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Naked eye astronomy 
I'm going to be outside observing the total eclipse of the moon. Perfect viewing in most of North America. Take a break and go witness a beautiful natural phenomenon. Then come back in and continue bashing Bush.
Quack, quack
Start a meme... by Garret Vreeland
Start a meme, get the crowds chanting. "Quack-quack, Mr Bush." Flap your arms, make it loud. "Quack-quack, Mr Cheney." To be precise, al-QaQaa. But quack-quack is close enough, with a secondary payoff ...the sound of soon-to-be lame ducks. [more]
One finger victory salute
The server is jammed so you may need to put off satisfying your curiosity.
George W. Bush's "One-fingered victory salute"
More on Eminem
Eminem Aims at Bush by Sam Graham-Felsen
Has Eminem--the poster child of American disenchantment--become the new face of activism?
Those who are accustomed to Eminem's gay-bashing, gun-toting antics will hardly believe their eyes, as they watch his new video in which the top-selling rapper and his posse file into the voting booths, the words "Vote Tuesday, November 2" fading into the screen.
Mosh could well be one of the most overtly political pop music videos ever produced, and is easily the most direct anti-Bush cultural statement since Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Although the video debuted just a week before the election, it could have an unprecedented cultural and political impact, coming from the top-grossing rap star in America, and one of the seminal pop icons of the last decade.
The largely animated video begins with a suited Eminem reading "My Pet Goat" upside down to a classroom full of children. Moments later, however, Eminem shifts from his usual mode of sarcastic critique to lyrics reflecting sincere political passion. [more]
Scary wolves reworked
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
Bush's buddy, Allawi
Allawi Blames Ambush on 'Negligence' by Tini Tran
Iraq's interim prime minister blamed U.S.-led coalition forces Tuesday for "great negligence" in the ambush that killed about 50 American-trained soldiers, and a U.S. airstrike in Fallujah killed an aide to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the military said.
(...)
Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi blamed the coalition for poor security in Saturday's ambush about 95 miles east of Baghdad.
"It was a heinous crime where a group of National Guards were targeted," Allawi said. "There was great negligence on the part of some coalition forces. It seems there was sort of determination on doing Iraq and Iraqi people harm."
The attack on the soldiers, who were returning home on leave, occurred on a remote eastern highway when their buses were stopped by insurgents at a fake checkpoint, police and defense officials said.
Some of the bodies were found in rows -- shot execution-style in the head, the Defense Ministry said. Other bodies were found on a burned bus nearby. [more]
Diplomacy is such an annoyance
US gave date of war to Britain in advance, court papers reveal by Colin Brown
Secret plans for the war in Iraq were passed to British Army chiefs by US defence planners five months before the invasion was launched, a court martial heard yesterday.
The revelation strengthened suspicions that Tony Blair gave his agreement to President George Bush to go to war while the diplomatic efforts to force Saddam Hussein to comply with UN resolutions were continuing.
Alan Simpson, the leader of Labour Against the War, said the documents were "dynamite", if genuine, and showed that Clare Short was right to assert in her book, serialised in The Independent, that Mr Blair had "knowingly misled" Parliament. [more]
Republican for Kerry
With Bush's foreign and economic policy a sheer disaster, my vote goes to John Kerry by Dan Simpson
I need to provide some personal history today so you'll know what I'm talking about.
I am virtually a lifelong Republican, partly originating from the fact that my father was one of the few Republicans ever to hold city office in the small, Democratic, Ohio town I come from. My mother was always a Republican poll-watcher.
I cast my first vote for president in 1960, for Richard Nixon, for whom I voted altogether three times. I voted for Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan twice, George H.W. Bush twice, and George W. Bush in 2000. Disgusted by Watergate and vaguely attracted by Jimmy Carter's throw-back, apparent rural cleanliness, I voted for him in 1976, and for Bill Clinton in 1996, repelled by Bob Dole. I generally vote a split ticket and am not an automatic anything, certainly not a Democrat.
As a career diplomat I worked for every American administration from Lyndon Johnson through George W. Bush, serving mostly overseas, in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, carrying out the foreign policy of whatever administration was in power. One does make foreign policy as well as carry it out, but I come from the old school of the U.S. Foreign Service that believes that the American people elect the government in power in Washington, it sets the policy, and you carry it out.
That, as a long prelude to saying that next Tuesday I will vote for John Kerry for president. I will do so with a long, family Republican background because, as a longtime foreign affairs professional I feel that George W. Bush has made an awful mess of U.S. policy.
That would be bad enough in itself but his actions in that area have also already killed more than 1,100 young American men and women in Iraq. But his reasons are even worse.
I believe that he came to office with the intention of transferring as much of America's wealth as possible into the hands of defense contractors such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton and the oil companies that were his background and remain his so-called "base." The result is a U.S. economy on the skids. The jobs situation is very bad, as we know especially well here in Western Pennsylvania. George W. Bush is the first American president since the Great Depression under whom our economy has slipped backward in creating jobs. The national debt -- our debt -- fueled by spending for his war and his budget deficit, has reached an inconceivable $7.4 trillion and continues to rise at $1.67 billion per day.
