This is our last day to post information to our Spokesman-Review Elections Blog and this will be my final posting. I feel blessed and very grateful to have been given the opportunity to be involved in this exercise. I want to thank Ken Sands and the Spokesman Review and I hope my postings and commentary have added something of value.

So here we are… Election day 2004… I awoke with a prayer this morning. Not praying for a candidate, but praying for our nation. I awoke asking for my God to help us restore reason, compassion and sanity to our collective will. And maybe more than anything I was just praying for us as a whole… the American people. That we might once again realize the wonderful gift we have been blessed with. Not in a partisan or zealous way that alienates and polarizes but in an all inclusive, collective sense.

Certainly, as a nation, America has done things that I have not agreed with and I have spoken out against. But I never stopped appreciating my right to do so. I never felt afraid for our fundamental values as a nation. The things that those revolutionary rascals enriched our nation with upon its creation. They didn’t get everything right, but the fundamental goodness of what they created and the fact that it stood functionally in tact for over 200 years is something I have never stopped believing in…

I’m not given to patriotic frenzies. However talking with a friend recently, we were taken by how much we love this country and how proud we were of what the real essence of American democracy stood for in the world. Sadly we don’t feel as proud as we once did. Our position in the world is diminished. We are now feared by many but respected by few. And many among us don’t seem to care. This is extremely troubling to me. You wouldn’t discount the opinions of your associates in your workplace or school or neighborhood. Isn’t our global community at least as important?

The feeling I characterize as what we all felt on September 12th really focused all of this for me. I recall that day crystal clear as I’m sure we all do. Like it was yesterday. There were no republicans, democrats, independents, libertarians… We were just Americans. We had been attacked and we were furious and outraged, but we were united completely. Our collective spirit was bonded at that moment in time. We didn’t have to say it. Indeed it would have been overkill at the time. But it was so genuine, there was no doubt about it. With all of the pain we felt then, that spirit was like a medication that gave us peace.

But then something happened and we lost it. I’m not sure exactly when this happened but we definitely did and I pray that its not too late to get it back.

I wonder if we can we go beyond winners and losers on this Election Day and realize that we will all lose if we don’t get our act together and work toward our common good once again? Don’t we all really want the same things? In the big picture, don’t we all want to be happy, healthy and comfortable and to provide better for our children and grandchildren than we had for ourselves? Can’t we realize that it isn’t so important to have more of the above than our neighbor, but that our neighbor also has his or her fair share of the pie as well? There is no doubt that we differ on how we accomplish these goals but I maintain we will never reach them if we continue to fight amongst ourselves. If we can’t appreciate that we are all part of one nation, indeed one very small world. Whether democrat or republican or whatever, we are not the enemy. We have common goals.

We can debate the reasons why our national conversation has sunk to such depths. There is no doubt that there are those who feel their interests are better served through generating ongoing conflict. These are diversions from our collective good and it is our duty as citizens to be informed and to resist these manipulations through our democratic process. Those who summon hate and fear in us are no different today than they were proven to be in Europe in the 1930s or any other time in history. They are vexations to our lives and they divert us from our spirituality that holds us together as people. That makes us care about each other as the brothers and sisters that we truly are.

So will my morning prayer be answered today? Will we get past the partisan bickering and work to become a unified people once again? A part of me scoffs at the very idea! The impracticality of my idealism… but I’ve always been stricken with it and I guess even at 52, I still am.

So I will continue to pray for us and work to affect positive change in our lives. I hope that you will too. They say God helps those who help themselves so it’s really all I can do. To quote another revolutionary rascal…

“Imagine there’s no country.”
“It isn’t hard to do.”
“Nothing to kill or die for.”
“No religion too.”
“Imagine all the people living life in peace…”

“You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.”
“I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.”

New York Times | Editorial: Urging Americans to vote on Election Day should be a motherhood-and-apple-pie editorial topic. But nothing is simple in the post-2000 political world. We all know the difference between a swing state and one that's long been consigned to the column of sure things. If you happen to be living in Ohio or Florida, nobody has to explain why it is important for you to go to the polls today. But citizenship is more complicated in places like New York and California, or Utah and Georgia, where electoral votes were all but conceded by last spring.

Still, every vote counts. Including the ones that already feel counted.

On the presidential level, the popular vote really does matter, despite the Electoral College. Those of us in the deep-dyed blue or red states vote to register our bit of the national will, to help confer a mandate on our chosen candidate or withhold one should the other side triumph. We vote because the very act of turning out shows that we believe that this election is critically important, and we don't want to give even the slightest impression that it doesn't matter to us who wins.

