I've got a particular interest in debates, having been a high school and college debater and, for a blissfully short time afterwards, a high school debate coach.
Competitive policy debate has very little to do with political debates (trust me), but being involved with debate as long as I have has a way of rubbing off on you.

I'm cutting life short to make sure I watch the Thursday Kerry/Bush debate.

What do I expect? Who knows? Krugman seems to think that our captive press will trumpet a Bush victory no matter how the debate actually goes:

Let's face it: whatever happens in Thursday's debate, cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner. This will reflect the political bias so evident during the party conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation.

In a particularly good post, Atrios says he expects more of the same fantasyland crap from Bush that we've been getting lately:

As for my pre-debate spin, which has the added benefit of being honest, is that what we're going to get from Bush is the exact same thing we've been getting from him throughout his presidency. We'll get "happy talk" on Iraq which contradicts reality. We'll get "tough talk" on unnamed terrrorists, despite the fact that Ashcroft hasn't managed to convict any. We'll get "happy talk" on Afghanistan, with Bush doing things like hilariously claiming that the "Taliban is no longer in existence." We'll probably get some shockingingly unpresidential behavior, including the inappropriate humor he so loves.

But, what we probably won't get is anything new. Same shit, different night, as Iraq continues to burn.

Ezra from Pandagon snarks on the things that the Bush team especially wanted. Draw your own conclusions:

[NYT:] Still, officials of the debate commission said they were agreeing primarily to those things Mr. Bush's aides had emphasized as especially important to them: a strict time limit on candidate responses, an electronic warning when candidates exceed their speaking time that can be seen and heard by viewers at home, and a prohibition against the candidates' directly posing questions to each other.

[Ezra:] So the Bush campaign is particularly concerned that candidates will have too much time to explain their policies, viewers won't know that a speaker has exceeded their time limit, and the two men vying to lead our nation might be able to engage each other's ideas directly. Were I a Republican, I'd be so damn proud right now...

Marie at Left Coaster is tired of the whole damn thing:

The worst thing about this set is that it’s bad TV. It’s boring. Two old white men standing at podiums and pretending to answer easy questions is not visually stimulating. For the most part they don’t even answer the question. They pawn off-well memorized 120 second speeches that address some component of the question, but really only answer the question as phrased by their trainers, but the audience never gets to hear that question and therefore are left to puzzle out what the question was. Mini-speeches not designed to inform the public but only to make them look strong, resolute, commanding and not dumb.

James Fallows, author of an excellent piece on the debating styles of Kerry and Bush in the Atlantic Monthly, has been hitting the radio circuit. You can listen to him, and others, talk to Michael Krasny* of KQED San Francisco for an hour about the debates here.

If you've seen footage of Bush at his campaign events lately, standing mike in hand, sans podium, you have to admit that he's got a certain snarky cowboy quality that comes across really well with dumb people. I expect he'll do okay in the debates -- good enough. Kerry needs to kill, and I don't know if he's got it in him.

[An Aside Regarding Michael Krasny: I listen to a lot of radio. Krasny is the finest local radio host I've ever heard, bar none. He should have a bigger platform.]

Gloomy.

That's what life without internet access is like. I feel like I've lost one of my five senses. My fleeting moments of internet time are spent trying to figure out what the hell is going on -- reading other people's blogs, deleting spam, checking monstrous amounts of email, etc.

And it's not my fault. It's the fault of my lunatic roommate. More on him after I move out.

Help me, someone.

Help.

[Salto may be back up on Thursday. I'm doing my goddamned best here, people. Do me a favor and use this page to click your favorite links on the right. It'll get me some reciprocal links and expand my power.]

Burly workmen arrive at Salto's pad to install broadband cabling. While attacking the floorboards with a pink crowbar, they hear tiny mewling sounds below. They carefully pry up a single plank and see hundreds of thousands of baby rats, nesting *in* the cabling area.

Diverse city agencies are called in, as well as the ASPCA, PETA, and the Lower Haight Rodent Preservation Society. A brouhaha of epic proportions ensues: catcalls, japes, wild-eyed jig-like dances of rage and joy. There are blows and assorted fisticuffs. Then, after the storm, embraces and fond, quiet cheek-stroking.

But no broadband.

Salto still be down. And my readership is up. Go figure.

