Anthony Lane's review of the movie "The Phantom of the Opera" in thie month's New Yorker is the meanest, most wonderful review I've read. "And so it came about, this week, that I gazed at a black screen and saw words so calamitous that they might have been written in my own blood: `Screenplay by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher.'"
HoustonChronicle.com - Marine, 100th Texan to fall in Iraq, is laid to rest: In a letter he wrote just before combat to his five year old son in Texas, he said, "'you're the sweetest little man. Be studious, stay in school and stay away from the military. I mean it. Always be a man. If you make mistakes, stand up and say so.'"
If you're looking for human anatomy knitting patterns, you could do worse than start with a uterus.
I bike commute in rush hour city traffic. As I've written elsewhere, I pass messengers between lights, they pass me at lights. The video mentioned on Josh Rubin's site is a helmet-cam view of a race, messenger-style, through Manhattan.
Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting: A Cyclist's View: "Ever see a bicycle messenger hurling down a Manhattan street, dodging pedestrians and threading the needle between a bus and a stupid stretch Hummer? If you think it looks crazy from the safety of your cab, just imagine what it's like from the messenger's perspective. Lucas Brunelle mounted a camera to his helmet and made an incredible little video that gives you just that."
Dear Santa,
If you get me a freebord (vid clip), could you also toss in some really, really good health insurance?
Hours after the polls closed, visitors to Ohio's vote tally web page noticed a problem - an 800-voter district cast 4000 votes for Bush.
The district was using an older electronic voting machine, and the particular error is believed to be an anomaly. Ohio officials say that the error would have been noticed before they released their official tally.
The New York Times has more details: Election 2004 > Voting Machines: Glitch Found in Ohio Counting: "An electronic voting machine in hotly contested Ohio added 3,893 votes to President Bush's tally in a suburban Columbus precinct, even though there are just 800 voters there."
Paul Freedman at Slate has a great analysis of the election results, The Gay Marriage Myth: Terrorism, not values, drove Bush's re-election. Comparing the 2004 election to 2000, and also 2004 states with anti-gay rights initiatives to similar states without such initiatives, Freedman concludes that gay rights and other moral value issues were not significant to Bush's win. Instead, terrorism was the deciding factor.
This may seem obvious - what with Osama bin Laden popping up just days before the election - but it is contrary to current conventional wisdom that gay rights brought evangelical and Hispanic voters out in record numbers. In fact, conventional wisdom is often whatever story is catchiest, regardless of data.
Freedman concludes:
These differences hold up at the state level even when each state's past Bush vote is taken into account. When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.
The Washington Post has an interesting analysis of Bush's election strategy and how it has influenced his decisions in office:
Once Again, Targeting Base Pays Off for Bush: Although the final judgment is still to come, yesterday's balloting did in several instances validate important elements of the Bush political model. This strategy has been based from the outset of Bush's term on carefully tending the Republican Party's conservative base, and a governing strategy based more often on trying to vanquish political adversaries rather than split the difference with them.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Iraq war, Bush strategists have also calculated that there is not so much difference between base voters and centrist 'swing' voters -- both, they maintained, are concerned above all with national security and lower taxes. strategy defied the wisdom of many Democrats since Bill Clinton, which held that swing voters were a distinct political entity and would not respond to a president as partisan as Bush.
As it happened, though, Bush's strategy last night worked much like it was supposed to...
For those of you obsessing about the election, here are some good sites with up-to-the-minute information:
CNN's great election page, updated frequently
Official Ohio Election Results, updated every minute as the votes come in.
John Kerry Campaign Weblog
I'm personally interested in how Ohio will turn out. Currently, 95% of precincts have reported, and Bush is ahead by approximately 150,000 votes. There are around 250,000 votes still to be counted.
Here's the BBC's take on Ohio
Here are the sites I'll be watching on election day:
Electoral-vote.com
CNN Election Results
For SF Bay Area voters, here are the endorsements from the San Francisco Chronicle and the SF Bay Guardian.
Reuters: Fahrenheit 9/11 to air on eve of presidential election: "LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Filmmaker Michael Moore and distributors behind 'Fahrenheit 9/11' have clinched last-minute deals to bring his anti-Bush documentary to pay-per-view television and the Internet on the eve of the U.S. presidential election.
Moore's scathing critique of President Bush and his conduct of the war in Iraq will be offered on Monday night to the 10 million-plus subscribers of the satellite-based Dish Network.
The film also will be available for online streaming Monday night to more than 30 million households with broadband Internet access through video-on-demand service CinemaNow.
