote from Through the Looking Glass to make this point:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

Bill concludes his post with the following:

Where WS-Transfer may prove useful is in breaking down barriers and getting architectural factions to the table by raising awareness that there are issues with both REST and Webservices approaches. The debate between REST/Web and Webservices/Middleware communities has often been acrimonious. Aside from complications resulting from the strategic and commercial agendas imposed by the industry that have resulted in a plethora of competing and inconsistent web services 'standards', the core technical debate has been arcane. It is not always obvious to outsiders and system stakeholders why some kind of agreement can't be forged. While the architects and vendors are busy in argument, customers and practitioners are frequently left with little by the way of clear advice on how to either construct new systems or integrate existing ones. The outcome is that systems are being built, week in, week out, than cross the Web/Middleware boundary without being informed by both approaches and where they are approriate. This implies projects with excess risks and costs, wasted effort, re-learning of best practices or what is already in the state of the art. This is all the more important now that systems that incorporate web and middleware aspects are increasingly the norm (the size of the industry sector affected is significant). Any effort that raises mutual understanding is most welcome.

Amen, brother (emphasis mine).

I have been noodling over WS-Transfer and trying to assess its impact. I am somewhat disappointed that we never did a formal mapping of a SOAP infoset to an HTTP GET in the XML Protocol WG when we were working on addressing the TAG feedback regarding HTTP GET. Instead, SOAP1.2 defines a SOAP Response MEP and a corresponding binding to HTTP GET.

At the time, I was lobbying that we should define a mapping of a particular SOAP infoset to an HTTP GET. The difference being that as with the default HTTP binding for SOAP, there would be a SOAP request and a SOAP response with the request mapped to an HTTP GET and the response SOAP message carried as the entity body of the HTTP response message. In hindsight, I should have lobbied more ardently for a mapping of SOAP onto HTTP.

WS-Transfer provides us with a Web services framework with which this might be accomplished. I would much prefer that WS-Transfer move in this direction than to continue to leverage the default binding of SOAP onto HTTP POST. Of course, this has implications for WS-Addressing as an EPR will need to be mapped to a URI and some means of conveying it's reference properties via HTTP protocol artifacts such as cookies.

Your tax dollars at work

This AP story entitled: Bush Ad Appears to Be News Story should serve as a wake-up call.

The administration is using your (if you live and work here in the U.S.) tax dollars to fund yet more propaganda.

Previously, the administration was denounced for a similar piece, by the same contrator no less, to tout its Medicare reform package. The GAO judged that to be covert propaganda, in violation of federal laws, and the administration drew a rebuke from Congress to boot.

Do they never learn? Apparenty, not.

This time, Education Department is using a faux news report to tell us how wonderful the (underfunded) No Child Left Behind act is.

All hail the Chief!

Debate Referee

The WaPo has an exellent fact-check peice on Friday's debate here: Debate Referee

Essentially, it is the transcript of the debate into which they have interposed glyphs of a referee calling foul whenever the candidates strayed from the facts in their statements.

By my count, the Prevaricator-in-chief won hands-down again with a lop-sided score of 14-3. That puts the home team (aka the Serial Prevaricators) ahead for the week with a combined total of 24-10 which just happens to be the same score by which the Patriots trounced the hapless Miami Dolphins this weekend to break the NFL record for most consecutive wins.

The good news is that the press is not giving the Preznit a pass on his excessive mendacity, and this is playing into the Kerry campaign theme that the President is "not being straight" with, or is "hiding the truth" from, the American public.

Given that the BC04 campaign has basically decared that they are going to ratchet up the level of their Kerry bashing using the Wilkes Barre, PA stump speech as a base, they are only making the Kerry case stronger.

Karl Rove can thank Dick Vader for raising the public awareness of factcheck.org which while not quite as good as the WaPo fact-check coverage (IMO) still makes it quite clear that the President (whether it be the figurehead, G.W. Bush, or the man behind te curtain, Dick Cheney) is a big fat liar.

Whether or not people think that Dubya might be stronger on terrorism, they really don't like being lied to on a regular basis. Nov 2nd will telljust how much.

I guess you could say...

G. W. Bush 10/08/2004:

I guess you'd say I'm a good steward of the land.

The quality of the air's cleaner since I've been the president. Fewer water complaints since I've been the president. More land being restored since I've been the president.