Matt Y., writing in TAPPED:

By the same token, of course, events in Iraq will affect the election in the United States. Recent reports of a deterioration of the American position threaten to derail the Bush campaign, hence the effort to perform a little jujitsu and make the argument that the worsening situation is a token of jihadists’ love for Kerry. First and foremost, of course, the president must keep the body count low if he wants to win. Iraqi deaths and shifts of public opinion are the stuff of the inside pages of our newspapers. Dead Americans make page 1 and the evening news. When enough die, it may even lead the news, or make the local news. It wouldn't be prudent to let that happen. So Bush has adopted policies designed to keep the death count low, primarily by avoiding ground combat in the Sunni triangle. Good campaign tactics, needless to say, but, as ever, the Bush team seems better at winning elections than winning wars. By delaying any assault on the wily Salafi terrorists (read: Democratic campaign operatives) lurking in Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi, and Baquba until after November, we give them more time to dig in, prepare defenses, and strengthen their forces before the attack.

An important point comes next, so it gets a paragraph of its own: This plan will get people killed. If an assault is to be mounted, it should be done as soon as possible, before the adversary has been given months to prepare for it. The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they've been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It's appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists. We're waging war as an extension of an electoral campaign, exposing our soldiers to harassing attacks right now and to a more difficult fight later on in order to help secure the president's re-election.

It's sickening.

Tines the cat chewed through some wires and brought down broadband connectivity for a good swath of the Lower Haight. No. Just kidding. But our broadband is down at the homestead and as the broadband goeth, so goeth Salto.

Hopefully not for long...

...correction: light posting until I leave this cafe.

Here.

[Via EmDee]

This is not good:

The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie batteries — the term artillery units use instead of "companies" — that threatened to turn into a brawl involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base police to intervene.

These are the people who deserve the truth. And they're not getting it.

Steve has more.

...Can you blame these guys when this is happening?

Soldiers from a Fort Carson combat unit say they have been issued an ultimatum - re-enlist for three more years or be transferred to other units expected to deploy to Iraq.

Hundreds of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team were presented with that message and a re-enlistment form in a series of assemblies last Thursday, said two soldiers who spoke on condition of anonymity.

I love this country!

[Via Alterman]

I still think the most important line for Kerry to push is Bush's incompetence in everything he and his administration have done.

But I'm happy with the "misleader" angle. I think there's some real potential there. Or I would think so if we didn't have a press that thought that Dan Rather and CBS were far more important than the election of a president in like 40 days. But whatevers!

This stuff from Seymour Hersh in Salon has a little of both angles:

In March 2002, Hersh writes, a military action against al-Qaida, known as Operation Anaconda, was botched in Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan. Billed at the time as a success story by the Pentagon, it was in fact a debacle, plagued by squabbling between the services, bad military planning and avoidable deaths of American soldiers, as well as the escape of key al-Qaida leaders, likely including Osama bin Laden.

And then there's this, which really just blows me away (and don't think I haven't heard it before):

Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.

We live in dangerous times.

Most of you have probably already heard about how those expensive Kryptonite bike locks can be picked in five seconds with a Bic pen.

If you haven't, read this article.

You really shouldn't click here.

[Via Kat]

Salto has to quit blogging at such a frenetic pace and finish a project.

But for your Friday timewasting edification, he recommends the following sites:

Joe Cartoon

and

Home Star Runner.

I think Joe's work "joe mamma" is sublime and wonderful. I would strongly advise you to familiarize yourself with his oeuvre before you watch it. It will enhance the experience.

I confess slightly less familiarity with Homestar Runner.

According to a new book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie, Secretary of State and Official Black Man of the Bush Administration, Colin Powell, described the neo-conservatives in the Administration as being a bunch of "fucking crazies."

It all stems from this Guardian story.

Gen. JC Christian continues:

Of course they're fucking crazy. That's why I like them. Anybody who's ever seen an episode of OZ knows that no one messes with a crazy man. The same is true for governments. The rest of the world looks at Our Leader's administration and says, "Hey these guys invaded Iraq to punish a bunch of Saudis, betrayed one of their own agents because her husband embarrassed the president, and paid Chalabi to lie to them. They're fucking nuts. Don't mess with them."

You know, I think it would make a great slogan for Our Leader's campaign: "Vote Bush/Cheney 2004 because we're fucking crazy." Our Leader could then start talking about the invisible rabbit who drew up the plan for the post-war occupation of Iraq. Deputy Leader Dick could videotape one of the frequent arguments he has with his ficus tree and run it as an ad.

And then the good General proffers this:



Excellent work, sir.

The backlash has begun. It's the decideds vs. the undecideds.

First, Larry David:

The truth is, Undecideds, you're getting on our nerves. We Decideds hate all the attention you're getting and that you're jerking us around. Anyone who can't make up his or her mind at this point in the campaign should forget about the election entirely, buy a pint of ice cream and get into bed.

We'd love to tell you to take a hike, but we're afraid to alienate you. If we really had any brains, we wouldn't spend another second on you, but on the people who can truly make a difference: the "unlikely" voters. And there are millions more of them than there are of you. Those people aren't after attention, they're just incredibly lazy. The only way they'll register to vote is if someone shows up at their door with a form. And then the only way they'll actually vote is if you carry them to the booth.