The Dish and CinemaNow deals add to an agreement reached last week for two Monday night pay-per-view showings of the film by Los Angeles-based TVN Entertainment, which reaches about 1 million homes through various cable systems.
"The potential audience out there is quite large for this," said Mark Benoit, a spokesman for Moore told Reuters.
The two-hour film will be priced on all three platforms at $9.95 per showing. Moore and the Fellowship Adventure Group, which holds rights to the movie, will donate their portion of the profits to a veterans charity, Benoit said.
Fellowship Adventure was formed by Miramax cho-chairs Bob and Harvey Weinstein to buy back rights to "Fahrenheit 9/11" and distribute it after corporate parent the Walt Disney Co. declined to release the documentary.
George W. Bush's latest campaign ad, titled "Whatever it takes," answers its own question. When you don't have enough troops, just cut and paste more in!
The ad is on www.georgewbush.com, and the scene is 3/4 in.
Click here for larger image.
(Image from Aaron Harnly's website. Alt image links: small, and medium versions)
Update: Reuters - President Bush's campaign acknowledged on Thursday that a television ad depicting soldiers listening to Bush speak had been doctored so that some of the faces of the soldiers appear more than once.
DailyKos found a fascinating challenge to the conventional wisdom that undecided voters on election day vote for the challenger over the incumbent by 2 to 1. The My Election Analysis weblog takes a look at polls and voting for presidential elections from this century and finds that undecided voters, whether undecided in the summer, in the month before, or even in the week before the election, do not tend to favor the challenger.
My Election Analysis: Whither The Undecideds: "The fact is, there's no compelling evidence for such a trend. Since the advent of modern polling in 1936, there have been 12 Presidential elections where an incumbent ran. The good folk at Gallup have provided us with nice trendline charts for each of these years, which summarize their polling results: 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1992, and 1996."
Alex, I'll take surprising presidential endorsements for $1000.
American Conservative Magazine, in their latest issue, endorses Kerry for President. Here are some excerpts from their article, "Kerry's the One."
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation's children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing clich� about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy....
During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world....In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It's the same throughout the Middle East.
These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists?indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge.
New York Times: Thailand Acknowledges Prisoner Deaths During Transit: BANGKOK, Oct. 25 - At least 78 people died from suffocation while being transported in overcrowded military trucks after a violent demonstration in Thailand's largely Muslim south, government officials said today.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra appeared to have little sympathy for the victims. Referring to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which is now under way, he said: 'This is typical. It's about bodies made weak from fasting. Nobody hurt them.'
I called it. Now what do I win? Bush's mistake in the third debate, which was to say he's never made a mistake, has come back to bite him (third debate video here).
But it's not that Bush made a mistake in the third debate. He's used the same answer in the past.
Rather than a debate error, I believe this is the single greatest weakness of Bush and his cabinet. This hubris - this enormous lack of humility - leads to their inability to believe they could make mistakes. And this is the root of so many of the severe miscalculations that they have made, not just with Iraq, but across the board. By believing themselves incapable of error, they have no reason to heed advice, and no reason to fix their plans when faced with evidence that they have made a mistake.
That there even could be a mistake is so foreign, they cannot see the evidence.
ABC: Kerry: Bush Won't Own Up to Bad Decisions: 'When the president is faced with the consequences of his own bad decisions, he doesn't confront them, he tries to hide them,' Kerry said. 'The truth is, President Bush isn't leveling with the American people about why we went to war, how the war is going, or what he is doing to put Iraq on track.'
The media is reporting that the Iraqi Al Qaqaa facility is unguarded and that hundreds of tons of high explosives have been removed.
To me, this is a minor story. Al Qaqaa was Iraq's nuclear weapons research lab, Iraq's version of the Manhattan Project. Leaving this facility unguarded was insane. Who knows what design documents, equipment, and specialized machine tools were looted and are now furthering some other nation's nuclear ambitions?
Here's the Boston Globe's take:
''This is not just any old warehouse in Iraq that happened to have explosives in it; this was a leading location for developing nuclear weapons before the first Gulf War,' said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, a nonprofit organization that has followed Iraq's attempts to procure weapons of mass destruction for more than a decade. ''The fact that it had been left unsecured is very, very discouraging. It would be like invading the US in to order to get rid of [weapons of mass destruction] and not securing Los Alamos or [Lawrence] Livermore [National Laboratory].'
''The military did not view guarding these sites as their responsibility," Kay said, recalling that he witnessed US troops guarding the gates of the Tuwaitha nuclear facility while Iraq civilians carried away radioactive pipes and metal drums through other exits.
