From Mathew Gross, GoMainStream.org, an attempt to revitalize the conservation movement. The organization is a partnership between Robert Kennedy, Jr, Gross, and Bobby Sundeen. From Matt’s email:

We formed GoMainStream.org because more than 90% of Americans hold our values in common — clean air, clean water, open lands — yet 40% think that ”most environmental activists don’t really care about people.“

We formed GoMainStream because the corporate plunderers have hijacked our public lands and the public process.

And we formed GoMainStream because they’ve hijacked our language. They call polluting the air “Clear Skies” — and they call it “development” and “access” when they lock Americans out of the public lands that we hike, hunt, fish and love.

We’re going to change that. And we’re going to change it by building a new coalition from the bottom-up — an organization that helps Americans take action and that works to reframe the debate about the future of our country.

We’re going to do it by connecting hunters fighting to maintain access to elk habitat with suburbanites combating urban sprawl.

Because conservation is not an issue of right or left, or urban versus rural, or red versus blue.

It’s an issue of who we are as Americans.

I think that this sort of action is an important first step in reversing the tide of Newspeak that continues to impede progressive efforts in the US—note the careful use of “conservation” rather than “environmentalism” and the nod toward the Bush administration’s successful avoidance of broad public outrage through careful language use. In fact, the only thing I can think of that I would change in the message is some of Gross’s language regarding “corporate plunderers.” He’s emailing to his base, but we learned in 2004 that if you stir up your base using inflammatory language, they’re not the only ones who end up getting mad. As commenters on my site have noted over and over again, the same fighting words that put a fire in the belly of liberals tend to make potentially sympathetic but conservative-leaning undecideds hot under the collar.

Oliver Willis engages on a one-man branding campaign for the Democratic Party. I think he’s really onto something here. The Dems have tried to be so many things to so many people for so long, the core message has gotten diluted. This is a good way to bring it back—combinations of evocation of famous Democrats past with enunciation of core values. I think, along those lines, that this might be my favorite one:

Though this one is also good for a laugh:

Another nice touch, the images are explicitly Creative Commons licensed (By-NC-SA). And Oliver has put the template up for reuse..

I have a bunch of pages stuck open in my aggregator that I haven’t posted yet because I didn’t feel right about them. They’re all about alleged or actual errors, improprieties, or other issues with the voting in this presidential election. Today Scott Rosenberg at Salon posted what I feel is the more balanced perspective on this: if there was vote fraud, we‘ll report it, but the people who continue to insist that the election was stolen are beginning to sound like the folks who think Iraq had WMDs and caused 9/11. With that perspective, I can comment on these links and then move on—unless, of course, the vote stealing allegations are proven.

A lot of the articles start out with statistical analyses of the variances between exit polls and actual reported results, such as Blue Lemur’s Odds of Bush gaining by 4 percent in all exit polling states 1 in 50,000; Evoting/paper variance not found to be significant. This article sums up a lot of the threads going around as follows: It seems like Bush got an average gain of 4.15% between exit polling and actual vote tallies across the 16 states where exit polls were taken. That seems pretty high, and you can make a probability assessment that it’s pretty unlikely, but the article is careful to point out that the differences between exit polls and vote counts were higher in some paper ballot states than in e-voting states.

The authors of the paper want the raw exit poll data. This strikes me as scary, since that data has to be weighted against the actual population before it’s any good and if you’re going to go into the raw data and start weighting it yourself, you can make it tell pretty much any story. The only thing this approach buys is the ability to recreate the weightings that the polling organizations actually used, then second guess their methodology. Nice, but what I would really want is the actual vote counts.

Unfortunately, for every careful but ultimately futile article like that at Blue Lemur, you get a dozen roundups of anecdote and speculation, such as the one at bellacio.org: Too many voting “irregularities” to be coincidence. To which I reply, How many voting irregularities would constitute coincidence? And what is the chance of a voting irregularity in 2004, when we’ve all been sensitized by the 2000 election, compared with earlier days when no one would dream to ask the question? Don’t get me wrong, some of the errors, like the 4,000 extra Bush voters in Franklin County, Ohio, are pretty egregious. But some of the other observations, like the one at Commondreams.org about the correlation between voting for Bush and the minimum wage hike, seem pretty thin.

