As referenced recently in Doonesbury, John Eisenhower, son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, plans to vote for Kerry. I can't share Eisenhower's enthusiasm for the Democratic alternative, but he's certainly right when he says that the Republican party has gone astray during the Bush administration:
Today many people are rightly concerned about our precious individual freedoms, our privacy, the basis of our democracy. Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so? I wonder. In 1960, President Eisenhower told the Republican convention, "If ever we put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both." I would appreciate hearing such warnings from the Republican Party of today.
This month Discover offers a detailed comparison of Bush's and Kerry's records on science policy issues:
Examining the positions of both Bush and challenger John Kerry might appear to be easy because both have track records. But feints, winks, and oratorical extravagance are the daily tactics of politics. What's said and seen do not necessarily become policy and lawmaking. A president can loudly support a big research project, then fail to push it in Congress. The House and the Senate can make a show of an appealing program by passing an authorization bill, then somehow fail to pass the appropriations bill that pays for it. Often the impression of battle comes from firing blanks. To see where both the bullets and the blanks are being fired, let's examine the major issues of science policy in 2004 and see where the candidates stand.
Lifeouttacontext points out that during last week's Presidential "debate" not every network showed the candidates' reactions to their opponent's remarks. I watched the debate (half of it, anyway) on NBC, and seeing those reactions did make a difference to my assessment of the two candidates. Kudos to Fox for ignoring the rules on this one...
Also of interest, Connie Rice's essay "Top 10 Secrets They Don't Want You to Know About the Debates".
The White House said they'd released all documents pertaining to Bush's military service. Seems another one just turned up.
I'll be the first to say that the Bush administration's so-called "War on Terror" has been at times outrageous and even laughable. But the recent deportation of Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) is not one of those times. Am I the only person who remembers his support for the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie? Did I only imagine smashing one of his records in protest during my radio show at the time? No, apparently not. Dangerous? Probably not. A dupe? Quite possibly.
President Bush's grandfather was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. [via kbuxton]
David Foster doubts that John Kerry is any smarter than Bush. At least, the evidence is pretty thin on the ground...
Those Kerry attributes that many take for signs of intelligence seem to me to be something very different: markers of class status. Enunciating precisely, using long and complex sentences, not having certain regional accents...to a certain set of people, these things say "one of us" in a manner similar to the role that upper-class accents once played (and, to an extent, still play) in Britain.
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (in cooperation with the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union and two Connecticut law firms) today filed a suit on behalf of seven gay and lesbian couples from across Connecticut designed to end Connecticut's exclusion of lesbian and gay couples from marriage rights. GLAD represented plaintiffs in the recent gay marriage case in Massachusetts.
[/politics/connecticut] permanent link
Since bloggers covered the Democratic National Convention, there's was more information available than anyone could summarize (though Technorati gave it the old college try). Of course, this was also plenty of discussion about bloggers vs. "journalists". See Wired and Salon for more bird's eye coverage.
But, the novelty of bloggers with credentials aside, who cares about the conventions? Nothing new gets said inside on the convention floor, that's for sure. The real story this time was what happened outside the convention, in the DNC's so-called "Free Speech Zone". If you want to know what both major parties think about free speech, just take a look at the pictures.
While we're on that subject, don't miss James Atkinson's security assessment of the convention. Would you feel any safer with the folks responsible for this mess protecting the whole country? Or do you think that both major parties would rather just sweep their failings under the rug?
John Kerry's "Let America Be America Again" slogan is problematic, we know. Jess at A Great Notion has some suggestions for alternate slogans.
Hell, if Kerry had the balls to use "America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel" as his slogan, I'd probably vote for him...
[via boingboing]
Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and the author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America contends that, "Thanks to his meticulous planning and foresight, Saddam's lieutenants are now running the Iraqi resistance and the US's best option is to withdraw now..."
Regardless of the number of troops the United States puts on the ground or how long they stay there, Allawi's government is doomed to fail. The more it fails, the more it will have to rely on the United States to prop it up. The more the United States props up Allawi, the more discredited he will become in the eyes of the Iraqi people -- all of which creates yet more opportunities for the Iraqi resistance to exploit.
We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon.
The calculus is quite simple: the sooner we bring our forces home, the weaker this movement will be. And, of course, the obverse is true: the longer we stay, the stronger and more enduring this byproduct of Bush's elective war on Iraq will be.
There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning but rather of mitigating defeat.
[via metafilter]
Robin Good links to two explanations of why "left" and "right" do not matter, or, The Quigley Formula in action.
Download For Democracy is taking it (an archive of government documents) to the P2P networks:
The Download For Democracy campaign is currently offering PDF's of over 600 government memos, communications, and reports, all of which were obtained from mainstream media sources, respected legal or academic groups, or the federal government itself.
And, yes, MD5 checksums are available to verify the authenticity of the documents you download. Way to go! [via metafilter]
Oh, gee, I guess we had those records after all. You know, the ones we thought we'd lost. Of course, it still doesn't look like Bush drilled with his unit or even picked up paychecks. But, don't worry, since he was honorably dishcharged, that proves he really served, right?
That may not be news. But here's what Paul Lukasiak The AWOL Project has to say about the secrets of Bush's payroll records (the ones we'd already seen):
On February 10, 2004, the White House released George W Bush's quarterly payroll summaries for his last year in the Texas Air National Guard, claiming that they proved that Bush had "fulfilled his duties" as a member of the US Armed Forces. However, An examination of these records within the context of laws and policies of that time reveals that at least half (and as much as two thirds) of the pay and "points" credited toward Bush's mandatory monthly training were fraudulent. When one deducts these fraudulent points from Bush's records, Bush does not achieve the minimum number of points under the White House's own (erroneous) criteria.
It is likely that the White House is unaware of what the payroll records reveal, because the most damning information is buried in lines of "incomprehensible" data found at the bottom of the payroll reports. This article breaks that code, and shows that Bush repeatedly claimed credit and pay for performing "substitute training" for mandatory monthly drills with his unit that was well outside the time limits set for "substitute training." And although he was required to get advance authorization for all training, the public record shows that Bush could not have received the necessary authorizations for "training" performed in Alabama .
Read his article and decide for yourself...
boingboing summarizes where to get dead tree versions of "The 9/11 Commission Report".
Her Majesty's government has also been busy writing reports about what went wrong with intelligence on Iraq: the Butler report, the Hutton report, the Intelligence and Security Committee report, and the Foreign Affairs Committee report. And don't miss the government's September dossier and February dossier.
The Butler report blames no individual, focusing instead on "group think - the development of a prevailing wisdom". Lord Butler specifically insisted that John Scarlett, the chairman of the joint intelligence committee responsible for drawing up the Iraq dossier, should not lose his job as forthcoming head of MI6.
Sound familiar?
[via disinfo]
In case you've already zipped through the Senate report on Iraq intelligence, here's the full text (585 pages) of "The 9/11 Commission Report".
Read it for yourself (all 512 pages of it; except the substantial portions that have been blacked out, of course): "Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments Of Iraq" by those wacky guys and gals of the US Senate's Select Committee On Intelligence .
For the first time, some bloggers will be covering the Democratic and Republican conventions alongside traditional journalists.
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