Deep instinctual distrust of W

Recently, a Republican friend led me to seriously assess my thoughts and feelings about why I support Kerry, beyond my obvious partisan feelings and the belief that he'd be better for the high tech market, as Clinton was. As a result, I am beginning to see that for me, it's a matter of conscience and gut instinct. Here are my tacit and unarticulated reasons for supporting Kerry:

1. when I look at Kerry and Bush, I realize that I am measuring them against the yardstick of who I'd prefer to run a company - and Bush feels and looks the kind of CEO who can look good when you're hiring him, but will end up destroying a company - a spoiled lazy rich kid who delivers only excuses for his failures and refuses to take responsibility. Kerry - at least during the debates genuinely feels like a potential "great president", another Clinton in the making. How Presidential did Bush look before he was actually President? Check out his act at: http://www.videovotevigil.org/
2. Kerry is reality-based whereas Bush is faith-based, and this makes a big difference in fighting an effective war and building a healthy economy. I just read that Newsweek is about to break a report that Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war. That the insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces "from top to bottom, from decision making to the lower levels." But he doesn't say anything publicly for fear of embarrassing the President and costing him the election. I believe that if Bush is failing at the war, then his supporters are as equally blinded to reality as he is, and the need to elect new leadership is greater than ever.
3. the next president will appoint two Supreme Court justices with deep impact on my personal rights over the next 20 years, and the idea that Bush might appoint them sends a chill down my spine
4. I had a feeling this was true, but Gallup has confirmed my suspicion that Bush is the most polarizing President in history, even more than Clinton or Nixon: http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=13735
5. I believe in environmental planning, and Bush's approach to clean air is to remove carbon dioxide from the list of pollutants and walk away from international treaties. With so many other important issues top of mind, the environment has shifted to the back of my mind. Anyway, with global warming now a certainty (http://www.indystar.com/articles/1/190557-3471-010.html), I believe that the long term health of the planet may depend of very important decisions made over the next ten years. Bush would make the wrong decisions.
6. I just now realized that I got a small glimpse into the strategic thinking capacity of the Kerry team, by looking at how they dealt with an advertising dilemma this summer. Both campaigns had an equal amount of money to spend in the race, but Democrats had to stretch it out for 13 weeks, the GOP over only 8. So Kerry went dark in August and conserved his resources for the final weeks of the campaign, as Bush went nuclear on Kerry after his convention. But in the final hours of the game, the Kerry campaign has had 50% money to saturate battleground states than Bush does, which, when combined with a bad news week for Bush, has led to his steady climb by 3 points during what should be a heavily entrenched war of the minds. This indicates to me more effective strategy and planning, which the Bush campaign seems sorely lacking.

What about you? Do you have a nagging doubt about either candidate that yearns to be vocalized?

For Bush, the hits just keep on coming

I'm sure that the Republicans are screaming "bloody liberal media conspiracy", but it's simply amazing, this last minute stream of bad news for Bush in the final week of the campaign -

1) The U.N. nuclear agency warns of missing explosives (the damage to Bush is done - simply because they didn't listen to the warning and weren't able to immediately explain what happened at Al Qaqaa)

2) Then the IAEA announces that U.S. officials were warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at the installation after ANOTHER facility was looted - ie, it wasn't just an isolated case of incompetence

3) To the chagrin of the RNC, Giuliani arrogantly announces that the troops in Iraq, not Bush, bore the responsibility for searching for the explosives. This basically caused soldiers to speak up and say that the received no orders to deal with explosives at Al Qaqaa.

4) A reputable study says that there are actually 100,000 fatalities in Iraq, primarily collateral casualties composed of women and children

5) RNC releases a campaign commercial with too obvious "wag the dog" type computer editing, requiring an embarrassing apology. I mean for a team that prides itself on its professionalism, a doctored photograph?

6) Surging violence in Iraq, with 50 newly-recruited Iraqi soldiers slaughtered, and Bush's puppet, Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi publicly blames the United States, rebuking the U.S. with charges of gross negligence.

7) News erupts that the FBI has begun investigating Halliburton Co., formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

8) Voters were reminded in the week before the election - yet another leak - that the cost in dollars is soaring too, with a leak that Bush plans to send Congress a request of up to $75 billion early next year for additional money to finance wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bringing the total to Kerry's $200 billion figure.