The frustrating thing about the obsession with the election being stolen is that the general tinfoilhatdom is obscuring some real issues, like the ease of hacking e-voting systems and optical scan computers. That’s where we need to put our time and energy, not re-fighting November 2 for four years.

Thankfully, Fury adds another dollop of balance by exploring the use of tin-foil hat as signifier for conspiracy theorist, including a full survey of current usage. Thank God for the academy.

Today: Colin Powell. Also William Safire, from a position in the other camp. And then there are people being let go from the CIA for being “disloyal.”

Let me make this clear. I, unlike the administration, believe in science. I believe in “prove it to me.” I believe that even in murky situations like interpreting intelligence reports—especially in those situations—how you proceed should be about whose interpretation best fits reality, not whether the analyst is a “soft leaker,” “liberal Democrat,” or a person who has been “obstructing the president’s agenda.”

This makes the disturbing New Yorker article about how selected intelligence reports that fit the Administration’s rosy scenario were fasttracked to the President, while less rosy reports were suppressed, look like child’s play.

Let’s not even get into appointing Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor during the worst failures of national security in history, to the State Department. She failed, folks. She tried to tell the nation, and the 9/11 commission, and did tell the president, that an August 2001 memo entitled “Al Qaeda determined to strike in America” meant no imminent danger to the country. She should be fired, she should be brought down, not rewarded. But then I said I wasn’t going to get into this.

…original letters, that is. Three original letters, plus a bunch of people xeroxing one of them, to levy a $1.2 million fine against a network. For showing a bachelorette and a bachelor party—tamed down, undoubtedly, for TV.

Nice reporting by Jeff Jarvis. Now, I agree with there being some accountability for outlets that have broadcast licenses, but I feel that upholding things like, oh, equal time for political broadcasts is a hell of a lot more important to enforce than whether someone removes a garter belt with his teeth or gets spanked on network TV.

Greenehouse Effect: He’s Ba-a-a-a-ack! Greg points to a petition to draft Howard Dean for chairmanship of the DNC. Not a bad idea. He was the only Democratic candidate that got lots of people passionate; he understood the importance of rural voters; and the party chairmanship is a hell of a lot better place for him than running for public office.

By the way, Greg’s headline could easily refer to his own blog. Glad to have you back, Greg.

NY Times: Attorney General and Commerce Secretary Resign from Cabinet. Can it be? Are we at long last free of this encumbrance on our liberties? Might we once again see breasts at Justice Department press conferences? Might we once again see due process in criminal cases?

Well, probably not the last one. But now we’ll find out how many of the abuses of the Patriot Act are coming from Ashcroft the man and how many are inherent in the law. Unless of course we get a more conservative attorney general.

Boston Globe: Sen. Edwards’ wife Elizabeth diagnosed with breast cancer. Our thoughts and prayers go to Elizabeth and the Edwards as they face this.

While I still await the results from Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa, I’m not optimistic. Sorry, Matt, but I don’t see a lot of hope out of this election; if we couldn’t beat this administration in a fair fight after the last four years, we need some serious overhauling. I’m thinking about what I learned last night about the last four years, and the next four.

First: it’s pretty clear that the rhetoric about “election stealing,” regardless of what happened in 2000, does not apply to the 2004 election—at least not yet. Turnout increased on both sides and so far their side had more than ours.

Second, the country as a whole is much more conservative—socially—than I think anyone on the left dreamed. Gone are illusions of isolated backwaters of Bible-thumping bigotry; with results like these elsewhere in the country, it’s clear that there was a major group of voters for whom protecting God from the Democrats was much more important than worrying about nuances of the reasoning to invade Iraq, the economic health of the country, or the lives of our boys.