We vote because the rest of the world has become disillusioned enough about the American political process. If people can ride donkeys over mountains in Afghanistan to choose among the decidedly imperfect candidates they were offered last month in their first democratic election, we can stand in line and force election officials to make sure our vote is recorded. And if people can find the location of their voting place in Kandahar, we can call up the board of elections or go on the Web to make sure we're heading for the right site here.

And once we find the right polling place, we're going to vote to make sure that our election officials are doing their job properly and to reassure the shocking numbers of our fellow Americans, especially first-time voters or minorities, who believe they will be prevented from casting a ballot or that it will not be counted. Here in New York, for instance, we have seen plenty of evidence that it is only the wide margins in most races that have been saving the state's creaky voting system from a meltdown that would make Florida look like Athens in the age of Pericles. If we start complaining now, perhaps we can fix things before it's too late.

We're going to vote because in many places there are other matters - ballot propositions, state legislative races, Congressional contests - that deserve our attention.

And even if all of those contests seem like foregone conclusions as well, we can vote to send a message. An incumbent state legislator who is used to getting 70 percent of the vote every year will feel a thrill of terror if this season's opponent comes within 10 percent, and may well be inspired to try to improve the political status quo that's causing dissatisfaction.

Most of all, we're going to vote because this is our country, our election, our national future. It's not possible to make up enough rules or roadblocks to discourage us.

Paul Krugman, Faith in America: Florida's early polling was designed to make voting easier, but enormous voter turnout swamped the limited number of early polling sites. Over the weekend, people in some polling places had to stand in line for four, five, even six hours, often in the hot sun. Some of them - African-Americans in particular - surely suspected that those lines were so long because officials wanted to make it hard for them to vote. Yet they refused to be discouraged or intimidated.

Here's what a correspondent from Florida wrote to Joshua Marshall, of talkingpointsmemo.com: "To see people coming out - elderly, disabled, blind, poor; people who have to hitch rides, take buses, etc. - and then staying in line for hours and hours and hours ... Well, it's humbling. And it's awesome. And it's kind of beautiful."

Yes, it is. I always get a little choked up when I go to the local school to cast my vote. The humbleness of the surroundings only emphasizes the majesty of the process: this is democracy, America's great gift to the world, in action.

But over the last few days I've been seeing pictures from Florida that are even more majestic. They show long lines of voters, snaking through buildings and on down the sidewalk: citizens patiently waiting to do their civic duty. Those people still believe in American democracy; and because they do, so do I. More...

"There have been more than 9,000 U.S. casualties in Iraq so far - more than 8,100 wounded and 1,100 killed. Nearly half of those casualties are the result of roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs in military jargon. Yet the U.S. military still lacks thousands of fully armored vehicles that could save American lives."

U.S. has $400 billion Defense Budget: Two weeks ago, a group of Army reservists in Iraq refused a direct order to go on a dangerous operation to re-supply another unit with jet fuel.

Without helicopter gunships to escort them over a treacherous stretch of highway, and lacking armored vehicles, soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company called it a suicide mission.

The Army called it an isolated incident, a temporary breakdown in discipline, and an investigation is underway.

But the 343rd isn't the first outfit to be put in harm's way without proper equipment, and commanders in Iraq acknowledged that the unit's concerns were legitimate, even if their mutiny was not.

With a $400 billion defense budget you might think U.S. troops have everything they need to fight the war, but that's not always the case.

Correspondent Steve Kroft talks to a general, soldiers in Iraq, and their families at home about a lack of armored vehicles, field radios, night vision goggles, and even ammunition - especially for the National Guard and reserve units that now make up more than 40 percent of U.S. troops.

In this report, Kroft also talks to Sen. John McCain about how pork-barrel politics have shortchanged troops on the ground.

Every couple of weeks Karen Preston gets a telephone call from her son Ryan who is serving in Iraq with the Oregon National Guard.

But Karen Preston has been worrying a lot ever since last summer when Ryan returned home on leave and showed her these photos of the unarmored vehicles his unit was using for convoy duty in Iraq.

Lacking the proper steel plating to protect soldiers from enemy mines and rocket propelled grenades, they had been jerry-rigged with plywood and sandbags.

"They were called cardboard coffins," Preston says. More...

More Important News...
Al Qaeda leader reminds America of unfinished business
Bin Laden's Economy Threat Is Timely
Colin Powell Believes U.S. is Losing Iraq war
Cheney is lying about Halliburton
Bin Laden tries to influence U.S. election-analysts

AP, November 1, 2004: Osama bin Laden vowed to bleed America to bankruptcy, according to a full transcript of unaired portions of a videotape released Monday by an Arab television station. The al-Qaeda leader's remarks appeared targeted to the final days of the U.S. presidential campaign in which the struggling economy is a major issue.

Bin Laden boasted in his first appearance in more than a year that for every $1 al-Qaeda has spent on terrorist strikes, it has cost the United States $1 million in economic fallout and military spending, including emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.