[via Pandagon]

And then Patricia Marx weighs in:

I know, I know, I know. At the last focus group, I said that I’d make up my mind by the next focus group. But how can anyone choose, given how little we know, even today, about John Kerry? Sure, I’ve read all his speeches and I’ve done an online background check, looking into his possible unclaimed property, deadbeat parents, and outstanding fines owed to the Department of Motor Vehicles. But is this enough? As a voter committed to making a responsible decision, I want to know the real John Kerry.

—We know, for instance, that John Kerry went to Yale, but did he ever meet my friend Penny, who also went there?

—Has John Kerry taken a position on whether he would rather freeze to death or burn to death?

—It’s safe to say that everyone is curious about how pants end up on the side of the highway. What light can John Kerry shed on this?

The humorists can have their day. How can anyone be undecided, though?

Here.

It's Lonely at the White House (washingtonpost.com): Russ Baker writes in the liberal Nation magazine: "Growing evidence suggests that George W. Bush abruptly left his Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 for substantive reasons pertaining to his inability to continue piloting a fighter jet. "A months-long investigation, which includes examination of hundreds of government-released documents, interviews with former Guard members and officials, military experts and Bush associates, points toward the conclusion that Bush's personal behavior was causing alarm among his superior officers and would ultimately lead to his fleeing the state to avoid a physical exam he might have had difficulty passing. His failure to complete a physical exam became the official reason for his subsequent suspension from flying status."

It’s with great sorrow and greater pity that I announce that I cannot support President Bush, whose image I have masturbated to countless times, this fall.

The whole thing is here.

[via DPH]

Here.

HAMILTON, N.J. -- A Hopewell woman whose son was killed while serving in Iraq was arrested Thursday after she interrupted a campaign speech by first lady Laura Bush.

Sue Niederer had refused to leave the rally and demanded to know why her son was killed in Iraq. She was eventually escorted from the rally site, a local firehouse, by police.

Niederer wore a T-shirt that bore the words "President Bush You Killed My Son" and a picture of her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin.

[via Oliver Willis]

The German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) is celebrating 10 years of its online service by adding a new language to the 30 it already publishes - Klingon.

No. This is apparently not a joke.

Why are Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Gen. Joseph Hoare, the former Marine commandant and head of the U.S. Central Command, and W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, and the top expert on Iraq there, such pessimistic left-lib pinko commie traitors?

Odom: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse -- he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He added: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving [Osama] bin Laden's ends."

Hoare: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Terrill: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency."

This story is a couple of days old, but a must-read if you haven't yet.

Wow, this story has just totally dropped off the radar.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Three Americans accused of torturing Afghans in a private jail were found guilty Wednesday in a Kabul court after a trial denounced by the defense as violating basic standards of fairness.

The three-judge panel sentenced accused ringleader Jonathan Idema, a former soldier with a past fraud conviction, and his right-hand man, Brent Bennett, to 10 years in jail. Edward Caraballo, who said he was filming a documentary on counterterrorism, received an eight-year term.

The interesting (and creepy) thing is that Idema has consistently claimed that his extracurricular activities were authorized at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Idema claims to have had high-level Pentagon support in his group's efforts to hunt down terrorists, but the U.S. military says the men were freelancers operating outside the law and without its knowledge.

Idema is a former Green Beret.

With U.S. forces held to the standards of the Geneva Conventions, wouldn't it just make sense that a worried administration would want to funnel certain terrorist types--who might know critical information about Al Qaeda--through, shall we say, alternative channels? Some of "our guys" not subject to the Genevas who are, well, plausibly deniable? Especially in Afghanistan, with these Al Qaeda and Taliban types getting nabbed all the time there?

Later, the defendants and their lawyers appeared stunned by the verdict, which came even though the defense was given no chance to cross-examine witnesses.

We run Afghanistan. Isn't it interesting that these American citizens are being tried by an Afghani court? Little apparent help from the Americans on this one.

Earlier, Fogelnest argued that the Afghan legal system was so badly devastated by more than two decades of war that it wasn't fit to carry out the trial.

The entire proceeding "doesn't meet international standards and should be halted," he said. The judge cut him off, insisting he stick to the charges against his clients.

These guys were buried in Afghanistan. They were our boys, doing our work, and our government plausibly denied them into an Afghan prison. Connect the dots. It's all there.

The U.S. military in Afghanistan has admitted receiving a prisoner from Idema and holding him for about two months. NATO forces cooperated briefly with the three, sending explosives experts to assist in three arrest raids in the Afghan capital. They found traces of explosives and suspect electronic components in one raid.