Third, I think this election dramatically showed the strengths and limitations of the blogosphere in the political process. While information was flowing freely, there was a whole class of issues and voters that never showed up on the blogosphere’s radar, but which turned out to be pivotal. (See my previous post about blind spots in the blogosphere.)

Fourth, while we were making logical arguments, people were falling into a reality distortion bubble in which Iraq was involved in 9/11 and had WMDs, John Kerry shot himself to get medals that he then threw away, and the rest of the world likes us for our efforts in Iraq. Not just a few people—a lot of people. We may want to start thinking how we reach people who have voluntarily disconnected from reality but who vote in large numbers—or, failing that, make sure that the people who are still living in reality have all the facts.

Fifth, we may just have been handed 2008, given that the president now has to clean up his own Iraq mess and deal with his own budget deficit. But we can’t win an election if we handle it like we did this one, and we won’t win it if we don’t start shifting the ground against the “loyalty oath” people and start making people think.

Finally, there is some comfort in seeing that I’m not alone in my anger: Fury, AKMA, Doc, and Larry Lessig all make interesting points.

As I write this, Bush is up over Kerry either 197–188 (CNN) or 207–199 (MSNBC). But that hasn’t budged in hours. Plus, of course, the news that Florida won’t have its vast oceans of absentee ballots counted until Thursday.

Oy. Anyone else watching this want to compare notes?

And what the hell did happen to the youth vote?

Lisa and I voted at about 4:30 pm. There was no line at our polling place, but the Scantron indicated that I was ballot # 1067 for the day. Now we’re sitting (after cooking dinner: chicken filets sautéed in lemon, butter and parsley (a la Siena) and risotto with prosciutto and peas, with a French Chardonnay—sue me) watching the election returns and waiting for the miracle.

(Incidentally, that would be my addition to the election mix tapes that are floating around.)

Shout out to Fury for putting Fury’s money and time where Fury’s mouth is (ah, the challenges of pronouns for an anonymous blog!).

Note: even voters in blue states have trouble voting. See George’s abbreviated story.

First, if you haven’t voted yet, go do it. Lisa and I are headed out later this afternoon once she finishes her conference calls.

Second, if you have trouble voting: Election Protection Hotline: 1-866-MYVOTE1 to report problems, 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) for immediate legal assistance.

Third, quick compilation from around the Internet of useful links:

• CNN Electoral Map
• The ever-invaluable Electoral Vote Predictor (currently with yesterday’s polls) and its mirrors: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
• Interpreting the above data: Mystery Pollster
• Ohio fraud watch blogs: Village Voice, Ohio Voter Suppression News
• Commentary: Josh Marshall, Oliver Willis
• More commentary: NewDonkey.com
• And, if you are local to Boston, here’s information about the party in Copley Square for Kerry’s speech tonight; he’s expected to take the stage about 11:30, after headlining performances from Jon Bon Jovi, Black Eyed Peas, Sheryl Crow, James Taylor, Carole King, and maybe even Don Henley (do not, however, discourage you from trying to crash the party. Remember, Clinton/Gore used that damned Fleetwood Mac song, and I hear their Election Night bashes were still lots of fun). The preparations for this speech, incidentally, are what I photographed last Thursday with George, not preparations for the Red Sox parade; I’ll update the photo captions shortly.

With everything over but the voting (one hopes), I’d like to put a personal thanks out to a lot of people on the Internet for making this, the most important election ever (with the possible exception of the election of 1860), also the most discussed, most debated, most opinionated, and maybe most informed election ever. Special thanks to the Electoral Vote Predictor site and its Votemaster, newly revealed to be Andrew Tanenbaum; Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and Oliver Willis; the Instapundit, anchoring the right hand side; Salon’s coverage; Eric Olsen and Blogcritics (especially this post); Tony Pierce for uncommon sense; Dave for focusing attention early on the role of blogs and the Internet in politics; Greg for being the deep-thinking gadfly he’s always been; Fury for coming in late but strong; Wonkette for keeping it funny; and a host of other folks I’ve forgotten but linked to before.

