I AM ALL FOR FUN, BUT THE CRAZY PROGNOSTICATORS ON BOTH SIDES of this political race are going a bit far (and yes, I'm going to overstate my case, just for fun).

It is Halloween tonight, and soon I'll have little goblins and dwarf Dick Cheneys, George Bushes, and John Kerrys here to collect candy. Normally, this is a night when rationality can be suspended and superstition given its time on the calendar. No harm done.

However, my friend Mark Goldberg text-messaged me from a large coffee bar in Adams Morgan called Tryst here in Washington with some interesting news. He said that he was really caught off guard and confused that the entire crowd (and it's a very large place) of Washingtonians were rooting AGAINST the Washington Redskins.

I am not a football fan. I had far too much exposure to football as a kid, and I grew up in a fun but typical Republican military family which always rooted for the Washington Redskins. One of the fun battles we had inside the family each year was visiting the grandparents at Thanksgiving and watching the Redskins and Dallas Cowboys go at it. My grandparents, their siblings, and my million and one second cousins were all for the Cowboys. I have to admit I really never cared who won, but I liked the idea of perhaps one day owning a franchise.

From Mark Goldberg's comments, I just assumed that all of his Tryst coffee house mates were opposing the Redskins because of some silly notion that the Redskins were a Republican team. I think that it was Nixon who dubbed the Redskins "America's Team." In these crazy times, I could regrettably imagine that we have become such a polarized society that a funky neighborhood in Washington might be able to draw 100% Democrats who perceived the Redskins as a 100% Republican icon.

I know that this is silly, but there is a lot of silliness out there right now as we ramp up to November 2nd.

My response to Mark was: "That is what is wrong with Democrats. They always want to oppose Republican symbols, like the Redskins, and not take them over or co-opt the team."

Well, I read it all wrong. The reason for the widespread hometown opposition to a Redskins victory over the Green Bay Packers had to do with one of these old, irrational presidential outcome indicators.

"The Redskins and the Vote" ran as an editorial today in the Washington Post, and it reads:

Ever since 1936, the year before the team moved to Washington, the last home game before the election has predicted the winner. If the Redskins won, so does the incumbent party in the White House; if not, not. This rule has held good for 17 straight elections. If you needed an extra reason to watch the team take on the Green Bay Packers this afternoon, you now have one.

The article's last graf reads:

. . .there is the Halloween factor. Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the candidate whose mask sold the most has won. According to the Goldman Sachs team, Bush was winning as of one month ago. But neither candidate can match the hapless Richard Nixon. His mask outsells them both.

Here's a question. Is Karl Rove out stacking the deck and having his agents buy thousands of George Bush masks? It might be considered by some an ingeneous move.

Seriously though, the race is real close between Bush and Kerry. And just like I don't approve of the subordination of rationality to faith by anti-enlightenment religious zealots, I think that liberals and progressives who try to look at irrational benchmarks to determine this election are just as silly.

Just so you know, Green Bay beat Washington, 28-14. But Bush's masks are dominating on the streets of Washington tonight, at least by my count here handing out candy.

Still too close to call.

-- Steve Clemons

THOSE WHO THINK THAT COMMERCIAL AIRLINES ARE NOT SENDING back the remains of soldiers have outdated information or are wrong it turns out. I have been been flooded with information over the last day about the Department of Defense regulations regarding shipping back a soldier's remains to the United States.

Here is some of what I have learned. The U.S. Army Human Resources Command maintains a good website designed to help those who have lost someone as a casualty in war. (ed note: Thanks to KS for sending this.)

Army Regulations 638-2 (Care and Disposition of Remains and Disposition of Personal Effects), Section 11-8 (2) reads:

Commercial transportation is the preferred method except when impractical, not available, or cost prohibitive.

The PDF that goes through the rules and regulations is very long, but I have it -- and if anyone would like to have a copy -- email me and I will forward it. The person who pointed out this regulation also noted that there may be other qualifications that modify or trump this regulation, such as classification of war dead.

My guess is that those of you who believed that the military always transported war dead to Dover, Delaware for processing, military honors, and the like may be correct in most cases -- and this may still fit with normal regulations. Very few U.S. airlines are flying in and out of Iraq or Afghanistan.

The United Airlines crew members I was speaking to were flying in from Germany, and the soldier on this plane may have died from some injuries sustained in a war zone after which he died in a hospital in Germany or could have been a U.S. soldier who just had something happen to him or her in Germany. United personnel did tell me that they fly soldiers for the U.S. military in and out of Kuwait frequently.

Another note from JS, who I happen to know is a well placed guy in military and intelligence circles shared this:

You will recall the case in April of this year of Maytag Aircraft Corporation whose employee photographed some flag-draped coffins leading to a Pentagon effort to ban further such photographs. Maytag is one of six charter freight carriers with a DoD contract for the Gulf/Iraq theater that is not limited to, but includes, transport of military coffins.

So it does not seem in any way unusual that an American carrier from Europe would be handling a coffin from a DoD medical facility in Germany under a DoD freight contract.

Another note about the soldier-to-soldier side of war death reality comes from "K":

Regarding the body of the soldier on the United flight -- it's possible that this was the case. The treatment for KIAs (Killed in Action) is what we see at Dover, but not every dead soldier gets that level of treatment.

I'd be that the soldier died from natural causes in Germany or during training there, but not in combat.

Another reader, TWB, sent this interesting note:

United States Army Memorial Affairs Activity Europe (USAMAA-E) in Landstuhl no longer sends all caskets to Dover for final preparations, but will in many cases send them directly to the families (according to the wishes of the Person Authorized to Direct Disposition, PAD). I don't know the logistical specifics, but it would make more sense to send them direct-to-point via commercial air. So I have no trouble with the casket story.

I spent some time looking into this issue about the casket on the flight because I received numerous emails from people showing "A Soldier's Story" to others who instantly rejected the story not about what the soldier told me -- but rather about my comment that a deceased soldier was being transported back to the U.S. on that commercial flight.

I hope that this post provides useful detail to those of you who got mugged by friends saying that caskets just are not sent back to the U.S. the way I described. I think that this other material -- but most importantly, the army regulation -- clears that up.

I am still working on the subject of the DNA probes.

Two days to go.

-- Steve Clemons

AFTER I PUBLISHED "A SOLDIER'S STORY," A THREAD of extraordinarily interesting and useful comments by others has developed on topics ranging from whether the soldier I was speaking to was feeding me material that was part real and part rumor, all real, or entirely contrived.

My judgment is that this guy gave me a snap-shot of his view of things. That's all. It's always a mistake to generalize from a single anecdote, but at the same time, it is clear that the Pentagon is so wrapped up in information control that collective anecdotes often aggregate into the 'real' history of an event.

There are two points I would like to seek some further commentary from people if you know of anyone who would like to either publicly post commentary or send me a private email. The first has to do with a private airline transporting a soldier's remains back to the U.S. The second has to do with the DNA probes used to try and find certain individuals in the rubble at Tora Bora.

First, I know that the military transports bodies, in coffins, to Dover, Delaware. That's well-known. That is why I was surprised to hear (not from the soldier by the way) but from several people who were working on this airplane that there was a coffin on board with a soldier's remains. In as respectful a way as possible, I confirmed that this was true with the captain who was walking the aisles and who talked with the stewards and stewardesses (and me) at the back of the plane for a few moments.

I didn't dig into this. But there have been many who have written that it is just impossible for a United Airlines flight from Frankfurt to have a body of a soldier on board.

My question to all of you is: is it impossible? Are there cases, or not, where soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or who have died because of sustained injuries, may be flown back commercially? I would really like to know whether or not collective awareness out there dismisses this possibility. If so, then there is an interesting story here -- because there are at least several United Airlines employees quite convinced that there was a coffin and soldier on board being transported back.

I look forward to responses from people who may be in a position to know something beyond the conventional.

Secondly, some people have gone nearly apoplectic at the story the soldier shared about long probes being shoved through rock and dirt to take blood and tissue samples from some killed at Tora Bora. He described long pole like probes with a puncture prick at one end and a box reading device on top. Science fiction writers have even written to me saying that the notion of something like the soldier described was too incredible to believe.

I really have no doubt that the soldier I spoke to believed that these were in-the-field DNA readers and recorders. Whether they were or not is a different question.

Since then (thanks to a reader -- badtux -- of The Washington Note), I have stumbled across this firm, Nanosphere, which seems to be developing or marketing something exactly along the lines of what the soldier tried to describe but had a tough time articulating.

As the reader of my blog shared, it would be interesting to know whether such a probe as the one from Nanosphere was available after the bombing of Tora Bora. Would this device have been available as a prototype or secret device then?

It would be useful to hear from others who were in the aftermath of Tora Bora and may have been involved in body collection and processing, the search for bin Laden, or other intelligence-related activities to contact me regarding whether these probes are fictional, or real.

I will post some other questions related to "A Soldier's Story" soon.

Remember to vote.

-- Steve Clemons

LAST NIGHT, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY'S NEWLY ACQUIRED G. JOHN IKENBERRY celebrated his 50th Birthday and his brilliant wife, Lidia Usami, performed in a chamber music recital for about 100 of their Washington friends to whom they wanted to say good-bye.

A lot of folks were discussing bin Laden's latest video message to Americans. However, Eminem got more play at this party than bin Laden. Even if you aren't into rap, watch Eminem's latest music video here. I think it's the most powerful piece of politically directed art I have seen (or heard) in years.

Brooke's Story, a short ad that has been running in battleground states but also over the internet, drew some healthy discussion last night.

No one talked about the wolves controversy, but I liked this comment from some of the Bush ad wolves who are protesting in their own "Wolf Packs for Truth" ad.