But Idema has since been denounced by the alliance and the American military as an impostor, and disowned by Afghan leaders and the Pentagon. The U.S. military had no comment on the convictions.

This guy was a non-Geneva torturer, an agent of the U.S. government. One of many, probably. And I bet we'll hear more about others soon.

Today's eBay funny.

[Via KFlans]

What a hurricane year. Jeez.

And then there's this:

Walter Maestri, an emergency manager in New Orleans, America's most vulnerable metropolitan area, has 10,000 body bags ready in case a major hurricane hits. As Hurricane Ivan's expected path shifted uncomfortably close to the low-lying urban soup bowl, Maestri said Tuesday he might need a lot more.

If a strong Category 4 storm such as Ivan made a direct hit, he warned, 50,000 people could drown, and the city could cease to exist.

"This could be The One," Maestri said. "You're talking about the potential loss of a major metropolitan area."

Whoa.

...more here:

Residents began following his advice Tuesday afternoon, with bumper-to-bumper traffic lining the causeway over Lake Pontchartrain to the north. If people can't get out of New Orleans, Nagin said, they should do a "vertical evacuation."

"Basically, go to hotels and high-rise buildings in the city," he explained.

Double whoa.

It's here.

Then, in 1972, something went badly wrong. My hunch is that Mr. Bush went through personal difficulties that he's embarrassed to talk about today. In addition, Mr. Roome suggests that changes at the Texas air base were making it more difficult for junior pilots, so sometimes Mr. Bush's only chance to fly was as a target for student pilots - not the most thrilling duty.

I want discussion of what went up Bush's nose in 1972 on every one of those talking-head shows.

Ooh ooh ooh ooh.

[S:] Another inflammatory passage in the book is about the girlfriend whose abortion George W Bush allegedly paid for as a young man. There again it seems like you go with one source, and it's somebody many people don't find credible - Larry Flynt.
[KK:] Not just him - I relied on his two detectives.
[S:] So you went and interviewed them as well?
[KK:] Yes.
[S:] Again, I'm trying to figure out your methodology and why your enemies come after you and say: "She relies on shaky sources or she'll lump a variety of sources together, no matter how they vary in credibility."
[KK:] Yes, I've read that one too.
[S:] So how do you respond to that - say on this one in particular, this abortion story?
[KK:] Well, I took the public record a little further and went to the investigators and asked for their stuff, and got their stuff. I have the woman's name, address and phone number ...
[S:] Did you make an effort to reach her?
[KK:] Of course.
[S:] And she wouldn't talk?
[KK:] No.
[S:] But you found the two investigators credible after talking to them?
[KK:] Yeah, I did.

Gorgeous. Mud. Muck. Bring it on. Etc.

Last Halloween in San Francisco I was the incredibly offensive priest with the enormous fake cock hanging out of my fly.

It was a very, very good time.

I'll probably do it again. But maybe you should be David Letterman:



I need ideas, people.

The Bush family is this nasty, Jacob's-Ladder-grotesquerie of drugs, drink, and women pushing wimpy men around. The Guardian's got it:

In one of the creepier passages of the book, a family gathering from hell at Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara is shown mercilessly baiting her dry-drunk son, then governor of Texas, as a teetotalling 'Chosen One', while he keeps pleading to skip the cocktails and put on the feed bag, and his elderly father "drools over [TV newswoman] Paula Zahn's legs".

Oh dear.

One of the major themes in Kelley's book is the family's weakness for liquor and drugs. Alcoholism, she writes, runs deeply in the family and among its victims, according to one Bush family friend, was Prescott, a "major-league alcoholic", who was in the habit of checking himself into his men's club and country club to go on benders. And Kelley writes that George W Bush is not the only one in the first family who enjoyed illegal substances. While a student at Southern Methodist University in the 1960s, first lady Laura Bush was known "as a go-to girl for dime bags of marijuana".

Say it ain't so! Even little Laura? America's sweetheart?

I'm shocked!

[Why aren't anti-Bush protestors showing up proffering liquor bottles? Martini glasses? Bags of white powder! First lady speaking? BIG FAKE SPLIFFS!

LET'S GET INTO THE MUD, PEOPLE!]

Angel of truth and justice H.L. Mencken rises from the grave to beat down Sen. Zell Miller:

"If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame or dignity. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition - the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine."

The whole thing is here. An excerpt:

Anno 1925, H.L. Mencken penned those uncharitable words about William Jennings Bryan after the letter exited both his public career and the realm of the animate. Anno 2004, as the Hon. Zell Miller, senior Senator from Georgia, approaches the end of his public career, the nation - or at least that portion of it that still possesses of a sense of irony - wishes the Sage of Baltimore could be living at this hour, so as to properly limn the life and works of this latest personification of a recurring American archetype: the country-fried demagogue.

