MORE SIGN STEALING? Spinsanity alum Brendan Nyhan posts this picture of what may or may not be a parody lawn sign from Durham, North Carolina, at his new blog. Check it out and stay for awhile -- there's lots of great stuff there, including the latest Nedra Pickler outrage and a link to political scientist Jim Stimson's very useful running average of public opinion polls.

--Nick Confessore

LIFE WITH MIKEY. If John Kerry wins, he'll certainly have that massive and unprecedented liberal ground operation to thank for winning the GOTV war -- but Ryan Lizza tells us why he'll want to thank Mike McCurry for winning the press war. I was a bit of a young whippersnapper when McCurry was press secretary for Bill Clinton, but even I vividly remember how effective, witty, and likeable the guy seemed in what was, needless to say, a rather tough job. What I remember was distinctive about McCurry is exactly what Lizza says is winning the press over in Kerry's campaign bus: the guy has a way of seeming to acknowledge and transcend the b.s. rituals that define his job at the same time that he engages in them. No presidential spokesman since McCurry -- not Joe Lockhart, and certainly not Bush's egregious flacks -- has managed to pull that off.

--Sam Rosenfeld

OHIO TAKES A TURN FOR THE WHAT? Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has taken no small share of abuse for what have seemed downright Floridian directives. After it became clear that pre–Election Day challenges would be disallowed in Ohio, he issued a directive that would enable some polling places to have three or four challengers per party, rather than the statutory single challenger.

So it's surprising to say the least that, about an hour ago, he issued a statement calling for the state attorney general to bar "all challengers of all parties ... from polling places throughout the state."

I just got off a conference call with the Moritz College election law team, and they're as thrown by this as anybody else. Unfortunately, it's not at all clear that Blackwell has the standing to issue this order, and neither the Ohio Republican Party nor Attorney General Jim Petro seem likely to view this as a satisfactory resolution. In Moritz's election law director Ed Foley's words, "There's a question about whether [Blackwell] has authority under state law to simply order the boards to, in essence, disobey §3505.20 of the Ohio Revised Code," which is the statute allowing challengers.

It's anybody's guess how this will play out, but if Blackwell's new directive holds then the Republican secretary of state of Ohio may have just delivered the state to John Kerry. Which makes me all the more suspicious: Is this just meant to delay the resolution of Spencer and Summit County, and keep those challengers there on Tuesday?

--Jeffrey Dubner

SOMETHING UNEXPECTED? Al Jazeera is reporting "Breaking News: Aljazeera to air video tape of Usama bin Laden. More soon..." Those given to conspiracy theories have long anticipated bin Laden's capture immediately before the election. Myself, I've always thought that was giving the administration far too much credit -- because if the Bushies really were as incompetent in managing foreign affairs as their critics have charged, there'd be no way they could accomplish anything like that. The conspiracy theory, while perhaps an accurate reflection of Republican aspirations and Democratic fears, was completely undermined by the available evidence of administration incompetence, among other things. In any event, we may be hearing a lot about bin Laden over the weekend, it seems. No word yet on how recently the tape was made. But that will be an important question, given the timing of its release.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HAWAII? There appears to be no font of conventional wisdom about Hawaii presidential politics other than that the state always goes for the Democrats except in the most crushing of landslides, and that it's far too small and far away to be worth campaigning in. But this year everything is different; recent polls showing the state neck-and-neck are provoking visits by Dick Cheney and Al Gore. Hawaii papers seem to have a taste for awful photo selection and poor web design. They've also got some pretty unenlightening political analysis. Here's The Honolulu Advertiser's editorial page editor:

What is interesting about the Hawai'i Poll results reported yesterday is that a substantial number of voters appear determined not to change horses in midstream despite strong negative feelings about such things as the war in Iraq and their own personal economic security.

Think about it: A majority of those surveyed said they believe they were misled about the rationale for the war in Iraq. A strong majority believe we are less safe than we were before we invaded. A substantial majority believe the troops won't be brought home on schedule.

That is a weird result, but no one seems to know the explanation, and I can't get my hands on a copy of the full polling data so it's hard to even guess at what's driving this. One theory is that because the Bush-Cheney campaign has been making nationwide cable buys and the Kerry campaign hasn't, Hawaiians simply have extremely negative views of the challenger that are outweighing their negative impression of the incumbent. If that's right, the presence of a large number of undecided voters and Kerry's decision to hit the local airwaves should be able to turn the situation around pretty quickly. Still, the drain on resources can't be something Democrats are happy about.

--Matthew Yglesias

SWING PAPERS WATCH: COLORADO. Both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News lead with the results of their newest polls on the Senate race between State Attorney General Ken Salazar and beer magnate Pete Coors. The Post poll pits the race as dead even, each candidate garnering 46 percent with 7 percent of Coloradans still undecided. In a bit of bad news for Salazar, the poll shows a sharp spike in unfavorable perceptions of Salazar, indicating that incessant Republican attack ads have stuck. Nevertheless, according to a Rocky Mountain News poll out today, Salazar enjoys a comfortable six-point lead over Coors -- a lead that is well out outside the poll’s margin of error.

--Mark Goldberg

IN OTHER NEWS... For those of you not obsessing over Ohio, there are two good pieces of press criticism out today. Prospect contributor Chris Mooney has a great article in the new Columbia Journalism Review explaining how the news media's "two sides to every story" approach tends to empower scientists with fringe or even discredited views. (He opens with a really depressing example drawn from the pages of the Los Angeles Times.) And over in the Chicago Reader, Michael Miner goes to town on an especially fact-deprived Mark Steyn column about Canadian health care, complete with an hilarious e-mail exchange between Miner and Steyn's assistant. (Steyn apparently didn't feel like defending his column himself.) Here's a good part:

Steyn, a Canadian who lives in New Hampshire, sneers with the best. "As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper," he went on. "After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to 'old age' or some such and then 'lose' the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq's."

This interested me enormously. At the beginning of October I'd never heard of Clostridium difficile -- or "C diff," as nurses call it. But then my mother in Saint Louis contracted the infection -- in a clean, cheery Lutheran convalescent home far from the squalor of socialized medicine -- and died. My sister, who lives in in Vancouver and isn't an ardent foe of Canada's health system, arrived in Saint Louis with a packet of information on C. difficile, including an alarming article on the Quebec outbreak published just that morning, October 22, in Canada's National Post. Dr. John Marshall, a professor of surgery at the University of Toronto whose study of C. difficile was about to be released, told the Post that overuse of antibiotics was destroying the natural defenses elderly patients had against the infection. He predicted that his research could lead to what the Post called a "watershed change" in the use of antibiotics in intensive-care units. Nowhere in the article did Marshall or anyone else suggest that the rash of deadly C. difficile cases could be blamed on socialized medicine.

Moreover, a second article provided by my sister reported the claim of an infection-control specialist in Montreal that the "epidemic strain" of C. difficile plaguing his city had shown up earlier in the U.S. and probably originated there.

So was Steyn drawing on facts, intuition, or ideological shamelessness? I e-mailed him and got a prompt response from his representative, Tiffany Cole. "Why is there such a lack of hygiene in Quebec and Canadian hospitals?" Cole e-mailed me back. "Mark wrote on this once before in relation to the fact that Toronto was the only North American city to get a SARS outbreak. . . . Mark also adds, if you're gynecologically inclined, you may also wish to look into the women in Labrador who contracted chlamydia from their hospitals. Mark's contention is that basic hygiene becomes a problem in government run health systems."

I called Doctor Marshall and began reading Steyn's column to him.

"That's absolute hogwash!" he declared before I'd finished. "Canadian medical standards are on average every bit as high as American medical standards. It has nothing to do with the structures of the health-care system."

This reminds me of that bogus e-mail about how John Edwards caused the flu vaccine shortage. The difference, of course, is that Steyn gets paid for his malarkey.

UPDATE: Reader S.A. points out that Steyn's column actually has the Canadian health care system doing pretty good, by American standards. So they had 600 deaths from nosocomial infections this year? In 1995, according to this journal article, such infections contributed to the deaths of more than 88,000 people in American hospitals. I don't know if there are more recent figures for us, but it doesn't seem like our system is vastly superior to Canada's on this question.

--Nick Confessore

BIG MO. One of many signs that John Kerry is in good shape heeading into Tuesday: He's pulled even with George W. Bush at tradesports.com. As of now, Kerry contracts are trading at 50.0 per share, Bush contracts at 50.4 per share. The two most recently traded contracts actually put Kerry ahead of Bush by a tenth of a point. Two weeks ago, Kerry was trading around 46; three weeks ago Bush was trading at 60.6. And this isn't the sort of single-event swing that will necessarily end with a rebound, like during each debate; the candidates have each steadily moved about six points toward the mean over the past week.