In case anyone has missed it, I endorse John Kerry for President, because he lives in the reality-based world:

Because he doesn’t have people on his side who so dramatically misunderstand the history of America that they try to claim the country was founded on principles that those who would seek to keep church out of state and vice versa are anti-American and anti-Christian. (Thanks to Christian Ethics Today for debunking this point of view, which has claimed several people I know);

Because he will admit it when he screws up;

Because he won’t need rigged voting machines built by a committed campaign contributor to get into office;

Because he will get elected in spite of help from the liberal media, who were going to run a slanted 45-minute attack against him for free but refused to run the ad of a bunch of Iraq veterans who are calling BS on the administration;

Because he will get elected in spite of attempts from the GOP to interfere with voters in Ohio, and Ohio, and Wisconsin, and Florida, and elsewhere;

Because his campaign cares about people who don’t have cars (see page 2);

Because his campaign wants people who think, not people who take loyalty oaths;

Because his campaign hasn’t promised not to use the greatest tragedy that has ever hit our country for political purposes, and then turned around and done it.

Given what we’ve been reading about potential GOP attempts to interfere with voters in Florida, Ohio, and other swing states next week, this Election Protection Card looks like it’s a must-have when you go to your polling place on Nov. 2. It won’t keep another Brooks Brothers Riot from happening but it might help bring the perpetrators to justice.

Daily Kos: Free speech, Bush style. At Richland Center High School in Richland County, Wisconsin, students were told in preparation for a visit from the President that they could not wear pro-Kerry clothing or buttons or protest in any manner at risk of expulsion.

Expulsion. Getting thrown out of school for the rest of the year. Because one chooses to wear an item that supports the Democratic candidate for president.

It’s never too early to learn that free speech isn’t for everyone, but only for those that can afford it. That schools restrict political activity during presidential campaigns instead of creating teachable moments is one of the greatest failures of our educational system to date. That the campaign would make this request in the first place is the final proof (as if we needed it) that they care neither for our rights nor our children’s education.

Suggested action? Patrick Nielsen Hayden links to the story and provides contact information for the school and its administrative personnel.

US Election Atlas: 2004 Election Night Events Timeline, all dressed up and ready to go. I hope the server is up to the load it will be getting on November 2. (Also, I didn’t realize that the Massachusetts polls were open until 8 pm—that’s cool, though we won’t need the extra time as we live three blocks up the hill from our polling location.) Thanks to Tin Man for the link.

Wonkette: Bush letters sent to the wrong e-mail address. Wonkette points to the Dead Letter Office at GeorgeWBush.org. Apparently some people on the president’s staff can’t tell .com (the reelection campaign) from .org (the protest site). As a result, there are a ton of interesting emails that have accumulated in the catch-all mailbox at georgewbush.org, including one staffer making the career-limiting move of observing how good he would look with First Daughter Barbara Bush (load the page and search for Barbara).

The only potential smoking gun I can see on the page is the thread about The Middle Eastern American National Conference endorsement of Bush, in which the draft email has several signatories’ names missing, with the note that the names are being scrubbed by the campaign and that “we need phone numbers, city, states.”

A rare glimpse from the New York Times on how the response has evolved on both sides to the missing explosives from Al Qaqaa. Josh Marshall has been tracing the emerging storylines as well, including the emergent “they were gone when we got here” theory which seems to be discredited by the facts.

In this case, one might well ask, with Pilate, “What is truth?” In this case, the only truth appears to be: The Bush administration and its proxies have known about the missing explosives for almost 18 months and haven’t done anything about them. Now that the story is breaking, based on the October 10th letter from the Iraqi interim government, the administration is falling all over itself and can’t get the story straight about what happened and why it hasn’t acted.

Leaving aside the other issues in Iraq, this is a simple failure of competence by the incumbent leader of the western world.