Newsweek, via Andrew Sullivan:

The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on U.S. forces in August — the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting—a step up to phase three.

And then there's the irreplacable Juan Cole:

At least 7 car bombs shook the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and guerrillas pounded the Green Zone and the area around it with at least 12 mortar strikes. Mortar shells were also launched at Abu Ghuraib prison and driver tried to get a truckbomb through its gates, but was killed by Marines. The US military and Iraqi National Guards fought a running battle in Haifa Street. The Baghdad fighting took some 37 lives.

A particularly disturbing scenario unfolded at Haifa Street, a hotbed of opposition to US presence in Iraq. The mortar attacks on the Green Zone, which houses the interim Iraqi government and the US embassy, began before dawn. When they continued into the morning, AP says, US troops went in search of the guerrillas, supported by armored vehicles. Then on Haifa Street, guerrillas took out a Bradley fighting vehicle with a car bomb, then sprayed it with machine gun fire and tossed grenades at it. This operation sounds like a well-planned piece of strategy, whereby the US forces were lured to Haifa Street by the mortar fire precisely so that they could be car-bombed and attacked. Two Bradley crewmen were injured by the car bomb, and four in the subsequent attack.

Now you have a burning Bradley fighting vehicle sitting there in the street, and a crowd gathers, many of them boys, to jeer and dance. Some of the young men haul out a banner of the Tawhid and Jihad terrorist group and hang it from a barrel sticking out of the vehicle.

Alarmed that the Bradley would now be looted for weapons and ammunition (and, some reports say, "sensitive equipment"), US troops now call in helicopter gunships. They arrive, but claim they took small arms fire from the area around the burning Bradley.

Now the tragedy unfolds. The helicopters fire repeatedly on the crowd gathered around the Bradley, killing 13 persons and wounding 61. Although some of the killed or wounded may have been guerrillas, it seems obvious that others were just curious little boys from the neighborhood. I am told some of the television footage, which I did not see, suggests that the helicopters fired into a civilian crowd.

In the street were television cameramen and Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian producer for the al Arabiya satellite network, He was among those hit by the helicopter fire. Reuters explains:

"The Palestinian died soon afterwards. Reuters cameraman Seif Fouad, recording the scene, was also wounded in the blast.

"I looked at the sky and saw a helicopter at very low altitude," Fouad said. "Just moments later I saw a flash of light from the Apache. Then a strong explosion," he said.

"Mazen's blood was on my camera and face," Fouad said from his hospital bed. He said his friend screamed at him for help: "Seif, Seif! I'm going to die. I'm going to die."

We're in trouble. And there's material somewhere here for John Kerry, though I can't seem to think of what it would be. Oh, it's this, via Atrios:

Richard Perle, just about a year ago:

A year from now I'd be surprised if there's not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.

'Member these guys? The neocons? The ones who overruled the military on postwar strategy?

A few days late for Labor Day, sadly:

You sit next to idiots, loathe office bonhomie and crave escape. You're half- crazy with boredom, pretend to work when you hear footsteps and kill time by taking newspapers into the washrooms [or, um, books to Starbucks. -ed.]. Your career is blocked, your job is at risk and the most ineffective people get promoted to where they can do least harm: management. You recoil at jargon, consider the expression 'business culture' an oxymoron and wish you had the guts to resign. If this is you, help is at hand.

Here. Check out the "10 Commandments for the Idle." They're superb.

[This one is for the Doc Monkeys.]

I would be awfully depressed if I woke up on November 3rd, or whenever this political season will finally end (and trust me, I can't wait), and Bush was up there smirking at a press conference.

I'd think to myself: "I must look at that man's smirk for four more years."

Then I'd think: "He's gonna totally pack the Supreme Court with insane right-wingers."

Then I'd probably cry and go fetal. UNLESS I was confident that I, me myself, had done as much as I possibly could to defeat this son of a bitch.

DON'T ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE SIMILARLY DEPRESSED ON NOVEMBER 3RD. THERE ARE LOTS OF WAYS TO HELP. MANY. MANY. And most of them just require a bit of time -- not money. It's not too late to help!

Here's Christgau with similarly encouraging words:

If George Bush is to be defeated this year, he'll be defeated on the ground. He'll be defeated because we want it more than they want it. He'll be defeated because we swallow our fantasies of a candidate who doesn't exist and recognize that John Kerry is a manifestly superior positive choice. And he'll be defeated not just because we vote for Kerry, but because we urge cynics and undecideds to vote for him too. This work will not be easy or neat—new campaign finance rules make figuring out where to help a job in itself. But no one is overqualified for it. Don't think blue-staters like us can't make the difference in swing states. And don't forget that even in New York [or California -ed.], pluralities count—win or lose, every vote for Kerry makes us feel better and Bush look worse. There are still two or three weeks to register voters, and there's plenty of follow-up to do in October. Examine the options outlined below and decide how you might best donate your time. Then tell your friends to do the same.

