In memory

of the 24 Canadians who died when the towers fell on Sept. 11.

How many deaths will it take 'til we know

that too many people have died

September and October

So, what is coming up for September and October that will affect the election?
1. A bunch of new smear campaigns will be started about Kerry (movies, ads). And so you can count on the media parroting the RNC talking points and following the RNC agenda which gets them to interview another bunch of unnamed democrats about how Kerry "must respond to these serious accusations" and how Kerry "must talk about his policies" and "Kerry must present a clear position on ___", as if he hasn't already done all this and more.
But also coming up will be:
2. Election in Australia -- Howard will lose and the Aussie troops are out
3. Election in Afganistan -- what are the chances that this will be successful? If it is held at all, suicide bombers will blast the polling stations.
4. Another 100 US troops will die in Iraq, another thousand will be injured. More cities will be lost to the insurgents.
5. The Kelly book will ignite the Bush cocaine/drinking stories.
6. Farenheit 9/11 will be released on video. New round of ads, coverage, etc.
7. Boston might be in another pennant race. The New England Patriots might be doing well, too.
8. In the vice-presidential debate, Edwards will wipe the floor with Cheney. In the presidential debates, who knows what might happen . . . but if Kerry embraces his "inner Munster", he will come off as genuine and caring, which is the only thing that is important about these debates.
Have I missed anything?

Update on sources

In spite of the blogflap about typefaces, Kevin Drum reports "CBS is very, very confident that the memos are genuine. They believe that (a) their sources are rock solid, (b) the provenance of the documents is well established, and (c) the appearance of the documents matches the appearance of other documents created at the same place and time. In addition, people who knew Killian well have confirmed that the memos are genuine."

I don't get it

Here are the new documents about Bush's flight status.
http://wid.ap.org/documents/bush/040908xfer.pdf
Supposedly, these are the originals from 1972?
But NOBODY used Times Roman justified typeface fonts in 1972 -- particularly in personal memos for files.
Nobody used "fonts" at all, except typographers in printing plants.
What we had was: Courier 12 point And that's what everyone used.
In an office situation, writing a note for a file, at best you would get a typewritten note, maybe on an electric typewriter but more likely on a manual. These notes would have been typed by the office secretary, whose initials would be at the end of the memo. Much more likely that a note to file generated by the executive himself would have been handwritten, because most men could not type at all.

Well, now we're getting to it

A couple of days ago, I posted that America should be asking Who dropped the ball on 9/11?
Well, its starting to happen, all brought about by Cheney's incredibly stupid remark about how America would only be safe by voting for Bush. The New York Times editorial and Maureen Dowd both write about this, but Dowd is more interesting. She says Cheney Spits Toads: ". . . Cheney implies that John Kerry couldn't protect us from an attack like 9/11, blithely ignoring the fact that he and President Bush didn't protect us from the real 9/11." (emphasis mine). She continues " Mr. Cheney warns against falling back 'into the pre-9/11 mind-set,'' when, in fact, the Bush team's pre-9/11 mind-set was all about being stuck in the cold war and reviving 'Star Wars' - which doesn't work and is useless against terrorist tactics. The Bush crowd played down terrorism because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger had told their successors that Osama was a priority, and the Bushies scorned all things Clinton. The president shrugged off intelligence briefings with such headlines as 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'' because there was brush to be cleared and unaffordable tax-cutting to be done."
What Cheney appeared to mean by the "pre-9/11 mindset" remark is that the "old way" of dealing with terrorists by legal processes (arrest, trial, prison) is not as good as the "new way" of military processes brought to America by the Bush administration, using 9/11 as an excuse.
So far, the new way includes The Patriot Act, no-fly lists, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Gharib, outsourcing torture, denying the Geneva Conventions, alienating allies around the world, promoting preemptive war, redacting reports critical of allies like Saudi Arabia, outing CIA agents, death by container, actual murder or something like it (when Bush, in the 2002 State of the Union, talked about people "not being around anymore"), utter failure to progress on the Palestinian issue, and, of course, the wars in Afganistan and Iraq - all enacted with the meme of "keeping America safe", which they did not do and will not apologize for. Nor will they take responsibility for how terrorist acts are increasing around the world, and how a generation of Arab youth into new terrorists.
Gee, I think I'm getting a little shrill.