-- Steve Clemons

I JUST SAT NEXT TO A VERY TOUGH SOLDIER FROM THE 82ND AIRBORNE on a flight back from Europe. I have been thinking for two days about how to share some of the things he told me without compromising him.

This guy I met is not one prone to talk; he was very serious, very mellow -- and comes from a family of enlisted military men. His dad was in Vietnam.

He has had one rotation in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. He is now in Germany but will soon be transferred back to Iraq. He was at Tora Bora and has seen a lot of Iraqi, Afghan, and American dead.

According to him, 75% of all soldiers want Bush defeated in the election and don't care who defeats him; anger and resentment are high. He says that 90% of the officers remain far out of harm's way. From lietenants all the way up, there is general understanding that the officers are hiding in holes, or holding back in well-defended buildings and quite cavalier about sending troops out for assignments and errands that are frequently stupid, poorly planned, and dangerous.

He has said that he has experienced good and bad commanders to whom he reported -- but that when it came to taking the anthrax vaccine (which a judge has just said that the military can no longer order its soldiers to take), he quietly refused. He told his commander that he just wouldn't take it -- and that many, many soldiers have avoided taking this anthrax vaccine without incident. He said that a friend of his took it and his nervous system was severely affected and is now permanently disabled. He said he would rather have "an Article 15 (non-judicial punishment) than be dead."

I asked him about Lariam, an anti-malarial drug which I have written about before. Lariam, also known as Mefloquine, can, according to drug warning labels cause aggression, psychosis and suicidal tendencies.

He told me that he had been issued seven tablets to take over a week -- and stopped after the second because of incredible negative physical reaction to the drug. He said that several people in his unit became deeply depressed, others very sick. And he said that most people in the military have had to become somewhat accustomed to the idea that the Pentagon looks at the soldiers as "guinea pigs" to test drugs on.

At Tora Bora, he reported on the massive bombing that went on there and said that during the clean up period, they used sensors to detect the remains of those killed and then would punch large poles down into the dirt with pricks that would suck blood up to test the DNA of the victim there on the spot. He said that it surprised the soldiers that they had DNA testing capabilities that were advanced enough to give readings immediately -- and said that they scoured everything that was bombed to try and find bin Laden.

At this time, I learned from one of the stewards on the flight that there was the coffin with a dead American soldier on the plane. The person to whom I was talking just reacted by saying, "everyone wants out -- everyone."

I asked him what he thought happened at Abu Ghraib and the handling of prisoners in general. He blamed both the people in the prison and their superiors. He says that everyone knows that the adrenaline rush and completely new experiences these young Americans are having lead to scary behaviors. He also stated that it is well known among the troops that al Qaeda takes (or keeps) no prisoners.

Early in the Afghanistan incursion, he said that he was on one of the last helicopters out of a very scary incident in which about ten U.S. soldiers were killed in a well-planned diversion and ambush by al Qaeda and the Taliban. He was at a fueling station between Kandahar and Shkin, very close to the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. A group began firing on U.S. soldiers at the fueling station, and some choppers and soldiers went after them. From behind, from the mountains on the Pakistani side, a massive number of al Qaeda and Taliban forces were streaming down behind the Americans -- and the soldier I was talking to could see this from the air in the chopper he was in.

Black Hawks were called in -- and the Taliban took out one or two -- but basically everyone just retreated. According to him at least ten soldiers surrendered to al Qaeda, and they were found later. One of the soldiers had had his penis castrated, and then this was stuffed in his mouth (sorry for the graphic detail, but it's important). The other soldiers were all shot in the head. Several others were "cut up," he said. To him, it was clear that they had been tortured.

He said that these experiences have been repeated in other encounters with al Qaeda -- and thus many of the soldiers who feel on the front lines of a war they don't understand and can't figure out -- have them so incredibly on edge that it's not surprising that they could come undone in a prisoner-holding situation. What he said though is that all of the officers know this to be the case and probably expected this kind of behavior from the soldiers and MPs.

He said that at night, when they are moving people or supplies, or making deliveries, they are scared -- and drive at 80 or 90 miles an hour with their lights off. He said lots of innocent people are killed by this night-driving and while the troops are supposed to report any damage or harm they do, almost none do -- no one wants to stop. This confirms an anecdote about the same kind of killer-driving that Seymour Hersh recently shared with me.

Interestingly, he said that all enlisted men or officers in command positions have orders not to talk about their war experiences with the junior and fresh troops. He refuses -- and tells those people under him everything he knows because he thinks it will help save their lives. When he went to Afghanistan at the beginning, basically nothing was told to them; he kept repeating "nothing." And he said that their basic training in North Carolina was 180 degrees opposite of what they really needed to know for this kind of combat.

He said morale is very low among the troops and that they all want out -- few believe in the war or Bush, and he thinks that many of these troops' negative feelings are being transmitted back to extended family networks that have traditionally been supporters of the Republican Party, like his own family.

He shared quite a bit more, including that his military commanders are planning for at minimum an eight year deployment in Iraq, maybe longer. He also shared an interesting anecdote that about a year ago, certain commanders in the 82nd Airborne had been told to prepare for a quick incursion into Cuba. I was stunned.

He said, "Yep, we couldn't believe that on top of everything else, Bush thought he could go take out Castro." The Navy Seals were going to go in and do the dirty work, he said, and the "82nd was going to go in for clean-up." He said that he never heard more about it but that the orders clearly didn't go forward -- but they were prepared for that possibility and told that "Bush just wanted to take out Castro."

Another thing he shared was that after this incident at Shkin, mentioned above, the Navy Seals were sent in to go find the al Qaeda and Taliban troops hiding in the Pakistan mountains. He said that they were all through those mountains in Pakistan and what he told me was probably classified. But they found nothing, packed their bags, and went home.

I don't want to analyze all of this -- but I want to emphasize that the guy who spoke to me was someone who quite genuinely believed in his country and in military service. He looked like the kind of guy who kept to himself and was clearly not used to articulating the kind of feelings and experiences he was sharing. He said he is just a very stable kind of guy, someone who doesn't react much to all the death he has seen -- though he feels for people. But he says that few of the soldiers he knows and with whom he works has the detachment from events and this horrible situations he generally has.

He said that in contrast to Vietnam where U.S. soldiers were killing other U.S. soldiers and officers whom they didn't like -- that is not happening in Afghanistan or Iraq. But he said people are getting depressed and disillusioned. They don't know what their objectives are -- and they see lots of dead children, dead innocent men and women, grieving families, whose early appreciation for Americans has given away to profound hate and resentment.

He said that if he were one of the Iraqi citizens experiencing what an occupying force was doing, he'd be fighting too. He said that the only way to win is to get out of there -- let the Iraqis resolve the issues they need to resolve internally. Give them money, give them resources, give them advice if asked -- but get the U.S. troops out.

Needless to say, my mind has had a hard time detaching from the grimness of this brave soldier's assessment.

-- Steve Clemons

AP REPORTS THAT AN ARMED INSURGENT GROUP, THE AL-KARAR BRIGADE, says that it worked with various U.S. military and intelligence officers in moving the massive amount of explosives that has become a major pre-election controversy.

Clearly, there are problems believing the assertions of an armed and hostile group, but on the other hand, this is the first reasonable scenario for how such a huge cache of weapons-making material could be moved without our intelligence operations seeing it.

After all, Colin Powell provided extensive photo evidence and other intelligence in his UN testimoney of truck movements of weapons and related materials. One would think that we would have been even more successful in monitoring movements around real rather than imagined weapons.

Could our intelligence services have somehow been involved in moving and hiding the materials that somehow fell back into hostile hands? There must be more to this story.

AP reports:

A group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, said it had coordinated with officers and soldiers of ``the American intelligence'' to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility."

Josh Marshall has been following this affair closely, and another little birdie tells me that it was none other than Bill Clinton who pulled Kerry aside and told him to go after this issue hard and tenaciously -- and to stay on it.

Good call.

-- Steve Clemons

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S OBSESSION WITH ESCAPING from the norms of the Geneva Conventions seems bizarre to me.

One would think that lessons might have been learned by this point from America's experiences at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. By ripping up this sacrosanct commitment that all nations have committed to -- a commitment to treat all prisoners with a standard level of dignity, not subject to harm or torture -- this administration is assuring that future American prisoners are subjected to the same treatment that we are extending others. Rather than being known as upholders of rule of law -- America is becoming known around the world as the lawyers who find the loopholes in the law or who behave arrogantly beyond the reach of law.

Douglas Jehl writes in the New York Times:

A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, administration officials said Monday.

They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the C.I.A. to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

I am returning to the U.S. today from Geneva, the namesake of these important in-times-of-war commitments to humaneness and sanity.

I suspect that many other major nations in the world are preparing to distance themselves further from the United States.

They increasingly realize that Bush may not be an anomaly or accident and that their calculation of self-interest requires new bets on alternative alliances and the development of new competencies to constrain the power and behavior of the U.S. which Anatol Lieven has so aptly said was king of the hill and then "kicked down its own hill."

-- Steve Clemons

AP IS REPORTING THAT CHIEF JUSTICE WILLIAM RENQUIST is in intensive care, hospitalized for treatment of thyroid cancer.

The next president of the United States may appoint THREE justices, and maybe four, to the Supreme Court.

Four more years of the Bush administration may galvanize a more cohesive and organized Democratic Party than is the case today -- but a balanced Supreme Court, women's right to choose to have an abortion, and our privacy writ large may be part of the irreparable damage of these times that cannot be reversed.

Rehnquist's illness should sober up some voters. I still wish Chief Justice Rehnquist a speedy recovery.

-- Steve Clemons

EUROPE IS WORRIED ABOUT THE TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONSHIP, and I am in Geneva now making sure that they know that there is indeed a lot about which to be concerned.