Some of these resources are New York-centric. Most are not.

I'll take any other suggestions for immediate posting.

CLICK HERE. OR BE SORRY.

One huge problem with Friendster and MySpace and Orkut is that they are closed systems; it is very difficult or impossible to import your friendlists (as many have found, to their chagrin), or expand on a particular system's range of sharable information. XFN, which identifies human relationships in HTML, would change this.

Or, in other words:

XFN provides the basis for a world-wide distributed network of personal connections. Proprietary data-owning services like Friendster could be superceded by XFN crawling and searching sites —a sort of "Friendorati," as it were. The advantage of a Friendorati-style network is that it allows every individual to fully express themselves through personal weblogs and web sites, instead of to the limited degree permitted by a proprietary service's user interface.

Here's the intro:

XFN puts a human face on linking. As more people have come online and begun to form social networks, services such as Technorati and Feedster have arisen in an attempt to show how the various nodes are connected. Such services are useful for discovering the mechanical connections between nodes, but they do not uncover the human relationships between the people responsible for the nodes.

XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.

In sufficiently modern browsers, authors using XFN can easily style all links of a particular type; thus, friends could be boldfaced, co-workers italicized, and so on. It is also the hope of the authors that this practice becomes widespread enough to allow the creation of a service that charts personal (as opposed to purely mechanical) links between weblogs and the people responsible for them.

Interesting, hm?

[via nrdy Monstrepo]

This is very interesting.

Yellow Arrow is a sticker art/collaboratively authored viral narrative project. Project participants post a yellow sticker pointing to something they think is important in the urban landscape, and then send a short email description to the yellowarrow.org server via their phone. Each sticker has an individual ID. When other users encounter the sticker in the public space, they then can send an email to yellowarrow.org to retrieve the description the tagger left behind.

Be sure to browse the yellowarrow gallery.

[Via Grand Text Auto]

Click here.

At the Republican National Convention in New York City just a little while ago, there was a great deal of romanticizing of 9-11-01. It was a day, we heard, that demonstrated the best in America. And in many ways it was. But 9-11 as a great triumph of the human spirit isn't the 9-11 I recall on the ground. I remember it as a terrifying, horrible, confusing day followed by several terrifying, horrible, confusing weeks.

I don't know how it felt out in the vast American Expanse to the south and west of New York City, but for those of us -- a very large proportion of America's political, intellectual, and media elite -- whose roots and physical existence are and were in the Boston-Washington corridor it was a time spent under seige. On the day in question, no one quite new what was happening. It seemed inevitable that there would be more attacks, and soon, very possibly on slightly lesser cities like Boston. And with the coming of the Anthrax Scare it looked like there were more attacks. The country was mobilizing for war in Afghanistan, a war that -- at the time at least -- raised the specter of being a real war of the old school with high casualties and all. And if that's what it took to win, most of us were prepared to accept it. But for those of us under 40 it was the prospect of something we'd never experienced and it was destined to occur in a far-off land of which we knew little.

For many of us under-30s, the attacks were just about the first time in our adult lives that we were confronted with real fear -- the paralytic fear of events that are barely within our comprehension, let alone our sphere of control. With the cold war burned out, I remember, in the 90s, that random plane crashes kinda scared me.

Read the whole thing.

9/11 brought some heroes out. Here's another:

Only 12 survivors were pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center after the towers fell on Sept. 11, despite intense rescue efforts. Two of the last three to be located and saved were Port Authority police officers. They were not discovered by a heroic firefighter, or a rescue worker, or a cop. They were discovered by Dave Karnes.

Karnes hadn't been near the World Trade Center. He wasn't even in New York when the planes hit the towers. He was in Wilton, Conn., working in his job as a senior accountant with Deloitte Touche. When the second plane hit, Karnes told his colleagues, "We're at war." He had spent 23 years in the Marine Corps infantry and felt it was his duty to help. Karnes told his boss he might not see him for a while.

Then he went to get a haircut.

I was deeply touched by this article.

Click here to read it in full.

Answer: This company has a workforce of 17,000 people, whose average working year is only four months long.

Question: What's the alleged Final Jeopardy answer that supposedly brought down "Jeopardy!" uber-contestant Ken Jennings this week, according to reports that started circulating Wednesday?

Here.

Here.

and here.

I am in agreeance. Message control! Message control!