Moxie busts the Kerry campaign for digging at Cheney for getting a flu shot. I agree with the Mox on a political issue, for once in a blue moon. This was an unnecessary dig. However, I disagree with her logic. Clinton is six weeks removed from a quadruple bypass, at a time when his heart tissue is healing and still vulnerable to infection. Cheney is several years removed from his most recent attack. The Kerry campaign might be justified in making this distinction, but it’s ultimately an unclassy way to call the Administration on what is a serious failure in public health preparedness.

Salon: Reality-based reporting. An interview with Ron Suskind. He says, “The news strategies of those in power are really born of a dark corner of the American ideal, which is kill or be killed, which is to rely on assertion rather than authenticity and to use power as best you can to get to the agreed-upon ends.” Yeah, but what else is new? Sigh.

Tin Man was on fire yesterday. Point one: catching the great CNN headline, “Public Split on Whether Bush is a Divider.” Point two: pointing me to Andrew Sullivan’s fisking of William Safire’s editorial taking Kerry to task over calling out Mary Cheney. This is what I wanted to write on Monday and couldn’t pull it together.

But the best is his memory of the 1992 election. Like Tin Man, this was the first election in which I voted for president. I don’t remember as much about that election; if memory serves I was overloaded with classes and not watching a lot of television, but I shared the sense of excitement that things were going to be different. I didn’t know how different at that point.

Today I’m starting, for the first time since the DNC, to feel the stirrings of that hope again. Hope for a day where we govern the “reality based” world and not the world our fundamentalist leader would like to live in. Where we prosecute Ken Lay, not Martha Stewart; go after the radically decentralized and stateless Al Qaeda first and tackle its state sponsors (if any) second; where we don’t cynically underfund vote-getting mandates like “No Child Left Behind,” AIDS money for Africa, and body armor, VA hospitals, and salaries for the troops that fight our wars. Where the Attorney General and the President uphold the Constitution. T minus two weeks and counting.

The Mystery of PTI 961 takes an obscure code on George W. Bush’s discharge papers and gives it meaning from DOD regulations: “when an ‘action is reported by the 9xx PTIs’ it represents a ‘loss to the Air Force strength.’  In other words, despite the fact that Bush had almost eight months left on his six year Military Service Obligation at the time, Texas Air National Guard officers were signaling that Bush was essentially worthless to the Air Force, and should not even be retained in the ‘Ready Reserves’ for call up in the event of a national emergency.” The rest of the document is a close reading of the president’s file and the relevant regulations, concluding that Bush was discharged under Rule 8 in Chapter 12 of the Air Reserve Forces Personnel Manual AFM 35-3: that is, he was “unqualified for service.”

This isn’t a surprising finding, since he hadn’t done his flight hours and had refused to take a physical. But it is striking because it is one of the few places where Bush’s records show what is common knowledge among all but his most ardent supporters: that he was mustered out of the Air Reserves because he was unfit for duty.

Thanks to Hooblogger The Rittenhouse Review for the link.

...the crazies come out. Don’t blink, you might miss the dirty tricks machine, as well as some true faces that don’t pop up unless they think they can energize their base without ticking off undecided voters or the opposition.

Exhibit 1: State and national Republican officials are trying to get 63 Philadelphia polling places moved at the last minute. About 53 of the 63 are less than 10% white. I get confused every year about the time and place I have to go to vote, and I have a master’s degree. Can’t imagine why someone would want to wait until the last minute to do this.

Exhibit 2: Instapundit comes out in favor of George Bush. (His position is, I think, obvious, but his explicitly stating it is news.) Good on Tony for calling him out, and for staying on his back.

Exhibit 3: Anti-gay forces in Ohio are gathering reasoned support from all over, including the intellectual spawn of the Inquisition: “The proof for the Christian ethic which condemns homosexual marriage is the impossibility of the contrary. Reject the Christian ethic and you have no basis for making moral judgments.“ Quote from Dr. Patrick Johnston, vice chairman of the Ohio branch of an organization bearing the Orwellian name of the Constitution Party. (See page 3 of the Salon article.)