This meeting which involves a broad cross-section of Europeans, including Russians who at this meeting have defined themselves as Europeans, has a handful of Americans. Strangely enough, this conference and the list of attending Americans were assembled by Catherine Kelleher who is now at the Naval War College and a former senior Department of Defense official, and all have the name Steve: Steve Clemons, Steven Simon of RAND, Steven Kull of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, and Stephen Szabo of the Bologna Center of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

The most interesting thing for me in this conference is how supportive the Russians are of Bush. Practically everyone else is mystified by the resilience of George Bush's support and dumbfounded that most Americans don't seem to care that the rest of the world is very fearful of what four more years of the Bush team at the help will do to the global system.

One of the tasks we have yet to fulfill at this meeting is to generate some suggestions on how to get the Transatlantic Relationship back on decent ground. I'm pessimistic that the crowd we have here will be able to coalesce around something that would be seriously considered -- but for my part, I have decided to submit Zbigniew Brzezinski's New York Times piece, "How to Make New Enemies," today to serve as our basic outline.

I think Brzezinski diagnoses our current situation unsentimentally and brilliantly. He writes:

Both candidates have become prisoners of a worldview that fundamentally misdiagnoses the central challenge of our time. President Bush's "global war on terror" is a politically expedient slogan without real substance, serving to distort rather than define. It obscures the central fact that a civil war within Islam is pitting zealous fanatics against increasingly intimidated moderates.

The undiscriminating American rhetoric and actions increase the likelihood that the moderates will eventually unite with the jihadists in outraged anger and unite the world of Islam in a head-on collision with America.

After all, look what's happening in Iraq. For a growing number of Iraqis, their "liberation" from Saddam Hussein is turning into a despised foreign occupation. Nationalism is blending with religious fanaticism into a potent brew of hatred. The rates of desertion from the American-trained new Iraqi security forces are dangerously high, while the likely escalation of United States military operations against insurgent towns will generate a new rash of civilian casualties and new recruits for the rebels.

Pan-Arab nationalism, or what Steve Simon at this conference has called a new global, transnational Muslim awareness, is a far different global challenge than small groups of terrorists. The great tragedy of this so-called war against terror is that we have allowed, even helped, al Qaeda to morph into a movement that looks legitimate to far too many in the world who would otherwise be tilting towards modernity.

On Bush, Brzezinski writes:

If President Bush is re-elected, our allies will not be providing more money or troops for the American occupation. Mr. Bush has lost credibility among other nations, which distrust his overall approach. Moreover, the British have been drawing down their troop strength in Iraq, the Poles will do the same, and the Pakistanis recently made it quite plain that they will not support a policy in the Middle East that they view as self-defeating.

In fact, in the Islamic world at large as well as in Europe, Mr. Bush's policy is becoming conflated in the public mind with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policy in Gaza and the West Bank. Fueled by anti-American resentments, that policy is widely caricatured as a crude reliance on power, semicolonial in its attitude, and driven by prejudice toward the Islamic world. The likely effect is that staying on course under Mr. Bush will remain a largely solitary American adventure.

But he doesn't let Kerry off either:

Unfortunately, the predicament faced by America in Iraq is also more complex than the solutions offered so far by the Democratic side in the presidential contest. Senator John Kerry would have the advantage of enjoying greater confidence among America's traditional allies, since he might be willing to re-examine a war that he himself had not initiated.

But that alone will not produce German or French funds and soldiers. The self-serving culture of comfortable abstention from painful security responsibilities has made the major European leaders generous in offering criticism but reluctant to assume burdens.

What Brzezinski writes is on target. I have conversed with most of the leading European Ambassadors to the United States -- and nearly all of those who do not already have forces deployed in Iraq admit that there number one task should Kerry find himself elected is to prevent his incoming administration from asking for their respective nation's troops to be deployed in Iraq.

They don't want to explicitly reject Kerry's request and thus feel the need to try and preempt the request.

Brzezinski sees that for the U.S. to extract itself from this mess, some arrangement is going to be needed that involves a broader alliance of players -- and knows that the price of German and French involvement will be very high.

To get there, Brzezinski suggests a new bargain:

To get the Europeans to act, any new administration will have to confront them with strategic options. The Europeans need to be convinced that the United States recognizes that the best way to influence the eventual outcome of the civil war within Islam is to shape an expanding Grand Alliance. . .that embraces the Middle East by taking on the region's three most inflammatory and explosive issues: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the mess in Iraq, and the challenge of a restless and potentially dangerous Iran.

While each issue is distinct and immensely complex, each affects the others. The three must be tackled simultaneously, and they can be tackled effectively only if America and Europe cooperate and engage the more moderate Muslim states.

. . .A comprehensive initiative along these lines would force the European leaders to take a stand: not to join would run the risk of reinforcing and legitimating American unilateralism while pushing the Middle East into a deeper crisis. America might unilaterally attack Iran or unilaterally withdraw from Iraq. In either case, a sharing of burdens as well as of decisions should provide a better solution for all concerned.

Brzezinski has put a proposal on the table that has some flaws but also has a lot of sense. He has elevated the question about America's future foreign policy engagement from one not just of whether or not the U.S. should be engaged in Iraq -- but rather to how to fix the mess we are in and preempt greater damage to our and the world's mutual interests.

I highly recommend the Brzezinski piece -- and will try to get the Europeans I am meeting here in Geneva, and the Russians, to recognize the merit in his proposal.

-- Steve Clemons

AMERICAN ACCOUNTING PRACTICES USED TO BE THE ENVY OF THE WORLD. Then came the crimes of Enron and Arthur Andersen, foreshadowed and followed by hundreds of cases of fraud and malfeasance cases of illegal collusion between corporate management and those hired by stockholders to be the watchdogs.

There are revelations today in the New York Times that the firm Custer Battles repeatedly billed the Coalition Provisional Authority for non-existent services.

After a few years of news about how bad it is to fix prices, rig deals, and distort market forces, I find it remarkable that Eliot Spitzer seems to have no difficulty finding giant firms to shake to their foundation. Now, AIG Chairman Hank Greenberg and his son Marsh & McLennan CEO Jeffrey Greenberg may find themselves tied up in yet another huge case of corporate criminality. The son may be on the way out real fast.

What does the American brand name mean anymore?

I have a lot of respect for Claudia Rosett who deserves enormous credit for breaking the oil-for-food scandal that swirled between Iraq, the United Nations, and major nations around the world, including U.S. firms. Regrettably, she works as journalist-in-residence at the Fund for Defense of Democracies, but she does great investigative work.

My problem though is that she is writing nothing about the staggering fact that America's corruption rivals that of the U.N. The corrupt practices of blue-chip players in American society that are self-dealing and those who dip into the U.N. cookie jar for self benefit are similarly disgusting and similarly neglected until the cases fester so much that ignoring the corruption doesn't work any more.

I am traveling now, and it is tough to search and link the countless stories on missing money under the Coalition Provisional Authority's watch. But this floors me. After all the controversy about the single-bid, forced down-our-throat contract with Halliburton, Reuters reports:

The U.S. Army is laying the groundwork to let Halliburton Co. keep several billion dollars paid for work in Iraq that Pentagon auditors say is questionable or unsupported by proper documentation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

According to Pentagon documents reviewed by the Journal, the Army has acknowledged that the Houston-based company might never be able to account properly for some of its work, which has been probed amid accusations that Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root unit overbilled the government for some operations in Iraq.

Even if I wanted to give Bush the benefit of the doubt on some of his idealistic crusading around the world, I can't.

When our example is deep corruption abroad and at home, when we can't manage to hold senior leadership accountable for Abu Ghraib, and when deceiving the public by withholding or classifying information that could help us make better policy choices, America has no moral standing. . .none.

-- Steve Clemons

JAMES WOOLSEY'S MOST RECENT RECORDED CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS:

KLAYMAN, LARRY
VIA FRIENDS OF LARRY KLAYMAN
01/16/2004 250.00 24020212665

(information from the Federal Elections Commission)

At first, I didn't see much that interested me here. Supporting McCain, Jane Harman, the RNC, Dick Lugar, Joe Lieberman, and even the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Political Action Committee sounded normal. However, I didn't know much about Larry Klayman, who ran in the Republican Primary for Senate.

He lost -- but his roster of endorsements includes former Congressman Bob Barr, Illinois Senate candidate Alan Keyes, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, Pat Boone, Morgan Brittany, and Chuck Norris. Paul Weyrich made the list too.

The guy Jim Woolsey gave $250.00 to markets himself as one of the "leading enemies" of Bill & Hilary Clinton. His website is fun to look through. Here's one of the first grafs:

Honest. Reformer. Public Servant. Watchdog. Tough But Fair. Citizen Activist. Reagan Conservative. Man of Integrity. Self-made Man. Believer and Embodiment of the American Dream. Thinker. Man of Deeds. Leading Enemy of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their "comrades" like Senators Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, and Charles Schumer of the "great left wing conspiracy". These are but some of the words that have been used to describe Larry Klayman, Florida's next United States Senator.

This from Alan Keyes' endorsement:

Dr. Keyes in his endorsement promised to campaign with Larry across Florida. He will also be assisting Klayman with fundraising. Dr. Keyes has a nationwide following from his presidential bids as well as his fights for the Ten Commandments and for Terri Schiavo in Florida.

"Dr. Keyes will play an important part of my campaign," said Klayman, "I will call upon him for advice not only during the campaign but after my election."

Much of this won't surprise people, given Woolsey's buddy-buddy relationship with Chalabi, his role heading the Committee on the Present Danger, and the neocon cluster he is running with nowadays. But I have to admit that I still find myself astonished by the company our former CIA Director keeps lately.