I guess... However, you could only say that in some alternate universe where up is down and right is wrong. This statement is such a bald faced lie it isn't remotely funny.

Robert Kennedy Jr tells us just how perverted Furious George's claim is in an article entitled: Bush's Crimes Against Nature. I'd encourage you to read it.

It's a stealth attack. They have concealed their radical agenda from the American public using Orwellian rhetoric. When they destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Law; when they destroy the air they call it the Clear Skies Bill. And most insidiously they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the air division at EPA is a utility lobbyist who has represented the worst air polluters in America. The second in command at EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. The head of Superfunds, an agency critical to quality of life here in Oregon, is a lobbyist whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfunds.

This year for the first time since the passage of the Clean Water Act, EPA announced that America's waterways are actually getting dirtier. The New York Times ran a story that the levels of sulfur dioxide (that causes acid rain) have grown 4 percent over the last year. I have three children who have asthma and one out of every four black children in this country in our municipalities now has asthma.

Asthma rates have doubled among our children over the last five years. Whether it's hormones in our food or antibiotics, something is causing our children to have these kinds of haywire immune systems. We do know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and particulates.

This is an administration that's about plundering our air and our water, plundering our national treasure, shifting our wealth, plundering the great relationships we had with people all over the world, and shifting the wealth of those assets to large corporations who are its donors, who are the lowest bottom feeders who profiteer on the American people.

Nevermind...

The AP reports U.S. officials say no terror threat linked to disk with school data. As I said in my previous rant, the administration does this every f***ing time. Down in the polls? Issue another BOGUS terror alert.

Let's look at the facts:
- the computer disk that triggered the alert was discovered in JULY, yet they only felt the need to issue the alert NOW... how often have they done that? REPEATEDLY!
- the alert was, once again, issued with the whispered caveat that there was no specific credible evidence that an attack was eminent
- the alert was targetted to schools in 6 states that just happen to be swing states... could they possibly be more transparent in trying to stoke people's fears for political gain?
- now they are claiming that they were only acting out of "an abundance of caution"... Puhleeze!

Of course, now it is confirmed that the plans were publically available via the internet (or is that internets?) and collected by a man who had no connections to al Qaeda or the Iraqi insurgency, he was involved in projects to rebuild the schools in Iraq!

Quick! Lock the kids in the basement! Get the shotgun, Ma! Them terr-ists is after our young-uns! Good ole Dubya, he's lookin' out fer us... gonna smoke them terr-ists outta their caves. Booya!

WS-Addressing WG chartered

Yesterday, the W3C announced the formation of the WS-Addressing WG. I'm very glad to see this progress. Best of luck to my good friend Mark Nottingham!

Thought crimes

The WaPo reports Cheney: Weapons Report Justifies Iraq War (washingtonpost.com):

"'As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back' to his weapons program, Cheney said."

So, we pre-emptively initiated a war on a soveriegn country for thought crimes, killing over 1,000 of our brave troops and wounding thousands more. How Orwellian.

We have nothing to fear...

I never thought that they would stoop so low. I should have known better.

The AP reports: U.S. Alerts Schools About Terror Threat.

President George W Dipshit is down in the polls, so they pull out the fear card, yet again. They do this EVERY F***ING TIME. This time, it is simply inexcusable because, as they note on all of the politically motivated terror alerts:

But there is "no specific information indicating that there is a terrorist threat to any schools or universities in the United States," Hickok said.

I've had it.

F*** You, Mr. President for having the unmitigated gall to scare the shit out of our children for yuour political gain! You are a pucilanimous excuse for a human being. You deserve to rot in hell.

Usama bin-Laden is laughing in his "cave" that you are both stupid and selfish enough to put fear into the hearts of the American people... he doesn't have to lift a finger to accomplish his objective. What an asshole you are!

As a real President once cautioned us: "We have nothing to fear, but fear itself." It is time for a change.

You know Dubya's in trouble when...

Today, my son IM'ed me to ask me, out of the blue, how he could get an absentee ballot to vote next month.

Whoa!

This is the same person whom my wife and I were urging, not 5 months ago, to at least watch "The Daily Show" every night so he could stay somewhat up to speed on current events (he almost never watches TV, muchless TV news, preferring PlayStation activity or simply hanging out in IM-land with his friends, and was completely oblivious to current events). We even tried to use his best friend, who watched CNN regularly while he was staying with us this summer, as an example that he should emulate, to no avail so we thought.