9) And apparently, CBS (feeling trumped on the Al Qaqaa explosives issue) will be airing a segment on how the President allowed kids to be shipped overseas without proper body armor, in order to give a tax break to the rich. You can assume that the footage of crippled veterans will be pretty emotionally wrenching.

10) NPR's Daniel Schorr, a senior news analyst, answering charges of a media conspiracy to bury Bush, is accusing the Bush campaign of a massive coverup. He claims that the issues of the missing explosives in Iraq and the full cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been hid via a cover-up, and only became known after being leaked to the press.

That commercial about a pack of wolves was right. Only it was the media getting ready to tear Bush apart. And through it all, Bush is silent on this issues, and keeps repeating that line, "Freedom is on the march!" I predict this line will go down in history next to "Prosperity is just around the corner!"

Poor guy. The only way Bush could win this election, is to steal it... again.

About the missing explosives issue, you can see Karl Rove in full spin mode, as Bush loyalist mouthpieces spew the exact same flak, word for word, in a flurry of articles that are coming out: "it's only a drop in a bucket of 400,000 tons of munitions", "it might have been removed before the war", "this liberal media plot to sandbag the President will blow up in Kerry's face - it's Bomb-gate instead of Rather-gate", "it's unpatriotic to criticize the war effort in any way".

So here are some recent developments:

1) A few hours ago, the U.N. nuclear agency confirmed that it clearly warned the United States about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Iraq's Al-Qaqaa military installation after the country's main nuclear complex was looted in April 2003. "After we heard reports of looting at the Tuwaitha site in April 2003, the agency's chief Iraq inspectors alerted American officials that we were concerned about the security of the high explosives stored at Al-Qaqaa," said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency. These explosives are usable in nuclear triggers and thus were of great importance to this organization trying to keep nuclear weapons from the hands of terrorists. The organization clarified that most of the RDX - about 125 tons - was kept at Al-Mahaweel, a storage site under Al-Qaqaa's jurisdiction located outside the main Al-Qaqaa site. "IAEA inspectors were in the process of verifying this statement ... and would have proceeded later had they stayed in Iraq," Fleming added. The nuclear agency's inspectors pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion and have not been allowed to return for general inspections despite ElBaradei's requests that they be allowed to finish their work.

2) It's clear that US troops were not told to secure explosives, according to Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, which arrived at the al-Qaqaa base a day or so after other coalition troops seized Baghdad. He added that when troops arrived there were already looters throughout the facility. The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Wellman wrote in an e-mail message. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area. Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions." Clearly, these guys are not willing to take the rap or fall on their swords for Bush & Co, which clearly failed to heed the advice of the U.N. nuclear agency.

3) Recent reports on the ground indicate that there was widespread looting AFTER U.S. troops left. In fact, workers at the facility ASKED to have the site sealed from looters, but the U.S. troops had "more important" order to tend to. In fact, on video shot by an embedded reporter, U.S. troops broke into a bunker there, and when they left, failed to relock the bunker, full of munitions and explosives. And a few hour ago, some insurgents even released a statement that they looted the facility, after the U.S. troops left... "nyah, nyah, nyaaaaaaah!!!"

The issue isn't that mistakes were made. Everyone knows that all war planning is useless after the first ten minutes of battle. For example, when the Bay of Pigs operation failed, John Kennedy had the courage to take responsibility for the mistakes he made. It also taught Kennedy NOT TO REPEAT HIS MISTAKES. The real issue here is that Bush - a man who seems to refuse to see reality possibly because he's an evangelical true believer who talks to God and is leading a religious crusade into the holy land - fits Einstein's definition of insanity to a tee: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." The real issue is why Bush didn't let the U.N. nuclear agency back into Iraq to help. The real issue is whether Bush listened to the U.N. nuclear agency about it's most important advice - or to Clinton's last words to Bush to absolutely focus on Osama bin Laden as America's #1 threat - or to George Tenet and Richard Clarke's advice to focus on bin Laden instead of going after Iraq über alles?

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Finally, I saw something on the Internet recently that answers Bush's charge that Kerry is being unpatriotic to criticize the President. It was this quote: "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Who said it? Some wild-eyed liberal? Nope, President Teddy Roosevelt.

