Moby says it exactly:

"I'm not working under any grand assumptions that my involvement will change the course of the election," Moby says. "My great fear is that we will wake up on November 3, George Bush will have won and we will say, 'What more could we have done?'"

What more can you do? No one is asking you to do more than you can - just try to do what you are able to do.

...do whatever.

UPDATE: Chris Bowers, a major poll wonk most often seen at My DD, has a diary entry at Daily Kos in which he says that the L.A. Times poll is indeed an outlier, big-time:

Listen up you soup-spined, knee-knocking numbnuts: no matter how much you seem to enjoy panicking, Bush's poll numbers suck, and it is time for you to learn to deal with it.

Go read the wonky details.

On the balance sheet of moral bravery, as opposed to physical bravery, the two men are about as far apart as you can be on Vietnam. On the one hand you have Kerry, who already had doubts about whether we should be fighting in Vietnam before he went, and put his life on the line anyway. On the other hand, you have George W. Bush who supported the war, which means he believed the goal was worth the cost in American lives. Only, not his life. He believed others should go; just not him. It's the story of his life.

. . . . 

. . . . A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.

As I've been saying here for the last couple days, the issue isn't that Bush ducked service in Vietnam. It's that he tries to smear other people's meritorious service without taking responsibility for what he's doing. He gets other people to do his dirty work for him. Again, that image of McCain calling him on his shameless antics and his look of fear, his look of feeling trapped.

The key for the Kerry campaign to make is that the president's moral cowardice is why we're now bogged down in Iraq. It's a key reason why almost a thousand Americans have died there. President Bush has set the tone for this administration and his moral cowardice permeates it.

Consider only the most obvious examples.

The president didn't think he could convince the public of the merits of his reasons for going to war. So he lied to them. He greatly exaggerated what was thought to be the evidence of weapons of mass destruction and completely manufactured a connection between Iraq and al Qaida. He couldn't get the country behind him on the up-and-up. So he took the easy way out; he took a shortcut; he deceived them. And now the country is paying a terrible price for it.

He and his advisors knew that if they levelled with the public about the costs of war -- in dollars, years, soldiers -- he'd have a very hard time convincing them. So he didn't level with them. He took the easy way out.

The sort of forward planning that would have made a big difference in post-war Iraq was scuttled or attacked because it would make the job of selling the war harder. Those who sounded the alarm had their careers cut short.

Once we were in Iraq and it was clear that we had been wrong about the weapons of mass destruction -- a judgement that's been clear for more than a year -- he wouldn't admit it. And he still hasn't. A year and a half after we invaded Iraq and he still can't level with the American people about this. He still relies on his vice president to try to fool people into thinking Hussein was tied to al Qaida and the 9/11 attacks.

More importantly, once it became clear that the president's plans for post-war Iraq were producing poor results, he refused to shift policy or to reshuffle his team. He refused to demand accountability from his own team because of how it would have reflected on him. He's preferred to continue on with demonstrably failed policies because to do otherwise would be to admit he'd made a mistake and open himself to all the political fall-out that entails. And that's not something he's willing to do.

The stubborn refusal ever to change course, which the president tries to pass off as a sign of leadership or devotion to principle, is actually an example of his cowardice.

For the same reasons, he runs from soldiers' funerals like they were burying victims of the plague -- because it's the easy way out. If there's a problem, he denies it or finds someone else to take the fall for him.

Everyone has these tendencies in their measure. No one is perfect. But they define George W. Bush.

The same sort of moral cowardice that led him to support the Vietnam war but decide it wasn't for him, run companies into the ground and let others pay the bill, play gutter politics but run for the hills when someone asks him to say it to their face, those are the same qualities that led the president to lie the country into war, fail to prepare for the aftermath and then refuse to take responsibility for any of it when the bill started to come due.

It's ironic in the extreme that the guy who campaigns on a theme of "personal responsibility" himself refuses to take personal responsibility for anything. Remember this exchange from Bush's press conference on April 13, 2004, after Iraq had really started to go to hell in a handbasket?:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You've looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?

THE PRESIDENT: I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet.

. . . . 

I hope I -- I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

Bush still hasn't admitted to having made a single mistake as president: not taking a month-long vacation in August 2001, after receiving the August 6, 2004 PDB warning that bin Laden was determined to attack in the United States; not sitting like a lump reading "The Pet Goat" to students for seven minutes after he had learned that America was under attack; not perhaps being a tad precipitous in deciding that Iraq was swimming in WMD's; not neglecting post-war planning; not being hasty in declaring "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2002 (when the latter became an embarrassment to him, Bush tried to claim that the ship's sailors, not his office, had decided on that theme).

Nope, Bush just can't think of anything he's done wrong as president. Remind me again why I have this silly blog?

[T]he larger story here is clear: John Kerry volunteered for the Navy, volunteered to go to Vietnam, and then, when he was sitting around Cam Ranh Bay bored with nothing to do, requested the most dangerous duty a Naval officer could be given. He saved a man's life. He risked his own every time he went up into the Mekong Delta. He did more than his country asked. In fact he didn't even wait for his country to ask.

George W. Bush spent those same years in a state of dissolution at Yale, and would go on, as we know, to plot how to get out of going to Southeast Asia. On that subject, here's a choice quote. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment," Bush told the Dallas Morning News in 1990. "Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

Let's parse that quotation phrase for phrase. We do not, of course, know the full context of the conversation he was having with the reporter, and we don't know exactly what question Bush was asked. But his words begin from the presumption that actually going to Vietnam was absolutely not an option. The quote is entirely about how to avoid going. He wasn't prepared to damage his hearing intentionally for the sake of securing a deferment (he probably meant a 4-F classification and confused the two). And he wasn't willing to go to Canada. So he took the third option, the Air National Guard. And note how the choice was about bettering himself, not about thinking of a way to best render service that this child of privilege might -- had he been possessed of the moral fiber and sense of duty of, say, John Kerry -- have considered his obligation, especially considering that, on paper at least, he supported the war.

Dick Cheney is another who, on paper at least, supported the war. But we know Cheney's story: A series of deferments going back to 1963, when he was a student at Casper College in Wyoming. As Tim Noah reported in Slate, Cheney went on to marry -- as fate would have it, right after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when it was clear that young single men would be called up in larger numbers than before. And then he went on to have a child, Elizabeth, born precisely nine months and two days after the Selective Service ended the proscription on the drafting of married but childless men. What a happily timed burst of passion he and Lynn were consumed by! So, while Kerry was plying the Mekong Delta, Cheney was safe and dry stateside, dropping out of Yale because his grades weren't sufficient to maintain the scholarship the school had offered him.

. . . . 

So now we're having a debate about whether the man who did the honorable thing may have embellished his record a little (although nothing in the documentary record suggests he did this), while we have two cowards who did everything they could to stay miles away from the place Kerry demanded he be sent. This is the fundamental truth. And while yes, Kerry has made his war service a centerpiece in a way that Bush and Cheney for obvious reasons did not, is it really Kerry who deserves scrutiny for how he behaved in 1968 and 1969? Why shouldn't the major media be doing comparisons of how Kerry, Bush, and Cheney passed those years?

Paul Krugman has a great column about why so many Americans prefer fake war heroes, like Dubya, to real ones. The L.A. Times has an excellent editorial about the Bush family tradition of sleazy political campaigns.

And then there's this classic bit from The Daily Show:

STEWART: Here's what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry's record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the US military, and hasn't been disputed for 35 years?

