Wishy washy: John Kerry admits that, while he may have had some "inarticulate moments" that earned him the flip-flopper label, George Bush has "consistently been wrong." CBS runs a two-part series, the president's top ten flip-flops and Kerry's. And: Several of the networks have refused to be bound by the 32-page "debate" rules set out by the Commission on Presidential debates.

God is love... but not that kind. An image of the mailer sent out in Arkansas by the Republican National Committee that says liberals seek to ban the bible while allowing same-sex marriage. [What's up with the image--stock photography?--of the gay couple. Clean-cut, smiley, and warm, the Henley-and-flannel duo are on the porch swing of what looks like a colonial-style house. Could be praying before heading off to the Promise Keeper's rally in Concord... Wouldn't the GOP's fundy Christians be better served by finding a less likeable, more demonizable couple?] (Thanks, Jim.)

Dave Obey's America: Wisconsin's Democratic Congressman Dave Obey offers a more nuanced take on what it means to be Christian and political. He writes an essay on the recent conflict with bishop Raymond Burke, who tried to coerce Obey (a practicing Catholic) into refraining from receiving Communion because of his support of legislation favoring reproductive choice (let's note, Burke didn't threaten to refuse Communion to politicians who supported unprovoked war in Iraq). Link (free pdf link to come.)

Point-It guide for Iraq: Kind of a Point-It Picture Dictionary (the photo-illustrated traveler's companion that helps you order greasy eggs in Amsterdam with the wave of a finger) for the military, the Visual Language Survival Guide helps soldiers in interrogations. Just point to the appropriate picture--remove your toupee, lift your tongue, strip nekkid--to convey to non-English-speakers what they're supposed to do. Via Boing Boing.

The new Florida Ballot. (Thanks, Ben.)

Day in the life of a middle-class Republican: Great piece by John Gray, via 1115.org, posted in its entirety:

Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.

Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he?ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noon time, Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his life-time.

Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dads; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house didn't have electric until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republicans would still be sitting in the dark)

He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn?t have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.

He turns on a radio talk show, the host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. (He doesn't tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day) Joe agrees, "We don't need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I'm a self made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."

Kickin' it for Kerry; kickbacks for Zell: Democratic wonderboy Barack Obama will be stumping for John Kerry in the final weeks of the election, while Democratic turncoat Zell Miller is reaping the rewards of selling out his party at the Republican convention.

Smart stoners: Fox's Bill O'Reilly says viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are just a bunch of "stoned slackers." Not so: turns out viewers or Stewart's show are more likely to have a four-year college degree than viewer's of The O'Reilly Factor. And the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey said young viewers of The Daily Show were more likely to answer questions about politics correctly than those who don't. Maybe that's because, unlike O'Reilly's team (who recently made the incorrect assertion that Bush never said "Mission Accomplished"--Bush did), Stewart's band of stoners gets the facts right.

Soros power: Billionaire George Soros, demonized by the right for his support of progressive causes, is dialing up his efforts to oust Bush. His rationale for a 12-city tour: "President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests and undermining American values. That is why I am sending this message." See what Soros is about, and look for his blog later this week, at GeorgeSoros.com.

Hometown pride: As the paper billing itself as George W. Bush's hometown daily, The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford, TX, endorses John Kerry, my own hometown paper runs an excellent letter on the ruse called the presidential debates. From the Wausau Daily Herald:

As we get our hopes up for anything beyond sound bites in the Presidential Debates, let us remember that since the founding of the private organization called the "Commission on Presidential Debates", the two major parties have colluded in memoranda of understanding under which they agree on the rules, on who will participate, who will ask the questions, and what questions will be asked. They have agreed not to directly question each other and questioners or moderators are not allowed follow up questions.

Prior to 1988, the Presidential debates were conducted under the auspices of the League of Women Voters, and the candidates really engaged in debate. In 1988 the two major parties objected to an actual debate and attempted to take control of the structure and content; at that point, the League withdrew its sponsorship, and they two parties formed the governmental-sounding Commission on Presidential Debates which has allowed their campaign organizations to completely script what George Farah of Open Debates called a "bi-partisan press conference". Further information can be found at Now with Bill Moyers and Open Debates.