The Kerry campaign has recently accused the Bush camp of twisting the remarks about terrorism out of context. Bush has kept up a pathetic criticism of comments Kerry made in an interview with The New York Times Magazine, in which, in answer to a question about what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, the senator replied that "we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life," Kerry told the magazine.

Alluding to those comments, Bush told his luncheon audience in Arizona that he and Kerry "have a different view of the war on terror. It's not just to be reduced as a nuisance. It is to be defeated by using all of the might of the United States and spreading freedom as an alternative."

Well, I have a different view of this issue. I think that Kerry is saying that we can fight a "balanced war" against terrorism. Something effective, but within reason. Bush is clearly willing to fight an unreasonable and (mentally) "unbalanced" war, at the cost of a $500 billion deficit, at the cost of our personal liberties, at the cost of breaking the Geneva Conventions and instituting torture as SOP, at the cost of our international reputation, at the cost of hunting down and killing every "potential" terrorist... which invariably creates more terrorists than it kills.

When Bush says, "He can run, but he cannot hide from his record." Who is he really talking about? Isn't this just another pathetic attempt to run from his own record of failure, both economic and in foreign policy?Clearly, it's time for new leadership.

Here's my prediction on the election, which is based on the following:

1) the polls remain neck to neck up until the election, which will galvanize significant numbers of new voters and apathetic slackers to actually make it out to vote
2) significant new voter registrations (up 60-100% over 2000, with Democrats outregistering Republicans two-to-one.)
3) continued momentum in both debate success for Kerry and news pressure in terms of poor job numbers and deteriorating conditions in Iraq

If this holds, I believe that the "Incumbent Rule" (http://www.pollingreport.com/incumbent.htm) will be reinforced - that 80% of undecideds usually vote for the challenger. The Incumbent Rule was developed by The Polling Report, and is based on an analysis of 155 final polls before an election, which reveals that, in races that include an incumbent, over 80% of the time, most or all of the undecideds vote for the challenger. They cover both general and primary elections, with both Democratic and Republican incumbents, provided by CBS, Gallup, Gordon S. Black Corp., Market Opinion Research, Tarrance Associates, and Mason-Dixon Opinion Research.

The Incumbent Rule indicates that an incumbent leading with less than 50% is frequently in trouble; how much depends on how much less than 50%. A common pattern has been for incumbents ahead with 50% or less to end up losing.

So why do undecided voters decide in favor of challengers? It seems that undecided voters are not literally undecided, not straddling the fence unable to make a choice – the traditional interpretation. An early decision to vote for the incumbent is easier because voters know incumbents best. It helps to think of undecided voters as undecided about the incumbent, as voters who question the incumbent’s performance in office. Most or all voters having trouble with this decision appear to end up deciding against the incumbent. This means that about one in four of all 155 polls actually overstated the incumbent’s percentage. Of the 127 challengers who gained more undecideds than did incumbents on election day, 78 gained 10 or more points over their stated poll percentage.

Thus, I'm predicting a neck to neck poll on the eve of the election, followed by a landslide win for Kerry that will send the neocons packing.

Reflections after debate #2:

The best thing about the presidential debates is how they've raised the level of the election out of the gutter that Karl Rove put them in. Imagine that, a semi-intelligent discourse on Supreme Court appointments, feeder layers of mouse cells that contaminate stem cells, etc.

Anyway, my favorite zingers were:

Bush: "I heard there's rumors on the Internets!" (Man, Bush doesn't even know that it's THE Internet. Only one. Maybe he's living in a dream world where there are several Internets? Maybe he just doesn't get coalitions of anything?)
Bush: "When a drug comes in from Canada, I wanna make sure it cures ya, not kill ya."(These are American made prescription drugs, reimported from Canada.)

Kerry: "Bush... a weapon of mass deception."
Kerry: "Missouri would be the third largest member of his 'coalition'."
Kerry: "I was able to do with some of my votes in the Senate what you have failed to do, which is balance the budget."

Bush offered quips and slogans. Kerry hit back with facts and reason. It was clear by the end of the evening that Kerry has a plan, and Bush is offering only more of the same. In general, Bush's performance was indicative of a failed administration that produces only excuses. It's wuz the recession! It wuz the generals! It was bad intelligence! It was "bad appointees"! It wuzn't my fault! I'm great for the environment! Kerry would try to point out reality: "The Clear Skies bill that he just talked about, it's one of those Orwellian names you pull out of the sky, slap it onto something, like 'No Child Left Behind' but you leave millions of children behind. Here they're leaving the skies and the environment behind. We're going backwards. In fact, his environmental enforcement chief air-quality person at the EPA resigned in protest over what they're doing to what are calling the new source performance standards for air quality."