CORDDRY: That's right, Jon, and that's certainly the spin you'll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days.

STEWART: Th-that's not a spin thing, that's a fact. That's established.

CORDDRY: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontrovertible fact is one side of the story.

STEWART: But that should be -- isn't that the end of the story? I mean, you've seen the records, haven't you? What's your opinion?

CORDDRY: I'm sorry, my *opinion*? No, I don't have 'o-pin-i-ons'. I'm a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called 'objectivity' -- might wanna look it up some day.

STEWART: Doesn't objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out what's credible and what isn't?

CORDDRY: Whoa-ho! Well, well, well -- sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! [high-pitched, effeminate] 'Ooh, this allegation is spurious! Upon investigation this claim lacks any basis in reality! Mmm, mmm, mmm.' Listen buddy: not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me.

STEWART: So, basically, you're saying that this back-and-forth is never going to end.

CORDDRY: No, Jon -- in fact a new group has emerged, this one composed of former Bush colleages, challenging the president's activities during the Vietnam era. That group: Drunken Stateside Sons of Privilege for Plausible Deniability. They've apparently got some things to say about a certain Halloween party in '71 that involved trashcan punch and a sodomized piZata. Jon -- they just want to set the record straight. That's all they're out for.

STEWART: Well, thank you Rob, good luck out there. We'll be right back. [errors in original transcription corrected by me]

All of these links are from the immortal Atrios, who is your one stop shop these days for anything pertaining to the Swift Boat Liars. He has lots more debunking of them over there. By this point, it may be that no group of people in history have been more conclusively demonstrated to be lying sacks of shit than the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."

[I]n 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further--and here we'll let slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.

Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn't really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry's record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it's far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It's designed to reassure uneasy minds.

The above link is via Political Animal, who also has a good post about favorable things some of the Swift Boat Liars have previously said about Kerry.

You can see the Kerry campaign's ads in response to the attacks, "Rassmann" and "Old Tricks," here. Josh Marshall has a great discussion of the campaign's response here and here. This is from his first-linked post:

Today, though, the Kerry campaign came out with a very powerful ad, one which in its tone and focus is exactly where the Kerry campaign needs to go.

It's called Old Tricks and the entire ad is a brief exchange from a debate from February 15th 2000 (which the political junkies among us probably remember) in which John McCain -- then in the thick of Bush's smears -- told Bush to his face to stop getting others to smear him over his war record. He ends by telling him he should be ashamed. The camera focuses on Bush and catches him not knowing how to respond, with what I think even his supporters would have to agree is a callow, trapped look on his face.

I say this is exactly where the Kerry campaign needs to go because it very powerfully captures a truth about President Bush -- namely, that he's a coward who truly lacks shame.

I don't say he's a coward because he kept himself out of Vietnam three decades ago. I know no end of men of that age who in one fashion or another made sure they didn't end up in Indochina in those days. (I quickly ran through both hands counting guys I talk to on a regular basis.) And they include many of the most admirable people I know.

He's a coward because he has other people smear good men without taking any responsibility, without owning up to it or standing behind it. And when someone takes it to him and puts him on the spot to defend his actions -- as McCain does in this spot -- he's literally speechless. Like I say, a coward.

As I said earlier, this is vintage Bush. And it's also a subtle nod to all the ways that Bush is someone who's always gotten by with help at all the key moments from family friends, retainers and others similarly hunting for access and power.

The Boston Globe has an excellent editorial here.

I originally did this calculation to help think about how to allocate my campaign contributions. I believe that one can make the biggest difference by donating at the margin, where probabilities for success are 20-80%. To read a discussion click here. Since trends are in Kerry's favor and the Senate is within reach, I recommend that Democrats give to the DSCC and to the Senate campaigns of Inez Tenenbaum (D-SC), Betty Castor (D-FL pre-primary), and Chris John (D-LA). Note: Since Tony Knowles (D-AK) is ahead in 8 of the last 9 polls, he currently fails my 20-80 test.

For those of you still wanting to reinforce the national election . . . , I recommend the voter registration and turnout organization America Coming Together. For the optimists there is the DCCC.

• French is the No. 2 language (87,400);
• Portuguese is No. 3 (81,048);
• Farsi is fourth (64,041);
• Spanish is only 7th (26,353);
• Catalan is 12th (7,962), just below Japanese (8,012). There's a Catalan Opening in chess, named after the region of Spain, but I didn't even knew that there was a Catalan language. It turns out that 10 million people speak it. Who knew?
• Who are these 3,390 people blogging in Esperanto?
• Why are there twice as many people blogging in Danish (2,933) as Swedish (1,447)?
• Why are 1,713 people blogging in Latin?
• As Kevin Drum asks, why isn't Russian in the top 25? Can there really be more people blogging in Breton (1,277) than Russian?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States faces a painful moment probably next month when its military deaths in Iraq are expected to surpass 1,000. It will also be a crucial moment for President Bush, who faces a presidential campaign in which Iraq is a central issue.

"Unfortunately that day will likely arrive next month and it will be a fulcrum event that may change many people's views of what we're doing in Iraq," said David Birdsell, a political scientist at Baruch College in New York City.

"It's a gripping number, a large number, a tragic number and it will be a pivot to revisit Bush's reasons for fighting the war and his premature declaration last year that the mission had been accomplished," he said.

. . . . 

In July, the first month after an Iraqi interim authority took office, U.S. deaths totaled 55, compared to 42 the previous month. So far this month, they are running at a similar or possibly slightly higher rate.

Compared to past wars, this is a relatively low figure. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. lost 1,363 soldiers in the month of March 1968 alone and more than 58,000 for the entire war. But it is still a higher rate than for any military conflict the United States has fought since Vietnam.

"The Iraqi body count hurts the president. Already less than half of respondents in my polling say the war was worth fighting and the 1,000 casualty will be a milestone that will be page one news and put a lot more focus on it," said pollster John Zogby.

. . . . 

The moment will likely arrive around the time when the candidates are preparing for their crucial debates, tentatively scheduled for late September and early October. [link via truthout]

At this writing, there have been 936 U.S. military deaths in Iraq. At the current rate of about two deaths a day, we will hit 1,000 around September 15. Horrible as that number is, the number of Iraqi military and civilian deaths is far higher, and for what? As the button says, "Killing 1 person is murder. Killing 100,000 is foreign policy." Bush has a lot of foreign policy on his hands.

Click this link to see Jon Stewart rip the talking points of one of Bush's apologists apart. Were every news anchor half as smart as Jon Stewart.

Jonathan Weisman writes in The Washington Post: "Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign."

Here's the full CBO report (1.6M PDF).

Edmund L. Andrews writes in the New York Times: "Fully one-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday.

"The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings - averaging about $57,000 a year - were getting an average cut of only $1,090."

Here's a bit more from Weisman's article:

The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.

Over that same period, taxpayers with incomes from around $51,500 to around $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase. Households earning around $75,600 saw their tax burden jump the most, from 18.7 percent of all taxes to 19.5 percent.

The analysis, requested in May by congressional Democrats, echoes similar studies by think tanks and Democratic activist groups. But the conclusions have heightened significance because of their source, a nonpartisan government agency headed by a former senior economist from the Bush White House, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. The study will likely stoke an already burning debate about the fairness and efficacy of $1.7 trillion in tax cuts that the president pushed through Congress.