--Jeffrey Dubner

SITES TO SEE. There are a number of Web sites that you'll want to look at if you're hoping to keep up on the many, many Election Day controversies. A few to note:

• Election Law @ Moritz -- the Web site of the election law division of Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State. This site is simply indispensable for following the legal challenges around the country.
• Election Protection's Election Incident Reporting System -- Election Protection is logging all complaints received by their call center; they've already registered more than 200 calls for Miami-Dade County alone, ranging from the innocuous ("Wants to know where to vote") to the troublesome ("She reported that Haitian immigrants had been intimidated by 'Republican' lawyers").
• Equal Vote -- The blog of Dan Tokaji, one of the professors behind Election Law @ Moritz.
• Election Law Blog -- The news-clipping blog of Rick Hasen, Loyola law professor and co-editor of Election Law Journal.
• Vote Watch 2004 -- An ever-growing list of news clippings about vote suppression, voter fraud, voting irregularities, and the like.

I'm sure I missed a couple sites, so please email me if you know of any resources people might want to check out.

--Jeffrey Dubner

100,000 DEAD? The Lancet has just published a study conducted by public health professionals using statistical sampling that purports to show that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the American invasion and occupation. Spencer Ackerman has conducted an interview with the lead author in which the methodology is spelled out. As with polling, there's a margin of error around this result and there's always the possibility that what we're looking at here is an outlier.

Still, the methods look pretty sound, and statistical sampling is regularly relied upon in a wide array of fields without undue criticism, so this is worth taking seriously despite the extent to which it's out of line with other estimates using different methods. I think there are legitimate questions one could raise, based on Spencer's interview, as to what proportion of the dead were civilians and what proportion were insurgents of one stripe or another (the battle with the Mahdi Army in Najaf was more or less a one-sided bloodbath, according to U.S. troops proud of their vastly superior military performance) and as to what proportion of the dead were really killed by Coalition forces, which is often something the relatives of the deceased are ill-positioned to know.

--Matthew Yglesias

A NATIONAL SCANDAL. The coverage CNN just provided of the Pentagon's latest spin on Al Qaqaa should be a national scandal. Lawrence DiRita trotted out an Army Major who explained that he oversaw the carting off of 250 tons of stuff from the facility where the RDX, HMX, and PETN was supposed to have been looted from. Under questioning, the Major conceded that, no, he had no idea whether or not the stuff he carted off was, in fact, RDX, HMX, and PETN. Now in light of the fact that there's totally unambiguous video evidence that the RDX, HMX, and PETN was still at the facility days after the Major's visit, it's perfecly clear that he didn't cart it away. After all -- it was still there after he left!

Nevertheless, in the post-game spin, not only did Fox News treat this as absolute vindication of the administration, but CNN's Barbara Starr pronounced the dispute "confusing" and said the Pentagon was obviously trying very hard to "get to the bottom" of it. They even ran the ABC videotape of soldiers searching the facility over Starr's description of the Major's story, thus turning unimpeached evidence that the Pentagon is wrong into supporting evidence for the Pentagon's story. As The Los Angeles Times writes, the "Munitions Issue Cuts Both Ways." As they neglect to mention, it cuts both ways solely because the majority of the reporters covering the story are too stupid -- or, far more likely -- too craven to call bullshit on an administration that's come up with three or four different, totally implausible, accounts of their behavior all of which stand in opposition to the available evidence.

--Matthew Yglesias

EYES ON OHIO. The two lawsuits filed in the past 24 hours in Ohio against Election Day challenges don't look likely to win, to my untrained eye, but they'll have a dramatic impact on the electoral landscape in Ohio (and perhaps elsewhere) if they do. The situation, in case you haven't followed it too closely, goes roughly like this: The state GOP filed challenges to 35,000 voters, ostensibly based on the return of registered mail that they sent to test that those voters were in fact living at their registered addresses. If successfully challenged, voters would be removed from the rolls but would still be able to cast provisional ballots pending a post-election check of eligibility. (This article is a must-read on the integrity of those challenges.) The state Democratic Party filed suit to stop the pre-election challenges; District Judge Susan Dlott issued a temporary restraining order against the challenges in six counties, pending a hearing today, on account of the Dems' suit's "strong likelihood of success on the merits." (Be advised: Most links in this post are PDFs.) This morning, the Sixth Circuit denied Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro's request for a stay of that restraining order, further indicating that the pre-election challenges will be blocked; in addition, the Ohio Dems put in a motion to extend the restraining order state-wide. (Confused yet? Just wait.)

So, assuming the current rulings hold, no voters will be knocked off the rolls until Election Day. On Election Day itself, as things currently stand, each candidate is entitled to place one challenger in each precinct in the state. Challenges will proceed according to this directive from Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Basically, the challenger will call a challenge; the presiding judge (who comes from the party that received the most votes in that precinct in 2002's gubernatorial race) of a four-member panel will ask a defined series of questions as well as "such other questions ... as are necessary to test the person's qualifications"; if the person refuses to answer any questions or answers differently from his or her registration, or "if for any other reason a majority of the judges believes the person is not entitled to vote," the voter will not receive a ballot. A successful challenge is "final" -- implying that a provisional ballot will not be allowed.

Sounds like fun, huh? Sounds pretty defensible -- a representative of a political party can challenge any voter they please, with no cause required, and any irregularity will disqualify that voter. At least that'll keep provisional ballots from being a hassle! And while the presiding judge is interrogating the voter, the rest of the voters may just have to hang out for a few -- maybe, maybe not, but what's the harm in slowing down the voting? Blackwell did set out steps by which a presiding judge could remove a challenger if, for example, "a challenger challenges so many voters that his or her activities slow down the voting process or intimidate voters," but lord only knows how that would play out on a case-by-case basis. And the "judges" themselves, to top things off, are not what we commonly think of as judges but rather pollworkers appointed by the local election board. No mechanism is in place to monitor them.

That's what Tuesday will look like if the process is frozen in place as it is today. In the last 24 hours, though, two suits have been filed to block Election Day challenges. One, Spencer v. Blackwell et al., is a civil-rights class action, not brought by the Democratic Party (not even brought by Democrats but by Charterites), alleging that "African American voters will be blocked from exercising their right to vote." The other, Summit County Democratic Central and Executive Committee et al v. Blackwell et al., seeks to declare unconstitutional Blackwell's directive and the section of the Ohio Revised Code on which it is based. If either of these lawsuits succeeds in time for Tuesday, it could keep thousands of voters from being blocked at the polls. At the least, Summit County would seem to make plain the need to give voters some recourse against being thrown out of the polls; as the suit says:

The challenge provisions of §3502.20 of the Ohio Revised Code permits the potential voter to be denied his or her right to vote, without notice, an opportunity to be represented by counsel, to rebut evidence, to confront the challenger, to introduce evidence in his or her favor, or to otherwise participate in the process as anything other than an interrogated witness. If the potential voter is denied a ballot at the discretion of a majority of the judges, for any reaason, the voter has no opportunity to appeal, and is effectively denied his or her voting right.

How the courts will handle such suits this close to the election I can't imagine. They may well be dismissed altogether; that's what Blackwell requested in Spencer and will presumably request in Summit. But if they're heard...

--Jeffrey Dubner

NEW REGISTRANTS = WELFARE RECIPIENTS! I had to sit through five or six excruciating minutes of this "Fox & Friends" airing to confirm that Chuck Booms, a conservative radio host out of Ohio, actually said what he said during a debate with Jerry Springer over new voters in that state. (Hat tip to reader K.B.) At first, I thought the biggest surprise was how sober and statesmanlike Springer was. But then I got to the part where Booms, in response to a question about voter intimidation, says this (exact quote drawn from the closed captioning):

"Intimidated? You've got to be kidding me. These are the same people, guys, who aren't very intimidated to go wait in the line for welfare and unemployment checks…That's who you're running to register.

Lovely. So, according to the GOP county chairman in Cuyahoga, new voters who lean Democratic are all "ringers." And according to Booms, they're all unemployed welfare recipients.

Sort of speaks for itself, doesn't it?

As a side note, one of the Fox hosts tried out what I expect to be a new line of attack emanating from the GOP and its surrogates: If someone is legally registered to vote, why should they worry about being challenged? Now, in fact, this is much in the vein of "if you haven't committed any crime, why would you object to having the police perform an anal cavity search on you?" I think most people of good common sense can understand why it can be intimidating to have an aggressive, official-looking person sitting behind a desk at the voting station claiming you're a fraud and committing an illicit act. (Especially if that person is challenging your right to vote because the GOP sent you a piece of registered mail and you, not wanting any GOP literature, refused to sign for it. See this important story out of Ohio for the details on that one.) But I expect to hear this line a lot come Election Day.

--Nick Confessore

EXILES EVERYWHERE. Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay is excellent as usual on the Al Qaqaa story, bringing an interesting new angle to light:

But when the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command produced their own list of sites that a limited number of U.S. "exploitation teams" should search, priority was given to those identified by exiled Iraqi opposition groups, he said. Al Qaqaa wasn't one of them.

"The top of the list was dominated by nuclear facilities and places where we expected to find chemical and biological weapons," he said. "Iraqi exiles had a very heavy hand in determining which places got looked at first."