90 attacks a day in August -- but the generals soldier on!

Confronting Insurgents: U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq
Suggest the song which occurs to you while reading this article -- my own is the old Perry Como tune "dream along with me . . ." (Perry Como was in a movie I saw tonight, so likely that's why this one occured to me).
Its lines like this that bring it to mind:
". . . the administration had decided to let Dr. Allawi try to persuade rebel leaders to join the process of reconstructing Iraq, or suffer the consequences if they did not." So far, the "consequences" for Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra are that they have become rebel (US military definition) or free (insurgent definition) cities. Added to these should likely also be Najaf and Tikrit.
And then there is this line: "To buy time, General Myers said, Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, is working with the Iraqi government to develop a strategy to retake the cities. General Myers said that strategy included trying to "isolate certain communities," hampering the insurgents' ability to rearm and resupply, and curtailing attacks against American forces." Considering that they have now had 18 months to "hamper" and "curtail", how successful is this going to be?
And this one: ". . . an American assault is likely in the next four months. 'I do have about four months where I want to get to local control,'' General Metz said. 'And then I've got the rest of January to help the Iraqis to put the mechanisms in place.' . . ." And this one: ". . . commanders gave an upbeat assessment, noting that "the messages at Friday Prayer are becoming more and more moderate" and that American forces "keep continuous pressure on the enemy" while they help Iraqis with reconstruction."
Yes, they'll be winning any day now.
Kerry is right -- the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. The US has to get these people out of there before another thousand US troops and another 20,000 Iraqis are killed. Right now, the generals are singing "Dream along with me, I'm on my way to the stars!"

Who said this today?

Crossposted to E-Group
Read this excerpt from this transcript and try to figure out whose supporter is complaining:
". . . character assassination is the real centerpiece of the __ campaign . . . But if you want to be honest about who you are, just tell us, and you'll find you may lose, but you'll at least at the end of the campaign know that you were true to yourselves instead of all this gobbledygook. It's just amazing. The fact that they don't think they've been mean enough, they don't think they've been negative enough? These people have no sense of perception or proportion. They have no idea of who they are and how they sound . . . if they think they're exercising restraint and moderation as they walk down the aisle in this campaign they have no concept of who they really are, so no wonder it's tough for them to tell us. "
Is this -- a Kerry supporter complaining about the Bush campaign? Or a Bush supporter complaining about the Kerry campaign?
When I read the right-wing blogs and the left-wing blogs, sometimes I think I am reading about election campaigns in two different countries, maybe even on two different planets.
When Kerry wins, as I very much hope he will, I hope he can make some dent in the level of anger and despair and division in the US, and lead them away from this kind of division. Its bad for the country, whatever country you're in.

"But...but...but..."

This MSNBC story Kerry, Bush battle over the war uses the usual "he said/he said" format -- but this time, for a change, note that it is Kerry on the offense - Iraq, jobs - and Bush/Cheney on the defense.
And note that Kerry is now talking about bringing all the troops home - to this, after another seven dead today, Bush really has no response. He's been so "resolute" about "staying the course" in Iraq that its hard to see how he can twist to another position now.

The GOP's platform of tragedy

I love Garrison Keillor. It was for his "Mr. Blue" column that I originally subscribed to Salon. Now read this: The GOP's platform of tragedy. Great exceprts abound:
"The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, N.M., little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous."
and
"George W. Bush is running for re-election on a platform of tragedy - the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours."
Thanks, Buzzflash, for finding this story.

Bush Is A Miserable Failure, But Good News - John Kerry Has An Optimistic Plan For a Better America

Great post on Daily Kos -- Daily Kos :: Bush Is A Miserable Failure, But Good News - John Kerry Has An Optimistic Plan For a Better America
Its EXACTLY what the democrats and friends need to stress now.