Now, if I could only find the direct link between Woolsey and Alan Keyes. . .

-- Steve Clemons

CARL LEVIN GOES AFTER DOUGLAS FEITH IN A NEW REPORT drafted by the minority staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee accusing the Defense Undersecretary of misleading, well really lying to, Congress.

In the New York Times Douglas Jehl reports:

The report said a classified document prepared by Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, not only asserted that there were ties between the Baghdad government and the terrorist network, but also did not reflect accurately the intelligence agencies' assessment - even while claiming that it did.

In issuing the report, the senator, Carl M. Levin, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he would ask the panel to take "appropriate action'' against Mr. Feith. Senator Levin said Mr. Feith had repeatedly described the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda as far more significant and extensive than the intelligence agencies had.

I have been uncomfortable with the fact that I have been one of many voices, indeed I think a majority, who can't believe that Douglas Feith still has his job. I'm a natural contrarian, or at least perceive myself to be.

So, now I need to spring to Douglas Feith's defense for a moment. Isn't it possible that Feith is the Lyndie England of the Hussein-al Qaeda connection story? Well, if not Lyndie England -- then at least only a henchman for far more powerful pols who have been devoted to perpetuating this connection between not only Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda -- but Saddam Hussein and 9/11?

The Alpha-dog at the top of this chain is Vice President Cheney. Isn't Feith's best defense regarding his obfuscation of facts, distortions and lies to Congress that he was just doing what his big boss, Dick Cheney, was doing?

But on the other hand, if Lyndie England and her young friends who are undeservedly being shackled with the entire responsibility for Abu Ghraib as Rumsfeld enjoys the perks of being above it all, then I'm all for Doug Feith spending some time paying for his sins too.

-- Steve Clemons

ELECTORAL-VOTE.COM HAS BUSH AND KERRY TIED TODAY 264-264, with ten Minnesota votes still without a home.

An Associated Press poll has Kerry up by 3 points over Bush, but Fox News is tilting towards the majority of polls that are calling it dead-even.

Tradesports.com still has Bush at 60% chance of winning over Kerry at 40%.

-- Steve Clemons

MAYBE IT'S TIME TO GO BACK TO CASH AND JOIN MEMBERS OF CONGRESS who refuse to hold a passport.

Bruce Schneier reports on these new RFID passports (that's radio frequency identification chips in your passport) that continually broadcast your personal information to whatever reader picks up the signal.

Schneier writes:

RFID chips are like smart cards, but they can be read from a distance. A receiving device can "talk" to the chip remotely, without any need for physical contact, and get whatever information is on it. Passport officials envision being able to download the information on the chip simply by bringing it within a few centimeters of a reader.

Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that anyone carrying around an RFID passport is broadcasting his identity.

Here's more, and more, on the Ashcroftian nightmare that we seem to be sleep-walking towards.

I'm concerned enough about credit cards, cell phones, and all the other digital fingerprints I leave in nearly everything I do. I'm going to Geneva tonight -- and while I don't have a broadcasting chip in my passport yet -- this deterioration of privacy is weighing on me.

Thanks to Nigel for forwarding this.

-- Steve Clemons

MARK SALTER, JOHN McCAIN'S ABLE CHIEF OF STAFF AND CO-AUTHOR with McCain of three books -- Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him; Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life; and Faith of My Fathers -- protested Mark Goldberg's critique of Tony Blair's American lap-dog tendencies.

In Mark Salter's note to Prospect today, he writes:

perhaps i shouldn't be, but i was quite surprised by mr. goldberg's admonishment of tony blair for supporting american offensive operations in Iraq. i take it his point is that a good ally would let us lose in iraq. hard to find even a trace of patriotism in that. mark salter

I like Mark Salter and Mark Goldberg and think that this exchange is intereesting.

What got Mark Salter's ire going was Goldberg's passage:

We've known for years now that Tony Blair is a true believer in George W. Bush's plan for Iraq; nonetheless American liberals are somewhat comfortable with Blair because we have always assumed that he exists in our own "reality-based community." Unlike Bush, we thought, Blair uses his intellect to analyze empirical data, reason if necessary, and make an informed decisions based on discernable reality.

Blair's acquiescence to this newest manifestation of Bush's hopeless strategy for Iraq should seriously question any lingering love for Blair among American liberals.

I have a few short thoughts.

First, what would have been more patriotic in the case of George Custer at the Little Big Horn? (I recognize the limits of this metaphor...but just hear me out.) Would the "patriotic" thing have been to send in more reinforcements to support a reckless excursion? Or would the patriotic action be to help enable a retreat from disaster -- sending in troops or whatever supplies were needed to help move Custer's troops into a position where the long-term battle could be won? I think that the latter would be the patriotic thing to do.

But on the other hand, after recently spending some time at No. 10 with a foreign policy aide to Tony Blair, I do understand the importance the UK assigns to standing by the United States in good times as well as bad -- and that kind of unconditional support deserves thanks. But my contact there said that what Blair needs to do when bucking the base of his party in favor of Bush's policies is to show that Britain made some difference in American policy, helped direct it to more enlightened ends, rather than just being a lap dog.

Mark Goldberg argues that Blair failed to secure any "noticeable concessions from the United States" in its decision to redeploy troops. If he's right, and Blair is using none of his political capital to help the U.S. get on a more rational course of action in Iraq, then all he is doing is sending in more troops to enjoy Custer's proverbial fate.

These soldiers won't be wiped out as in Custer's case, but I don't think that we are on a course to win this war -- and what the patriotic thing for Mark Salter and Tony Blair to do is to help get America on a course where its actions can lead to some kind of stability, which we can call victory.

But as it is going, American action is radicalizing much of the Iraqi population against us, firebranding a new pan-Arab nationalism, and making brutal, primitive terrorist thugs look legitimate in the eyes of the very people we are trying to save.

The problems in Iraq are complex, but Blair needs to use his capital with Bush to get us on a more enlightened course. And Mark Goldberg is patriotic for pointing that direction.

-- Steve Clemons

ACCORDING TO ELECTORAL-VOTE.COM, IF THE ELECTION WERE TODAY, John Kerry would win by a single electoral vote, even if Minnesota's ten electoral votes, now dead even, swing toward Bush.

Fragile, very fragile.

However, TradeSports.com is bouncing all over the place. Before the first debate, those putting money on the line in this presidential race gave Bush an approximate 68% chance of winning vs. Kerry at 32%. After the first debate, the ratio evened just a bit to 62% for Bush and 38% for Kerry.

On October 15th, Matthew Yglesias recorded that Tradesports had the betting averages on Bush vs. Kerry at 54% Bush; 46% Kerry.

Today, however, Bush is up again -- 61% Bush and 39% Kerry.

Maybe this is a good moment for those who are betting types to profit on some arbitrage. I don't gamble, but what is clear is that all of those people who seem to KNOW who will win this race don't have a clue. The compass is pointing in different directions.

Courtesy of Gloria Dittus, I had the opportunity to enjoy dinner the other evening with Andrew Kohut and Diane Colasanto, who are the power-couple of public opinion research. Kohut now heads the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and was president of the Gallup Organization for ten years. Colasanto was president of Princeton Survey Research Associates and is one of America's very top survey methodologists.

Kohut, who has a piece on polls and voter attitudes in the New York Times today told me that he thinks that the vote, on election day, will decisively favor one candidate or the other -- and that it's unlikely we'll have a replay of the many weeks long process that we had in the Gore-Bush 2000 race. That said, he told me that he and his wife have never called a presidential election wrong.

I asked what he predicted four years ago, and the prognostication then had been that public opinion was too close too call. Kohut told me that Pew will have its data and predictions on the election out on election day.

-- Steve Clemons

ALBERT WOHLSTETTER WAS ONE OF THE PREMIER DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS of the last century -- a very conservative one but still someone who understood the downsides involved in the Cold War's "delicate balance of terror."

His wife, Roberta Wohlstetter, wrote one of the great treatises on strategy and surprise attack, an early treatment of prevention and preemption in war in her seminal Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision.

Interestingly, I had forgotten that Richard Perle, dubbed the "Prince of Darkness" by Strobe Talbott in a book on arms control negotiations was a close devotee of Albert Wohlstetter. Interestingly, he seemed to have retained little from Wohlstetter who would have been quite certain that though his arsenals were mostly empty Saddam Hussein would have taken a duplicitous course with the United Nations, the United States, and Iran -- just to preserve his options.

Wohlstetter would have expected Hussein to maximize his interests and to bluff, to a certain degree, particularly so that Iraq could continue to deter Iran. What was missing in this strategic game between the United States and Iraq were the lessons learned during the Cold War and dedicated steps to prevent miscommunication and escalation. Hussein tried to use Dan Rather as his "hotline" to the White House -- but Bush's defense strategists seemed bent on escalation and miscommunication from the beginning.

Drawing off of Fred Kaplan's excellent classic book on RAND, The Wizards of Armageddon, I wrote this piece which some of you might find interesting.

-- Steve Clemons

SEYMOUR HERSH IS FLYING BACK FROM SPAIN, and I have not been able to connect with him today. I have been trying to ask him if the story he has shared about friendly granary guards in Iraq being gunned down by U.S. military is the same as the New York Times cite today about 15 Iraqi National Guard being killed outside of Qaim, near the Syrian Border.

I still am not sure -- but I have a hunch these may be separate and distinct events. For one, the chronologies do not work together. Hersh has spoken about this call from a distraught soldier since at least October 1st -- and the report in the New York Times is about war dead this past week.

In this report about Hersh's UC Berkeley address where he mentions these killings, he says that the town was considered a stable, mostly pacified area somewhere between Baghdad and the Syrian border. The report today in the Times puts the killing of the 15 near the border.