The extent to which almost everything that's gone wrong with America's Iraq policy has connections to the snow job pulled on us by Iraqi exile groups is truly astounding. The fact that after the extent of the damage they've done has become known, we went and put exile leader Iyad Allawi in charge of the Interim Government is incredible. And that we're now following that up with efforts to bring Ahmed Chalabi back into government as part of the consolidated party list scheme for the January elections is mind-boggling. Worse, due to the awkward timing of events, there's nothing a new administration will be able to do to de-exilify the Iraqi government he'll be honor bound to support.

--Matthew Yglesias

GAY-BAITING IN KENTUCKY. With Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky.)'s campaign going down in flames, state Republicans have dipped deep into the gutter to defeat Democratic dark horse Dan Mongiardo. You have to read the whole article -- published in the Lexington Herald-Leader -- to get the full flavor, the deep currents of both bile and cowardice running through this move. Here's a long excerpt, with emphasis added:

A top state Republican called Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Dan Mongiardo "limp-wristed," and another GOP state legislator said she questions whether "the word 'man' applies to him" in speeches during Sen. Jim Bunning's campaign bus tour yesterday.

Both state Senate President David Williams of Burkesville and state Sen. Elizabeth Tori of Radcliff denied they intended to raise questions about Mongiardo's sexual orientation -- though Tori later said that if any listeners thought she was referring to his sexuality, "so be it."

...

Williams at least twice yesterday described Mongiardo, a 44-year-old Hazard physician, as "limp-wristed" -- once last night in Owensboro and earlier that day in Elizabethtown.

In an interview after the Owensboro rally, Williams denied he used the phrase to imply that Mongiardo is gay.

"'Limp-wristed' denotes weakness. It's not a sexual slur," Williams said. "I'm not going to have them limiting my choice of vocabulary, my freedom of speech," he said, referring to Bunning's opposition.

"Besides, I don't understand the Democrats on this one," Williams added. "I'm not saying anything about anyone's sexual orientation. But if I were -- are they saying that's pejorative, that it's bad to be homosexual? I don't think they would say that, but how can they have it both ways?"

Recently, Williams had criticized candidates in an Eastern Kentucky state Senate race for trying to play "the homosexual card" by raising questions about each other's sexual orientation.

At the Elizabethtown stop, Tori, the state Senate majority whip, said "I served with Dr. Dan -- let me tell you he is not a gentleman. I'm not even sure the word 'man' applies to him." The comment drew laughter and applause.

In a telephone interview last night, Tori repeated her comment and volunteered, "The remark is a little ambiguous, isn't it?"

Tori said that she doesn't consider Mongiardo "a man" because he "has never taken one step to help us on a major issue" in the state Senate. "All he does is whine."

She said that to many people, being a "man" means "being in control, being a leader."

"I don't know anything about his sex life," she said of Mongiardo, who is unmarried. "I didn't say it that way." But, Tori added, "It's up to the person who hears it to decide" what the remark means.

Lovely, isn't it? These folks don't even have the courage of their own bigotry.

One other thing: This fits Karl Rove's M.O. to a "T," don't it? Recall this passage from Josh Green's recent Atlantic profile, which describes a bit of ugly campaigning in 1994 involving two candidates for judicial office in Alabama, incumbent Democrat Mark Kennedy and his challenger, Republican Harold See:

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

I guess the difference is that Rove is usually a lot more subtle than what we're seeing in Kentucky.

UPDATE: Blogger Publius at Legal Fiction says Mitch McConnell is the more likely culprit, since McConnell also has talent with the shiv and is responsible for coordinating Republican campaigning in Kentucky. McConnell's hometown paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, agrees.

--Nick Confessore

KERRY'S EXAGGERATIONS. Just to show that a Democrat can't get a break in this media climate, here comes The Washington Post with a story that should be devastating to George W. Bush, but instead gets spun as a hit on John Kerry:

U.S. military commanders estimated last fall that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to 1 million tons of explosives, artillery shells, aviation bombs and other ammunition. The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown.

Against that background, this week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts as exaggerated.

That's totally right. It's not as if the administration had some brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed war plan that was all brought down by the failure to secure Al Qaqaa. Instead, they had a desperately ill-conceived and ill-executed war plan, filled with failures, most notably the failure to secure huge quantities of Iraqi weapons and former WMD sites. The point of all this focus on the Al Qaqaa story is that the press had rigorously refused to cover this issue over the past eighteen months and the frisson of scandal around the Al Qaqaa cover-up was finally able to pique their interest. So the Kerry campaign, which is trying to win an election and not write an academic text on the exact nature of the problems with Bush's approach to post-conflict reconstruction, has chosen to blow Al Qaqaa a bit out of proportion relative to the wider story of administration mismanagement.

And what do they get for their trouble? Now comes a story about how Al Qaqaa was more the rule than the exception, but not written as an example of how bad things are in Iraq (e.g., "Al Qaqaa Merely The Tip of the Iceberg") but as a story about how Kerry doesn't know what he's talking about. It's pathetic. Just pathetic.

--Matthew Yglesias

IRAQIS FOR KERRY. Erstwhile Middle East expert Lee Smith's eccentric views aside, it's well-known that the president is detested throughout the Arab world. Less obvious is that even Iraqis aren't too hot on their would-be liberator, with just 16 percent saying they hope he wins re-election as opposed to 22.5 percent pulling for John Kerry. The big winner here, of course, is indifference, but the results should give pause to those who've been arguing that a Bush defeat would constitute some kind of betrayal of the expectations of the Iraqi people.

--Matthew Yglesias

TURNABOUT'S FAIR PLAY? The Democrats have really been mercilessly pounding George W. Bush on the draft issue, even though it's highly unlikely -- at least in my opinion -- that Bush will ever reinstate one in his second term. Obviously it's been a hugely effective issue. So it was only a matter of time before the GOP tried to turn the tables.

I was e-mailed a PDF of the flyer below, sent out by the Iowa Republican Party to voters there:

What makes this a killer is that there really is a Democrat-sponsored bill in Congress to reinstate the draft -- or at least there was until recently. You'll recall that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) introduced such a bill around the time the Iraq war was gearing up, the better to dramatize (he believed) the costs of going to war and the fact that poor and minority Americans make up a disproportionate share of the armed forces. The bill didn't go anywhere until earlier this month, when Republicans -- who were freaking out about the draft rumors, which were really hurting Bush -- yanked the bill out of the metaphorical dustbin and hurried it to a near-instantaneous vote, in effect calling Rangel's bluff. The bill failed by a vote of 402 to 2. Even Rangel voted against it.

So on its face, the flyer is false. Not to mention the fact that the bill specifically allows for young people to perform civilian service in lieu of military service, along the Charles Moskos/Paul Glastris model. (I happen to think this is a good idea on the merits.)

Like all good propaganda, this one has just enough true information to be totally misleading. Then again, I can't really say it's any more misleading than allegations that Bush has a secret plan to reinstate the draft.

--Nick Confessore

THE BOSS SETS THE TONE. The Bush campaign is walking back from its aptly named new ad, "Whatever It Takes," which an eagle-eyed DailyKos.com reader discovered used a manipulated image, leading to half of day of negative press for the campaign. Bush media advisor Mark McKinnon has taken responsibility for the image-doctoring, making him one of the few people affiliated with the campaign willing to publicly take responsibility for any of its missteps.

President Bush's campaign acknowledged Thursday that it had doctored a photograph used in a television commercial and said the ad will be re-edited and reshipped to TV stations.

The photo of Bush addressing a group of soldiers was edited to take out a podium, aides said, and a group of soldiers in the crowd was electronically copied and used to fill where the podium had been.

"There was no need to do that," said Mark McKinnon, head of Bush's advertising team who shouldered the blame. "Everyone technically works for me so I accept the responsibility."

...

McKinnon said a video editor he declined to identify was told to edit the picture to focus on a young boy waving a flag. On his own initiative, the editor removed the podium and copied the faces, McKinnon said.

But the buck shouldn't be stopping with McKinnon -- it should be stopping with Bush. What McKinnon's editor did was only the visual equivalent of the verbal distortions used by the president every day. That's a tone that's set from the very top. The editor wouldn't have dared take liberties with the image he was using if he knew his supervisors frowned on playing fast and loose with the facts. Instead, in a clear reflection of his workplace values, he felt free to take the initiative to distort. Ultimately, the candidate sets the tone for the campaign. That went for Kerry in August and certainly goes for Bush now.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE GIULIANI MENTALITY. When George W. Bush's allies sink, they sink low. Today's exhibit: Rudy Giuliani's disgusting attempt to shift blame for the Al-Qaqaa scandal onto our troops. Giuliani has always had a habit of blaming the victim, notes Michael Tomasky, but this is simply despicable.

--Jeffrey Dubner

IT'LL GET WORSE. Two gloomy pieces in today’s Roll Call (subscription-only) make the crucial point that the vicious partisanship in American politics isn’t somehow going to melt away on November 3. There’s been this tendency among hand-wringing observers to lament the harshness and polarization of this presidential campaign as if they don’t spring from some pretty serious and historical sources. As AEI’s Norm Ornstein rightly stresses:

These tensions and the climate of anger and mistrust are not new and were not caused solely by the Florida debacle four years ago. The partisan and ideological divisions in Washington have been building steadily over the past two decades.