"As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers," bin Laden said, estimating the deficit at more than $1 trillion.

In reality, spending in the war against terror and other factors have resulted in an expected $377 billion shortfall for 2003 – the highest deficit since World War II accounting for inflation. The total U.S. national debt is near the $7.4 trillion statutory limit. More...

More important news:
Colin Powell Believes U.S. is Losing Iraq war
Cheney is lying about Halliburton
Bin Laden tries to influence U.S. election-analysts
Al Qaeda leader reminds America of unfinished business

Jack MacMillan, Perspective: George Bush forfeited this election when he openly declared the war, the recession, and the deaths on 9/11 to be his lucky trifecta, joking on fourteen occasions about the good fortune those tragedies had brought to him and his wealthy supporters.

The evidence? His own words, published on the White House website.

Two speech transcripts there show Budget Director Mitch Daniels reporting that shortly after 9/11, while discussing the recession, the war, and 9/11, Bush turned to him and said, "Lucky me! I hit the trifecta."

A trifecta, of course, is racetrack jargon for the big payoff you get for picking three winners.

After 9/11 Bush took his trifecta joke on the road, using it as a laugh line at thirteen Republican fundraising events in the winter and spring of 2002. You can find all thirteen speech transcripts on the White House website. Just search "trifecta."

So why did Bush think his audiences would find the recession, the war, and 9/11 so funny? The answer lies in his tax agenda. In the summer of 2001, rising federal deficits caused pressure to rescind the tax cuts. Wealthy contributors were worried. The trifecta joke reassured them.

Bush had promised to never run a deficit, he said, unless "we had a war, or a national emergency, or a recession." Now, to their relief, he would be free to fund the tax cuts with borrowed funds.

That's why the White House transcripts always show the strange notation (Laughter) whenever he lists the three events that others read as tragedy. They knew the punch line in advance. "Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta. (Laughter.)"

For four months he repeated the joke to more than a dozen elite audiences who laughed because they understood the equation. War, recession, and national emergency excused the deficit. Deficit financing made their tax cuts possible. Good luck for all. Funny to some.

Bush's shockingly egoistic response to 9/11 cannot be dismissed as "old news" when his chief political strategist Karl Rove begins the final weekend of the 2004 campaign defending the use of 9/11 families at a New Hampshire campaign rally by saying: "9/11 is one of the great unifying moments, whether we like it or not, for America."

"Lucky me!" The president's own words establish a premeditated intention to turn that unifying moment into a divisive campaign weapon. Time and again Bush positioned himself beside the widows and children, and even the coffins, of 9/11 victims. What will those families feel when they discover how often he left their sides to joke about the deaths of their loved ones?

You've probably seen the emotionally charged commercial with George Bush hugging Ashley, a young woman who lost her mother on 9/11. What will Ashley feel when she learns how often Bush laughed about the event that took her mother's life? How do you feel about that? More...

More important news:
Colin Powell Believes U.S. is Losing Iraq war
Cheney is lying about Halliburton
Bin Laden's commercial

This is the first election in which process has received almost as much attention as content. Part of the campaign has been about who wins, Bush or Kerry. Another part, equally important, has been about how to be sure who wins, really wins.

Our democracy lost a lot in 2000. Looked on by much of the world as a democratic paragon, America was turned by Florida and the Supreme Court into a hanging-chad, 5-4, laughing stock. Known for sending monitors to observe elections in developing nations, we will receive monitors from those nations this time. More...

(CBS) Two weeks ago, a group of Army reservists in Iraq refused a direct order to go on a dangerous operation to re-supply another unit with jet fuel.

Without helicopter gunships to escort them over a treacherous stretch of highway, and lacking armored vehicles, soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company called it a suicide mission.

The Army called it an isolated incident, a temporary breakdown in discipline, and an investigation is underway.

But the 343rd isn't the first outfit to be put in harm's way without proper equipment, and commanders in Iraq acknowledged that the unit's concerns were legitimate, even if their mutiny was not.

With a $400 billion defense budget you might think U.S. troops have everything they need to fight the war, but that's not always the case.

Every couple of weeks Karen Preston gets a telephone call from her son Ryan who is serving in Iraq with the Oregon National Guard.

But Karen Preston has been worrying a lot ever since last summer when Ryan returned home on leave and showed her these photos of the unarmored vehicles his unit was using for convoy duty in Iraq.

Lacking the proper steel plating to protect soldiers from enemy mines and rocket propelled grenades, they had been jerry-rigged with plywood and sandbags.

"They were called cardboard coffins," Preston says.

There have been more than 9,000 U.S. casualties in Iraq so far – more than 8,100 wounded and 1,100 killed. Nearly half of those casualties are the result of roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs in military jargon. Yet the U.S. military still lacks thousands of fully armored vehicles that could save American lives. More...