I learned today from a former senior Pentagon official that (1) it is not unusual for the dates of killings to be modified or adjusted, particularly if a mistake was involved in the operation, so that chronologies can be ordered in a way to minimize impact on the U.S. side; (2) that Republican National Guard members are relatively easy to identify because of the treasure trove of precise records that the Iraqi government kept on its military personnel so as to keep them in line and threaten them in case of desertion or other forms of betrayal; and (3) that in the "fog of war," there are far more cases of 'friendlies' being killed than we want to admit because of one U.S. squad moving with incomplete information into a zone managed by another squad.

I was told that the kind of case suggested by Hersh and his distraught soldier would not be unusual and happen in the field far more often than anyone wants to admit.

One question I have, however, is that while the New York Times mentioned Iraqi National Guard deaths, isn't the Iraqi National Guard on our side? Someone needs to determine whether this passage in the Onishi article means that Americans killed 15 Iraqi guardsmen or whether insurgents killed these people.

The article implies that it was U.S. forces who killed these guardsmen, but then it does not make sense to me -- unless this was an outpost of former Republican National Guard, or a group of renegade Iraqi National Guard.

I'll pursue this further, but clearly there are questions both about what happened outside Qaim, as well as what happened in the as yet undisclosed town with the killed granary guards?

Comments on these incidents welcome.

-- Steve Clemons

SEYMOUR HERSH CALLED IT RIGHT. Iraq has become a body count exercise, and we all need to be worried about the ramifications.

The New York Times' Norimitsu Onishi asks in an article today "How Many Iraqis are Dying?"

Best estimates for the past week:

From Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, an estimated 208 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents, significantly higher than the average week; 23 members of the United States military died over the same period.

The article goes on:

...On Tuesday, 46 Iraqis were reported killed. Just after midnight, an American warplane flattened Falluja's most popular restaurant, Hajji Hussein, famous for its kebabs. The military said it was a meeting place for terrorists and was no longer frequented by ordinary people. Ali Hussein, the owner, said his son and nephew, who had been working as nighttime guards, were killed in the strike.

The largest number, at least 15, were reportedly killed in an attack against an Iraqi National Guard outpost near Qaim, along the border with Syria. Many Iraqi insurgents are believed to be based on the other side of the border and to receive support from Syrians...

Seymour Hersh told me that he had received a phone call from the father of a distraught and upset soldier who wanted to go public that Americans had killed friendly Iraqis whom his detachment had gotten to know. The captain to whom the soldier reported said it was all about "body count now."

I do not know whether this outpost near the Syrian border, referenced above, is the same site as that mentioned by Hersh -- but it sounds pretty close.

As if Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were not enough, a calloused attitude towards the killing of innocents pretty much nails the coffin lid down on our 'hearts and minds battle' in Iraq and the Middle East writ large.

If there are troops out there reading this, email me at steve@thewashingtonnote.com if you believe that the norms of this conflict are veering in My Lai-like directions, or not.

I will not publish anything that exposes anyone's identity -- but we need to better understand whether body-count happy commanders are taking over in the field.

-- Steve Clemons

NOT TO MIMIC LYNNE CHENEY TOO MUCH, BUT IS JANET HUCKABEE a "good woman"?

This just over the wire from someone who observed Huckabee's behavior yesterday. I have confirmed that this individual was in a position to observe the Arkansas first lady as she did her 'civic duty,' but I need to keep the individual's identity concealed to protect her/him from the wrath of the Arkansas First Lady's office.

Steve,

Her conduct is inexcusable, and unbecoming a first lady certainly.

The writer has a point....me thinks.

One clarification I just got from an expert on Arkansas voting law -- and an error made by some of those reporting on Huckabee at the polls:

Steve,

She was generally rude to people who didn't show ID and in more than one instance she told voters they "had to" have ID. On another occasion, she asked an old lady with a cane to go back to her car to get her ID -- an outrageous request that was quickly nixed by the other election officials at the site.

Tensions are running high everywhere, but I can't really abide by folks who are hostile to voters who show up at the polls. Janet Huckabee once ran for the Arkansas Secretary of State.

Luckily, she lost.

-- Steve Clemons

JANET HUCKABEE, FIRST LADY OF ARKANSAS, HAS BEEN ACCUSED of intimidating voters at a polling station in Arkansas.

This just in from an Arkansas Fox News Affiliate KLRT:

Little Rock Fox News Affilliate -- KLRT
Election commission first lady controversy

Huckabee says she'll continue to exercise that right as long as the election commission allows her. And commissioners say if any complaints are with merit and warrant action, they'll meet to decide what that will be.

I guess there is no law against being "down right rude," at least not that I know of. But according to KAIT, a local ABC affilliate:

. . .Mrs. Huckabee once improperly asked a voter for identification, and another official said Mrs. Huckabee will have the rules more clearly explained to her.

Alleged rudeness and at least one mistaken request for identification may not add up to much, but in this charged atmosphere about the management of ballots and polling booths, one would think that Huckabee would tend towards being overly gracious in her role.

What is needed right now -- and what is missing from this election season -- is a unified message from all Governors, Republican and Democrat, that the health of our nation's democracy depends on voter participation and that every single eligible voter is welcomed -- and that all attempts to thwart the rights of any citizen to vote should receive the toughest sanction.

Remember Bradford County, Pennsylvania Judge Jeffrey Smith who sentenced a graduation ceremony streaker to six months to two years? Bad judge...very bad.

I'd be up for the National Governors Asssociation recruiting him to advise on sentences for those tearing up voter registration forms, intimidating voters at polling stations, or destroying or invalidating ballots. This would be a great job for a tough judge.

To Janet Huckabee -- This "First Lady of Arkansas Photo Gallery" make you look nice enough. Make it real, and graciously welcome any voter who shows up at your station.

-- Steve Clemons

LAST WEEK AT WASHINGTON COLLEGE, I WAS TREATED TO A PRETTY EXTENSIVE meeting with journalist Seymour Hersh -- followed by dinner and a public lecture that followed. This Hersh extravaganza ended just before the third presidential debates began -- and I was among a couple of people who helped Hersh rush to his car so that he could listen while driving back to Philadelphia.

I realize that to many Hersh is one of the most controversial journalists in America and is still harrangued for being duped by a forged note from Marilyn Monroe to JFK (to his credit, Hersh readily admits he was duped and did not use the material in his book, The Dark Side of Camelot).

However, I am convinced that America does not have enough hard-working investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh, James Fallows and Ron Suskind. Josh Marshall and some bloggers are picking up some of the slack left in a mostly complacent media today -- but it occurred to me that Hersh is the kind of guy who develops vast human networks, digs into issues that no one else will touch, and takes the kinds of risks serious journalism rarely takes any more.

It should be a national priority -- in order to promote and protect the checks and balances in our civil society -- to cultivate a hundred more Seymour Hersh type journalists. Clearly, if Congress will not play its oversight function over the Executive Branch, the media have to weigh in, highlight, and embarrass what Members of Congress have been unable or unwilling to do.

I am going to link Seymour Hersh's comments on October 8th from UC Berkeley because they track almost identically with his talk at Washington College the other evening. His talk is well worth reading.

But here's the scary part -- which he shared with Andrew Oros, Christine Wade, and me privately but did not mention in his Washington College address. Fortunately for this blog, Hersh did publicly share this anecdote at UC Berkeley about a frustrated and angry soldier who wants to report a potential war crime but is being advised by Hersh to wait and keep his powder dry.

Bonnie Azab Powell reports:

There was more -- rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.

"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."

I have spoken to some family members with brothers or sisters stationed in Iraq -- and I have heard rumblings of the same kind of brewing tension among the ranks.

When you add Hersh's frustrated soldier to the recent refusal to carry out orders by 18 men and women in the 343rd Quartermaster Company, one sees at minimum the beginning of a pattern of discord and tension among our own troops that ought to give us all serious concern.

-- Steve Clemons

RON SUSKIND LANDS THE BEST INDICTMENT YET of the Bush Administration's hostility to reasoned, sensible and empirically-grounded policy making.

Suskind writes:

The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush -- both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.

I have been surprised that the Bush team invested so heavily in trying to make Bush's life in his early years look so impressive, when we know that he was a screw-up. I had written in the past about the infallibility project of the Bush team, and Ron Suskind captures this nicely:

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions.

Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House.

Suskind gets Reagan conservative Bruce Bartlett to comment:

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

"This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." Bartlett paused, then said, "But you can't run the world on faith."

Writing about an exchange between Senator Joe Biden and Bush, Suskind recounts:

Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. "I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad," he began, "and I was telling the president of my many concerns" -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. "'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'"

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. "I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'"

Read this article today. It says it all. This election is increasingly about not letting Medievalism conquer the Enlightenment. It's a head-to-head contest between rationality and dogma.

Electoral-Vote.com has the electoral college race today with Kerry at 253, Bush at 247, and 38 votes are up for grabs in states that are exactly tied -- and those are Florida, New Hampshire and Iowa.

Does the nation really want someone who values instincts and faith above rationality and thinking through credible policy options for the country.

We deserve better than a by-the-seat-of-his-pants President.

-- Steve Clemons

I WORKED FOR CLYDE PRESTOWITZ AS EVP of the Economic Strategy Institute for two years. We did great things together during that time, but we also didn't see eye to eye on everything.

However, we do see the world the same way on this powerful and convincing essay that has been posted on the Kerry-Edwards blog titled "The Conservative Case for Kerry."

When Clyde Prestowitz began to get a lot of attention in the media as a "true conservative and die-hard Republican" who was supporting Kerry, I cringed a bit. I had a knee-jerk reaction because my experience with him made me feel that he was pretty politically ambidextrous, very pragmatic, solutions-oriented, and interested in getting back into government, no matter which party was at the helm.