Finally, I think the most telling comparison came when you watched Bush and Kerry's responses on Supreme Court justice appointments - in this, you can see the clear difference between Bush and Kerry. Bush's desperate and incorrect invocation of the Dred Scott case vs Kerry's straight-from-the-heart answer. (Dred Scott was denied rights of citizenship because of African ancestry... I'm sure some law school professor will write about this.) Kerry's response brought a patriotic tear to my eye:

"I subscribe to the Justice Potter Stewart standard. He was a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. And he said the mark of a good judge, good justice, is that when you're reading their decision, their opinion, you can't tell if it's written by a man or woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian. You just know you're reading a good judicial decision.

The Supreme Court of the United States is at stake in this race, ladies and gentlemen. The future of things that matter to you -- in terms of civil rights, what kind of Justice Department you'll have, whether we'll enforce the law. Will we have equal opportunity? Will women's rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman's right to choose be protected? These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law."

About the debates, I heard that since the first debate gets 10 million more viewers, Bush's team demanded that it be about foreign policy, which they thought would be Bush's strongest area. Well, they screwed the pooch on that one. Now with debate two in a town hall forum where questions cannot be controlled (likely to cause more scowling by Bush, a very un-presidential feature), and debate three about domestic issues like negative job growth and poverty, Bush is on the defensive.

Anyway, the polls must be scaring the Bush team. Historically, polls have shown that incumbents usually get very few undecideds. There have been four incumbent presidential elections in the past 25 years. If we take an average of the final surveys conducted by the three major networks and their partners, in three of these the incumbent fell short of or merely matched his final poll number, while exceeding it only once, and then by just a single point (Ronald Reagan). On average, the incumbent comes in half a point below his final poll result.

Year Incumbent Final Polls (in percent) Actual Vote (in percent)
1996 Bill Clinton 51 49
1992 George Bush Senior 37 37
1984 Ronald Reagan 58 59
1980 Jimmy Carter 42 41

The numbers for challengers usually go up. In every case, the challenger, including Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, exceeds the final poll result by at least 2 points, and the average gain is 4 points. In 1980, Ronald Reagan received 51 percent, fully 6 percentage points above his final poll results.

Apparently, this happens because elections are fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent. The first step in voters' decision-making process is to answer the question "does Bush deserve re-election?" Undecided voters have basically already answered that question in the negative, and their undecided status reflects the fact that they don't know enough about the challenger (yet) to feel comfortable stating a public preference.

No one ever talks about this, but the Bush team knows it.

Finally, with new voter registrations at an all time high and leaning heavily toward Democratic party membership, Bush has quite a few worries. He's already changed the tone of his campaign to compensate for losing the first debate. And yeah, Karl Rove must be staying up nights thinking up new dirty tricks to play. Unfortunately, the last one - the global test misrepresentation - was dismissed by Kerry as "pathetic" which seems to have worked.

This election is really quite entertaining, isn't it?

Back to politics...

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My support for Kerry has strengthened as a result of the first presidential debate. In the debate, I found Kerry articulate, intelligent and much more presidential than Bush. Apparently, the majority of people who watched the debate agree with me, and the vast majority of commentators have ceded a clear victory in the first debate to Kerry. More importantly, the underlying subconscious messaging based on stature, poise and body language was an absolute and total defeat for Bush. Kerry looked much more presidential and this is going to win him quite a few "undecided" votes in the long run. If you'd like to review the dichotomy of presidential "stature" between Kerry and Bush, check out this video:
http://mfile.akamai.com/8082/wmv/democratic1.download.akamai.com/8082/video/faces/faces.asx

Oddly, it was the pro-Bush Fox Channel running the cameras, and they had agreed not to broadcast "reaction shots", so Bush was probably ambushed by a Democratic camera/production team. Anyway, the reason I focus on Bush's lack of presidential bearing is because the next debate is in a town hall format, where Bush cannot control the composition of the audience. I expect for the liberals in the audience to get VERY nasty, causing him to wilt further - no matter what his handlers are telling him. Bush is simply not good at handling criticism, and the first debate - on foreign policy and security - was his best shot at looking presidential and he simply blew the opportunity.