The ACLU and the Justice Department are engaged in a prolonged struggle over the legality of the Patriot Act.

The Justice Department redacts portions of the ACLU's briefs that it deems inappropriate to release publicly for national security reasons. [To redact is to render portions of a document unreadable, often with a large, black marker, for confidentiality or national-security or other purposes. -ed]

The Justice Department redacted the following quote from an ACLU brief:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

The quote is from a Supreme Court case.

Is this a joke?



[via Orcinus. More at the Memory Hole]

A brand-new policy here at Salto:

We encourage commenting!

All one would have to do is click that little "comment [0]" link below. And then type, type, type away!

It's that easy!

Time to check in with those intrepid defenders of privilege, the Billionaires for Bush:

Call us hopeless romantics, but we're still walking on air from last week's Republican National Convention. Never before was there a a more glorious convergence of power, privilege, and money. And never before did the Billionaires, unsung heros of the class war, shine so brightly. "A billion points of light!" exclaimed an awestruck George H.W. Bush.

The champagne corks were already popping as our Limo Tour arrived from the midwest in a stretch Humvee Saturday night, plowing over the rank bodies of scruffy justice-loving freaks gathering to heap scorn upon our Grand Old Party. "How's that for free speech?" roared Limo Captain Monet Oliver d'Place with a joyful tear rolling down his right cheek. "By God, it's good to be home!"

Billionaires gathered bright and early on Sunday for a delightful morning of croquet, bandminton, and other lawn sports in Central Park. The unsightly rabble-rousers were nowhere to be seen, thanks to fellow billionaire Mayor Bloomberg's ban on protests int he Park. As City officials explained, the grass was too expensive for the feet of mere commoners.

By midday hundreds of Billionaires representing over 30 states had gathered in front of the Plaza Hotel to kick off the Million Billionaire March. We proceded down 5th Ave, guarded by paramilitary escorts from the NYPD, provoking jeers, guffaws, and waves of class envy amongst the 500,000 anti-Bush marchers as we stole their media spotlight...

Go take a look.

Stuff from my trip will continue to bubble up here for a while.

This was taken at the historic Cyclone rollercoaster in Coney Island:



Pas/Cal and the Disappointment and Of Montreal and My Favorite and the Essex Green can go on the Cyclone for free.

Cradle of Filth, however, must pay full ticket price.

AP: 'U.S. death toll in Iraq passes 1,000 mark' ... 4:27 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004

AP: 'Ridge: Terrorists hope to disrupt election' ... 4:40 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004

Timing!

Here.

More here.

Opening scene of movie:

Capsule with precious cargo returns from space voyage, detaches from mother, and hurtles down towards Earth. The cargo? Extraterrestrial samples! Two Hollywood stunt pilots, Buzz and Jax, are employed to try to catch the sucker as it falls. But the parachute fails! The capsule crashes in the desert!

Close-up on capsule. A tiny green feeler probes tentatively at the crack in the capsule...

Typical bad slash good slash bad sci-fi movie, right? Except everything in the first paragraph is true. Except the names of the pilots, which you may attribute to creative license...

The internet is, at times, just fuckin' gorgeous.

Hey. My name is Matt. I'm writing this near the end of August in the year 2000. I just turned twenty-four years old. You are reading this because recently a lot of people vanished from the face of the earth. Perhaps their clothes and jewelry just fell to the ground, their bodies disappearing without a trace. I'm sure you are wondering what happened, why it happened, and can it happen again. You're reading this because you were not one of them. You are one of the people remaining on the earth. I'm writing this because I'm one of those who disappeared, and I want you to know why.

There are a variety of other important resources at Rapture Ready.

But these letters are a pretty good place to start. Especially if you're a big ol' stinky sinner, like ME!

And -- oh dear! -- check out these pictures of signs of the End Times! Praise be!

Maybe you should think about going outside and registering some voters?

This site makes it, like, way too easy.

I know that I have a massive Iowa/Missouri/Arkansas readership. Hellooooooo? C'mon, guys!

Here's a lil' 411:

Driving Votes is a grassroots organization committed to reclaiming American democracy by ensuring that Democrats in swing states vote. The Driving Votes website at www.drivingvotes.org makes it simple for anyone to plan a grassroots voter registration drive. The Driving Votes website has voter registration packets for each swing state, information on which local groups to partner with, and how to find areas with a high percentage of Democrats.

[via the FC]

Oh dear.

The image has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women all around the world who don't give much of a shit about anything. The result is a new craze called "doing a Lynndie". If you aren't "doing a Lynndie" now, you soon will be.

So what does doing a Lynndie involve? Here are the basic instructions:

Find a victim who deserves to be "Lynndied".

Make sure you have a friend nearby with a camera ready to capture the "Lynndie".