I am pretty much the same -- which means that I didn't really buy the notion that Clyde was theologically conservative.

But I have had some time to reflect on this, and I think that my original reaction to Clyde's coming out for Kerry was wrong and that he is braver than I once believed -- and indicative of a very important strain of thinking among 'classic conservatives.'

To make my case, I need to share a few anecdotes that illustrate some of my points of tension with Clyde, but I think that they really show how he has evolved since 9/11 and why what he writes in this essay is genuine, deep, and reflective that more than one conservative is feeling at odds with George Bush.

In October 2001, Clyde sent me a frustrating email after reading in French (he's a great linguist) an article I had written and which appeared on the front page of Le Monde Diplomatique titled "United States: All Powerful -- But Powerless" which was on the implications of 9/11 on U.S. foreign policy as I saw things immediately after the attacks. This piece appeared in October 2001.

Clyde commented that this article could be read by some as anti-American. He didn't actually say that he read it as anti-American, but I believed the implication was there because that was the single line of his email. Later, Clyde wrote the best-selling book Rogue Nation, which in my view, follows a course of thinking not at odds with my Le Monde Diplomatique piece.

Via interviews with world leaders and many of his buddies from the Davos World Economic Forum meetings over the years, Clyde Prestowitz came to believe through empirical experience what I had felt before 9/11 -- that America was out of touch with the negative perceptions many in the world had of our behavior and had no sense that there was an increasingly high cost for other nations in their dealings with us that was enhancing global resentment of American arrogance.

The point is that Clyde is no soft-power softy, but I think it took his own encounters with other world leaders and thinkers for him to clearly see how enormously wrong-headed American foreign policy had become. He clearly did not have that view right after 9/11. I thought that the piece I had written for Le Monde Diplomatique was actually one of the most patriotic I had ever penned.

I feel that over the years, I have gotten to know Clyde well -- his strengths and weaknesses, and he certainly has come to know mine. But one thing that always interested me in Clyde was the fact that he was a Born Again Christian, big time. He did not proselytize in the office -- but his religious predilections surfaced frequently. We even had his local minister, a great guy named Sam, working as the in-house editor.

My great grandfather was a traveling minister for the Church of Christ, was born in Kentucky, and moved his family to Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1900 and was one of the first ministers there -- but our family largely grew out of its deep fundamentalist roots. I have a bias that is perhaps inappropriate; I'm not sure. I don't get on well with deeply religious people who can't handle rationality and science and who find comfort in dogma.

But Clyde Prestowitz showed me that he, at least, could be devoutly religious but highly rational and intelligent, holding both impulses in his head together without subordinating rationality to faith.

There was a time when ESI's staff was probably about 25% gay, and even more if you count those who would love to have been gay if it was in fact all a choice. In very private moments, Prestowitz might rumble this way or that about someone's partner, or whether some outward display of sexual identity was appropriate or not. To his credit, I can't remember Clyde ever confronting anyone directly about these occasionaly discomforts he might have felt -- and each year, he'd host in his private home the whole, diverse ESI crowd at a holiday party.

I mention all of this because of the current furor over Mary Cheney, the play the RNC made with the homophobic mailer, and the obvious tension a lot of this has placed on Christian fundamentalists.

In his essay, Clyde Prestowitz talks about the fiscal and foreign crusade reasons not to support George W. Bush. He doesn't go into the deeply moral questions -- but after reading this, and also reading Bill Buckley's piece today, I feel that Clyde is even on the edge of finding a lot of the faith-driven moralizing of President Bush over the line.

I won't put words in Clyde's mouth; he is perfectly capable of making his own case -- which he has done brilliantly so far in my view.

Clyde almost gets there on the faith question, but he slams it home well enough anyway in these concluding thoughts of his on what those of faith would not do:

Before the current campaign, it might have been argued that at least in affirming the importance of faith and respecting those who profess it the administration had embraced traditional conservative views. But in the wake of the Swift Boat ads attacking John Kerry, even this argument can no longer be maintained. As an elder of the Presbyterian Church, I found that those ads were not at all in the Christian tradition. John McCain rightly condemned them as dishonest and dishonorable. The president should have, too. That he did not undermines his credibility on questions of faith.

The fact is that the Bush administration might better be called radical or romantic or adventurist than conservative. And that's why real conservatives are leaning toward Kerry.

I have had an up and down relationship over the years with Clyde Prestowitz -- and this is one of those up moments.

Congratulations Clyde Prestowitz.

-- Steve Clemons

IN THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE BY WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, you can almost hear him lilting, "the RNC doth protest too much, me thinks."

In particular, I liked Buckley's lines:

Sen. Kerry was commenting on the referee's question, previously answered by President Bush, whether to be gay is a matter of choice or a matter of biological determination. Bush had said he couldn't give the final answer to this. Kerry said: All you need to reflect upon is that the daughter of your running mate is herself gay and isn't for that reason in the least thought less of by her parents, or by me, or by the voting public.

Mr. Bush said nothing more, and there were no indications, on leave-taking, that he had been offended by the use of Ms. Cheney's lesbianism to make a political point.

Later in the piece, Buckley writes;

It is not in question that Mary Cheney's gayness had already become a part of the cast of characters in the political play. Senator Kerry was in no sense "outing" someone who had hidden her sexual impulses. So that the question narrowed to whether what was said was an expression of magnanimity and inclusiveness, or whether it was a bid for votes from the bigoted.

That position is of course irreconcilable with the position that Mr. Cheney has profited politically from publicizing his daughter's gayness -- that he has, in effect, said to the gay community: Look, my own beloved daughter is a member of the Cheney family, and a member also of the gay community. You can hardly suspect in the GOP ticket prejudice against gays, when you see that we have one in the family, whom we cherish.

Buckley never answers his own question, but the course of his response and its methodology implies that he is disgusted by his fellow conservatives' behavior.

If Buckley were to amend his piece in the next few days, he might even write that those who doth protest too much are now unambiguously politicizing Mary Cheney themselves.

Thanks to SB for sending this article my way.

-- Steve Clemons

BRADFORD COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA JUDGE JEFFREY SMITH doled out an unacceptably harsh penalty against student streaker Russell Chmieleski, sentencing him to jail for six months to two years for a graduation prank, that he has decided was hard-core indecent exposure.

In all of the reporting about this novelty story about a young man's momentary lapse of judgment that is landing him in jail, no one is focusing on this ridiculous judge.

Who is Judge Jeffrey Smith? He has two sons whom I hope have successfully hid from their father any harmless pranks they may have done growing up. But here is his profile.

The first graf reads:

Judge Smith has been President Judge of the Bradford County Court of Common Pleas since 1983, when he was appointed to office by Governor Dick Thornburgh. In 1985, he was elected to the office at the age of 32, becoming the youngest person ever elected judge in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Before becoming President Judge, he served Bradford County as Assistant District Attorney and as Family Court Hearing Master.

What is missing from this is that he was disciplined himself by the Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline in 1997. Judge Smith was found to be negligent in performing the duties of his office. The statement of reprimand is here.

Given Smith's own standards, I think that the reprimand he received was rather light.

What makes this particular case even more odd is that as recently as October 8th in the local Towanda, Pennsylvania newspaper, the Daily and Sunday Review, reported that:

Bradford County District Attorney Steve Downs appeared at the commissioners' meeting Thursday, urging the board to authorize a criminal justice study to determine the best course of action on how to handle Bradford County's ever-increasing inmate population.

One telling line from the article:

Schrader, Downs, and others at the meeting agreed that Bradford County Judges Jeffrey Smith and John Mott are good men who are doing the best they can under the circumstances. However, Downs continued to press for the study, saying that it could be used to persuade the judges that alternatives to incarceration are available.

It sounds like Towanda, Pennsylvania has a primitive judge who has disconnected from the consequences of many of the decisions he is handing down.

If he is really overcrowding his prisons with cases like Russell Chmieleski's, then this guy needs a sabbatical and needs to recalibrate.

Note to Fox News, how about some coverage on the judge?

-- Steve Clemons

WHAT IS IT WITH THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IN THE SOUTH and disgusting political flyers and mailers?

A nasty flyer has turned up in Tennesse politics which depicts a handicapped athlete running on a track with George Bush's face pasted on.

The text reads:

Voting for Bush is Like Running in the Special Olympics -- Even if You Win, You're Still Retarded.

The Traditional Values Coalition and other right wing operations in the South jumped on this fast alleging that Tennessee Democrat Craig Fitzhugh's office, which shares space with the Kerry/Edwards Campaign, was distributing this flyer.

I have just spoken to Fitzhugh's office -- and here are the facts so far.

First, the Chairman of the Democratic Party Randy Button and Craig Fitzhugh have denied that these flyers were produced and/or distributed by Fitzhugh's or the campaign office.

Remember when the equally nasty RNC mailer emerged in West Virginia and Arkansas? It took more than a week for Ed Gillespie and the RNC, which originally disavowed knowledge of the mailer, to own up that the "ban the Bible" mailer was an RNC product. In this case, the denial from the Dems is immediate and firm.

Fitzhugh's office reported to me that they have asked the District Attorney's office to investigate and looks at this flyer and the attempt to pin it on Fitzhugh as a disgusting -- but more importantly -- an illegal act.

What has been reported is that these flyers were left in a trash can in Fitzhugh's office. No one on Fitzhugh's staff or among campaign volunteers saw that these flyers had been deposited by anyone in the garbage. Shortly after some unknown individual dropped the flyers in the trash can, another individual came into the office and found the flyers in Fitzhugh's trash -- and then made this public.

Coincidence? I think not. I hope the D.A. goes after these culprits and nails them hard.

This appears to be a classic dirty trick.