And in the VP debate, expect Edwards to take off the kid gloves and mop the floor with Cheney on all issues, foreign and domestic. Edwards is a world class orator, dashing and trustable, a compelling trial attorney able to collects hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from juries, etc etc. Cheney is... well, let's just say that Dick Cheney is Bush's weakest link. It's going to be a slaughter.

Anyway, I am now convinced that Kerry would be able to prosecute a war based on effectiveness, realism and international support. The bottom line is that Bush has been far less than effective in prosecuting the war, has run the Pentagon on a "closed information basis" (as Paul put it), and has blown whatever international credibility he had going into the war. In the words of Admiral Stansfield Turner who served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency: "George Bush as the Commander-in-Chief has got us into a morass in both Iraq and Afghanistan. John Kerry is a true veteran, and would be a much better commander-in-chief." I mean, THIS IS THE FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE CIA. He's not your typical stupid liberal jerk, ya think?

Pretty much everyone in the know sees that Bush has seriously screwed up here, and that it's time to fire him. But how well would Kerry do in fighting terrorism? Consider the recent Kerry endorsements by military leaders, in additional to Stansfield Turner and Wesley Clark --

• <>Admiral William J. Crowe (United States Navy, Retired), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking officer in the U.S. military.

• "The current administration has an overly simplistic view of how and when to use our military. By not bringing in our friends and allies, they have created a mess in Iraq and are crippling our forces around the world. John Kerry has a realistic understanding of the requirements of our military and the threats that we face."

<>General John M. Shalikashvili (United States Army, Retired), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking officer in the U.S. military.
• "I believe in John Kerry. As a young man, he heeded his country’s call to service when it needed him. He commanded in combat and did so with bravery and distinction. He knows from experience a commander’s responsibility to his troops. He stands with our troops and with their families."

<>General Johnnie E. Wilson (United States Army, Retired), Commanding General of the U.S. Army Material Command, responsible for the Army's wholesale logistics, acquisition and technology generation operations.
• "Senator Kerry is a principled, patriotic leader with the requisite skills to lead America in the 21st century."

<>Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy (United States Army, Retired), the first and only woman to achieve the rank of three-star general in the United States Army.
• "John Kerry understands the future as it is framed by the international community and by the people at home. He will make the right decisions about education, defense, intelligence, economic development both foreign and domestic, and sustaining international relationships. He is a leader I trust."

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Recently, 500 military flag officers came out and endorsed Kerry.

Finally, my vote is still primarily based on the fact that Kerry would be much better for high tech than Bush and also, I'm very worried by stuff like the following:

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President Bush has announced his plan to select Dr. W. David Hager to Head up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. The committee has not met for more than two years, during which time its charter lapsed. As a result, the Bush Administration is tasked with filling all eleven positions with new members. This position does not require Congressional approval. The FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee makes crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used in the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, including hormone therapy, contraception, treatment for infertility, and medical alternatives to surgical procedures for sterilization and pregnancy termination.

Dr. Hager, the author of "As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now." The book blends biblical accounts of Christ healing Women with case studies from Hager's practice. His views of productive health care are far outside the mainstream for reproductive technology. Dr. Hager is a practicing OB/GYN who describes himself as "pro-life" and refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women.

In the book Dr. Hager wrote with his wife, entitled "Stress and the Woman's Body," he suggests that women who suffer from premenstrual syndrome should seek help from reading the bible and praying. As an editor and contributing author of "The Reproduction Revolution: A Christian Appraisal of Sexuality Reproductive Technologies and the Family," Dr. Hager appears to have endorsed the medically inaccurate assertion that the common birth Control pill is an abortifacient.

All Americans should be concerned that Dr. Hager's strong religious beliefs may color his assessment of technologies that are necessary to protect women's lives or to preserve and promote women's health. Hager's track record of using religious beliefs to guide his medical decision-making makes him a dangerous and inappropriate candidate to serve as chair of this committee. Critical drug public policy and research must not be held hostage by antiabortion politics. Members of this important panel should be appointed on the basis of science and medicine, rather than politics and religion. American women deserve no less.