"CBO is nonpartisan, it's independent, and right now it works for a Republican Congress with a former Bush economist at its head," said Jason Furman, economic director of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). "There's no higher authority on the subject."

The Bushies' lame response:

Girding for the study's release, Bush campaign officials have already begun dismissing it as "the Democrat-requested report."

Much can happen in the next three months, that's why we should approach this election as if 10 points behind. Complacency is the kiss of death.

President Bush pushed back Wednesday against Sen. John Kerry’s criticism of his handling of Iraq, saying, "I know what I’m doing when it comes to winning this war."

War? What war? Didn't you say on May 1, 2003:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

U.S. military fatalities in Iraq March 20-May 1, 2003: 139

U.S. military fatalities in Iraq since May 1, 2003: 796

In his brand new campaign ad, President Bush vows to "bring an enemy to justice before they hurt us again." (Here's the video. Here's the text.)

An enemy? Any enemy in particular?

Although there are certainly lots of enemies out there, public enemy number one is obviously al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But Bush didn't mention bin Laden -- who, just six days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Bush said he wanted "dead or alive," and who, almost three years later, is still at large.

. . . .

. . . . Bush treats bin Laden a lot like those wizards in the Harry Potter books treat He Who Must Not Be Named.

Since the beginning of 2003, in fact, Bush has mentioned bin Laden's name on only 10 occasions. And on six of those occasions it was because he was asked a direct question.

In addition, there were four times when Bush was asked about bin Laden directly but was able to answer without mentioning bin Laden's name himself.

Not once during that period has he talked about bin Laden at any length, or said anything substantive.

During the same period, for comparison purposes, Bush has mentioned former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on approximately 300 occasions.

The last time Bush spoke protractedly about bin Laden was at a March 2003 news conference. Bush was asked then by Kelly Wallace of CNN why he so rarely mentioned bin Laden, and whether bin Laden was, in fact, dead or alive.

Bush's answer: "Well, deep in my heart, I know the man is on the run if he's alive at all. Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not? We haven't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is -- really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission.

"Terror is bigger than one person. And he's just -- he's a person who's now been marginalized. His network is -- his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match. He is -- as I've mentioned in my speeches, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death, and he himself tries to hide -- if, in fact, he's hiding at all.

"So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him."

Froomkin misstates the date of the last exchange: it was March 2002, not 2003. Here's the sequence of Dubya's comments on "getting" bin Laden:

On September 15, 2001:

President Bush Monday repeated his vow to track down Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in last week's terror attacks . . . .

"I want justice," Bush said. "And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"

On December 12, 2001:

President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken "dead or alive," no matter how long it takes, amid indications that the suspected terrorist may be bottled up in a rugged Afghan canyon. The president, in an Oval Office meeting with Thailand's prime minister, would not predict the timing of bin Laden's capture but said he doesn't care how the suspect is brought to justice. "I don't care, dead or alive — either way," Bush said. "It doesn't matter to me."

On March 13, 2002:

I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. . . .

. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him.

So in September 2001 Bush vows to get bin Laden "dead or alive." Three months later he reiterates that, adding that he'll achieve this no matter how long it takes. But three months after that (six months after his first statement) Bush doesn't know where bin Laden is and doesn't particularly care. I'm reminded of that Paul Simon song:

A man walks down the street,

He says, Why am I short of attention?

Got a short little span of attention . . . .

Ironically, the song is entitled, "You can call me Al." It should be, "You can call me George."

On the one hand you have the fellow who sits and read children’s books when he's told that the country is under attack and on the other you have the fellow who rushes in to save lives over and over again.

Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.

Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.

Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht's side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver -- four times.

The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.

"This man gave me my life," the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.

Hecht said he was amazed that Kerry acted so quickly -- some people were assuming that he was having a heart attack.

"He knew exactly what to do," he said. "But a lot of people know what to do. They just don't size up the situation immediately."

I hadn't heard about this one and I don't think most other people have either.

Let's just say some people are a little bit more quick and decisive under pressure than others.

Ask yourself which person you'd rather have running the country in dangerous times. [corrected typos in original]

Keyes will be the perfect foil for Obama to campaign against, and the selection of Keyes will seem exactly the shoddy and cynical move that it is. The Republicans should know better.

Obviously, I'm not a big Alan Keyes fan. My last significant encounter with the former ambassador occurred at the door of a local television station in Atlanta Georgia in the spring of 1996. The station was holding a TV debate for the presidential primary and had banned Keyes, who was then running for president. My candidate, former governor Lamar Alexander, and I had the bad timing to enter the station at exactly the moment Keyes was attempting a media stunt that included chaining himself to the front door. A minor scuffle occurred and I remember the priceless look on the normally unflappable Gov. Alexander's face when he realized that he was a split second away from becoming hopelessly chained to a frothing Alan Keyes in front a phalanx of glaring TV lights and news cameras. Zigzagging in a flash like an NFL running back, Alexander shot through the door like a rocket, evading Keyes and pulling me through in his draft alone. It was the highlight of the Alexander for President campaign in Georgia.

I'm certain Ambassador Keyes is now busily at work printing up some "Crazy Times Demand a Crazy Senator" yard signs and oiling his trusty chains for a repeat performance in Chicago this fall. Whatever element of the Illinois GOP that came up with this plan will regret the day they thought it up. [link via Talking Points Memo]

Keyes four years ago said he "deeply resented" Hillary Clinton's decision to run for Senator of New York, which was "destructive of federalism," no less, and stated that he certainly would not imitate such a course. But at least Hillary had the decency to move to New York a couple of months before announcing her candidacy. Keyes still lives in Maryland. Josh Marshall, who calls Keyes the "master of grandiloquent nonsense," notes that Keyes accordingly had to wax poetic in explaining himself:

As Keyes told his new Illinois supporters today, he was at first dead-set against running for senate in another state. But then he was shown copies of Barack Obama's state legislative voting record and he decided he had no choice -- flip flop or no flip flop -- but to jump into the ring.

"I'll tell you by the time I got through the records, I was convinced that somebody had to run against Barack Obama," he said.

And then after this long dark night of the soul Keyes spent with Obama's voting records he decided that "I must leave the land of my forefathers [i.e., Maryland] in order to defend the land of my spirit, of my conscience and my heart -- and I believe that that land is Illinois."

Only Keyes could manage to bring a flourish to the rather prosaic work of backing out of backing out of a flat promise or turning a flip-flop into something vaguely reminiscent of St. Paul's decision to abandon the teachings of the Pharisees and launch off on foot around the shores of the Mediterranean preaching Christ crucified.

What I can't help but wonder is what issues get pulled into the mix when Keyes and his wife get in an argument about ... say, whose toothbrush is whose? Or when one of the kids won't take out the trash?

"You have said that you will not take out the trash, that you will take out the trash after you play Nintendo. But I tell you today that taking out the trash is no mere chore. Just as a righteous society is preserved by preserving what is good and just and tossing aside what is bad, just so with the ..."

"Dad?"

Well, you get the idea.

People for the American Way has collected quotes illustrating Keyes' positions on the issues. Here's an excerpt:

Keyes on Moderate Republicans
"On all the matters that touch upon the critical moral issues, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the evil side. This is a fact. A mere list of the positions he supports is enough to make this plain: abortion as a 'right,' cloning of human beings, governmental classification of citizens by race, public benefits for sexual partners outside of marriage, disrespect for property rights against environmental extremism, repudiation of the right to bear arms - no more need be said to show that this candidate is wrong where human decency, human rights and human responsibility bear directly on political issues."