I quibble with the substance of Ornstein’s historical take that follows, but the general point is well-taken. And while I’m hardly the brow-furrowing extoller of moderate conservatism and accommodation that Ornstein is, I think his worries about the longstanding damage that is being done to American political institutions -- “the danger of breakdown,” he says, “is growing acute” -- are not completely baseless. Ornstein spreads the historical blame around evenly among the parties; I tend to agree with Paul Glastris that such evenhandedness doesn’t really jibe -- that the current climate is in fact largely the consequence of the modern GOP’s brand of politics and governance.

Meanwhile, this thorough report makes it clear that regardless of who wins the presidency on Tuesday, the 109th Congress is going to be more contentious and ugly than anything we’ve yet seen:

With a potential ethics war, a hard-fought 2006 election and controversial topics like Social Security and tax reform on the horizon, Republicans and Democrats alike agree that all the ingredients are present for open partisan warfare beginning in January.

“I think it’s going to be a very ugly 109th Congress,” predicted a senior House GOP leadership aide.

At this point, strategists in both parties do not expect the House to change hands in November, though the jury is still out on which side will pick up seats.

More important than the House ratio, Democratic aides said the degree of hostility in the chamber will rest on who wins the White House on Tuesday.

They suggested that if Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) prevails, Republicans will spend the next two years trying to undermine his influence and attack his character, just as they did when Bill Clinton was in office. They also anticipate the GOP will launch a series of investigations and charges against Kerry immediately upon him taking office.

Meanwhile, if President Bush and House Republicans remain in power, Democrats expect the GOP to run roughshod over them given the Republican president is a lame duck facing no political consequences. Democrats will be ever more angry that Bush survived the election despite what they perceive as a mess in Iraq, a poor economy and an ethically challenged Congress, several Democratic aides said.

“It will get worse, not better,” said one Democratic leadership aide.

“It will be a bruising 109th Congress,” predicted another top Democratic aide. “The bruising will come from the Republicans if they remain in power because there will be even less of a reason to work with the minority party.”

Democrats envision that they would have even fewer seats at the table under another two years of Republican control. The minority often has complained about being shut out of the debate, barred from offering amendments and participating in conference committees.

Regardless of who’s president, we can apparently expect, for one thing, retaliatory ethics charges to be filed against Democratic House leaders now that Chris Bell’s complaints against Tom DeLay has effectively ended “The Truce” that has kept both parties from using the process in the last several years. As one GOP aide puts it, “Democrats have opened a Pandora’s box.” Lovely.

For the reasons I said here, I think that the climate will be more poisonous if John Kerry is elected, regardless of the efforts he’s likely to make (under heavy pressure from hand-wringing D.C.–establishment folks) to extend olive branches and attempt to heal partisan divisions. Given the hand he’ll be dealt, Kerry would do best to take Paul Krugman’s advice and not be magnanimous in victory.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ADD THIS TO THE SCANDAL TALLY. Halliburton's no-bid contracts are now under FBI investigation. Courtesy of reader L.O., here's the wire story from the Associated Press:

The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co., seeking an interview with a top Army contracting officer and collecting documents from several government offices.

The line of inquiry expands an earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice President Dick Cheney's former company.

FBI agents this week sought permission to interview Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer who went public last weekend with allegations that her agency unfairly awarded a Halliburton subsidiary no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars in Iraq, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

It appears the FBI has now joined the anti-Bush conspiracy.

--Nick Confessore

SHRILL LATELY? Richard Cohen, September 16, 2004:

I nevertheless cannot bring myself to hate Bush or, as someone here told me, to consider his possible reelection as a reason to leave the country. In fact, Bush haters go so far they wind up adding a dash of red to my blue, pushing me by revulsion into a color I otherwise would not have.

October 28, 2004:

I do not write the headlines for my columns. Someone else does. But if I were to write the headline for this one, it would be "Impeach George Bush."

May 7, 2003:

I mention Jackson right at the top because I feel that it will hardly matter if, as now seems possible, no large cache of weapons of mass destruction is found in Iraq and the war to disarm that country turns out to have been unnecessary. All that will matter is that the United States won a magnificent victory -- never mind why the war was fought in the first place. Everyone likes a winner, and Bush is a winner.

October 28, 2004:

Not since the Spanish-American War has the United States gone off to war so casually, so half-cocked and so ineptly. The sinking of the Maine, the casus belli for that dustup, has been replaced by missing weapons of mass destruction, and the Hearst and Pulitzer presses are now talk radio and Fox News Channel. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed. Still, though, we mourn the dead, look away from the wounded and maimed, and wonder what it was all about. We embarked, truly and regrettably, on a crusade.

Yet from Bush comes not a bleep of regret, not to mention apology. It is all "steady as she goes" -- although we have lost our bearings and we no longer know our destination. (Don't tell me it's a democratic Middle East.) If the man were commanding a ship, he would be relieved of command. If he were the CEO of some big company, the board would offer him a golden parachute -- and force him to jump. But in government, it's the people who make those decisions. We get our chance on Tuesday.

I guess it gets to everybody sooner or later. I also note that, weirdly, the Post refused to headline his column "Impeach Bush."

--Matthew Yglesias

EVEN PARANOIDS HAVE ENEMIES! From Congressional Quarterly, here's a little grist for those who are convinced that the Patriot Act is merely stage one of turning America into a police state:

Eight months before the White House appointed him the Homeland Security Department’s top intelligence official, retired U.S. Army Gen. Patrick M. Hughes told a public forum at Harvard last year that the government would have to “abridge individual rights” and take domestic security measures “not in accordance with our values and traditions” to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States.

“What I’m about to say is very arrogant — arrogant to a fault,” said Hughes, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in previously unreported remarks at a March 2003 Harvard University forum on “Future Conditions: The Character and Conduct of War, 2010 and 2020.”

“Set aside what the mass of people think. Some things are so bad for them that you cannot allow them to have them. One of them is war in the context of terrorism in the United States,” Hughes said, according to a transcript obtained by CQ Homeland Security.

“Therefore, we have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause,” said Hughes.

“Things are changing, and this change is happening because things can be brought to us that we cannot afford to absorb. We can’t deal with them, so we’re going to reach out and do something ahead of time to preclude them.

“Is that going to change your lives?” Hughes asked rhetorically. “It already has.”

Neither the department nor Hughes would comment for the record on whether Hughes stood by his comments in the year he has held the senior DHS intelligence post.

At the time of his remarks, Hughes was a private consultant whose clients included the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DIA, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, Science Applications International Corp., SRI International, Anteon, Boeing, Rand Corp., and others, according to the Web site for his company, PMH Enterprises, LLC.

Fantastic!

I'd be curious to hear what the blogosphere's conservatarians, as Atrios rightly dubs them, think of this.

--Nick Confessore

RDX AND THE PLOTS AGAINST US. Not only do the 377 tons of explosives that have gone missing in Iraq include the same deadly type of explosive, RDX, used in 1988 to take down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, but, I was reminded at a book talk by former-Washington Post investigative reporter Lorraine Adams last night, RDX figured prominently in the 1999 Al Qaeda plot to blow up the Los Angeles Airport (the so-called Millenium Plot). Adams' novel, Harbor, is based on her reporting in the immigrant communities that harbored the Algerians behind the plot.

According to this Jan. 1, 2000, CNN piece on the lead plotter:

[Ahmed] Ressam, 32, last week pleaded innocent to five federal counts related to his alleged attempt to smuggle bomb-making materials. He was arrested in Port Angeles, Washington, after crossing from Victoria Island, Canada, aboard a ferry. The trunk of his rented car contained timers, detonation material and highly explosive chemicals, officials have said.

According to court documents released Tuesday, Ressam was carrying the liquid chemical RDX, or cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, which is used by military forces around the world for demolition. No blasting caps or other possible detonators were found, the documents said. (emphasis added)

The main ingredient in the plastic explosive C-4 is RDX. This Seattle Times piece -- a long narrative detailing Ressam's capture with 135 pounds of bomb-making equipment in his car -- has pictures of his RDX and allied explosive timing devices, rigged from Casio watches.

C-4 plastic explosives have also been used in number of other foiled -- and successful -- terrorist plots against America in recent years.

• In December 2001, according to CNN, British al-Qaeda shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to ignite shoes filled with "10 ounces of PETN-based material, a version of the plastic explosive C4 that is very sensitive to heat and friction" on American Airlines flight 63 from Paris, which is why you and I now have to remove our shoes for screening at American airports.
• In October 2000, terrorists in Yemen attacked the U.S.S. Cole using C-4, killing 17 American servicemen and wounding 49.
• In October 2001, "a third of a pound of C-4 was found in a suitcase inside a Philadelphia bus terminal. Police said that was enough explosive to level the building."
• On June 25, 1996, "A truck, a truck used to clean out Port-A-Johns stuffed with at least a minimum of 5,000 pounds of C4 explosive pulled out, pulled to perimeter of a fence" at the Khobar Towers U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, according to CNN, "and detonated a bomb there, killing 19 Americans, wounding hundreds of others." As for the bombers, "they thought that initially it might have been al Qaeda related, but later on the investigation revealed that it was a local Shia group that was Iranian backed and possibly, again, possibly funded by bin Laden."