I'm wondering if the rampant rumors of a resurrection of the draft circulating amongst college students hasn't stirred this new-found interest in politics.

Regardless of his motivation, it certainly made me feel proud!

FactCheck.com (oops!)

For those of you who didn't catch on to the subtle mistake that Darth Cheney made last night when he referred Americans to visit factcheck.com (which the domain name owner quickly redirected to George Soros's (of MoveOn.org fame) blog to add insult to injury;-), rather than use precious debate time to counter Sen. Edwards's stinging points regarding Cheney and Halliburton. Here's what FactCheck.org has to say in response:

Cheney Plugs FactCheck

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

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

(emphasis mine)

Doh! I'll bet the BC04 campaign staff is feeling pretty down in the dumps this morning after they were all a-twitter last night claiming that their guy trounced Edwards (NOT!). In fact, I think that this faux pas could be counted as a twofer for KE04 given that some people probably did, or will, visit factcheck.com.

This post-season series is not over yet, but the BC04 campaign is most definitely 0-2 going into the third debate on Friday night. The Dems are energized, the undecideds are breaking for Kerry, and the right-wingnuts and Swifties are left wondering WTF happened to our 11 point lead!

Let the fact-checking begin!

In the immortal words of John Stewart of "The Daily Show" :

Mr Vice President, your pants are on fire.

Last night's debate between the two candidates for V.P. has to be considered a win for the incumbent... at least as far as the award for unmitigated and shameless mendacity is concerned. The WaPo weighs in with its fact-check of last night's debate. By my count, Cheney won on technical merit by a score of 10-7, but clearly when it comes to artistic merit, he is the hands-down winner for most egregious falsitude by asserting that he never suggested that Saddam had direct ties to the attacks on 9/11. As the article points out, he has damned near made a career out of doing just that. Why else would 33% of Americans (scroll down) still hold the highly debunked and repeatedly refuted belief that Saddam was directly responsible for 9/11?!

(Update: Just re-read the polling data and the good news is that people are waking up from this delusion... 33% today, down from the 39% in September that I previously noted in my original post and 51% in May 2003).

The one point that I take exception to is the WaPo charcterization of Edwards's statement regarding tax cuts as being misleading:

Edwards asserted that "millionaires sitting by their swimming pool . . . pay a lower tax rate than the men and women who are receiving paychecks for serving" in Iraq. President Bush last year cut the tax rate on dividends to 15 percent, whereas most soldiers would be in a 15 percent tax bracket -- and pay an effective rate much less after taking deductions for children and mortgages.

The fact is that Edwards is correct in his statement. Millionaires sitting by the pool sipping cognac pay either nothing, or a far smaller effective rate into Social Security and Medicare (FICA),because Social Security is capped at $5,449.80/yr which is reached at roughly $64,000, whereas the troops in Iraq have 7.5% for FICA and another 1.5% (I think that's right) deducted from their pay. Bottom line, the little guy gets screwed while the rich get the real benefits of the administration's tax cuts, which was Edwards's point. Don't think that point was lost on the majority of voters who know better and who also know that they are paying higher state and local taxes to make up the difference.

As for who won the debate, I think that Edwards won even though many of the pundits are calling it a draw. Anytime the vice presidential challenger can demonstrate that he can go toe-to-toe with the incumbant, as Edwards clearly did last night, it is a win for the challenger as his goal is to convince the voter that he has what it takes. What really matters to the voter is the top of the ticket. I mean, if nothing else, Dan Quayle proved that point beyond any reasonable doubt:-)

It will be interesting to watch the post-debate spin cycle to see how effectively the Dems play the mendacity card, continuing their campaign theme that Edwards so effectively started out with in the debate ("Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people") given that Cheney basically threw them a hanging curve ball to hit out of the park with his statements last night.

Priceless

Keeping America Scared: gopconstrm.mov (video/quicktime Object)

You can say that with a straight face?

Slate reports: Scenes From Spin Alley.

MIAMI—Karl Rove must have known things didn't go well when the New York Post asked him whether this was the worst debate of President Bush's life. No, Rove insisted. This was one of the president's best debates, and one of John Kerry's worst. "Really?" asked the reporter, Vince Morris. "You can say that with a straight face?"

Even Rasputin couldn't spin this as a win for aWol.