WorldNetDaily, "Arnold’s corruption of Republican Party," October 6, 2003

Keyes on Black Leaders
"I think part of it is that the Black leadership, the vocal ones that the media concentrates on, are all bought-and-sold, step-and-fetch-its of depravity for the Democratic party."

People For the American Way Foundation, "Eyewitness Report from the C-PAC Conference,"
February 21, 1999

Keyes on Reproductive Choice
"The violation on [sic] innocent human life is the same whether you commit terrorism or commit abortion."

People For the American Way Foundation, "The Vocabulary of Terror: Anti-abortion politics since 9/11," April 10, 2002

Keyes on Homosexuality
"Hitler and his supporters were Satanists and homosexuals. That’s just a true statement." He added that, "The notion that is involved in homosexuality, the unbridled sort of satisfaction of human passions" leads to "totalitarianism," "Nazism," and "communism."

People For the American Way Foundation, "Hostile Climate 1997," p.26

Keyes on Taxes
"The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed. ... Only abolition of the income tax will restore the basic American principle that our income is both our own money and our own private business not the government’s."

Renew America, "Alan Keyes on the Issues"

Keyes, true to form, started out the Senate race by proclaiming that Obama, by being pro-choice, was taking the "slaveholder's position." This sort of inflammatory rhetoric, although typical of Keyes, will gain him no votes. Nor will his decision to focus on abortion in a majority pro-choice state. But this election campaign will surely be entertaining, at least for Democrats. Republicans doubtless won't be so amused about the prospect of their people staying home because neither Bush nor Keyes has a chance in Illinois. Jack Ryan would have lost, but my guess is that he would've finished about 10% higher than Keyes will.

Let’s face it—having O’Reilly debate Krugman on economics is like having Pee Wee Herman wrestle The Hulk.

Media Matters has more on the Krugman-O'Reilly mismatch.

ANNANDALE, Va. — When President Bush picks up a microphone, bounds onto a stage and engages his cheering audience in a rambling discussion of topics from Iraq to the economy, it comes off as relaxed, informal and largely spontaneous.

"I feel like a talk show host," Bush often says as he roams the platform in the center of the arena.

But these "Ask President Bush" campaign forums, the eighth of which was held at Northern Virginia Community College here Monday, leave little to chance.

The national Bush campaign staff works through a local Republican office to assemble an audience of 1,000 to 2,500 people, depending on the site. The party offers registered party volunteers two tickets — and says more are available if volunteers want to bring open-minded friends.

Depending on the message Bush wants to put across, the local office also lines up some carefully chosen locals to take the stage with him and explain how Bush's policies are helping them afford college, buy a home, save money on health insurance or expand a business. They are given "talking points" ahead of time.

. . . .

After Bush chats with those people, he asks for questions from the audience. The ones he gets are usually soft and friendly, raising suspicions that they have been arranged in advance. Campaign officials insist they have not.

. . . .

Sometimes, instead of a question, Bush gets praise.

A man who stood up Monday identified himself as a volunteer firefighter from Chase City, Va., and said: "We've had hard times raising money. And since you've been in, the federal money that you appropriated to us, we appreciate it a lot."

Last Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, a man Bush called on said he had no questions. "Thanks for accepting the call and answering the call to work for what's right in the country and in the world," he said and sat down.

. . . .

Bob Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, defended limiting the "Ask President Bush" audiences to Bush supporters and their friends.

"You're not going to load up an event with a bunch of your opponents," he said. "It just invites disruptions."

Hey, at least the Bushies didn't make the attendees sign loyalty oaths this time:

RIO RANCHO, N.M. (AP) -- Some Democrats who signed up to hear Vice President Dick Cheney speak here Saturday were refused tickets unless they signed a pledge to endorse President Bush.

. . . .

Two men who had sought tickets reported they were required to give name, address, phone number, e-mail address and driver's license number, then were presented the pledge of endorsement when they arrived to pick up the tickets Thursday.

. . . .

Kerry campaign spokesman Ruben Pulido Jr. said there had been no plan by the campaign to disrupt Cheney's event.

"I think that every American should have the right to see their vice president and hear from him firsthand what he plans to do for our country," Pulido said.

He also said the Kerry campaign had not attempted to screen Bush supporters out of Kerry's appearance at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque on July 9.

On that occasion, about a dozen Bush supporters wearing flip-flop beach sandals began chanting "Viva Bush" and waved their flip-flops over their heads.

. . . .

Richard Fox, a political science instructor at a local community college, said attempts to screen political events is commonplace.

But he said: "This pledge or this 'loyalty oath' -- quote-unquote -- to me is unheard of."

As Democratic Underground documents (item No. 4), the form required the signer to pledge, "I . . . herby [sic] endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States [sic]." Sort of a reverse literacy test.

I have previously written (here, here, and here) about the Bush regime's blatantly unconstitutional actions in arresting Nicole and Jeff Rank, and firing Nicole from her federal job, because the Ranks had the temerity to wear anti-Bush T-shirts to a Bush rally on the grounds of the West Virginia State Capitol building.

All of this shows how insincere Bush was when he claimed, after being heckled while speaking to the Australian Parliament, "I love free speech." He loves free speech about as much as Saddam Hussein did when he was President of Iraq.

When Friday's dismal job report was released, traders in the Chicago pit began chanting, "Kerry, Kerry."

Pakistani military intelligence (Inter-Services Intelligence) told Reuters,

"[Khan] sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz . . . He was cooperating with interrogators on Sunday and Monday and sent e-mails on both days . . ."

In other words, the Bush administration just blew the cover of one of the most important assets inside al-Qaeda that the US has ever had.

The announcement of Khan's name forced the British to arrest 12 members of an al-Qaeda cell prematurely, before they had finished gathering the necessary evidence against them via Khan. Apparently they feared that the cell members would scatter as soon as they saw that Khan had been compromised. (They would have known he was a double agent, since they got emails from him Sunday and Monday!) One of the twelve has already had to be released for lack of evidence, a further fall-out of the Bush SNAFU. It would be interesting to know if other cell members managed to flee.

Why in the world would Bush administration officials out a double agent working for Pakistan and the US against al-Qaeda? In a way, the motivation does not matter. If the Reuters story is true, this slip is a major screw-up that casts the gravest doubts on the competency of the administration to fight a war on terror. Either the motive was political calculation, or it was sheer stupidity. They don't deserve to be in power either way. [emphasis added; typo corrected]

So one scenario goes like this. Bush gets the reports that Eisa al-Hindi had been casing the financial institutions, and there was an update as recently as January 2004 in the al-Qaeda file. So this could be a live operation. If Bush doesn't announce it, and al-Qaeda did strike the institutions, then the fact that he knew of the plot beforehand would sink him if it came out (and it would) before the election. So he has to announce the plot. But if he announces it, people are going to suspect that he is wagging the dog and trying to shore up his popularity by playing the terrorism card. So he has to be able to give a credible account of how he got the information. So when the press is skeptical and critical, he decides to give up Khan so as to strengthen his case. In this scenario, he or someone in his immediate circle decides that a mere double agent inside al-Qaeda can be sacrificed if it helps Bush get reelected in the short term.

On the other hand, sheer stupidity cannot be underestimated as an explanatory device in Washington politics.