Real democracy is subverted and stifled when the press and the public cannot confront presidential canditates in open debate on the curcial issues of our time, and instead we only hear prepared sound bites. The Presidential Debates we will see on Thursday are to meaningful confrontation on issues and ideas as all-star wrestling is to the Olympics. The American people have a right to demand more.

Year of the Rat: I can't capture the why of it, but City Pages writer Jim Walsh's new column--where he's on a country jog, barking at dogs, baa-ing at sheep, and pondering hope and human suffering--works.

Monkeying with the election: Bev Harris' Black Box Voting proves that Diebold's touchscreen voting is so susceptible to vote tampering that even a monkey could screw up the election. Enter: Baxter the chimpanzee.

God-awful: The Republican National Committee admits that, in two states, it sent out mass mailings claiming that "liberals" want to ban the bible. An editorial on Sept. 22 in The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia asked, "Holy Moley! Who concocts this gibberish? ...Most Americans see morality more complexly. Many think a higher morality is found in Christ's command to help the needy, prevent war and pursue other humanitarian goals. Churchgoers of this sort aren't likely to believe childish allegations that Democrats want to ban the Bible."

Suppressing the overseas vote: "On Monday, the International Herald Tribune reported that the Pentagon is restricting international access to the Web site for the Federal Voting Assistance Program, the official government agency that helps Americans living abroad register to vote in the November election," reports Salon.com. "According to the IHT, Americans who connect to the Internet using one of several foreign Internet service providers have reported difficulty logging in to the voting-assistance site. The Pentagon confirmed that it is blocking traffic from these ISPs - which provide Internet service in 25 countries - but it declined to say why." Allegedly, their aim is to "thwart hackers." Please forward this information to friends overseas: Verifiedvoter.org reports on the Pentagon's move, offering mirror and proxy sites where overseas voters can get information on the sometimes tricky processes of absentee voting.

Hip Hopera: Check this out before the cease-and-desists fly. In the spirit of The Grey Album comes The Kleptones' mashup of Queen's repertoire, hip-hop style, with plenty of Plunderphonic add-ons (like "Bicycle Race" with a bit of Ben Stein's Ferris Bueller dialogue). The entire album is mirrored at Waxy.org. (Via Metafilter.)

The moral of the story: In a piece where she likens Bush's response to Saddam Hussein to "the guy who reserves a hotel room and asks you to the prom," Maureen Dowd accuses John Kerry of "sidestepping the central moral issue":

It was wrong for the president to take on Saddam as a response to 9/11, to pretend the dictator was a threat to our national security, to drum up a fake case on weapons and a faux link to Al Qaeda, and to divert our energy, emotions and matériel from the real enemy to an old enemy whose address we knew.

It was wrong to take Americans to war without telling them the truth about why we were doing it and what it would cost.

It wasn't the way W. did it. It was what he did.

Party of bigots and bubbas? I can't indict an entire category of people--Bush supporters--based on the actions of a few, but Doug Grow's story in today's Star Tribune seems increasingly emblematic of the decline in civility I see ushered in by Republican activists. From defaced and stolen lawn signs to Bush's unpresidential mocking of John Kerry, from Rush Limbaugh's diatribes to the libelous (and continuing) swift boat ads, Bush backers seem to be, in many instances, proving themselves to be bigots, bubbas, and callous enemies of free speech. Grow writes of an incident in the suburb adjacent my Minneapolis neighorhood:

at least 17 families with lawn signs supporting John Kerry received hate-filled diatribes that were inserted in greeting cards.

The mailings were addressed to "Doltocrat." In the envelopes, recipients found greeting cards with perky messages ranging from "Happy Rosh Hashanah" to "Get Well Soon." When the cards were opened, three pages of typewritten hate oozed out.

"You have committed yourself to supporting Kerry as evidenced by your subversive and immorally-suggestive Kerry lawn sign display ... and it will be practically impossible for you to back out and retract it now. ..."

And on and on. The mailings included praise for Hitler. Attacks on gays and Jewish people and "not-so-Christian" churches. Attacks on Kerry. Praise for President Bush.