Imagine Florida 2000 repeated several times over, as Republicans challenge voters in every swing state not just after the election, but at the polls. Is it to late to call in the UN to monitor this fiasco?
NYTimes: Big G.O.P. readies 3600 to challenge votes in Ohio:
Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.
Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.
Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.
Ohio election officials said ... they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.
Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid $100.
Republican officials said they had no intention of disrupting voting but were concerned about the possibility of fraud involving thousands of newly registered Democrats.
'The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems,' said James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County.
It still surprises me that the Bush administration ignores Republican fiscal conservatives.
Reuters.com: Without fanfare, Bush OKs corporate tax cuts: Without fanfare, President George W. Bush signed into law on Friday a nearly $140 billion corporate tax cut bill derided by both Democratic presidential rival John Kerry and Republican Sen. John McCain as a giveaway to special interests.
The White House had marked the signing of Bush's other major tax bills with lavish public ceremonies. This one was marked with a one-paragraph statement by the press secretary.
[The bill] included many special interest provisions sharply criticized by public interest groups and fiscal conservatives, which congressional aides said explained Bush's decision to sign it in private.
Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who is campaigning for Bush, had called the measure 'the worst example of the influence of special interests that I have ever seen.'
The bill includes a $10 billion industry-financed buyout for tobacco farmers and tax breaks for U.S. multinational companies, some of which critics say will encourage companies to ship jobs overseas.
A one-year tax holiday for multinationals was included that will allow them to return billions of dollars in profits back to the United States at a dramatically lower 5.25 percent rate instead of the normal 35 percent top corporate rate.
A close election in 2004 is likely to be far more heavily litigated than the 2000 election. The main factors:
Look at the swirling, ugly currents at work ... a GOP history of going negative to win elections. There is Karl Rove's disposition to challenge close elections in post-election brawls. And there is a new unwillingness among Democrats to roll over.... Finally, look at the fact that a half-dozen lawsuits are in the works in the key states and more are being developed.
And it won't only be the Democrats heading to court. Indeed, in Florida in 2000, it was Bush who sued first -- while later falsely accusing Gore of starting the litigation.
[S]uing is a standard operating procedure for Karl Rove when he is losing (or has lost) a race....Make no mistake: If Bush loses, and it is very close, Rove will want to litigate as long as possible, going to the U.S. Supreme Court again if possible.
....
It may be days or weeks, if not months, before we know the final results of this presidential election. And given the Republican control of the government, if Karl Rove is on the losing side, it could be years: He will take every issue (if he is losing) to its ultimate appeal in every state he can.
It's dawning on Americans that they may go to sleep Election Night, Nov. 2, and not know for weeks who won the presidency.
Close polls, technical glitches, human error and legal challenges threaten a nightmare replay of the 2000 race.
"We could have five or six Floridas including Florida itself, given the number of legal issues surfacing in one state or another so far in the 2004 race," says law professor Burt Neuborne, who spearheads voting reform efforts at New York University.
"If the issues are significant, the election could wind up in the Supreme Court, which broke the ice four years ago with Bush v. Gore," the 5-4 ruling that ended the 36-day Florida recount, effectively giving Florida's Electoral College votes and the 2000 presidential race to George W. Bush.
The justices sought to minimize Bush v. Gore as a one-way ticket not good for future trips. It was "a one-of-a-kind case," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said later. "I doubt it will ever be cited as precedent by the court on anything."
That was wishful thinking to George Washington University constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen. He predicted early on that the ruling would prompt a flood of election-related lawsuits for local, state and federal office.
"Bush v. Gore exponentially increased the legalization of politics," Rosen told a recent gathering. "We might see weeks of uncertainty as a result" in the 2004 election cycle.
"Before Bush v. Gore, litigation wasn't a successful way to challenge an election; if legal challenges occurred, they were distant from an election's outcome and affected only future elections," says Vanderbilt law professor Suzanna Sherry. "Bush v. Gore opened the door to real-time lawsuits and arguments not previously available."
The campaigns aren't waiting. The Democratic National Committee will have 10,000 lawyers in battleground states Election Day, with six "SWAT squads" ready to deploy on orders from nominee John Kerry. The Florida team is headed by Steven Zack whose law partner, David Boies, argued Al Gore's case in Bush v. Gore.
Team Bush has similar plans with attorneys headed to 30,000 key precincts to challenge any voter whose registration seems suspect. The Republican National Committee is coordinating efforts through state parties, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has told all U.S. attorneys to stand by for fraud investigations.