With our Troops poised to storm Falluja and Ramadi days before the national elections, we must ask ourselves some serious questions about what we are accomplishing in Iraq. It is my studied opinion that for every Iraqi insurgent or civilian killed even more are driven to return the favor. This has taken on the likeness of a nightmarish horror movie where every foe killed springs forth ten more to take his place. And the Bush Administration’s answer to all of this is “stay the course”. There is no apparent exit strategy in sight… Only an endless war against an enemy we can’t seem to find.

If you contend Bush is re-electable, where is his “stay the course” strategy likely to take us? If we start flattening cities in Iraq, what exactly will that accomplish? Will it bring us closer to victory, to peace? I see no indication that this is the case. However, every indication does point to our actions providing recruitment fodder for bin Laden that he could never achieve through other means. It seems the harder we fight, the more we advance his cause. This doesn’t sound like a course we should “stay”.

Beyond all of this, it weighs heavily on me that we are poised to destroy two large cities with hundreds of thousands of innocents mingled among those with whom we are “at war”. Again, what are we going to accomplish here? Will it give George Bush a last minute boost in the polls for a show of his strength and resolve? Are all of these people going to die in a last ditch attempt to energize Bush’s re-election campaign?

I often consider the tables turned. What would you do if our nation were invaded on some trumped up charges that proved not only false, but intentionally fabricated by a foreign power? I know what I would do… And it wouldn’t involve welcoming any of them with flowers!

So "winning the hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people has been replaced with the president’s “unflinching confidence” in his “tough decisions”. Any good will of our purpose is now gone the way of the “stockpiles of WMDs”, the “smoking gun that might come in the form of a mushroom cloud”, the yellow cake uranium that Saddam wasn’t trying to purchase in Africa, and the “aluminum tubes” that never had anything to do with making nuclear weapons. Finally we must concur that any scraps of benevolence have long since washed down the drain along with any hope of ever winning this conflict.

Insanity is defined as “extreme folly, complete lack of common sense”. Does this describe our nation’s schizophrenic fear of being attacked by unseen “evil doers”? Many other nations have long ago had to learn to deal with these fears but we feel it's different for us… Are we the school bully who finally got beat up so now attacks at will to regain his identity? I am very afraid that four years of the Bush agenda has transformed us from an economically strong and peaceful democracy to a demagoguery spilling hatred and fear on anyone who comes near us. A nation of followers chasing policies that make no real sense and serve only those manipulating the masses to follow them.

Being hysterical will not keep us safe. We don’t need to kill innocent people because we are scared to death by our leaders. We have the resolve we need to make ourselves and the world a safer place but we must assert it as a united people. Let’s resolve to bring sanity back into our national character and throw off our fears that are being played like violins by those in power. We must stop seeing ourselves as republicans and democrats and see ourselves once again as Americans united behind our collective common good. We are strong, and when we are united in truth and doing truly honorable deeds we cannot be defeated. On Tuesday, please vote to change the course we are on. Please vote to put our beloved nation back on the rails. (Ron Reed 10/30/04)

Related News:
U.S. Marines Poised to Storm Falluja and Ramadi
U.S. Marines Killed near Fallujah
Letting Down the Troops
Bush Says U.S. Safety from Terror 'Up in the Air'

William Rivers Pitt, Perspective

To quote Mr. Pitt, "So the bastard is still alive." And from all indications, looking no worse for the wear. Bush's claims of "smoking him out" and assertions that only his administration will keep the American people safe, take on a transparency as so much re-election rhetoric.

Then his assertion that we shouldn’t be too “concerned about him” in 2002… "So I don't know where he [bin Laden] is... Nor - you know, I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you. I... I truly am not that concerned about him."

Mr. Pitt: “Beyond the demonstrable fact that Mr. Wanted-Dead-Or-Alive is still upright and breathing, there is the scathing mockery bin Laden leveled at Bush, along with a back-handed thank-you to Bush for giving the 9/11 terrorists the time they needed to complete the attack. "We never thought that the high commander of the U.S. armies would leave 50,000 of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors alone," bin Laden said. "It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God." “

“The fellow who orchestrated the massacre of 3,000 people, the fellow whom Bush said he wasn't concerned about, thanked Bush for giving him the time necessary to complete his wretched act. In the parlance of American youth, Bush got punked by the top terrorist on national television.”

“A lot of people thought the capture of bin Laden would be the 'October Surprise' to affect the vote. Instead, we got, hard as it is to believe, an election editorial from Osama, who remains alive and free. As far as October surprises go, this one is completely off-the-grid strange.” More...