People, this is bigger than the Plame Affair (as horrible as that outing was). We are locked in a bona fide war against a shadowy enemy. We finally infiltrate an Al Qaida cell, and our asset is burned in a matter of days either out of political expediency or sheer stupidity.

It boggles the mind.

There are few vices a left-leaning liberal cannot admit to these days, but affection for the United States is among them. The sneering, the mockery that once attended more prohibited passions is instant and severe: just wait for the derision that will rain down on next month’s Republican convention in New York. I don’t need to wait: I have my own experience of ‘coming out’ as an Americanophile, which I did six years ago by publishing — on 4 July, of course — a declaration of love for the US. That book, Bring Home the Revolution, was adoringly subtitled: How Britain Can Live the American Dream.
. . . .

. . . [D]rawing from my own spell living in 1990s America [I argued in response to my critics] that, behind the stereotypes, the US remained a vigorous democracy and an engaged civil society, still captivated by the dream of self-government — a dream made manifest by a degree of volunteerism, philanthropy and local autonomy that put Britain to shame.
That and much else flowed from a founding ideal and accompanying text, the US Constitution, which expressed the yearning for human liberty and self-rule better than any other document in the English language. This, I insisted, should inspire British progressives rather than just the Thatcherites who had made pro-Americanism their own. British radicals should be especially comfortable, I assured them, since 1776 was nothing if not the handiwork of a bunch of dreamers hailing from these very islands.

. . . . But nothing prepared me for the fruit of Florida: the presidency of George W. Bush.

He revived and embodied every one of those chattering-class caricatures: a swaggering cowboy, syntactically challenged and incurious about the world. The US refusal to co-operate with Kyoto or the International Criminal Court confirmed the disapproval; the post-9/11 rhetoric of ‘hunting down’ the bad guys deepened it; and the war on Iraq transformed it, finally, into hatred.

. . . .

I shared [British protesters’] opposition to the war, believing as they did that it was an unnecessary, unprovoked attack on a country that posed no threat to its invaders — and which would only make the (more urgent) war against al-Qa’eda harder to win.

. . . .

There is, though, more to it than that. For Bush’s programme, in Iraq and beyond, is not only logically separable from what we might call Americanism, the values that have animated the country since its birth; it is also a violation of them. This Bush presidency represents a break from all its predecessors. Future historians will regard it as a strange aberration, maybe even un-American. For the United States should be the last nation on earth to get into the empire business, as it has done in Iraq. America, as John Kerry reminded his Boston audience last week, was born in a rebellion against imperialism, in the form of George III and his British redcoats. That founding experience sank deep into the US psyche, prompting Americans thereafter to regard self-rule as a sacred right and to see themselves as the ally of all who sought to shake off the foreign yoke.

No matter how great US influence became, especially in the 20th century, this history obliged the behemoth to walk lightly. It may have been disingenuous, even deceitful, but the US avoided the trappings of formal empire (the Philippines was an unhappy exception). Necessity forced responsibility upon it in Germany and Japan in 1945, but viceroys ruling over faraway lands and a world map splashed with the Stars and Stripes were never objects of American strategic intent. Yet in Iraq the Bush administration embarked on a nakedly imperial mission. The original occupation plan called for each one of Iraq’s 23 government ministries to be run by an American, all of them under the ultimate command of a US ‘administrator’ — first General Jay Garner, then Paul Bremer. A proconsul by any other name.

The Bushites retort that this was only ever meant to be a temporary set-up, in contrast with the centuries-long ambitions of the Greeks, Romans or, for that matter, British. ‘As soon as we could,’ they say, ‘we handed over sovereignty to the Iraqis themselves.’ Even without weighing the degree of ‘independence’ of Iraq’s new prime minister, the plain fact that upwards of 160,000 foreign troops remain on Iraqi soil should leave no doubt as to who is really in charge.

All of this represents a stunning departure from American norms. This is the nation whose first leader declared in his first presidential address that the new republic would avoid ‘entangling alliances’. One of George Washington’s successors, John Quincy Adams, expressed the same sentiment more poetically, announcing that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. Yet what else was the pursuit of Saddam Hussein — a monster, to be sure, but one who was bound and de-fanged in his cage of containment?

Of course there is no single American ideal against which the Bush project can be judged. US history reveals a bundle of different, often competing strands: isolationist and internationalist strains, for example, have rubbed against each other since the very beginning. The historian Walter Russell Mead usefully outlines three rival schools of US foreign policy; what’s striking is how Bush’s neocon vision tramples on each one of them.

Followers of Alexander Hamilton, for example, believed in the notion of an international system and a balance of power. Hamiltonians acknowledge the inevitable existence of global rivals and equals. Not the Bush administration. The infamous National Security Strategy of 2002 preached a solo, hegemonic role for America, demanding that any would-be competitor be stopped before it could become so much as a regional power.

Andrew Jackson defined US interests narrowly: no Jacksonian would understand the case for hitting a Saddamite Iraq that posed no immediate threat to the US. Even Woodrow Wilson provides little cover for Bushism. The neocons may like casting themselves as muscular Wilsonians, realising through force his dream of American liberation of benighted peoples, and there is something to be admired in the neocon zeal for spreading democracy and human rights. But Wilson is an unlikely spiritual patron. For he was the father of the League of Nations and a firm advocate of multilateralism, the very doctrine so disdained by Bush and his UN-bashing, allies-dissing acolytes. It’s worth remembering that so much of the world’s multilateral infrastructure — the very bodies rubbished by the Bush circle as limp-wristed, cheese-eating, European fripperies — were Made in America. The UN and Nato, along with the Bretton Woods financial system, were forged in the post-war belief that America’s future lay in global co-operation. The go-it-alone impulse of today’s Washington is the first break from that thinking.

No matter which way you slice it, the current Republican world view is at odds with American tradition, Republican as much as Democratic. Americans are, despite popular myth, hardly a warlike people. One US researcher has established that the peace movement against the Vietnam war was only the fourth biggest such movement in the country’s history: they have constantly tried to avoid conflict. John Kerry struck a chord last week when he vowed to ‘bring back this nation’s time-honoured tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to’. Historically, the American giant has been slow (sometimes too slow) to stir. Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war marks a radical break from that habit, too.

Future generations will puzzle over an administration which tore up the rule-book, and not only in foreign policy. They will note the separation of Church and State, older than the Constitution, and wonder at a White House which made morning Bible study for staff ‘not quite uncompulsory’, in the words of former Bush speechwriter David Frum. They will marvel at an attorney-general who thinks nothing of interrupting a speech to burst into song, perhaps his own composition, a Christian soft-rock anthem called ‘Let the eagle soar’. The previous pattern was, to quote Kerry again, not to wear one’s faith on one’s sleeve. The Bushites broke that one long ago.

None of this strips me of my own faith in America. For I see the Bush era for what it is, an exception to the rule. And the exception is a reminder of what a very good rule that is. The sooner it is restored the better. [link via BuzzFlash]

A reporter is being held in contempt of court and faces possible jail time, and another was earlier threatened by a federal judge with the same fate, after they refused to answer questions from a special prosecutor investigating whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of a covert CIA officer last year.

Newly released court orders show U.S. District Court Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan two weeks ago ordered Matt Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC to appear before a grand jury and tell whether they knew that White House sources provided the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media.

The Justice Department probe is trying to determine whether this information was provided knowingly, in violation of the law. Hogan's orders show that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald believes Cooper and Russert know the answer.

