Category: America

Given what we’ve been reading about potential GOP attempts to interfere with voters in Florida, Ohio, and other swing states next week, this Election Protection Card looks like it’s a must-have when you go to your polling place on Nov. 2. It won’t keep another Brooks Brothers Riot from happening but it might help bring the perpetrators to justice.

Daily Kos: Free speech, Bush style. At Richland Center High School in Richland County, Wisconsin, students were told in preparation for a visit from the President that they could not wear pro-Kerry clothing or buttons or protest in any manner at risk of expulsion.

Expulsion. Getting thrown out of school for the rest of the year. Because one chooses to wear an item that supports the Democratic candidate for president.

It’s never too early to learn that free speech isn’t for everyone, but only for those that can afford it. That schools restrict political activity during presidential campaigns instead of creating teachable moments is one of the greatest failures of our educational system to date. That the campaign would make this request in the first place is the final proof (as if we needed it) that they care neither for our rights nor our children’s education.

Suggested action? Patrick Nielsen Hayden links to the story and provides contact information for the school and its administrative personnel.

US Election Atlas: 2004 Election Night Events Timeline, all dressed up and ready to go. I hope the server is up to the load it will be getting on November 2. (Also, I didn’t realize that the Massachusetts polls were open until 8 pm—that’s cool, though we won’t need the extra time as we live three blocks up the hill from our polling location.) Thanks to Tin Man for the link.

Wonkette: Bush letters sent to the wrong e-mail address. Wonkette points to the Dead Letter Office at GeorgeWBush.org. Apparently some people on the president’s staff can’t tell .com (the reelection campaign) from .org (the protest site). As a result, there are a ton of interesting emails that have accumulated in the catch-all mailbox at georgewbush.org, including one staffer making the career-limiting move of observing how good he would look with First Daughter Barbara Bush (load the page and search for Barbara).

The only potential smoking gun I can see on the page is the thread about The Middle Eastern American National Conference endorsement of Bush, in which the draft email has several signatories’ names missing, with the note that the names are being scrubbed by the campaign and that “we need phone numbers, city, states.”

A rare glimpse from the New York Times on how the response has evolved on both sides to the missing explosives from Al Qaqaa. Josh Marshall has been tracing the emerging storylines as well, including the emergent “they were gone when we got here” theory which seems to be discredited by the facts.

In this case, one might well ask, with Pilate, “What is truth?” In this case, the only truth appears to be: The Bush administration and its proxies have known about the missing explosives for almost 18 months and haven’t done anything about them. Now that the story is breaking, based on the October 10th letter from the Iraqi interim government, the administration is falling all over itself and can’t get the story straight about what happened and why it hasn’t acted.

Leaving aside the other issues in Iraq, this is a simple failure of competence by the incumbent leader of the western world.

Moxie busts the Kerry campaign for digging at Cheney for getting a flu shot. I agree with the Mox on a political issue, for once in a blue moon. This was an unnecessary dig. However, I disagree with her logic. Clinton is six weeks removed from a quadruple bypass, at a time when his heart tissue is healing and still vulnerable to infection. Cheney is several years removed from his most recent attack. The Kerry campaign might be justified in making this distinction, but it’s ultimately an unclassy way to call the Administration on what is a serious failure in public health preparedness.

Salon: Reality-based reporting. An interview with Ron Suskind. He says, “The news strategies of those in power are really born of a dark corner of the American ideal, which is kill or be killed, which is to rely on assertion rather than authenticity and to use power as best you can to get to the agreed-upon ends.” Yeah, but what else is new? Sigh.

Tin Man was on fire yesterday. Point one: catching the great CNN headline, “Public Split on Whether Bush is a Divider.” Point two: pointing me to Andrew Sullivan’s fisking of William Safire’s editorial taking Kerry to task over calling out Mary Cheney. This is what I wanted to write on Monday and couldn’t pull it together.

But the best is his memory of the 1992 election. Like Tin Man, this was the first election in which I voted for president. I don’t remember as much about that election; if memory serves I was overloaded with classes and not watching a lot of television, but I shared the sense of excitement that things were going to be different. I didn’t know how different at that point.

Today I’m starting, for the first time since the DNC, to feel the stirrings of that hope again. Hope for a day where we govern the “reality based” world and not the world our fundamentalist leader would like to live in. Where we prosecute Ken Lay, not Martha Stewart; go after the radically decentralized and stateless Al Qaeda first and tackle its state sponsors (if any) second; where we don’t cynically underfund vote-getting mandates like “No Child Left Behind,” AIDS money for Africa, and body armor, VA hospitals, and salaries for the troops that fight our wars. Where the Attorney General and the President uphold the Constitution. T minus two weeks and counting.

The Mystery of PTI 961 takes an obscure code on George W. Bush’s discharge papers and gives it meaning from DOD regulations: “when an ‘action is reported by the 9xx PTIs’ it represents a ‘loss to the Air Force strength.’  In other words, despite the fact that Bush had almost eight months left on his six year Military Service Obligation at the time, Texas Air National Guard officers were signaling that Bush was essentially worthless to the Air Force, and should not even be retained in the ‘Ready Reserves’ for call up in the event of a national emergency.” The rest of the document is a close reading of the president’s file and the relevant regulations, concluding that Bush was discharged under Rule 8 in Chapter 12 of the Air Reserve Forces Personnel Manual AFM 35-3: that is, he was “unqualified for service.”