The materials that have disappeared in Iraq are the building blocks of exactly the sort of weapons already used against us by terrorists. Arguing about when the explosives disappeared strikes me as beside the point right now, though the label Explosiv 1.1D, clearly visible on materials in the KSTP-TV video, is the label for the explosive category that includes RDX (scroll way down).

The explosives are gone and someone took them. It wasn't us and it wasn't the Russians. This is a disaster.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

LOOKING DOWN THE PAPER TRAIL. When Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller mandated that "a voter verifiable receipt printer be included on all newly purchased DRE [Direct Recording Electronic] machines for the 2004 election," he probably didn't expect Nevada to be the only state to mandate a voter-verifiable receipt (VVR) for this cycle. The way election controversies are shaping up, DRE machines don't look to be the major battlefield that many expected; although it's too early to discount DRE malfunctions or malfeasance, I'd say that registration challenges, provisional ballots, and all the attendant controversies seem like more of a sure-thing disaster.

That said, it'll be interesting to see if Nevada has a significantly smoother election than states with heavy DRE usage that haven't made as much of an effort as Nevada has at getting it right. (I'm looking at you, Florida.) So far, the only DRE-related problem reported in Nevada's early voting is a brief paper jam.

Heller, from all indications, has done everything he can to make sure Nevada's election goes as its voters choose; I'll be very surprised if his names ends up howled in the same breath as Glenda Hood, J. Kenneth Blackwell, Chet Culver, or the various other Katherine Harrises du jour. The latest commendable sign: After Nye County Clerk Sam Merlino reassured voters that that 30-minute paper jam was inconsequential because the paper trail serves only as a back-up, Heller rushed out a statement renouncing that excuse as "ill informed and an affront to the voters of Nevada" and explained again how voters should handle any DRE problems at the polls. Heller seems genuinely committed to ensuring both the accuracy of the Nevada vote and the confidence of the Nevada voters, and that's not something you see in too many states. Now if they could just wrap up that Sproul investigation...

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHY SO FEW TROOPS? Josh Marshall takes on the question of why the invasion of Iraq was so badly undermanned and comes up with an answer:

The biggest reason is that President Bush and his chief advisors knew that it would be much harder to get the country into Iraq if the electorate knew the full scope of the investment -- in dollars, deployments and casualties -- upfront. In other words, undermanning the operation was always part of the essential dishonesty and recklessness with which the president led the nation to war.

I don't doubt that political considerations like this played a role in the decision-making, but I think that explanation misses the fundamental point. The intellectual architects of the Iraq War are driven by some eccentric views about WMD proliferation, specifcally the centrality of regime type to the analysis of the situation. This leads them to believe that it's intolerable to allow certain kinds of states to acquire WMD, and also that it's pointless to use diplomatic agreements to dissuade these states from acquiring them. That doesn't quite require the U.S. military to overthrow a whole long succession of regimes (Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc.) but it does require us to be able to credibly threaten to invade.

This policy only makes sense if it's possible to conduct a regime-change operation with a smallish number of troops and, reasoning backwards, they therefore concluded that it was, in fact, possible to conduct them this way. So-called "experts" who said it would be harder than that were regarded as agenda-driven know-nothings whose belief in the need for a large deployment was driven by their desire to undermine neoconservative policy by making it appear impossible.

If you talk to the folks at a place like AEI today, they'll be happy to admit that the postwar situation has been mishandled and that Iraq is a mess. In a rather cunning illustration of the Quine-Duhem thesis (note: purchasing term papers online is not recommended), the conclusion they draw from this is not that there were too few troops, but too many. Barbara Lerner outlined this view in an article called "Rumsfeld's War, Powell's Occupation" back at the end of April, in case you're curious.

--Matthew Yglesias

ET TU, VLADIMIR. The Washington Times' Bill Gertz has a bizarre story out today in which Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security (worst Web site ever, incidentally) John Shaw alleging that the Russian military moved the RDX, HMX, and PETN out of Al Qaqaa and into Syria before the war ever happened. This is totally at odds with every other story we've heard from the administration, and Bush's point man on the subject, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita "could not be reached for comment" on the story, which seems unlikely.

Shaw claims to have gotten this information from "two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration." Since this whole story seems to be contradicted by all of the publicly available evidence, and, as Ryan Lizza reports, the White House has disavowed it, I think it's safe to discount it, but it sure would be nice to know which European intelligence services are saying this and why. Incidentally, while Googling around I noted that the Defense Department wants you to be very clear on the fact that any criminal investigations regarding Shaw that may or may not be taking place are being handled by the FBI and not, as some had it, by the DoD Inspector General.

--Matthew Yglesias

TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT. The nasty, state-wide RNC hate-mailings have spread across the country into local races. Take a look at this ad sent out on behalf of Republican Woody White, running in North Carolina for the State Senate. In it he accuses Democratic candidate (and out lesbian) Julia Boseman of running to push that ever-elusive "homosexual agenda." The ad, and others that accuse Boseman of being beholden to gay rights' groups, as this story makes clear, were paid for by the North Carolina Republican Executive Committee.

--Sarah Wildman

KERRY'S PLANS FOR IRAQ. One of the key issues hovering over this campaign is whether, given the mistakes that have already been made, a Kerry administration would actually be able to do anything better for Iraq. Writing in Mother Jones, Bradford Plumer makes the case that he could. It's a somewhat convincing argument but -- and it's a big "but" -- it neglects the fact that there's a very real possibility that the National Assembly that should take office at the beginning of February may ask the United States to set a departure date and beging drawing down our forces.

There are plenty of signs already of Iraqi leaders trying to distance themselves from the unpopular United States, and at a certain point parties who will dominate the Assembly may reach the conclusion that Shiite discontentment with life under occupation is a bigger threat to their power than is the Sunni insurgency, which for demographic reasons stands little chance of actually overthrowing the Iraqi government. One important factor here would be the attitude of the American president. A leader like George W. Bush who apparently has designs on a long-term basing arrangement in Iraq would put his thumb on the scales toward getting the Assembly not to make such a request, whereas John Kerry might well do the reverse.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE SOX EFFECT? One joke going around Kerry campaign headquarters over the weekend was that if the Red Sox won the World Series, John Kerry could lose Massachusetts, because the entire state would be out celebrating at the Sox victory parade (then expected for Tuesday, November 2) and forget to go to the polls. Of course, we all know Massachusetts is no Tennessee, and the Sox win only jazzes up the MA Dems and others who see the Sox victory as proof that this is the year historical precedent goes out the window and Massachusetts dominates the field. From today's Cape Cod Times:

Massachusetts Democrats are dreaming of a double play this year.

Jane Lane, the communications director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, has gathered her sleepy staff for Monday morning planning sessions full of politics and baseball talk. The rigor of a campaign season for the state Legislature and the White House - plus hours of late-night baseball viewing - has left them a little giddy, hoping it isn't stardust when the bats are put away.

"People are feeling really energized and very optimistic that there is this certain alignment of the stars and the moon and planets, (that) this is really going to happen," Lane said. "That, by God, Boston can win the World Series and John Kerry can win the presidency. It's a good time to be from Massachusetts. I think people are just optimistic, and we are not optimistic a lot ordinarily."

In Ohio this morning, Kerry reminded voters that a talk-radio caller a while back had said, "John Kerry won't be president until the Red Sox win the World Series." Kerry's response now is, "Well, we're on our way!"

Another, less tongue-in-cheek worry was that a Sox victory could have some effect around the margins on voting in neighboring New Hampshire, which is a swing state and is home to legions of Sox fans who will stream over the state line to Boston or out of their hometowns to Manchester for various victory celebrations. Fortunately, the Sox' clean sweep allows the victory parade to be held on Saturday, according to The Boston Globe, a day before the originally slated final game of the Series. Or maybe it'll be on Friday. Says the Globe in a different story: "The largest celebration in Boston's 374-year history is expected tomorrow when the team is honored with a parade and championship ceremony." In any event, the victory parade, according to this Boston Herald story, may then swing through southern New Hampshire some time over the weekend or early next week as part of a New England-wide celebration.

According to our spies, the Sox have plotted a party that will encompass all of New England and will take the World Series trophy on a six-state tour "like a rock 'n' roll band," said our spy.

"They envision this thing in concentric circles, starting in Boston and working its way out to Worcester, Providence, Springfield, Hartford, Manchester, all over New England," said Deep Dugout. All of which would be, of course, out of this World!

One thing's for sure: between still-jazzed Sox fans and either elated or angry Kerry supporters in Copley Square Tuesday night, where Kerry will hold his election-night rally, Boston is going to be one heck of a scene on November 2.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GOOD NEWS IN FLORIDA? The most recent Florida polls haven't been looking so hot for the Kerry campaign, but Miami Herald columnist Jim Defede points to some contrary trends based on the Herald's latest polling. Their poll shows John Kerry winning Dade County (where Miami is located) by almost 100,000 votes, which would be a massive improvement over Al Gore's 40,000-vote margin in Florida's largest county. Defede writes that such a big margin "would be hard for Bush to make up across the rest of the state." That's not self-evidently true in a state where 6 million ballots were cast in 2000 and where we can expect a larger turnout this time around, but it certainly is a problem for the Bush campaign.