Related News :
5 Eyewitness News Confirms Video Shows Al-Qaqaa
Bill Moyers - The Road to War: Disceptions Abound...
Lynn's 100 Reasons & 1 Opinion
Springsteen Brings Out 80,000 to Cheer Kerry

Pentagon seeking answers for missing munitions:
Bin Laden Video Tape Surfaces: The tape has just been shown on Al Jazeera. I haven't found anything on line discussing content yet, but they are discussing bin Laden's comments on MSNBC at this time.
More evidence on the missing Iraqi explosives
FBI Investigates Halliburton's No-Bid Contracts
Civilian Death Toll in Iraq Exceeds 100,000
Provincial Capital Near Falluja Is Rapidly Slipping Into Chaos

The Bush Administration can’t seem to get it right. The weapons of mass destruction they said were there, weren’t, and now it seems the explosives they say weren’t there, were, and what’s more there’s video from an ABC News affiliate to prove it. To make matters worse the Republican spin is all messed up: Rumsfeld is suggesting the explosives were moved before US troops arrived; his deputy undersecretary of Defense John Shaw claims the Russians moved them, and Rudy Giuliani blames it all on US troops. John Edwards responded: "Our men and women in uniform did their job. It's George Bush, the commander in chief, who didn't do his job.”

I saw this video from April 18,2003 last night. The name of the Al Qaqaa site and areas within the Al Qaqaa site are clearly printed on the sides of boxes identified by the members of the 101st Airborne as different types of high explosives. View the video here...

'...Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.'

'During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives." Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.'

'"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.' More...

Related News & Stories:
Missing Explosives, Tip of the Iceberg
Provincial Capital Near Falluja Is Rapidly Slipping Into Chaos
Videotape shows GIs at site that held missing explosives

I posted a timeline earlier today that reports the US Military was at the site on April 3rd (2003) and the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade was there on April 10th but only searched for chemical weapons. An NBC reporter embedded with the unit said there's no talk among the 101st of securing the area after they leave.

The IAEA warned U.S. officials directly about what was stored at Al-Qaqaa, the main high explosives facility in Iraq on May 3rd. On May 8th an American site survey team arrives to inspect the Latifiyah Phosgene Facility - part of Al-Qaqaa - and finds the plant heavily looted.

May 11: An American site survey team arrives to inspect Latifiyah Missile and Rocket production facility, also part of Al-Qaqaa. The team assesses the facility as non-operational but with possible dual use.

May 27: U.S. troops search specifically for high explosives. The troops find the seals have been broken. It's not clear whether they did a further accounting of the materials themselves.

Finally KSTP-TV, Minneapolis/St. Paul had a news crew in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in the area where the purported explosives disappeared, and may have videotaped some of those weapons at that time.

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003. More on the video...

Additional new information...
U.N. agency says U.S. was warned site was vulnerable in 2003, Updated 5:21 p.m. ET Oct. 28, 2004: WASHINGTON - The controversy over 377 tons of missing Iraqi explosives took new turns Thursday. Four Iraqis reported looting at their storage site after U.S. troops had left, while a group released a video saying it had the explosives and threatened to use them against U.S. troops.

Russia, meanwhile, denied a report that its troops had helped Iraq move the explosives before the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

And the U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday that U.S. officials were warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Iraq’s Al-Qaqaa military installation after another facility — the country’s main nuclear complex — was looted 18 months ago. More...

Related News & Stories:
AP: IAEA Says It Warned U.S. About Explosives
Eyewitness News Video May Be Linked to Missing Explosives in Iraq
Missing Explosives - Tip of the Iceberg

Congratulations, Mr. President! Florida's Computers Have Already Counted Thousands of Votes for George W. Bush: Before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with a several-thousand vote lead for George W. Bush. That is, the mechanics of the new digital democracy boxes "spoil" votes at a predictably high rate in African-American precincts, effectively voiding enough votes cast for John Kerry to in a tight race, keep the White House safe from the will of the voters.

To understand the fiasco in progress in Florida, we need to revisit the 2000 model, starting with a lesson from Dick Carlberg, acting elections supervisor in Duval County until this week. "Some voters are strange," Carlberg told me recently. He was attempting to explain why, in the last presidential election, five thousand Duvalians trudged to the polls and, having arrived there, voted for no one for president. Carlberg did concede that, after he ran these punch cards through the counting machines a second time, some partly punched holes shook loose, gaining Al Gore160 votes or so, Bush roughly 80.

"So, if you ran the 'blank' ballots through a few more times, we'd have a different president," I noted. Carlberg, a Republican, answered with a grin.