Here’s something with which you can while away subway rides or incarcerations: the US Constitution for your iPod (text format, not audiobook). Instructions included.

William Gibson’s blog, silent since the end of the author’s tour for Pattern Recognition, crackled back to life yesterday. The natural question, “Why?”, is the first word of the posting. I excerpt the rest of the post in its entirety here, because it’s short, sweet, and right on point:

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, “At times, to be silent is to lie.”

Nice.

Special off-topic bonus: Pattern Recognition is one of Gibson’s works or concepts to inspire a Sonic Youth song. The other, of course, was the Neuromancer trilogy, which is linkable directly to “The Sprawl” on Daydream Nation. So which Yoot is a Gibson fan?

I’ve passed on liveblogging this debate, partly because I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained, but partly because Lisa was coming back after a business trip tonight. Sorry, folks; priorities. Interesting, though, this last question, to find the humanity in the candidates? Also interesting that Kerry punts the “strong women” question to his mom, rather than Teresa. I don’t think Kerry is coming away a winner in this debate—unless, of course, you count all the lies that the administration is telling through Bush; and unless you weigh the administration on its record rather than Bush’s words.

Item 1: A private voter-registration firm in Las Vegas is under attack from its own employees, who allege that the firm has been throwing away Democratic registration forms by the hundreds while keeping all the Republican registrations. The firm is under contract in another case for door-to-door canvassers by the GOP, and has also done work in Arizona for Ralph Nader. There are some dots waiting to be connected here…

Item 2: From the dirty-tricks file, Josh Marshall connects the dots and fingers Jim Tobin, New England regional chairman for the Bush-Cheney campaign and former Northeast political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, as being deeply involved in the felonious “phone jamming incident” that knocked a Democratic get-out-the-vote operation out of commission on Election Day in 2002.

Item 3: Sinclair Broadcasting, owner of 62 stations across the country has committed to airing an anti-Kerry broadcast two weeks before the election, funded by “Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth,” attacking Kerry’s Vietnam record. (Note Tony Pierce’s reaction: “if the dems can be derailed by a dumbass swiftboat talkie despite [twelve points including ‘bush’s failure to find obl,’ ‘bush’s military record cover up,’ and ‘five gop senators coming out against him,’] then the dems don’t deserve to win ever.”) Interesting side note: Sinclair has a subsidiary, Jadoo Power Systems, Inc., that just won a big contract to supply the US Special Operations Command in the war on terror.

Item 4: Veterans of the Iraq conflict are self-funding a TV ad that focuses on the failures of the Bush administration’s preparation, conduct, and post-war support in Iraq and the consequences for veterans. They call BS on claims that the lack of body armor is an “urban legend,” and discuss how the war has cost them dearly while at the same time the administration is cutting VA benefits.

It seems to me that if the Bush/Cheney campaign wasn’t so busy trying to disenfranchise voters and mislead the public instead of taking care of the boys (and girls) they sent to Iraq who are now coming home maimed and angry—or in boxes—they might actually be making some headway in public opinion.

On Friday we caught up with our long elusive Irish friend Niall, newly returned from Ireland after a summer of dissipation and waiting for his US visa situation to straighten out. He said that he was getting grumpy about the scene in the embassy, until he turned around and looked behind him and realized he was sitting near Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate. He mentioned that it was apparently better not to be a poet when getting a travel visa. Heaney was trying to get a visa to go over for a six-week-long guest professorship at Harvard, and the official kept probing, “What are you going to do when your professorship is up? Do you have a job to come back to in Ireland?”

Ah, the hard life of a poet in America. Didn’t we use to go out of our way to make sure that vital creative people from other nations could visit our country easily? I guess the ideology of the free exchange of ideas is as dead as the Cold War.