Cooper still refused to answer questions after Hogan's July 20 order, and on Aug. 6 Hogan held him in contempt of court and ordered that he go to jail. Cooper has been released on bond pending his emergency appeal to a federal appeals court. Hogan has ordered that Time pay a $1,000 fine for each day Cooper does not appear before the grand jury.

Sources close to the investigation said they believe Russert was not held in contempt Aug. 6 because he agreed to answer the questions after Hogan's July 20 ruling.

Both journalists had earlier tried to quash the subpoenas issued by Fitzgerald in May. But, citing a Supreme Court decision, Judge Hogan ruled that journalists have no privilege to protect anonymous sources when the state has a compelling interest to investigate or prosecute a crime.

Hogan wrote in his just-unsealed order that the information requested from Cooper and Russert is "very limited" and that "all available alternative means of obtaining the information have been exhausted." He added that "the testimony sought is expected to constitute direct evidence of innocence or guilt." [link via Needlenose; emphasis added]

If Russert has talked to the grand jury and disclosed the identity of the Plame leaker, Fitzgerald should be getting close to an indictment. Let's hope he doesn't decide to wait until after the election to announce it.

Journalist:  What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and state governments?

 

Bush:  Yeah. Uh, tribal sovereignty means just that:  sovereignty. It's, you're a, you're a, you've been given sovereignty and you're -- viewed as a sovereign entity. (Journalists laugh at Bush.) And therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

A violent squall sprang up in Blogistan earlier this year over comments made by a wonkish blogger named Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos. He typed something impolitic about four contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, whose charred, mutilated corpses made for a perverse photo-op on the front page of The New York Times, as well as leading the news on CNN. The dead men weren't there on orders, Moulitsas, a military vet, pointed out. They weren't there to rebuild Iraq. "They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them."

Not surprisingly, Moulitsas' rant offended a number of people representing a wide palette of political persuasions. And here's where it gets interesting. With the Internet being the Internet, his comments spread at the speed of data. Worse, they were immediately etched into the ether and permanently archived, unlike, say, cocktail chatter. In response, conservatives organized a boycott; liberal bloggers jumped in, urging Moulitsas to apologize; three sponsors pulled their ads; and the Kerry campaign, allergic to such controversy, announced in the campaign's own Web log that "In light of the unacceptable statement about the death of Americans made by Daily Kos, we have removed the link to this blog from our website."

. . . .

. . . I wonder if the Kerry campaign really thought through its decision to cut links with the Daily Kos. It sets a dangerous precedent. After all, just because you link to a site, does it mean that you stand by its content? Does it imply an implicit endorsement? If that’s the case, then how can the Kerry campaign justify linking to other sites that post material that is arguably just as off-color as Moulitsas "literally speaking ill of the dead[.]"

. . . .

[I]f Kerry and company are going to be consistent (read: not hypocritical), they had better cut links to any site that posts material contrary to Kerry's official views -- and now.

. . . .

OK, Mr. Kerry. Let the de-linking begin.

In the parts of the article I've ellipsized out, Penenberg referenced supposedly objectionable things said at Democratic Underground and this site. Ironically, as right blogger The Shape of Days pointed out, Penenberg's criticism of this site, at least, was misplaced:

I took slight issue with one thing [Penenberg] said, though. He said:

After all, the Kerry website links to Kicking Ass -- the Democratic National Committee's official blog, and BeatBushBlog, whose purveyor asked recently: "How many different wars can our 'war president' fuck up? The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the 'war on drugs,' the 'war on terror'...." I'm sure John Kerry would agree with the sentiments, but I bet he wouldn't endorse the language. (Although Vice President Dick Cheney, who recently told Sen. Patrick J. Leahy to "fuck himself" after Leahy questioned Cheney's Halliburton ties on the Senate floor, might.)

I pointed out that since Senator Kerry used the f-word himself in a December 2003 interview with Rolling Stone he probably would endorse such language. In fact, the statement Mr. Penenberg quoted from BeatBushBlog was very close to being a direct quote.

I don't doubt, though, that there are things on this blog that Kerry might find offensive, or might not want his campaign associated with. No doubt the same is true of other blogs on Kerry's (former) blogroll. But that's to be expected. Neither Kerry, nor any fair-minded person on the Right (OK, that may be an oxymoron), can think that every blogger who supports Kerry will hold views identical with his. I would have thought that Kerry could adequately protect against a recurrence of another Kos-type situation by simply putting a disclaimer on his site, as others have done. For example, the DCCC's blog, The Stakeholder, says under its blogroll:

(Opinions Expressed by these sites are not necessarily those held by us. So don't even try to blame us for things they say. It will just make you look lame. Seriously.)

"I'm running because I understand how to take a strong economy and make it stronger. I say we have a strong economy and it's getting stronger..."

George W. Bush
August 6, 2004
(On his way to Kennebunkport for the weekend)

Largest drop in consumer spending in three years. Oil prices reach record highs. Value of the U.S. Dollar plunging. Construction spending off. Shockingly low job growth in July (May and June figures also revised downward). Stock Market at new low for the year.

NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average plunged nearly 150 points Friday to a new 2004 low as investors bailed out of stocks in the wake of a disappointing jobs report and continuing high oil prices. The Nasdaq composite index and Standard & Poor's 500 also marked new year-to-date lows for the second straight session.

The Dow fell 147.70, or 1.5 percent, to 9,815.33, the lowest close on the Dow since Nov. 28. Broader stock indicators also fell sharply. The Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 16.73, or 1.6 percent, to 1,063.97, and the Nasdaq was down 44.74, or 2.5 percent, at 1,776.89. It was the lowest close for the S&P 500 since Dec. 10, and the lowest for the Nasdaq since Aug. 26, 2003.

Payroll figures released early Friday showed employers added just 32,000 jobs last month, data low enough to warrant worries that a slowing in the economy in June may have been more just a brief pause.

Combined with oil prices still hovering near $44 a barrel, investors sold off heavily for a second straight day, worried that inflation and slow job growth would interrupt the economic recovery for a sustained length of time.

"We've broken through our lows for the year, and the outlook for the near future looks even more negative," said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at Spencer Clarke LLC. "Today's jobs data was clearly disappointing and calls into question the strength of the labor market, the strength of the economy and the strength of corporate profits over the next few quarters."

For the week, the Dow dropped 3.2 percent, the S&P 500 fell 3.4 percent and the Nasdaq plummeted 5.9 percent. It was the worst weekly performance for the Dow since the second week of March, and the worst week of the year for the other two indexes.

The July job report reflects the weakest increase in hiring since December and comes after a revised gain of just 78,000 in June, even less than previously reported. Economists had forecast the creation of roughly 243,000 jobs for July.

"If I know Republicans and their grass-roots operations, they'll spend most of their time trying to phone bank the Amish," said Kerry spokesman Mark Nevins.

Other significant events that happened on this day?

- The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

- Karenna Gore, M. Night Shymalan and Soleil Moon Frye were born.

- Bush couldn't glean from a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside America" that Osama bin Laden might be determined to attack inside America.

Note that since Jesse is half my age, he cites co-birthdayists (to coin a word) who are actually still alive.

FURTHER UPDATE: It was NTodd's birthday, too! Happy belated birthday to him!

"I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness to go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there. So I certainly wouldn't imitate it."