But when the dust clears on this one -- despite the efforts of Fox News and the Traditional Values Coalition to try to keep this mailer linked to Democrats -- the RNC has to not only live with its admission of producing and distributing a duplicitous, homophobic mailer but that it has produced a culture in its party where this kind of political prank seems to be becoming a norm.

-- Steve Clemons

I JUST DOWNLOADED GOOGLE'S NEW SEARCH TOOL that looks for items on your own computer, buried in files or email. It's staggeringly good and fast.

I read about the tool in this Washington Post article and wanted to make sure that others knew about it. I spent much of the day Saturday looking for a specific file that someone sent me some time ago about Abu Ghraib, and I could not find it. It took less than a second to find it once I used this Google tool.

So, nothing controversial here -- just an enthusiastic product endorsement that will enhance your efficiency on your own computer.

Truth in advertising moment -- Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google is on my board of directors at the New America Foundation, and has absolutely nothing to do with my enthusiasm for this new search device. He used to be the CEO of Novell -- and I never once said anything nice about Novell's lan network systems.

Have fun with it.

-- Steve Clemons

JAMES WOOLSEY CONTINUES TO SPREAD PARANOIA AND THE POLITICS of permanent threat to keep America focused on its fears rather than figuring out the best path back to a high trust/low fear world.

The Prague Post reports:

Former President Vaclav Havel has agreed to co-head an international chapter of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a member of the foundation's board of advisers, made the announcement. Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar will also co-head the group.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies is headed by former RNC Spokesman Cliff May, and it is this organization that relaunched the neocon hive of the Committee on the Present Danger. Here is my original post on this nefarious outfit.

-- Steve Clemons

THE FIRESTORM OVER JOHN KERRY'S COMMENTS ABOUT MARY CHENEY, which are raging on all the spin shows and even on the public comments on this blog and in about 200 emails I have received about this, signifies that the question of society's stance towards homosexuality is burning strong among the passions of many Americans.

The emails I have received go both ways (no pun intended) -- some are outraged by Kerry's comments, and others outraged by the outrage.

I want to rethink this and consider whether my own views that I held last night right after the debate were on target or not, and not be one of these sorts of referees who can't adjust a call after a review shows that the call was in error.

Let's consider what I wrote last night -- and what I believe after some reflection.

First of all, I watched this debate with a group of people who were mostly Republican students. This matters only in the sense that I was trying to surround myself by those who would balance my built-in pro-Kerry bias. They groaned very loudly and instantly when the Mary Cheney line surfaced. They groaned when Bush talked about education as a response to offshoring. They groaned when Bush talked about no litmus test for the Supreme Court. Though Bush got more groans, it was a night of equal opportunity groaning.

When I scribbled my reactions, real time, and assembled them for my UPI article, I wrote this:

John Kerry's own low moment was when he gratuitously dragged Mary Cheney's lesbianism into his response on whether being gay is a choice or not; he'll take some deserved hits on that. To Bush's credit, he avoided raising the fact that Kerry's first marriage ended in divorce.

Here is what John Kerry said in the debate:

SEN. KERRY: We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as.

I think if you talked to anybody, it's not choice. I've met people who struggled with this for years, people who were in a marriage, because they were living a sort of convention, and they struggled with it. And I've met wives who are supportive of their husbands, or vice versa, when they finally sort of broke out and -- and allowed themselves to live who they were, who they felt God had made them. I think we have to respect that.

The president and I share the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. I believe that. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

But I also believe that because we are the United States of America, we're a country with a great, unbelievable Constitution with rights that we afford people, that you can't discriminate in the workplace, you can't discriminate in the rights that you afford people. You can't disallow someone the right to visit their partner in -- in a hospital. You have to allow people to transfer property, which is why I'm for partnership rights and so forth.

Now with respect to DOMA and the marriage laws, the states have always been able to manage those laws. And they're proving today, every state, that they can manage them adequately.

Let me take the last line of what I wrote first, the one giving Bush credit for not attacking Kerry for the fact that his first marriage ended in divorce. I take that back. I'm pretty sure that had Kerry's divorce stood in contrast to the family circumstances of most Americans, Bush would have used it. But to attack a divorcee running for President is to attack an awful lot of other divorcees out in the country.

Now, for the first part. I really do think that Kerry could have kept this debate from becoming one about him mentioning Mary Cheney inappropriately -- and more about the question of Republican hostility towards gay people if he had had a greater preamble to what he said before mentioning Mary.

As I re-read what Kerry said, it wasn't mean-spirited and was quite generous overall. The fact is that Bush is trying to have it both ways -- have Dick Cheney and Laura Bush out being friendly to gays and PFLAG members, while on the other side Alan Keyes attacks Mary Cheney and lesbians and the RNC sends out disgusting anti-gay flyers to church parish members.

Kerry should have pointed to the hypocrisy of the Republican Party, and Mary Cheney was the best and most effective way to highlight the gay-friendly and homophobic faultlines in George Bush's Republican Party. I wish Kerry had mentioned the mailer, or even asked Bush if he or Karl Rove endorsed the mailer.

I also slightly resent Kerry's stand on gay marriage. I understand why he is parsing his words on marriage vs. partnerships and civil unions -- but he is still with the primitives when it comes to opposing gay marriage. If David Brooks is for gay marriage. . .well, as George Bush mumbled last night, you know the rest.

So, here's my bottom line. If Kerry was going to mention Mary Cheney -- which I think he and John Edwards intended to do whether asked or not -- then he should have couched her name in a broader comment on the subject. I think he was just too cavalier with her name, and to the DNC operative and many of my friends who are gay activits who said Mary is "fair game"...well, yes -- she is. But while that is true, drop the recklessness.

I think Kerry should have invoked Mary Cheney's name and the issues of her place inside the Republican world in a way that would make the real debate about scary strains of Republican intolerance.

Kerry could have mentioned David Catania, a Republican D.C. City Council Member and former staff member for Senator Kit Bond, who would not endorse George Bush and was barred from attending the Republican National Convention -- or could have mentioned the fact that Log Cabin Republicans could not endorse Bush; or even more -- could have mentioned a long-time personal friend of George and Laura Bush, Charles Francis -- who is out and whose brother ran George Bush's gubernatorial campaign in Texas.

Francis has been the founder and driver of the Republican Unity Coalition that formed after the death of Matthew Shepard and involved folks like former Senator Alan Simpson and even Mary Cheney to try and make homosexuality a 'non-issue' in the Republican Party.

Listen, we are all back-seat drivers in this process. I believe Kerry could have and should have done better than he did if he had intended to invoke Mary Cheney's name. I should not have used the word "gratuitously" and probably should have gone lighter on the comment that Kerry was going to get some "well deserved hits" for his comments. But I was clearly right that he was going to take some heat and also right that he left too much room to the opposition to make the after-debate banter about him rather than about the issue of bigotry.

But I have high expectations of this man running for President against Bush -- and I think that the Republicans have been dreadful on issues of social tolerance. I want to see Kerry do better.

So, for all of those taking me on -- please know that I don't have any aversion to Kerry having used Mary Cheney to make a point. I think Kerry's comments about friends who struggle with being gay were heartfelt and real -- but as one who does believe in gay marriage and doesn't believe in shades of gray when it comes to people's rights -- I wish Kerry had been more compelling, and I'm not sure that the manner in which Mary Cheney was brought into this helped close the deal.

No doubt I will keep hearing from friends who think I'm really off base on this. But maybe some might agree. I look forward to your comments.

-- Steve Clemons

IN THE THIRD AND FINAL DEBATE, JOHN KERRY SCORED WITH THE GROUP with which he most needed to connect: women.

I watched the debates with 150 students at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland -- hosted by the College Republicans here. The place cleared out so quickly after the debate that it was clear that most were not wildly inspired by the Bush-Kerry exchange, not enough to talk about it for a few more hours anyway.

But I thought the debate was a pretty remarkable exchange of contrasting views, particularly on the importance of what type of justices may next be appointed to the Supreme Court.

My UPI analysis of the last debate is here. I'll offer more commentary later today.

-- Steve Clemons

FOR THOSE OF YOU IN THE WASHINGTON, D.C. AREA, feel free to join a couple of different meetings I will be attending tomorrow.

At noon tomorrow (Wednesday), I will be speaking in a program with Anatol Lieven offering comments about his new book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Jessica Mathews will be presiding, and the event is taking place at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. If you want to go, contact Jennifer Buntman at buntman@newamerica.net or 202-986-4901.

Otherwise the event, can be listened to right over your computer as a "Live at Carnegie" event. Go here to find the event, which will actually start at approximately 12:30 p.m.

I will be saving my commentary on his book for a later post -- but if you want to read a beautifully-written, pull-no-punches critique of American foreign policy and a solid off-shore look at new virulent strains of American nationalism, read this book.

Then I have to race to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland (on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay) to have a late afternoon meeting with Seymour Hersh. Hersh will be speaking at a Goldstein Lecture meeting at Washington College at 7:30 p.m. -- and anyone can go.

I will look forward to hearing what Hersh thought about the Pentagon's attempts to preempt his recent book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.

I will be there for exactly 27 minutes before I go watch the Bush-Kerry debates at 8 p.m. with the College Republicans at Washington College who have organized an event. In order to keep myself from being biased, I either find a way to stay away from all spin -- as I did in France during the last presidential debate, or try to watch the debate as if I were a Bush supporter, just to counter my own pro-Kerry bias.

After the debate, I'll be scribbling an article for UPI, at the request of editor Martin Walker, and then linking the piece to The Washington Note.

If you would like to read my commentary on the last three debates, including the vice presidential debate, here are the links:

First Presidential Debate

Vice Presidential Debate

Second Presidential Debate

I look forward to meeting any of you who can attend the Anatol Lieven or the Seymour Hersh meetings. But most importantly, check in with me here after the debate.