Mr. Bush, please try to answer the question. Out of thousands of decisions you’ve made in the last four years, you can’t come up with three examples, no matter how small, where you made a mistake, other than appointments? Don’t tell the citizen the meaning behind her question and then answer that meaning.

Did Bush just bring in Dred Freakin’ Scott in an answer to the Supreme Court question? Way to show you were paying attention in history class, Mr. Bush, but relevance?

I didn’t think Bush’s performance in debates could be worse than it was in the last debate. I was wrong. If anyone thought that Bush could connect better with the people in a town hall format, they were living in a dreamworld.

I came in after the debate started. But there are some fantastic liveblogging exercises at Fury (example 1, 2, 3) and at Scott Rosenberg’s blog, and even at Wonkette.

Last night’s VP debated is being fact-checked everywhere, most impressively in the New York Times. Jeff Jarvis thought Edwards won; most other bloggers in the room with him thought it was a draw. Tony Pierce thought Cheney lost it, as did Scott Rosenberg, who says Cheney was “tired and repetitious… [had a] tone of exasperation… [and] went down snarling.”

Anyone else think the moderator should just bitchslap both candidates and get it over with? Edwards fails to answer the last question, and it’s all over. Better commentary by far on Fark.com for this debate than for any other source I’ve seen. Even the redoubtable Oliver Willis appears to be MIA.

Interjected question: how will the administration go after Osama in a second term? Cheney completely refuses to answer the question, slipping in hits on the Kerry/Edwards defense record as he does so. Edwards redirects to the Veep’s distortion on the “global test” question. Cheney makes an interesting comparison between El Salvador in the 80s and Afghanistan today. Edwards brings up Cheney’s support for lifting sanctions on Iran and North Korea.

The moderator gives Edwards an opportunity to clarify the “global test” remark from the last debate. He says, “For America to lead…it is critical that we be credible. It is critical that when America takes action, they [our allies] can believe…that the word of the President of the United States is always good.” Right on, John.

Next question: “Will the US be in greater danger from terror attacks if John Kerry is elected?” Cheney claims that Kerry and Edwards were swayed by Dean’s anti-war platform. Edwards hits Cheney for hypocrisy on the weapons systems issues. Halliburton enters the fray, but Cheney reiterates on the flip-flop point—and to be fair, Edwards didn’t hit it well.

Edwards is doing a pretty good job of pointing out places where the US could internationalize. Cheney hits weakly on the “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time” point, and makes an interesting point about the casualties of the Iraqi allies.

With the opening question, Cheney comes out swinging against the Kerry campaign’s positions, trying to make the case and sounding reasonably cogent despite speaking a mile a minute. Edwards responds, sounding less than solid—“Iran” for “Iraq,” though he corrects himself. On the rebound, Edwards attacks hard on the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda with no chance for response.

Follow up question is a hard one: Would Saddam still be in power if Kerry had been in power? Edwards reiterates the point about subcontracting the hit on Osama to the Afghani warlords. Response: “I have not suggested that there is a connection between Iraq and 9/11.” Oh really? How about a year ago? How about this week?

Whatever would we do without Wonkette? Just in time, she’s posted a Vice Presidential Debate Drinking Game. Highlights in the bonus round:

• Edwards calls himself the “son of a mill worker”: Chug a bottle of moonshine.
• Edwards refers to Cheney’s six deferments: Have sex without using birth control.
• Cheney mentions “family values”: Do a shot with your gay daughter.
• Cheney refers to Edwards’s lack of foreign policy experience: Look for a WMD.
• Edwards talks about “fighting for people just like the ones I grew up with”—sip expensive drink while thinking nostalgic thoughts about the people you grew up and their Budweisers.
• Cheney tells Edwards to go f___ himself: Watch him try.