Perhaps more interesting is what the polling shows about Democratic efforts -- led by the New Democrat Network -- to court the Hispanic vote in Florida. The poll suggests that messages targeted at non-Cubans have been very successful, as have efforts to register more of these voters. On the other hand, simultaneous efforts to court both the younger generation of Cuban-Americans (theoretically turned off by George W. Bush's hardline anti-Castro policies) and even the older exiles (theoretically open to the argument that they shouldn't be single-issue voters) haven't done much good. Over the long term, which is where NDN President Simon Rosenberg has repeatedly told me his efforts are aimed, that's good news for the Democrats since Cuban-Americans are an ever-shrinking share of the Florida demographic pie. Over the short term, while the numbers are encouraging, they're not as encouraging as many liberals (myself included) had hoped a little while ago, and for the next few days that's all anyone's going to care about.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT IF ARAFAT DIES? Last night’s news that Yasser Arafat is not just sick with the flu, but actually slipped into unconsciousness (if briefly) and will finally leave his compound for the first time in two years for medical help, would be roiling the press if we weren’t days from the election. Arafat’s four-decade reign as self-designated leader of the Palestinian people has had one common trope throughout: He has long resisted appointing, grooming, or even indicating the possibility that someday he will need, a successor. This is, needless to say, a major problem. As the Gaza withdrawal draws closer, the Palestinians desperately need a credible leader: to rule over Gaza once it is “fully” Palestinian, to negotiate what the future will hold for the West Bank, and to represent the Palestinians to the world. While there are two men ostensibly closest to taking the helm in the event that Arafat dies or is too ill to govern (to the extent that he actually governs now) -- Ahmed Querei, the current prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, his predecessor -- the man the Palestinians say they want is Marwan Barghouti, who is currently in an Israeli jail serving a life-sentence for terror-related activities. There is a Free Mumia–like effort to free Barghouti and there have long been rumors that Israel has been grooming him to become the Palestinian leader. That’s because Barghouti (putting aside the nasty little terror conviction) has made some quasi-moderate speeches in the past few years, condemning suicide bombings and terror inside Israel. He was born in 1960 which means he is well into the next generation of Palestinian leaders. (Read this interview he gave to the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv in 2001.) He’s also fluent in Hebrew and in English, which makes him a very nice diplomat. In a 2002 interview on NPR, before Barghouti's conviction, then–Jerusalem Bureau chief of The New York Times told Terry Gross:

He was arrested in the last major offensive in Ramallah, and he is still in jail. And Israel says it is going to put him on trial, accusing him of being a terrorist; accusing him of basically working on Arafat's behalf carrying out direct orders from Arafat to kill Israelis. Marwan Barghouti is one of the more interesting Palestinian figures. He was a young leader in the first intifida in the late '80s. He was arrested, deported, came back and he came back ultimately as part of the Oslo peace process. He had many Israeli friends, like many of his generation, that actually grew up in the West Bank not in exile. He's a fluent speaker of Hebrew, which he learned in prison. He also speaks English. And he formed these friendships with Israeli parliamentarians and others during the Oslo peace process, which he repeatedly said he was a deep believer in and still says that he's a believer in a two-state solution.

Israel says that over the course of this conflict, he became one of the most dangerous terrorist leaders, Israel says, on the Palestinian side; a charge he denies. He insisted he's a political leader of Fatah, and that while he supports attacks on Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, which he regards as legitimate struggle against occupation, he has always said he opposes attacks within Israel--that is pre-1967 Israel.

The various conspiracy theories, by the way, Terry, about Barghouti's imprisonment by the Israelis, at least on the Palestinian side--some Palestinians think that Israel is essentially trying to turn Marwan Barghouti into the Palestinian Nelson Mandela, exaggerating his credentials as a potential terrorist, removing him from the scene now as the Palestinian Authority is faced with so many difficult decisions so that he can return and possibly run for election, ultimately, and become the next Palestinian leader.

Look for these rumors to resurface in the coming weeks if Arafat does not fully recover.

--Sarah Wildman

CLAIM: JOHN EDWARDS CAUSED THE FLU VACCINE SHORTAGE. You may have gotten an e-mail forward recently alleging that a lawsuit waged by John Edwards back in his days as a trial lawyer is responsible for the flu vaccine shortage. Yeah, it is pretty stupid. (This reminds me a bit of that Simpsons episode where Krusty runs for Congress against a Democrat and debates him on the FOX News Channel, which runs crawls saying things like "Study: 92 percent of Democrats are gay" and "JFK Posthumously joins Republican Party.") But here's the relevant Snopes.com page, should it be needed.

--Nick Confessore

WHERE'S MY SHARE? As much as George W. Bush touts his tax-cut package as a middle-class benefit, we all know that most of the cuts went to the wealthiest in this country. Not only did Bush fail to pay for the tax cuts, causing the deficit to balloon out of control, the cuts haven't done their job in aiding the economy. Wages are stagnating, family income is on the decline, jobs are being outsourced, and I have yet to see any benefits come tax day. Bush has the double privilege of being the first president since World War II to preside over a four-year rise in the deficit and the first president since the Great Depression to see a net loss in the number of jobs. Instead of surfing around for all the info you need to know, visit Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, for one-stop shopping for all the latest numbers and research on the current state of jobs and the economy.

--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org

THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER? Here's an Animal House–inspired take on the Bush presidency. Surely there's a 527 out there that has some extra dough and wants to put this one on the air? I'm thinking Comedy Channel, right between Crank Yankers and The Daily Show.

--Nick Confessore

SINGLETON PUTS ON THE SQUEEZE. Reader P.M. alerts me to yet another bizarre newspaper endorsement of George W. Bush that came out on Sunday, and the story behind it is likely the same as the one behind the Denver Post’s painful editorial. The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah hasn’t run endorsements in 32 years, but the paper was recently bought by the MediaNews Group chain, whose CEO is big-time Republican contributor William Dean Singleton. And so, on Sunday, the paper endorsed Bush through the editorial equivalent of painfully gritted teeth. Now wouldn't you know it, MediaNews also owns the Denver Post!

So far the chain is boasting a 16-2 record of Bush versus Kerry endorsements among its papers. And clearly, some of these papers’ editorialists have had a hell of a hard time writing these things. Some highlights from the Tribune’s less-than-ecstatic endorsement, replete with hallucinatory “recommendations” to Bush for an improved second term:

Tribune readers know that this newspaper has been consistently critical of a number of the president's policies, particularly his war in Iraq, his tax cuts for the rich and his abysmal environmental record.

…

It was his blinkered determination to topple Saddam Hussein that led him and the nation disastrously astray. The justifications for war - weapons of mass destruction and collaboration with al-Qaida - have been thoroughly discredited. Worse, the United States was militarily and strategically unprepared to enforce the peace in an occupied nation.

By the odd logic of war, however, Bush may be the leader most able to withdraw from Iraq. After January, if elections can be held, he could declare victory and begin to bring U.S. forces home. He would have to take care, however, not to remove American troops prematurely, which could cause Iraq to collapse into civil war.

…

With a second term, the president should focus on bringing the federal budget back toward balance, which means that he cannot make his tax cuts permanent. He has promised action on Social Security, but he must flesh out his plan, including costs. And he must take the complex health-care debate beyond the single issue of tort reform.

High on President Bush's to-do list should be removal of ideological extremists, particularly Attorney General John Ashcroft, from his Cabinet, in favor of Republican moderates like Mike Leavitt. Donald Rumsfeld and deputy Paul Wolfowitz should get the boot from the Pentagon because of their failed policies in Iraq.

It probably goes without saying that yesterday’s published sampling of letters to the editor in the Tribune was comparable to the Denver Post’s in the anger and incredulity expressed.

Obviously Utah is no swing state, and it’s unlikely that newspaper endorsements really make much of a difference in presidential races anyway. But it is quite a sight to behold when members of the reality-based community are forced by their paymasters to try to make a cogent case for another four years of George W. Bush. Personally, I prefer the more honest route taken by The Victoria Advocate of Texas in its Bush endorsement:

We have no consensus on which one, President George W. Bush or Sen. John Kerry, would be an abler, more effective president for the coming four years.

That said, the owners of this newspaper believe Bush is the better candidate.

…

We are proud that the Advocate's editorial board has diverse opinions. We do not always reach consensus. That is as it should be.

The ownership of this newspaper believes it is important for us to express our voice and will use its privilege to unequivocally endorse George W. Bush for a second-term as president of the United States.

Kinda says it all right there, doesn’t it?

--Sam Rosenfeld

HOW NOT TO COVER A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN. Today's New York Times features two stories about Al Qaqaa. One, campaign-oriented and written by two campaign reporters, reads like this:

President Bush broke his silence on Wednesday on the disappearance of 380 tons of explosives in Iraq, accusing Senator John Kerry of making "wild charges" about the missing explosives and of "denigrating the actions'' of troops in the field.