Alan Keyes today:

Alan Keyes . . . has agreed to accept the nomination as the Illinois GOP nominee for Senate and plans a public rollout for his campaign on Sunday, several Republican sources said Thursday.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown:

Keyes lives in Maryland and has no known connection to Illinois[.]

A funny thing happened after the United States transferred sovereignty over Iraq. On the ground, things didn't change, except for the worse.

But as Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect puts it, the cosmetic change in regime had the effect of "Afghanizing" the media coverage of Iraq.

He's referring to the way news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off sharply after the initial military defeat of the Taliban. A nation we had gone to war to liberate and had promised to secure and rebuild - a promise largely broken - once again became a small, faraway country of which we knew nothing.

Incredibly, the same thing happened to Iraq after June 28. Iraq stories moved to the inside pages of newspapers, and largely off TV screens. Many people got the impression that things had improved. Even journalists were taken in: a number of newspaper stories asserted that the rate of U.S. losses there fell after the handoff. (Actual figures: 42 American soldiers died in June, and 54 in July.)

The trouble with this shift of attention is that if we don't have a clear picture of what's actually happening in Iraq, we can't have a serious discussion of the options that remain for making the best of a very bad situation.

The military reality in Iraq is that there has been no letup in the insurgency, and large parts of the country seem to be effectively under the control of groups hostile to the U.S.-supported government.

. . . .

One thing is clear: calls to "stay the course" are fatuous. The course we're on leads downhill. American soldiers keep winning battles, but we're losing the war: our military is under severe strain; we're creating more terrorists than we're killing; our reputation, including our moral authority, is damaged each month this goes on.

So am I saying we should cut and run? That's another loaded phrase. Nobody wants to see helicopters lifting the last Americans off the roofs of the Green Zone.

But we need to move quickly to end our position as "an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land," the fate that none other than former President George H. W. Bush correctly warned could be the result of an invasion of Iraq. And that means turning real power over to Iraqis.

. . . .

Should we cut and run? No. But we should get realistic, and look in earnest for an exit.

 

Bush flip-flops all the time. If he had been in public life as long as Kerry has, his flip-flops would be as legion as the fish in the sea.

But it is the areas in which Bush's convictions have not changed that are the most troubling, and this includes a religiosity that comforts him in his intellectual inertness and granite-like beliefs that are impervious to logic, such as his tax policy and his relentless march to war in Iraq. Flip-flopping, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. It can be an indicator of an alert mind, one that adjusts to new realities, or it can be evidence of ambition decoupled from principle. With Kerry it's a mix of both. With Bush, who changes his positions but never his mind, it is always the latter.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.

 

They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

At a Monday night rally in Milwaukee, Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, introduced her husband. At times their speeches were interrupted by chants from Bush supporters using a megaphone on a nearby street to shout, "Four more years."

Heinz Kerry responded, "They want four more years of hell." The candidate threw back his head with a laugh, and the partisan, pro-Kerry crowd roared its approval, chanting, "Three more months, three more months," referring to the time remaining before the Nov. 2 election, with Heinz Kerry joining in.

Illinois Republican leaders asked Alan Keyes, an East Coast conservative who says out-of-state candidates aren't a good idea on principle, to be their U.S. Senate candidate Wednesday. But like a string of previous possiblities, Keyes said he needed a few days to think about it before deciding.

It's been a laborious six-week search as Republicans have sought a candidate willing to the tackle of daunting task of taking on Democratic rising star Barack Obama in the race for U.S. Senate.

'I'm Daniel Vovak. I'm running for senator. I'm the guy with the wig." That tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the process used Tuesday by the Illinois Republican Party to try to pick a nominee for the United States Senate.

. . . .

"It attracts attention," Vovak explained when asked about his George Washington colonial hairpiece, which at that moment was still tucked away in his backpack because Vovak said he "didn't want to have an unfair advantage" over the other candidates.

An amazing 13 individuals presented their credentials to the Republican State Central Committee in a closed-door meeting at the Union League Club. . . .

. . . .

Following the stir created by the appearance of Vovak, "the guy with the wig," the news media jumped to attention when they saw the "the guy with the beard.''

The guy with the beard was candidate Raymond Defenbaugh, a wealthy agribusinessman from Biggsville in western Illinois. Nobody had heard of him, which wasn't Defenbaugh's fault, but when we asked to see a copy of the resume he'd brought, Defenbaugh demurred.

"I'm not sure whether that would be safe or not," he said.

Defenbaugh's scraggly gray beard reached all the way to his necktie bar, which caused reporters to inquire as politely as possible whether the beard had some religious significance, guessing he might be Amish.

The reticent Defenbaugh explained even more politely that the purpose of his beard was to draw attention away from his right arm, severed below the elbow from a farm accident when he was young.

My first reaction was to look for his arm, which sure enough I hadn't noticed wasn't there, so transfixed was I by the beard.

. . . .

Wig guy Vovak said he's lived out of his car since moving to Illinois a month ago, which is one month more than Keyes has lived here.

The two finalists the party settled on after that meeting were Keyes and Andrea Grubb Barthwell. Who's Barthwell, you ask?

Some party insiders were surprised at the selection of Barthwell as a potential replacement for Ryan, who stepped down amid allegations he once took his wife to sex clubs. Barthwell has been the subject of a series of embarrassing revelations.

Republicans learned she contributed to Democrats and voted in Democratic primaries until 2001 when President Bush called her to ask her to serve as a deputy director at the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

And an internal probe found she "engaged in lewd and abusive behavior" by joking about an underling's sexual orientation.

"Are you f------ kidding me?" one GOP strategist close to the negotiations asked when told that Barthwell was in the top two.

Even more surprising to some was the ideological differences between Keyes and Barthwell. Barthwell has told the Sun-Times she supports abortion rights and opposes Bush's proposed amendment banning gay marriage.

Keyes is a staunch opponent of abortion and gay rights.

But [Illinois GOP Chairman Judy Baar] Topinka insisted "they are not necessarily on the opposite ends of the political spectrum."

State Sen. Dave Syverson, a panel member from Rockford, conceded the two clearly differ.

"It shows the diversity of party and the diversity of the state central committee," Syverson said.

He insisted the committee did not choose the two because both are African Americans, like Obama.

. . . .

"It just turned out to be that way," Syverson said. "We don't look at color the way the Democrats do. We look at the candidate and where they stand on the issues and their ability to articulate the issues," he said.

Sure, Dave. You look for a candidate who's strongly pro-choice or pro-life, and strongly supportive of, or opposed to, gay rights. And the Illinois GOP has put forward plenty of African-American candidates in the past. Such as . . .  well, OK, no one I can recall. The Chicago Tribune reported:

While some committee members said the issue of race was not specifically discussed in the meeting while they selected Keyes and Barthwell, one committee member said Keyes' race "obviously" played a role in his being seriously considered.

Josh Marshall has a hilarious piece about Keyes and Barthwell that you really should read in its entirety. Among other choice bits, he explains the sexual harassment charge against Barthwell:

In the words of the Associated Press, "In front of her staff, Andrea Grubb Barthwell made repeated comments about the sexual orientation of a staff member and used a kaleidoscope to make sexually offensive gestures ..."

The staffer in question later told the investigator that he found her comments "lewd, derogatory and called into question his heterosexuality."

A kaleidoscope, you ask?

Thus the AP ...

The lewd and abusive behavior finding stemmed from a Dec. 19, 2002, staff gathering. Barthwell made comments about a staff member's sexual orientation after the staff member misspoke in an earlier conversation, the memorandum said.