So it was throughout the state - in certain precincts, at least. In Jacksonville, for example, in Duval precincts 7 through 10, nearly one in five ballots, or 11,200 votes in all, went uncounted, rejected as either an 'under-vote' (a blank ballot) or 'over-vote' (a ballot with extra markings). In those precincts, 72 percent of the residents are African-American; ballots that did make the count went four to one for Al Gore. All in all, a staggering 179,855 votes were "spoiled" (i.e., cast but not counted) in the 2000 election in Florida. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission matched the ballots with census stats and estimated that 54 percent of all the under- and over-voted ballots had been cast by blacks, for whom the likelihood of having a vote discarded exceeded that of a white voter by 900 percent.

Votes don't "spoil" because they are left out of the fridge. Vote spoilage, at root, is a class problem. Just as poor and minority districts wind up with shoddy schools and shoddy hospitals, they are stuck with shoddy ballot machines. In Gadsden, the only black-majority county in Florida, one in eight votes spoiled in 2000, the worst countywide record in the state. Next door in Leon County (Tallahassee), which used the same paper ballot, the mostly white, wealthier county lost almost no votes. The difference was that in mostly-white Leon, each voting booth was equipped with its own optical scanner, with which voters could check their own ballots. In the black county, absent such "second-chance" equipment, any error would void a vote. More...

Related News & Stories:
The Coming Post-Election Chaos: A Storm Warning of Things to Come If the Vote Is as Close as Expected
Registrations of soldier, homeless challenged
The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy
Some Fear Ohio Will Be Florida of 2004
Postal Experts Hunt for Missing Ballots in Florida

Judge says GOP was targeting new voters for challenges: One voter picks up letters at the post office because trucks kept hitting his mailbox. Another serves in Iraq. Hundreds more are homeless, listing shelters as permanent addresses.

All are among the 35,000 whose eligibility has been challenged by the Ohio Republican Party. Because mail came back undelivered, the GOP says, those registrations could be fraudulent. Democrats say the GOP is trying to keep poor and minorities, who move more often, from voting.

A federal judge put a temporarily halt to the challenges Wednesday, ruling in favor of Democrats who said the GOP was targeting new voters registered by political groups supporting Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic challenger to President Bush. U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott ruled that six county elections boards should stop hearings scheduled this week in Ohio, a hotly contested state in the presidential election. (Showdown states: Ohio)

In southwest Ohio, Republicans challenged the registration of Surjo Panerjee, a fact his brother found unusual. Panerjee, 40, is an Army sergeant who is now in Falluja in Iraq.

Panerjee, also a veteran of the first Gulf War, uses his brother's house in Centerville as a permanent address even though he has lived around the world, said his brother, Dr. Partha Banerjee.

"He would laugh it off," Banerjee said. "He would say, 'I never get picked for anything nice -- why can't they give me a car or something?"' More...

Related News & Stories:
Conflicted Evangelicals Could Cost Bush Votes
Postal Experts Hunt for Missing Ballots in Florida
The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy

I found a Timeline (Associated Press) of recorded interactions of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Military with the "explosives in question". There are so many allegations going around that I think once again confusion will reign. I also believe this is exactly what the Bush Administration wants. To create an atmosphere of myriad conflicting stories and confusion surrounding this situation so their “political analysts" can more easily spin away the very real magnitude of this blunder.

As I said in an earlier posting, this is only one of an ongoing string (or we should probably call it a rope by now) of "misplaced priorities and screw-ups" that represent consistent lapses "of priorities and focus on the most important issues facing our nation." What is more important than doing all we can to ensure the safety of our troops in harm's way? Review the timeline here...

Related News & Stories:
Missing Explosives - Tip of the Iceberg:
Mystery of missing explosives continues
Eyewitness News Video May Be Linked to Missing Explosives in Iraq, KSTP-TV, Minneapolis/St. Paul
Provincial Capital Near Falluja Is Rapidly Slipping Into Chaos

Perspective by David Thalheimer: I have been a registered Republican since I first became eligible to vote. I've been an Air Force officer for 20 years, first on active duty and now in the reserves. I gladly voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and supported his battle to win the Cold War. If called to serve in Iraq, I would willingly do my duty for my country. You might think I'm a slam-dunk for the Republican ticket this year, but you'd be wrong. I backed John McCain in the 2000 primary, but I did not vote for George W. Bush and I'm even more opposed to him after seeing his performance over the past four years. I can't say I'm a big fan of John Kerry, but he's a smart guy and I'm willing to give him a chance because Bush has done such a bad job and shows so few signs of improvement that he doesn't deserve to get reelected. This letter explains why I'm voting against my Commander in Chief.

President Bush would have you believe that he is making hard decisions and doing what needs to be done to win the Global War on Terrorism. While I have no doubt that he is trying, his actions have shown me that his judgment is poor and he and his advisers aren't smart enough to figure out the right way to win this war. Taking out Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan was a no-brainer, but the invasion of Iraq was a huge diversion of resources away from the real sources of terrorism. Showing the world that we can and will "take out" any country we want may make puny countries like Libya quiver, but it isn't a smart way to beat the terrorists or our real enemies - it plays right into their hands.