This isn’t a surprising finding, since he hadn’t done his flight hours and had refused to take a physical. But it is striking because it is one of the few places where Bush’s records show what is common knowledge among all but his most ardent supporters: that he was mustered out of the Air Reserves because he was unfit for duty.

Thanks to Hooblogger The Rittenhouse Review for the link.

…the crazies come out. Don’t blink, you might miss the dirty tricks machine, as well as some true faces that don’t pop up unless they think they can energize their base without ticking off undecided voters or the opposition.

Exhibit 1: State and national Republican officials are trying to get 63 Philadelphia polling places moved at the last minute. About 53 of the 63 are less than 10% white. I get confused every year about the time and place I have to go to vote, and I have a master’s degree. Can’t imagine why someone would want to wait until the last minute to do this.

Exhibit 2: Instapundit comes out in favor of George Bush. (His position is, I think, obvious, but his explicitly stating it is news.) Good on Tony for calling him out, and for staying on his back.

Exhibit 3: Anti-gay forces in Ohio are gathering reasoned support from all over, including the intellectual spawn of the Inquisition: “The proof for the Christian ethic which condemns homosexual marriage is the impossibility of the contrary. Reject the Christian ethic and you have no basis for making moral judgments.“ Quote from Dr. Patrick Johnston, vice chairman of the Ohio branch of an organization bearing the Orwellian name of the Constitution Party. (See page 3 of the Salon article.)

Here’s something with which you can while away subway rides or incarcerations: the US Constitution for your iPod (text format, not audiobook). Instructions included.

William Gibson’s blog, silent since the end of the author’s tour for Pattern Recognition, crackled back to life yesterday. The natural question, “Why?”, is the first word of the posting. I excerpt the rest of the post in its entirety here, because it’s short, sweet, and right on point:

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, “At times, to be silent is to lie.”

Nice.

Special off-topic bonus: Pattern Recognition is one of Gibson’s works or concepts to inspire a Sonic Youth song. The other, of course, was the Neuromancer trilogy, which is linkable directly to “The Sprawl” on Daydream Nation. So which Yoot is a Gibson fan?

I’ve passed on liveblogging this debate, partly because I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained, but partly because Lisa was coming back after a business trip tonight. Sorry, folks; priorities. Interesting, though, this last question, to find the humanity in the candidates? Also interesting that Kerry punts the “strong women” question to his mom, rather than Teresa. I don’t think Kerry is coming away a winner in this debate—unless, of course, you count all the lies that the administration is telling through Bush; and unless you weigh the administration on its record rather than Bush’s words.

Item 1: A private voter-registration firm in Las Vegas is under attack from its own employees, who allege that the firm has been throwing away Democratic registration forms by the hundreds while keeping all the Republican registrations. The firm is under contract in another case for door-to-door canvassers by the GOP, and has also done work in Arizona for Ralph Nader. There are some dots waiting to be connected here…

Item 2: From the dirty-tricks file, Josh Marshall connects the dots and fingers Jim Tobin, New England regional chairman for the Bush-Cheney campaign and former Northeast political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, as being deeply involved in the felonious “phone jamming incident” that knocked a Democratic get-out-the-vote operation out of commission on Election Day in 2002.

Item 3: Sinclair Broadcasting, owner of 62 stations across the country has committed to airing an anti-Kerry broadcast two weeks before the election, funded by “Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth,” attacking Kerry’s Vietnam record. (Note Tony Pierce’s reaction: “if the dems can be derailed by a dumbass swiftboat talkie despite [twelve points including ‘bush’s failure to find obl,’ ‘bush’s military record cover up,’ and ‘five gop senators coming out against him,’] then the dems don’t deserve to win ever.”) Interesting side note: Sinclair has a subsidiary, Jadoo Power Systems, Inc., that just won a big contract to supply the US Special Operations Command in the war on terror.

Item 4: Veterans of the Iraq conflict are self-funding a TV ad that focuses on the failures of the Bush administration’s preparation, conduct, and post-war support in Iraq and the consequences for veterans. They call BS on claims that the lack of body armor is an “urban legend,” and discuss how the war has cost them dearly while at the same time the administration is cutting VA benefits.

It seems to me that if the Bush/Cheney campaign wasn’t so busy trying to disenfranchise voters and mislead the public instead of taking care of the boys (and girls) they sent to Iraq who are now coming home maimed and angry—or in boxes—they might actually be making some headway in public opinion.

On Friday we caught up with our long elusive Irish friend Niall, newly returned from Ireland after a summer of dissipation and waiting for his US visa situation to straighten out. He said that he was getting grumpy about the scene in the embassy, until he turned around and looked behind him and realized he was sitting near Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate. He mentioned that it was apparently better not to be a poet when getting a travel visa. Heaney was trying to get a visa to go over for a six-week-long guest professorship at Harvard, and the official kept probing, “What are you going to do when your professorship is up? Do you have a job to come back to in Ireland?”

Ah, the hard life of a poet in America. Didn’t we use to go out of our way to make sure that vital creative people from other nations could visit our country easily? I guess the ideology of the free exchange of ideas is as dead as the Cold War.