Mr. Kerry quickly responded that while "our troops are doing a heroic job, the president, the commander in chief, is not doing his job."

And on and on it goes, charge and countercharge, with no sense anywhere that someone in this dispute may be right and someone else may be wrong. Meanwhile, in the same edition of the very same newspaper is this story:

Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday.

Now back to the campaign story:

The exact timing of the disappearance of the explosives is critical to the political arguments of each campaign. Mr. Kerry's contention that the administration did not adequately secure the country and was unprepared for the war's aftermath presumes that the explosives disappeared after the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, as officials of the interim Iraqi government say.

If the explosives disappeared before Mr. Hussein fell, as Mr. Bush now says is possible, that would undercut Mr. Kerry's argument and bolster Mr. Bush's contention that his opponent is making charges without all the facts.

"If this, if that" -- but as the other article makes clear, the truth about this controversy is hardly unknowable. On John Kerry's side are witnesses, television footage, and officials from the U.S. Army and Iraqi Interim Government. On George W. Bush's side are Bush, Bush's political appointees, and the press aides to Bush's political appointees. It doesn't take a psychic to figure out who's wrong and who's right here. And yet people reading campaign stories -- especially people out there in the swing states where their media is filled with wire copy -- aren't getting any sense of the facts. Instead, day after day, they're reading transcriptions of each campaign's best quips.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE AL QAQAA VIDEOS: MUST SEE TV. Minneapolis/St. Paul ABC affiliate KSTP has put the video and pictures of the explosives cache their embeds saw on April 18, 2003, online. Click on "video" at the top for the news report. It's really devastating. You can see the American military cutting open the doors to explosives-containing facilities with bolt cutters, and then just leaving the doors open when they leave. There's even a shot of a couple of military guys jokingly posing with a big, dusty metal object, saying, "What do you think America? Is this a big bomb, or what?"

This is huge, for many reasons, but this late in the election season you've also got to wonder what kind of impact this new development in the story will have in Minnesota, where a group of local reporters have suddenly been thrust into the national spotlight at the forefront of a growing national scandal. George W. Bush will be campaigning in Minneapolis on Saturday. Minnesota went for Al Gore in 2000 by a very small margin; though John Kerry had had the lead in the state for most of the year, recent polls have shown the race in a dead heat. Given the local angles, you'd expect Minnesotans to be paying extra attention to this one.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SWING PAPERS WATCH: FLORIDA. The Sun-Sentinel from Fort Lauderdale reprints an LA Times article recapping their latest polling suggesting that Bush will win the Sunshine State while Kerry takes Ohio and Pennsylvania, leaving the election to be decided in the upper midwest, and reports that Broward County will resend the mysterious missing absentee ballots. The Jacksonville Times-Union reports that Bush has picked up the support of some local black ministers on the basis of his anti-abortion, anti-gay views.

The Miami Herald also covers the Broward County situation, focusing on Michael Moore's planned appearance at a protest rally. The Orlando Sentinel, like the St. Petersburg Times has no non-wire campaign coverage. In The Tampa Tribune, voting problems get another discussion and the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" launch their biggest ad buy yet in the state. The Palm Beach Post says there hasn't been much early voting after all, despite all the hype.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE NEW ANTI-WAR PROTESTORS. From Lila Lipscomb to Brooke Campbell, many military relatives have begun taking strong stands against George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. Prospect senior correspondent Joseph Rosenbloom spoke with some of the most active advocates and details their efforts to make their voices heard.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE PROOF IS IN. It looks like the final blow to the official spin on Al Qaqaa will be dealt by KSTP, a local ABC affiliate out of Minneapolis, which via Laura Rozen has the explosives on tape. The station had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne during their visit to Al Qaqaa:

There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

So that's that. And to be clear, the point here is not that the soldiers in the 101st Airborne didn't do their jobs properly -- they didn't know what they were looking at, and didn't have any orders to secure the facility. The higher-ups in the chain of command, on the other hand, new exactly what was in the facility and, had they used some common sense, would have ordered it secured. But they didn't.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE BIG PICTURE. There's something a bit farcical about the "dispute" the White House and the compliant-as-ever media has managed to gin up about the precise timing of the Al Qaqaa looting. It's been known (though rigorously ignored by the White House, its friends in the conservative media, and the vast majority of the mainstream press) for some time that looting of Iraqi WMD sites was widespread and that negligence on the part of the U.S. government was responsible. In yesterday's Boston Globe, Peter Galbraith, an Iraq War supporter, reminded us of some of the highlights:

I also described [to Paul Wolfowitz] two particularly disturbing incidents -- one I had witnessed and the other I had heard about. On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important.

When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated. He shook his head and said, "I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon." About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq's sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad's outskirts. They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere.

There was nothing secret about the Disease Center or the Tuwaitha warehouses. Inspectors had repeatedly visited the center looking for evidence of a biological weapons program. The Tuwaitha warehouses included materials from Iraq's nuclear program, which had been dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War. The United Nations had sealed the materials, and they remained untouched until the US troops arrived.

These are, let us note, the same facilities whose existence The National Review was pointing to yesterday as evidence of the Bush administration's wisdom in launching the invasion when, in fact, the story illustrates the precise reverse. Al Qaqaa is just one more example, and though it's the one that's done the most harm so far (since RDX and HMX can be used in insurgent bombs), down the road the likely smuggling of this other material outside of Iraq is likely to prove to be a far more damaging mistake.

--Matthew Yglesias

SUPPRESSING THE MINORITY VOTE: THE RATIONALE. Via Josh Marshall, this report from GOP pollsters Fabrizio McLaughlin Associates explains why a big minority turnout will be a big problem for President Bush:

[W]hen the data is weighted to reflect minority turnout based on the 2000 exit polls, Sen. Kerry leads by 3.5% and if minority turnout is weighted to census levels Sen. Kerry’s lead expands to 5.2%.

The wording here is a little unclear. But here's what I think it says. If minorities -- defined here as African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans -- turn out at roughly the same rate as non-minorities, Bush and John Kerry are neck and neck. If minorities turnout as well as they did in 2000 (which was pretty well), Kerry wins by 3.5 percent. And if you apply the actual 2000 turnout figures to the expanded minority population that exists today, you get Kerry winning decisively, by more than 5 percent.

(If I've gotten this wrong, I'd appreciate reader guidance at nconfessore-at-gmail.com.)

That's a big deal.

Of course, Republicans have been aware of this trendline for years. You may recall that in the spring 2001, Bush strategists were already sweating their percentage of the minority vote. His pollster, Matthew Dowd, calculated at the time that if minorities and whites, respectively, voted in the same percentages for each party in 2004 as they did in 2000, the Democrats would win by 3 million votes. Minority turnout was down in 2002, but the GOP didn't increase it's share among those groups. The president has since failed to do any better. (In part because his party's nativist wing has precluded any real outreach on amnesty issues, while the GOP's Cuban hardliner wing has so distorted the administration's policy towards that country that less-hardline Cubans are ditching the GOP.)

The solution? Shut down the swing-state minority vote as best you can, while pandering hard to white evangelicals.

UPDATE: Okay, Dwight Meredith of the invaluable Wampum blog has straightened me out on the numbers. They still prove basically the same point:

The sample that he actually drew from the battleground states was 89.5% white, 4.3% black, 1.9% Hispanic etc.

That sample had a 47%-47% tie.

Exit polling from 2000 showed that turnout in those states was actually 85.3% white, 7.5% black, 5.7% Hispanic etc.

When Fabrizio conformed his sample to those ratios (by using cross tabs), Kerry had a lead of 49.2% to 45.7%.

Since 2000, minority population has grown in the battleground states. To account for that change, Fabrizio combined the turnout ratios of 2000 with the current populaton mix as shown by the census figures, and with the cross tabs of his sample. Under those assumptions, Kerry leads 49.9% to 44.7%.

The bottom line is that if minority turnout comprises the same or a greater portion of the electorate this year as compared with 2000, Kerry is in good shape.

I should have noted in my original post that the pollsters were limiting themselves to battleground states. But I think Dwight's got the interpretation right. In any case: Even reasonably high minority turnout = really bad for the president.

--Nick Confessore

TORA BORA VERSUS IRAQ, THE CALENDAR The folks over at BOPNews.com have put together a great visual representation of the overlapping chronology of the assault on Tora Bora and the start of planning for the Iraq War. We didn't just let Osama bin Laden get away and then move into Iraq; the planning for the Iraq intervention was ongoing at exactly the same time bin Laden was slipping through America's fingers.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GETTING OUR STORIES STRAIGHT. It's hard to know if this James Robbins column for NRO is motivated by malice or ignorance, but he's way off-base:

The opposition really needs to get its story straight. The president cannot be taken to task for inventing the Iraqi WMD threat, and simultaneously disparaged for not securing Saddam's dangerous WMD-related materials.