Bush has made no real attempt to win the support of the large majority of Muslims who oppose terrorism. Instead, he has created millions of new enemies around the world - people who used to admire the USA - and these people are now more likely to be recruited by or support future terrorists. It is now more likely that they will overthrow their moderate, pro-US governments, such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and replace them with radical Islamic regimes. Far more dangerous to America than Iraq are the radicals trying to take over Pakistan (which already has nuclear weapons), the unpredictable leader of North Korea (which also has nukes), and Iran (which is allegedly working hard to get them). We are less secure today because we are creating more new enemies than we are able to kill or capture. There are smarter ways to track down terrorists and reduce the appeal of radical Islamic ideology, but Bush has decided to take the easy but wrong course of flexing America's conventional military might and intimidating the world rather than rallying our friends and allies around a grand strategy that has a chance of success. Read the entire perspective here...

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The seeming endless flow of misplaced priorities and screw-ups from the Bush Administration highlight the lack of leadership provided by Bush's teams across the board. The missing 380 tons of explosives are very likely some of those being used to kill our troops in the Iraq theater. I maintain that this lapse of priorities and focus on the most important issues that face our nation is incomprehensible and inexcusable.

From Misleader.com: In Iraq, 380 tons of powerful explosives have been looted and may have fallen into the hands of insurgents. In an effort to deflect blame, administration officials are pushing the theory that when "U.S. forces...reached the Al Qaqaa military facility in early April 2003, the weapons cache was already gone."1 This theory is not credible.

According to an AP report, U.S. solders visited the Al Qaqaa in April 2003 and "found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder."2 Officials who tested the powder said it was "believed to be explosives."3 Yesterday, "an official who monitors developments in Iraq" confirmed that "US-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact."4 Thereafter, according to the official, "the site was not secured by U.S. forces."5

It makes sense that the explosives were there when the U.S. solders arrived because, as the LA Times notes, "given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity."6

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The seeming endless flow of misplaced priorities and screw-ups from the Bush Administration highlight the lack of leadership provided by Bush's teams across the board. The missing 380 tons of explosives are very likely some of those being used to kill our troops in the Iraq theater. I maintain that this lapse of priorities and focus on the most important issues that face our nation is incomprehensible and inexcusable.

Reported October 25, 2004 by the Reuters News Agency reports: VIENNA - Nearly 380 tons of explosives are missing from a site near Baghdad that was part of Saddam Hussein's dismantled atom bomb program but was never secured by the U.S. military, the United Nations said Monday.

The head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, will immediately report the matter to the U.N. Security Council, a spokeswoman for the agency said.

The missing explosives could potentially be used to detonate a nuclear weapon or in conventional weapons, the agency said.

"El Baradei has decided to inform the Security Council today," spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

The New York Times, which broke the story Monday, said U.S. weapons experts feared the explosives could be used in bombing attacks against U.S. or Iraqi forces, which have come under increasing fire ahead of Iraq's elections due in January.

The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been barred from most of Iraq since the war and has watched from afar as its former nuclear sites have been systematically stripped by looters.

Fleming said ElBaradei informed Washington of the seriousness of the matter on Oct. 15 after learning about the disappearance of the explosives on Oct. 10.

One substance found in large quantities at the Al Qaqaa facility was the explosive HMX, which Fleming said had "a potential use in a nuclear explosive device as a detonator."

Prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the HMX had been sealed and tagged with the IAEA emblem while being stored at Al Qaqaa. More...

'President Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq appears to have achieved what Saddam Hussein did not: putting dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists and creating an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq...'

'...A particularly horrific case of irony involves weapons of mass destruction. It's been obvious for months that American forces were not going to find the chemical or biological armaments that Mr. Bush said were stockpiled in Iraq. What we didn't know is that while they were looking for weapons that did not exist, they lost weapons that did...' Read the NY Times editorial here...

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What is being missed (or ignored) in the lauding that I hear of George W. Bush's "leadership” is that leadership, by definition, involves far more than calling yourself a “war president” and making "tough decisions”. It involves asking important questions, listening to the answers and acting on them in a thoughtful and responsible way. It requires that actions taken serve to improve our collective national condition. Leadership requires moral fiber, honesty and an unflinching focus on the good of the many, not the corporate few. Bush has shown none of the above.

Whether his decisions have been “tough” or not is hard to say, however he has told us that being president is “hard work”. Regardless, there is no question that this president has made decisions that have had significant impact on our world and our nation and that his decisions, nearly without exception, have been wrong decisions. Decisions that have taken us not closer to security, prosperity, and peace, but farther from them.