Stick a cigarette (or pen) in your mouth and allow it to hang slightly below the horizontal.

Face the camera, tilt your upper body slightly forward but lean back on your right leg.

Make a hitchhiking gesture with your right hand and extend your right arm so that it's in roughly the same position as if you were holding a rifle.

Keeping your left arm slightly bent, point in the direction of the victim and smile.

Ideally, you should refrain from telling the victim what you're about to do. Victims who are unaware, bemused or angry make for a Lynddie that is more in keeping with the original.

The pics. Check the pics.

Hey.

Don't read blogs right now.

Turn the computer off and go outside or something.

That is all.

This handy guide from the people at Gallup is very well done.

1. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry are holding tough in their core states.

Looking at the average of likely voter preferences in the two-way race across the two latest Gallup Polls, Bush has a 20-point lead over Kerry in the "red" states, or those that Bush won by more than five points in 2000. Kerry has a 16-point lead over Bush in the "blue" states, those that Al Gore won by more than five points in 2000.

2. On the other hand, the race in key showdown states remains remarkably close.

The two major-party candidates are within one point of each other among likely voters (48% for Bush and 47% for Kerry) when the results of Gallup's trial heat ballots in the 16 states -- typically referred to as battleground or showdown states -- are averaged across the last two polls. (Gallup's showdown states are those in which neither candidate won by more than five points in 2000.)

Additionally, Gallup conducted August polls in five key showdown states -- Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Iowa -- and the average margin between the two candidates across these states (among likely voters) is two points.

And there are nine more important points in the article!

I have a flight to catch and it involves leaving Brooklyn at 4am. No rest for the wicked. Remind me not to book 7am flights from Newark again.

Lots of shouts-out.

First, to Salto readers: this blog's traffic has doubled since the beginning of the travelblog odyssey. Thanks for checking in and staying with us, even as alcohol abuse dimmed my blogging ardor.

Second, to my host in Park Slope, Brooklyn, M., and her roommates, JM and J. I was here an awfully long time and y'all are very, very sweet. I hope I didn't cause too much trouble and I'm proud to call you new friends. JM gets extra-special props for hooking me right in to the apt's wireless network.

M: Don't die in law school! And much, much, much love to you. And Alyoisha.

Third, to old friends:

My first night was spent with the youthful S and BB -- and then, surprisingly, unexpectedly, JH and CC and, eventually, MN! MN: Thanks for AS' phone number. He's a punk. MN/JH/CC/BB/S: It was a pleasure to see you again. I hope you could see the respect I continue to have for your minds.

Monstrepo made a special trip down from the woods of Western Mass to hang out. Thanks for coming down, yo. It was [fucking] good to see you, as always. Let's do it again sooner rather than later. Halloween in SF?

EG and her M: Who knows why the sparks fly? Surely not I. I sincerely wish the best to both of you.

Fishy and A: You rule and I'd love to see more of you.

ST: I see success soon for your band. And you remain the most splendid of fellas.

ZR and J: Double trouble soon, hm? I want pix. I'll send a wave of good karmic vibes when the time comes.

DHV: Have fun in Georgia! You'll wow the Georgian boys, you hott Valkryie.

AS: Sell the house to Sufjan. I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to hang out more.

MO: Whoosh! Here! Gone! (I've nicknamed you "The Avalanche")

The BL: Names and faces! Names and faces! Thanks, Miss T.

And much love to any I've left out. Your omission was unintentional.

Fourth, to my potentially violent sister and co-conspirator, A.:

You are the most important person in the world and I love you dearly. Thanks for going on this adventure with me. Apologies for my transgressions.

Fifth, to NYC:

Maybe I'll move back sometime soon. Is there room for me?

I thought Bush sounded incoherent and more than a little tentative. He doesn't read speeches well.

Kudos to the brave souls who dared interrupt the Emperor.

I'm back to SF tomorrow.

This is not a good place to be a smoker.



Not like there is a good place to be a smoker, but...

GOP FASHION DISASTERS

This was more difficult than I thought, mostly because I just don't have the endurance to sit outside the hotels of the Idaho or Utah delegations and wait for the single Zubaz-clad delegate to come wandering out looking for bargain Rolexes.

But before my willpower left me, I did find a single GOP Fashion Disaster. Behold the business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back mystique! Revel in the glory of this proudly-mulleted GOP drone!



It seemed like a good idea.

I'll look for more. *sigh*

More images from the big Sunday protest:



This dragon was apparently lit on fire later, prompting arrests. Here it is being set up:



Police observation in full effect:



Here's a nice photo of the march itself. Peep the size of that banner!

Heavy alcohol abuse has limited my ability to blog on a daily basis.