There were no direct threats to recipients. As vitriol goes, this stuff was not particularly creative.
Still, the fact that the creator of this material had taken the time to drive through Golden Valley neighborhoods to locate signs and to gather addresses and then had gone to the effort of mailing this stuff gave reasonable people the creeps...

Huh? Kudos to the gay group Log Cabin Republicans for refusing to endorse George W. Bush and his fervently anti-gay/anti-human rights agenda. But how to make sense of the Abe Lincoln Black Republican Caucus' decision to go for George? A day after legal and civil rights experts went on record predicting that millions of Americans--mostly black and most likely to vote Democratic--will be blocked from voting in November, the gay black Republican group announced it would endorse the president. And: Efforts to ease voter fears.

What's in a name? While rightwingers say the War on Terror isn't a war on Islam, you'd hardly know it listening to some of their pundits. Today, FOX News Channel's Brian Kilmeade wondered how someone named Yusuf Islam--a.k.a. the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens--could've boarded a plane with that name. Islam, who as an entertainer wrote the now-aptly-named hits "Peace Train" and "Wild World," will be deported back to the UK because his activities "could be linked to terrorism." Says Kilmeade:

How did he get on board if he's on one [a government no-fly list]? See, I don't ... If your name is Yusuf Islam, you better have a good close look at him.... But let me just say, if the IRA [Irish Republican Army] had declared war on America, you better believe they would be patting me down left and right before I went on United [Airlines], because I stand to be Irish. So they declare war on us.

Bushery: "The killing machine is running loose and no one is capable of stopping it," writes Eric Fottorino in a Le Monde article titled to reflect the identical pronunciation of boucherie (butchery) and Bushery in French. An Iraqi religious leader reportedly told the French envoy this weekend that "The Americans kill forty times more civilians than fighters. And those civilians have fathers, brothers, and sons who will not know any peace until they've avenged their deaths."

Loony bin:

Who would Jesus kill? Evangelical "man of God" Jimmy Swaggert--whose sexual rap sheet includes an arrest for soliciting a prostitute and an admitted porn addiction--wants gays dead. In a recent broadcast he said: "I'm trying to find the correct name for it ... this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. ... I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died."

Wild guess: The prez, discussing a CIA report that stated Iraq risks falling into a civil war, told Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, "The CIA laid out several scenarios. It said that life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better. And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."

Be very surprised: A year ago today, here's what neocon brainchild Richard Perle told the American Enterprise institute: "[A] year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush."

Dobbs' jabs: CNN's Lou Dobbs says the UN head's recent assertion--which jives with opinions of many experts in international law--that the Iraq war was waged illegally amounts to "another incredible outburst by Kofi Annan." Annan said the war was "not in conformity with the Security Council, with the U.N. charter." When asked, "It was illegal?," Annan replied: "Yes, if you wish," adding: "I have indicated it is not in conformity with the U.N. Charter; from our point of view and from the Charter point of view, it was illegal."

Fear wins! When Arabic writing was found on the pages of an in-flight magazine on a Milwaukee-to-San Francisco Midwest Airlines flight, the airline grounded the plane. Of the writing--which turned out to be "something of a contemplative nature," written in Farsi--Janan Najeeb of the Milwaukee Muslim Women's Coalition said, "When you have individuals who can't read a foreign language and assume some scribbles on something is a terrorist message, there's something clearly wrong with the direction the country is going."

How the world would vote: With nearly 11,000 people registering their choices, this site ponders how Bush and Kerry would fare in the upcoming election if the entire world could vote. (Thanks, Ben.)

A strident minority: Overseas military personnel have until October 11 to vote for president, and as the Christian Science Monitor reports, anti-Bush troops are a small, growing, and vocal part of the forces. "[For] 9 out of 10 of the people I talk to, it wouldn't matter who ran against Bush - they'd vote for them," said a US soldier in the southern city of Najaf, seeking out a reporter to make his views known. "People are so fed up with Iraq, and fed up with Bush."

Divine retribution? Was Hurricaine Ivan God's way of getting back at Floridians for their votes in the 2000 election?

Tyranny: Still on near-hiatus, but never too busy to post a quote attributed to Voltaire:

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.