Make no mistake. Electing George W. Bush for a second term will bring us only more of the same. It will bring us only closer to the precipice that our craft now seems irretrievably drawn to plunge down while our “captain” insists that we “trust his gut instincts”, sighting God's direction as his compass, much the same as his stated nemesis declares of himself.

I argue that God has nothing to do with Bush’s decisions. This administration’s actions have demonstrated time and again that they are directed by the corporate well being of those who have “contributed” their way into office. Nothing more.

The situation surrounding Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force is one of many perfect examples of this. The Bush administration refused to disclose information regarding the participants of this "task force" that formulated our U.S. energy policy. Then only after law suits by the Government Accounting Office, Judicial Watch, and The Sierra Club, court orders forced release of some documents in March 2002. We know now that in March of 2001 they met to outline energy policies for the next four years and among participants in those meetings were Enron CEO, Ken Lay and a host of petrochemical, mining, automobile manufacturers, and national utility corporate executives. Evidence shows they were allowed to pen much of our energy policy themselves. According to Judicial Watch, we also know that maps and charts of partitioned Iraqi oil fields and lists of “suitors” for them were used in these meetings… In March of 2001.

I can’t help but wonder when God got involved with this presidency… Did God ask us to handle Iraq’s oil fields and thereby commission Dick Cheney to “broker the deal”? Did God ask us to disregard the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and to send thousands of our own sons, daughters, husbands, wives, and friends to fight a war based on non-existent threats? Wouldn’t God have known that there were no WMDs?

These are questions I have been asking myself for some time now but I keep coming up with the same answers. God didn’t ask or guide Bush to do any of these things. However Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and Ahmad Chalabi did, to name just a few. And I can't imagine that the God I pray to, one of compassion and brotherhood, had anything to do with these characters or their collective actions.

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The Bush/Cheney campaign, underpinned by it's contentions that only they can keep America safe, must be called on to answer for this incredible failure of their watch.

Ironically, the oil fields and the Oil Ministry were protected completely after the invasion. For those who still maintain some honorable reason for this war I ask, "If this obvious failure doesn't completely expose the heart of the reasons for the rush to war, what does?

Sen. John Kerry railed against "the unbelievable blindness, stubbornness, (and) arrogance" of the Bush administration Monday following reports that 380 tons of powerful explosives are missing in Iraq.

U.S. Failed to Secure Known Nuclear Site: "White House and Pentagon officials - as well as at least one Iraqi minister - have acknowledged that the explosives vanished from the site shortly after the U.S.-led invasion amid widespread looting."

"The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations."

"The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year." Read the New York times article here.

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Edward Bitet fought in World War II, built affordable housing for veterans and taught sixth grade. When the Long Island native retired to Florida, he fulfilled another civic duty by becoming a poll worker. But Bitet, 77, isn't volunteering this year — he says he doesn't trust Palm Beach County's electronic voting machines. He walked out of a county demonstration of touch-screen terminals convinced that software bugs could wreak havoc on Nov. 2.

"We lost an election four years ago because they fooled around with the paper ballots and couldn't recount them," said Bitet, a Democrat. "Now we're moving to a system without paper, and they won't even have the ballots to recount. I can't be a part of this."

With polls showing nearly equal numbers of Florida voters for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the election's outcome may again hinge on a Florida recount.

And the more that Floridians learn about how voting machines work, the more they question whether the 15 counties with paperless voting systems can accurately count and recount votes. More...

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Ron Suskind, Without A Doubt: Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that "if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3. " The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion...

"Just in the past few months," Bartlett said, "I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do." Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . . Full Story

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Mother of Mohammad Salman Hamdani: My name is Talat Hamdani and I lost my son, Mohammad Salman Hamdani at the WTC terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Salman was my first-born. I joined my husband, Mohammad Saleem Hamdani, in New York on February 3, 1979. Salman was thirteen months old, learning to walk. We had come in search of the American Dream, which was cruelly shattered that fateful day of September 11, 2001.

Salman was a paramedic and an NYPD Cadet who voluntarily went there to rescue his fellow Americans and gave the ultimate sacrifice. He had been accepted to Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s MD PhD program in July 2001. A patriotic citizen, he wanted to become a medical doctor on American soil. Ironically, he was suspected and investigated as a terrorist and we were informed on March 20, 2002, that his remains were found, twenty four pieces, outside the North Tower. My life changed forever. I expressed my grief in numerous interviews on the first anniversary of 911.

There was a void in life, a vacuum, a sense of incompleteness. I stopped cooking and happiness was an alien creature. This loss took its toll on my husband, and he lost his battle with life on July 21, 2004. The loss of my husband, my best friend, my partner of grief, whom I knew for the last 38 years, made me sit back and reflect on my life. Destiny pushed me on a new path of life. I am compelled to speak the truth and participate actively for the security of all human life... Ms. Hamdani's Full Statement

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