Bush's "base" is prospering...[more]
Not this time
No Stolen Election
Our Purpose
We all remember the votes that were never counted in Florida 2000. While we are all working hard for a positive outcome on November 2nd, we also have to be prepared for a repeat of a 2000 stolen election. By signing the No Stolen Election pledge, you will be joining with thousands of others in the November 3rd Urgent Response Network. Please sign the pledge and pass it around far and wide.
We have established a Fair Elections Advisory Council made up of US and international elections experts who will give us their assessment on election day itself. If they find significant fraud, we will activate the Urgent Response Network on or immediately after November 3rd, calling on people everywhere to engage in protest, including non-violent civil disobedience, in front of their local federal buildings and other appropriate places. We will also be asking those who can to converge in the states where the most serious fraud occurred, as well as in Washington DC.
In addition to signing the pledge, please work with other people and groups in your area to protect the vote on Election Day on November 2nd and to build the Urgent Response Network. Pick a venue for your local protest in the case that the Urgent Response Network is activated, and list the time and place on the website. We also recommend that you set up a place to jointly watch the election results on Election Night.
Let us commit ourselves to making sure that this time around, the person who occupies the White House is the one who won the election.
The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy by Harold Meyerson
With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own.
Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was all but drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black ministers to keep their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey election came to light.
For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however, universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm. [more]
More White House lies
No Check of Bunder, Unit Commander Says by Jim Dwyer and David E. Sanger
White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.
But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.
The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.
Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.
"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."
What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took on new significance this week, after The New York Times, working with the CBS News program "60 Minutes," reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion. [more]
The best military in the world. But for how long?
Rumsfeld's War PBS and The Washington Post
From the Introduction:
With the United States Army deployed in a dozen hotspots around the world‹on constant alert in Afghanistan and taking casualties almost every day in Iraq‹some current and former officers now say the army is on the verge of being broken. The man responsible, according to those officers, is a secretary of defense who came into the Pentagon determined to transform the shape of the military.
In "Rumsfeld's War," FRONTLINE and The Washington Post join forces for the first time to investigate Donald Rumsfeld's contentious battle with the Pentagon bureaucracy to assert civilian control of the military and remake the way America fights.
This report traces Donald Rumsfeld's career from his time as an adviser to President Nixon to his rise as the oft-seen and well-known face of the George W. Bush administration during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In interviews with key administration officials, military leaders, and reporters from The Washington Post, the documentary examines how a secretary of defense bent on reform became a secretary of war accused of ignoring the advice of his generals.
"He came in determined to reassert civilian control over the Joint Staff and the rest of the military and it was a pretty tough process, a lot of friction in those first months, with Rumsfeld saying, `No, I don't think you heard me clearly. I'm the boss. I want it this way,'" reporter Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post tells FRONTLINE.
In the early months of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld saw his biggest enemy as the outdated Cold War thinking of the troops he commanded. "Donald Rumsfeld wanted to build a smaller, nimbler, and more networked military that could respond swiftly to threats anywhere in the world. He came into the Defense Department where the forces were heavy and slow, took months to deploy and worked best when used in massive numbers," says Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Former Secretary of the Army Thomas Whitesays that when Rumsfeld tried to push for a reduction in the number of troops in the army, the secretary found himself clashing with General Eric Shinseki, the army's respected Chief of Staff.
"There were very strongly held views, myself and General Shinseki and others in the room, that this was not the right answer," White says of one meeting with Rumsfeld. "The secretary, he just got up and walked out, which was a signal to all of us that he wasn't terribly happy with the results of the meeting." [more]
Yet another surprising Kerry endorsement
Why I Am Supporting John Kerry: Risk Management by Andrew Sullivan
The phrase "lesser of two evils" often comes up at this time every four years, but this November, I think, it's too cynical a formula. Neither George W. Bush nor John Kerry can be credibly described as "evils." They have their faults, some of which are glaring. They are both second-tier politicians, thrust into the spotlight at a time when we desperately need those in the first circle of talent and vision. But they are not evil. When the papers carry pictures of 50 Iraqi recruits gunned down in a serried row, as Stalin and Hitler did to their enemies, we need have no doubt where the true evil lies. The question before us, first and foremost, is which candidate is best suited to confront this evil in the next four years. In other words: Who is the lesser of two risks?
(...)
But, in every election, we decide on unknowables. When I read my endorsement of George W. Bush of four years ago, I see almost no inkling of what was about to happen and the kind of president Bush turned out to be. But we do the best we can in elections, with limited information and fallible judgment. I should reiterate: I do not hate this president. I admire him in many ways--his tenacity, his vision of democracy, his humor, his faith. I have supported him more than strongly in the last four years--and, perhaps, when the dangers seemed so grave, I went overboard and willfully overlooked his faults because he was the president and the country was in danger. I was also guilty of minimizing the dangers of invading Iraq and placed too much faith, perhaps, in the powers of the American military machine and competence of the Bush administration. Writers bear some responsibility too for making mistakes; and I take mine. But they bear a greater responsibility if they do not acknowledge them and learn. And it is simply foolish to ignore what we have found out this past year about Bush's obvious limits, his glaring failures, his fundamental weakness as a leader. I fear he is out of his depth and exhausted. I simply do not have confidence in him to navigate the waters ahead skillfully enough to avoid or survive the darkening clouds on the horizon. (emphasis added) [more]
Still undecided? Need a little help?
John Kerry for Dummies
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