"Dr. Barthwell made reference to this staff member sitting on men's laps. A kaleidoscope pointed upward was placed on a chair by Dr. Barthwell as the staff member was about to sit down," it said.

"Dr. Barthwell suggested that the staff member would want to cut the cake available for the gathering because the knife was 'long and hard' and he might 'enjoy handling it.' When the cake was cut, Dr. Barthwell referred to the pieces as 'most' or 'beefy' and she said to the staff member, 'I know you like it big and meaty.'"

Notwithstanding the strong social skills one might infer from that anecdote, the report also said that Barthwell's staff "almost uniformly stated their fear and discomfort with what they consider to be unusual behavior patterns and displays of temper."

Josh has a lot to say about Keyes, too. Remember when you're reading his post that these are the two best candidates the GOP was able to come up with.

The [SEC] did not say that Mr. Cheney acted improperly, and the papers released by [it] did not detail the extent to which he was aware of the change or of the requirement to disclose it to investors. The S.E.C. said that Mr. Cheney had testified under oath and had "cooperated willingly and fully in the investigation conducted by the commission's career staff."

The blogosphere's usual supects have their customary excellent analysis of this, and are, to say the least, highly skeptical that Cheney didn't know about the accounting change. Billmon has the most thorough discussion. Here's Josh Marshall:

[N]ot surprisingly, in the article, Cheney's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell is trumpeting the results of the investigation as a clean bill of health for Cheney.

Now, with a whitewash, you might at least expect that Cheney would be denying knowledge that this took place, as implausible as it might sound. But he won't. After taking down O'Donnell's crowing about the results of the investigation, the Times asked whether Cheney "had been aware of the effect of the accounting change on the company's profits." But O'Donnell wouldn't answer.

So here you have the Vice President of the United States. His company gets caught in about as clear a case of cooking the books to inflate profits as you can imagine during the time he was CEO. (His salary and bonuses are tied to company profits.) And he won't even go to the trouble of denying that he was aware of the wrongdoing.

Can we have some more aggressive reporting on this one?

And Kevin Drum:

All I can say about this is that it must be mind-numbingly frustrating to be an SEC investigator. Dick Cheney — like most CEOs in cases like this — is off the hook because there's no smoking gun. But anybody who's spent even a few minutes in the executive suite of a large corporation knows that of course Cheney knew about this. Not only did he know, but this over-budget project was almost certainly a subject of considerable interest to him, the cost overruns were probably a subject of numerous status reports, and its effect on Halliburton's earnings was surely a frequent source of conversation. There is nothing that a CEO pays more attention to than his company's quarterly and yearly earnings reports. Nothing.

So Cheney knew. But as long as his former CFO and controller are willing to fall on their swords for him, there will never be any proof. And we will all go on pretending that when FY98 earnings turned out to be 46% higher than expected, Dick Cheney just scratched his chin, said "I'll be damned, things turned out OK after all," and then went out and played a round of golf. When he got back, nobody on his financial team, nobody in sales, nobody on the board, none of the analysts who follow Halliburton, and nobody in operations ever mentioned the subject of surprisingly high corporate earnings in his presence again.

And they all lived happily ever after.

God, I'm sick of this stuff. During the Clinton administration, nothing Bill or Hillary did before Bill took office (Whitewater) or after (Filegate, Travelgate) was too inconsequential for the Republican Congress, their attack dog Ken Starr, and a compliant media to blow it up into a huge scandal. Nor was anything too personal and unrelated to the duties of office (Monica) to warrant such treatment. Today, it seems that there is nothing anyone in the Bush administration can do, however criminal, venal, or in breach of the public trust, that it can't be swept under the rug.

It may be, as Kevin says, that it's too difficult in a case like this for the SEC to prove what Cheney knew and when he knew it. But shouldn't the media and Congress have some interest in this? I'm sure that they would have reacted with much more than a collective yawn if the company of which Vice President Gore had been the CEO had been fined for the same behavior. And shouldn't President Bush, who professes to believe deeply in corporate responsibility and personal responsibility, be calling for reforms that would make high corporate officials liable for malfeasance that they knew or should have known about?

John Kerry Volunteered for Vietnam, Commanded a Swift Boat, and was Decorated for Heroism. John Kerry volunteered for service in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War, where he served two tours of duty -- one tour as commander of a Navy Swift Boat in the Mekong Delta. He was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Combat "V", three Purple Hearts, the Presidential Unit Citation for Extraordinary Heroism, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, three Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medals and the Combat Action Ribbon. Following his service in Vietnam, Kerry served the United States Naval Reserves through 1978. [John Kerry’s official U.S. Navy service records. Available online at JohnKerry.com]

is more impressive than Bush's military record.

Americans Coming Together is easily the most important 527 of the cycle, and may very well hold the future of the party in its hands. Predicated entirely on grassroots organizing, voter registration and turnout, ACT has been active in battleground states since November 2003, eight months before any Kerry (obviously) or party organization (surprisingly) was on the ground.

Armed with palm pilots, the army of ACT workers and volunteers are building a voter database that rivals the much heralded Demzilla database built by the DNC.

I have a rough thesis that there is nothing the party can do, that private 527s, PACs, and other organizations can't do better, cheaper, and/or more efficiently. ACT is exhibit A.

Duncan B. Black holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He has held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics; the Université Catholique de Louvain; the University of California, Irvine; and, recently, Bryn Mawr College. He also has been involved with grassroots political activism. Black is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. (mis-capitalization corrected by me)

(CNN) -- A former Air Force chief of staff and one-time "Veteran for Bush" said Saturday that America's foreign relations for the first three years of President Bush's term have been "a national disaster" but that the president's Democratic rival was "up to the task" of rebuilding.

Retired Gen. Tony McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff during the first Gulf War, delivered the Democratic radio address supporting implementation of the 9/11 commission's recommendations for national security.

"As president, John Kerry will not waste a minute in bringing action on the reforms urged by the 9/11 commission," McPeak said of the Massachusetts senator nominated by the Democrats this week. "And he will not rest until America's defenses are strong."

The president, on the other hand, "fought against the very formation of the commission and continues to the present moment to give it only grudging cooperation, no matter what he says," the general said. "Why should we believe he will do anything to institute the needed change?"

. . . .

McPeak, a former fighter pilot who campaigned for Bob Dole in 1996 as well as Bush in 2000, said Bush's inability to craft a true allied coalition was a serious deficiency.

"The report of the 9/11 commission makes this clear: Fighting terrorists alone just doesn't work," he said. "If our enemy hatches a terror plot in Rome, we will need help from the Italians. If German intelligence knows the whereabouts of a senior al Qaeda member, America must have that information."

Instead, he said, Bush has "alienated our friends, damaged our credibility around the world, reduced our influence to an all-time low in my lifetime, given hope to our enemies."

McPeak said he backed Bush in 2000 because he "had hoped this president could provide" the leadership needed to face modern threats. But disillusionment, he said, has led him to change his voter registration from Republican to independent and shift his support to Kerry.

. . . .

"We who have some experience -- who have seen war close up and sent troops to battle -- know that victory is not won by single combat," he continued. "War is not like that. War is a team sport.

"We built the team that won World War II. We put together the great team that won the Cold War. That's why what has happened over the last three years is such a tragedy, such a national disaster. Rebuilding the team won't be easy." (link via BuzzFlash)