He's coming back

Some better poll news.
The Rasmussen traking poll Prez track 2004 shows Kerry is coming back, to 46.4%, with Bush down to 47.6%. Two-thirds of this poll includes the Bush speech and the Kerry reaction. As I understood it during the Canadian election, the tracking polls may not indicate absolute numbers but they do indicate direction, whether someone is winning or losing. This poll is now calling a thousand people a day.

We had bad polls, too

To my American friends: a note about polls.
The Time and Newsweek polls are pretty discouraging, I admit.
But its still 8 weeks to the election. Come November, no one will remember what anyone said they might do on Sept. 2.
During the Canadian election campaign, which was only a month long, the Martin liberals had lots of bad polls -- from the beginning, the polls showed a close race, and about two weeks into the campaign, it looked as though Harper was winning. Martin didn't even "win" the leaders debate a week before the vote.
But, on election day, the Liberals elected 130 seats and the Conservatives about 95 (sorry, I cannot tell you the exact numbers because my computer is working so slowly it would take forever to call up the right references).
The key problem, for Harper, was when he started swaggering -- talking about who would be in his cabinet and the like. Many Canadians had been flirting with the idea of supporting him -- a likeable guy, good looking, energetic. In comparison, Martin looked sort of old, and he was dragging behind him a lot of scandal from the Chretien administration. But Martin got the nod in the end because he had "just enough" support to carry the liberals in a number of close races. So it didn't matter that the Conservative majorities in Alberta were huge. Basically, "just enough" people spread out across the country could not support Harper's brand of radical conservatism.
The bad polls had another effect -- they energized Martin -- for the first time in his life, he threw himself into campaigning, pounding home his messages, speech after speech, rally after rally. And oh, wasn't everyone still telling him he was doing it wrong, that he had the wrong messages! But HE believed in what he was saying, and it came through.
On the last day of the campaign, he flew coast to coast, walking in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The national press corps was pissed -- they had expected to be able to quit early on the last day, instead they had to follow Martin on a dawn til dusk odessey, ending in BC at midnight and still having to fly home from there. But this, for Canadians, sealed the deal -- it was a stunt, but people liked it.
So be of good cheer, Americans. Polls do not an election make.

Who dropped the ball on 9/11?

Bush did, that's who.
Watching the coverage of the horrible Russian school disaster, I noted that a lot of the parents are blaming Putin for the disaster. Unfairly, perhaps -- but Putin promised, apparently, to keep them safe two or three years ago and now its proven that he did not.
So why has Bush been let off the hook so throughly on 9/11? The media completely accepted Condi's "but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" line. The reason Bush was so opposed to the 9/11 commission was his fear that they would blame him for the attacks -- and they should have. It has now been proven that he had plenty of warning, with plenty of people running around with their hair on fire for months before it happened.
It's easy to see now how simple it would have been to stop 9/11 -- if, in mid-July, they had increased airline security by banning knives on planes, that would have done it. And if they had also, in August, followed up on the Presidential Daily Brief by pulling together all those on-going FBI and CIA investigations, that would have done it, too.
Now, you can argue that no one then could have known how easy it would have been to disrupt the 9/11 attack. But they knew that something big was being planned. And they failed to take some pretty obvious steps to increase protection for the American people.
Richard Clarke was right to apologize to the 9/11 families -- he WAS at fault. But so, even more so, was the rest of the Bush administration.
9/11 is back on the public stage now, because the republicans put it there during their convention.
So I wonder now if America will begin to reexamine its 9/11 meme, where the fall of the towers has been talked about as though it was a completely unexpected act of god. And I wonder if they will begin to realize that while Al Quada was to blame for 9/11, the Bush administration should have stopped it but didn't because they dropped the ball.

"It was better in the original German"

Best comment on Zel Miller's speech, from a commenter on Atrios.GOP backs away from Miller's blast -- too late! You guys decided to let a nutcase be a keynote speaker -- what were you thinking?