The cache at al Qaqaa was not the only WMD-related material in the news recently. Another IAEA report came out two weeks ago that did not get as much play. According to this account, dual-use equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons was taken from various locations inside Iraq. The Duelfer Report speculated this equipment could have been taken during the chaos of the invasion. The equipment was "professionally looted" by another account, and may have gone to Iran or Syria. Isn't it significant that equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons was there in the first place? Don't these constitute components of a WMD program?

As well, if CBS wants to recycle old news in an attempt to influence the election, how about this story: 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium and other nuclear material at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center (Saddam's main nuclear research and development center) was secured by the United States and flown out of the country last July. According to the Energy Department this material could have been used to make a radiological dispersion device (a.k.a. a dirty bomb) or "diverted to support a nuclear weapons program." The only thing we found in Iraq that was more hazardous than this haul was Saddam Hussein. The United States was able successfully to deny this dangerous material to terrorists, rogue states or anyone else. This good news story dropped like a stone when it came out. And unlike most of the hype of the last few days, this story has the benefit of being true.

Here's the thing -- all this stuff was under seal by the IAEA before the war. They were remnants of Iraq's pre-1991 WMD programs that had been seized by inspectors years ago. None of that stuff is relevant in any way to the administration's pre-war assertions about Iraqi WMD activities. More to the point, this is a proliferation threat that the war created rather than forestalled. The reason the IAEA lost control of these facilities is that the United States invaded. The reason the IAEA's loss of control became problematic is that the United States didn't act swiftly to destroy them. That's the reality-based community's story and it's perfectly straight. Unfortunately, NRO's readers will walk off today, as they so often do, with their heads full of misinformation.

--Matthew Yglesias

STALEMATE. Looks like the Senate conferees have been holding their own against House hard-liners, meaning that an intelligence reform bill won't be ready for a full vote in Congress before the election. From Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer's office:

"Just days before millions of Americans go to the polls on Election Day, House Republicans are providing voters with a perfect example of why their leadership has failed the American people and why they should be replaced by a Democratic House Majority that is willing and capable of achieving consensus and responding to our nation's most-pressing needs.

"House Republican leaders are continuing to hold up major intelligence reform that is supported by all 10 members of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan Senate and the families of 9/11 victims. President Bush has even called Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and urged them to resolve the remaining differences.

"But still, House Republicans cling to the notion that they alone know best. They are fighting to maintain Pentagon budget authority over intelligence-collecting agencies and trying to insert controversial measures on immigration - provisions that are opposed by virtually every other major player in this debate. And in so doing, they are threatening to undermine the momentum for intelligence reform in this Congress.

"The truth is, this House Republican leadership seems constitutionally incapable of putting aside partisanship and at least trying to reach consensus on key issues. They have repeatedly tried to silence anyone who opposes them; that have held votes open until they achieve the desired result; and they have even locked Democrats out of meetings.

"Partisanship - first and always - is the exclusive tactic of House Republicans. And it explains why this 108th Congress has been an abject failure, and why America needs a House Democratic Majority. ...

Stalemate for now is, alas, a better alternative to whatever would come out of a rushed conference if the House Republicans got their way.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATES, TERRORISTS, WHATEVER. Tom Delay seems to be getting his intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency from a pretty unreliable source (Doug Feith?):

The Democrats are using the courts and the legal system to criminalize politics, for their political gain and character assassination," said DeLay via telephone.

DeLay supporters have pointed to a calendar listing on the Morrison Web site as a smoking gun linking Morrison to the LaRouchians. "LaRouche is a con felon and all I can tell you is that Mr. Morrison has supported and campaigned with LaRouche followers and Mr. Morrison also has taken money and is working with the Daily Kos, which is an organization that raises money for fighters against the U.S. in Iraq," said DeLay.

LaRouche certainly is a con man and a felon, but Daily Kos most certainly does not raise money for "fighters against the U.S. in Iraq" unless Delay means something more like "Democratic House candidates." This comes hot on the heels of Dennis Hastert's totally unsubstantiated charge that George Soros is funded by drug cartels. On one level, this kind of thing is funny, but Hastert and Delay are among the very highest officials of the United States government and for them to be trying to intimidate their critics with unsubstantiated criminal allegations is completely unacceptable.

--Matthew Yglesias

TWO CHEERS FOR THE L.A. TIMES. They get two cheers for being what I think is the first major daily to front an in-depth story about Sproul & Associates's shenanigans across the country. The headline is "Signs of Voter Fraud Appear: Registrations that are faked or tossed out have emerged in key states struggling to comply with ballot reform and a flood of new signups." You can guess from the headline why they only get two cheers: The Times completely punts on its own evidence, which suggests that the preponderance of the fraud is on the GOP side. Instead, they go with the "interesting-but-neutral" storyline of, gee, all these outside groups on both sides are funding big voter-registration drives, and it's overwhelming the system, and some people say not everything is kosher. The sole concrete example presented of fraud on the Democratic side is presented by David Beckwith, an Ohio GOP spokesman, who alleges fraud by "Democratic front groups" without any supporting evidence beyond his own say-so. (As opposed to two Republican former employees of Sproul & Associates providing firsthand evidence of registrations being thrown away, and election officials in several states who have found the allegations credible enough to begin investigating.)

Beckwith may well be telling the truth. But the Times might have mentioned that the same Ohio GOP organization Beckwith works for just took aboard three Republican campaign operatives who have been charged with vote fraud by South Dakota officials for their work in that states. Shouldn't the Times reporters have asked Beckwith what his superiors are doing to keep their own house clean?

--Nick Confessore

DEPARTMENT OF IRONIC QUOTATIONS. Which presidential candidate took to the stump yesterday to explain that "a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief?" George W. Bush! Amusing as that is, the administration's spin on Al Qaqaa continues to aggravate:

Mr. Bush encouraged the idea today that the timing remains very uncertain. Accusing Mr. Kerry of making "wild charges," the president said American-led forces had seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions in Iraq. "After repeatedly calling Iraq the 'wrong war' and a 'diversion,' Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq was a dangerous place full of dangerous weapons," Mr. Bush said.

I don't know if anyone is stupid enough to buy this, but just to be clear, if the United States were to invade, say, France we would discover that despite its "cheese-eating surrender monkey" reputation it is, in fact, a country filled with dangerous weapons -- high explosives and even nuclear missiles -- and, no doubt, people trying to kill our troops. Nevertheless such an invasion would be a distraction from the war on terrorism and the country does not, right now, pose a threat to the American people. All that notwithstanding, if the president were to embark on such an unwise invasion, it would still be incumbent upon him to do it properly and not just leave tons -- literally -- of dangerous weapons and materiel lying around all over the place.

--Matthew Yglesias

GARDEN STATE BLUES. Over at The Gadflyer, Bart Acocella offers up the best explanation I've seen for the Democrats' relative weakness in New Jersey compared to the 2000 vote:

But all of this obscures the real reason that New Jersey is close in 2004 – it was always supposed to be. New Jersey, while Democratic-leaning, is not the party’s sixth strongest state, as the 2000 returns would lead you to believe. Gore’s 15.8% margin in 2000 was aberrational, inflated by a crackerjack GOTV operation underwritten by Jon Corzine, who was on the ballot that year. A kind of reverse coattails effect kicked in, with Corzine’s money helping Gore to overperform in the state. As recently as 1992, on the other hand, Clinton carried the state by a mere 2.4%.

I think that's right. New Jersey should probably compared to a state like Virginia that Bush is pretty clearly going to win (unless he experiences some kind of dramatic collapse over the next week) but by a non-enormous margin. If the Republicans wanted to launch a massive Virginia GOTV effort (or the Democrats a massive New Jersey GOTV effort) they could probably generate a blowout, but there's no good reason to do that this year, so it won't happen.

--Matthew Yglesias

SWING PAPERS WATCH: OHIO. It’s Arnold vs. The Boss in the Buckeye State. Four days after the Cleveland Plain Dealer declined the opportunity to endorse either candidate, the Dealer leads with a hard-hitting story that lists the numerous celebrities that are descending upon Ohio in the final days of the campaign. Schwarzenegger will stump for George W. Bush and Springsteen will appear at a rally with John Kerry in Columbus tomorrow and one in Cleveland on Monday. Meanwhile, P. Diddy and his Vote or Die outfit hosted an event at Case-Western Reserve University, while the once-upon-a-time Family Ties parents (Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross) stumped for Kerry elsewhere in the state.

The Columbus Dispatch offers some favorable coverage of Democratic efforts to put an end to the Ohio Republican Party’s shameful efforts to purge newly registered voters from the rolls.

Democrats say the Ohio Republican Party is trying to "discourage and intimidate eligible voters" — many of whom would be expected to vote Democratic — by challenging them without adequate notice in violation of federal laws that dictate how voters can be removed from the voting rolls.

They cite examples such as Lisa Potts of Westerville, who was challenged on the basis she doesn’t live where she is registered. In fact, she is registered from her mother’s address while serving in the U.S. Marines, the lawsuit said.

"The Republican Party is trying to throw tens of thousands of legitimate Ohio voters off the voting rolls," said David Sullivan, Ohio coordinator of Democrats’ voter protection project.

The Democrats have filed a suit with U.S. District Court Judge Susan Dlott in Cinci