John Robb thinks that Kerry lost this first debate, given that all Bush needed to do was hold Kerry to “tactical victories,” but he also provides much needed context for Kerry’s “global test” remark. At the time, I thought Kerry was just foolishly playing into right-wing paranoia about new world orders. It turns out that, according to Robb, he’s referencing part of Col. John Boyd’s “grand strategy” concept, the moral connectivity vector:

A key test of moral connectivity is proper conduct within alliances.  If a member of an alliance takes independent action that puts the other alliance members at risk, it needs to have a strong moral justification for that action.  If it fails that test, the alliance will melt away, and the independent actor will become isolated.

The post points to a fascinating article on Boyd’s strategic thought at Global Guerrillas. Thought provoking.

Interesting staking out of positions while position to the extreme facets. The president’s slipping in the World Criminal Court was telling, as was Kerry’s mention of the Kyoto Protocol.

Hmm. Good clarification from Lehrer. Bilateral vs. multilateral. Interesting clarification leaving Kerry looking slightly foolish, with Bush’s correction about “enriched uranium” vs. “plutonium.”

And here is the real point, on the Sudan: we’re overextended, straining the National Guard, holding people in who want to leave. But both candidates want to answer questions on Iran rather than the Sudan.

I think Kerry was a little overconfident, slipping “Mission Accomplished” into his reply on Korea and Russia. His closing is OK—not a barnraiser, but it is after all a debate moderated by Jim Lehrer. Bush: same talking points.

Post-debate spin: Giuliani gets checked by Tom Brokaw on the assertion of the leader of Pakistan that the war made things worse by America, not better, but calls Bush’s stalling on the same two talking points a “strength.”

The sum of the President’s point right now appears to be, “Don’t change horses in mid-stream. We won’t succeed if we send mixed signals to the world.”

Hmm. A free Iraq and a free Afghanistan will send a powerful signal. Hard to get to that signal if we are losing ground there daily.

Did Bush’s prep people give him any points other than “Wrong war, wrong time” and “grand diversion”?

The enemy attacked us, and I’m committing troops…in Iraq. Where the enemy wasn’t. Oh, and let’s slip “mixed messages” into our reply.

Good of Kerry to pounce on Bush’s slip there.

Homeland security. I think this could be the hidden strength of Kerry. This is the untold story of the Bush presidency—the strong emphasis on homeland security while adding no funding. Bush: “How are you going to pay for all those promises?” Hmm. Perhaps by not slashing taxes on the rich and the corporations. Bush sounds like an imbecile by comparison to the senator.

—What the hell? “We’ll never succeed until the Iraqis take responsibility for protecting themselves.” Is that a cover signal to the gun lobby—here’s a new market? A free Iraq is essential for the security of this country. True, now.

Interlude: New York Times is also live-blogging.

Kerry let Bush get away with the $87 billion again. Probably again wise to not try to explain the fine points of how Congress works in a 30 second rebuttal.

Watching on NBC, who are getting around the “no cutaway” rule by doing splitscreen reaction shots of the candidates. Meaning that Bush shared the screen with Kerry the whole time that Kerry was speaking, while Bush had the screen to himself during the response. But it looks like they’re keeping it fair by doing split screens for the initial respondent to each question.

Second question, about the reprehensible comments of Cheney about the safety of the country should Kerry be elected. Bush ducks by saying that’s not going to happen and refuses to answer the question, which Lehrer lets him do. But Kerry zings him on the rebuttal about the diversion in Iraq—then bobbles it with his military referrals—then makes an allegation about outsourcing the fight for Bin Laden.

Third question. Anyone else notice how Bush is a frowner, not a smirker, when he’s waiting to respond? Was Saddam ten times more important than Bin Laden? Rebuttal: flip-flop allegation.

Interjection: DNC fact checkers fact checking the RNC fact checkers, here.

Hmm, in the fourth question, Bush said, “Saddam Hussein,” then mumbled and corrected himself, “Osama Bin Laden.”

Bush’s response? “Flip flop.” Kerry, wisely, isn’t trying to explain the nuances of his decisions, which I don’t think are flip flops; he’s driving on the fact that this was a mistaken decision by the president.