-- Steve Clemons

BUSH WAS ON THE SAME PAGE AS JOHN KERRY WHEN COMMENTING in October 2001 on the Israeli-Palestinian terrorism and arguing that he was not absent from the peace process. He said:

. . .we are fully committed to working with both sides to bring the level of terror down to an acceptable level for both. And I fully understand that progress is made in centimeters in the Middle East. And we believe we're making some progress.

In Matt Bai's New York Times Magazine interview with Kerry, he writes:

We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," the article states as the Massachusetts senator's reply.

"As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

Kerry's comments make a lot of sense to me. Kerry is arguing that we need to get back to a world of higher trust and lower fear -- whereas the Bush campaign seems bent on justifying themselves through a high fear/low trust approach to managing this country.

Bush's comments today are nonsensical bravado -- and Kerry's are honest and straightforward. America is going to have some degree of instability that it needs to ratchet down but not let our paranoia about terror become a justification for a police state.

I really missed the convulsions over this comment on Sunday as I was traveling and offline -- but the tenor of Marc Racicot's, Ed Gillespie's, and even George Bush's response to Kerry is that he has uttered some politically incorrect notion about having to learn to live with a certain low level expectation of terror, at least for a while.

This is exactly what was implied in George Bush's own comments above in October 2001 -- and was implied when Bush told Americans that the best way that they can help America during its time of crisis was to keep shopping, flying planes, and going to the malls.

In September 2001, Bush said:

. . .one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry. It's to tell the traveling public: Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.

Doesn't anyone remember Bush's comments? Why does the President think that he can be so holier than thou on this one?

Bush and his team seem intoxicated by a righteousness about this war and are ruthlessly exploiting 9/11 to remain in power. It's wrong.

-- Steve Clemons

THERE IS ANOTHER SERIOUS INCURSION OF AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES working its way through the Congress in the name of 9/11 and the "War on Terror." And John Ashcroft is behind this Orwellian statute.

Via Chuck Spinney, I was sent the text of legislation titled the "Criminal History Access Means Protection of Infrastructures and Our Nation Act." Get the acronym?

. . .The CHAMPION Act.

This provision was amended to HR 10, "To provide for reform of the intelligence community, terrorism prevention and prosecution, border security, and international cooperation and coordination, and for other purposes." On Friday, 8 October, the House passed HR 10 and the language of the troubling CHAMPION Act 282-134.

I thought that conservatism was all about not trusting government because it could not help generating incursions and constraints on the rights of individuals. American-style liberals were always the ones who believed government could be positively directed to serve good public ends.

Spinney reports that a concerned Congressional staffer informed him that the language made it through the house in the form of a pilot program rather than as permanent law. The "pilot program" requirement is mentioned at the beginning of the text.

Chuck Spinney wrote to me "that it leaves the regulations in the hands of Ashcroft. To my non-legal mind, it seems to have some very ominous implications for civil liberties. Perhaps this is something that needs to be looked into before it is rushed into law."

I totally agree. The text of the CHAMPION Act follows (emphasis added in bold):

Subtitle F--Criminal History

(D) privacy rights and other employee protections to include employee consent, access to the records used if employment was denied, an appeal mechanism, and penalties for misuse of the information.

I hope someone gets this to John Kerry to raise in Wednesday's debate.

The questions should be:

President Bush, if you had been held accountable for misdeeds that only you know about from your self-described wild youth, would you have been hired by the people of the United States as President?

If your employers and business partners had known that you broke laws (not saying you did...but you and Jesus know) because this information had been plugged into a national data base and shared with anyone who wanted it and paid the Justice Department, "a reasonable fee," would you have gotten where you are today?

Did you read Orwell's 1984? Do you think sharking records of all criminal offenders with employers around the nation fits with compassionate conservatism?

Would Bush have made it under the laws his people are promulgating? I really think not.

-- Steve Clemons

ALTHOUGH THERE ARE SOME EUROPEAN BLOGS HERE AND THERE, I haven't run across many.

And it's clear from my conversations with hundreds of people in France these last couple of days, very few Europeans know that blogs and blogging exist.

The NRC Handelsblad's DC Bureau Chief Marc Chavannes is one of the smartest foreign journalists and public intellectuals I have met, in or out of the Beltway. He is the Bureau Chief for the NRC Handelsblad and has launched his own "Electionblog."

It is in Dutch -- but look at it anyway. Andrew Sullivan's name pops up, as does mine. And there's something about Dutch that seems nearly understandable even by the language-challenged.

I'm glad to see Marc Chavannes helping to introduce smart blogging to Europe.

-- Steve Clemons

"WE CAN SAY WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, NO WEAPONS OF MASS Destruction," Coors said. "Clearly we should be more worried today actually, about Iran and North Dakota than we are -- that is, North Korea -- than we are about Iraq, based on weapons of mass destruction"

This from a report covering a discussion between Tim Russert, Colorado State Attorney General Ken Salazar and Pete Coors on Meet the Press by T.R. Reid in the Washington Post today.

Coors, who has been one of the most stalwart anti-gay forces in the Republican Party while his company pumps a gushing amount of money into gay-themed causes and events for marketing purposes (and had employed Mary Cheney to help direct the effort), may have stumbled and tripped while getting through his sensible comment on the war resolution, but he got there.

I give him credit because very few Republicans have the willingness to say that the Iraq Resolution which Bush used to get us into war would not have passed if we had been smarter and better informed about the WMD issues and the consequences of this invasion and occupation.

Salazar, in contrast, doesn't get it.

As reported by Reid, Salazar said he "would vote today for a resolution giving the president authority to act in Iraq. But Salazar criticized Bush's management of the war." This is typical 'shades of gray' dissembling by many in the Democratic Party who are afraid of being counted as real opponents to this war.

Mr. Salazar -- Osama bin Laden and the 60-nation network of al Qaeda were the clear and present danger. What should have been next?

Pakistani proliferation was probably the second biggest threat to the country. I would argue that implementing a more systemic level strategy to move North Korea on an alternative course was third. Fourth, the problem of a missing but needed Palestinian state and assembling a new court of stakeholding regional powers stabilizing Israeli-Palestinin tensions would be next. Removing deployed troops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Djibouti to U.S. ships in the region should have been next. Fast-tracking a new relationship with Iran mixed with a reassessment of carrots and sticks should have also been high.

We have been so distracted by Saddam Hussein, who was not a threat of the order of these other problems, that we have created a climate where potential peer powers -- Russia and China in particular -- have moved to fill power voids in parts of the world we are neglecting. This is particularly evident in China's charm offensive in Southeast Asia.

Listen -- I want the Republicans to get knocked back in this election because I want the Republican Party to exile its fundamentalist wing before it gets more political control.

But when I hear this kind of discussion between Coors and Salazar, it's frustrating.

On one hand, Coors is homophobic and countenances intolerance but seems to have a higher bar in mind when giving the President war powers. And Salazar who has laudable and important messages of tolerance and inclusion in domestic policy seems unable to say that this war was bad and that it undermined the mystique of American power. For many, these problems with the Iraq Resolution were obvious without hindsight.

Democrats don't want to sound weak in matters of war and defense. However, I think that standing up for the right military objectives such as going after bin Laden while at the same time doing all that could be done to earn back the aspirations and affection of people in the Middle East and stifling the nascent connections between Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism is a far stronger and more effective security strategy than what we got.

I'm sure I will hear from Salazar's people today and have his comments clarified -- but this war was wrong from the beginning; it was not just "Bush's management of the war" that deserves condemnation.

-- Steve Clemons

HERE'S A FACTOID FOR JOHN KERRY ON DOMESTIC SECURITY. The New York Port Authority is cutting down on cops and overtime for police at Kennedy Airport.

Despite my normal position that America is focusing too much on monitoring people and not enough on cargo shipments in our terror concerns, I don't think it makes much sense to begin standing down like this just weeks before the election.

According to this UPI report:

Despite the federal government's warning that terrorists intend to strike in the United States in the weeks before the Nov. 2 presidential election, a money-saving measure restricting overtime was put in place this week by the authority, which manages and maintains the bridges and tunnels between New York and New Jersey, the New York area airports and bus terminals and seaports.

The report continues, "Another post stripped of overtime surveillance is the officer responsible for watching Israel's El Al Airline counter."

Not smart.

By the way, does security at home figure as a domestic policy question? or foreign policy? These distinctions between foreign and domestic policy are increasingly artificial and someone ought to say so at the next debate.

-- Steve Clemons

DAVID HALE IS ONE OF THOSE POLYGLOT ECONOMISTS WHO MESMERIZE, exhaust, inform, and entertain all at the same time. There are a few of those types out there, and I really enjoy spending time with David and the very few others out there like him. I always learn a lot.

Hale was just in D.C. for the Spring Meetings of the IMF and began to snoop around about what the Bush economic team might look like if he wins re-election. Note that I am not reporting that Hale thinks Bush will be re-elected or that he wants Bush.

In his October 8th Hale Advisors Report, he writes:

First, the Bush administration does not yet have a clear strategy for post election economic policy. There will also be numerous personnel changes which could alter how the administration debates policy.

The odds are high that Stephen Friedman of the National Economic Council and Greg Mankiw of the Council of Economic Advisors will leave. John Snow would like to stay. The odds are high that Joshua Bolten will remain at OMB for the time being.

There is nothing earth-shattering here other than the fact that someone finally mentioned Stephen Friedman's name. Friedman must be one of the most hidden and obscured national economic advisors to the president in history. Friedman inherited Lawrence Lindsay's job, while Mankiw got Glen Hubbard's perch.

John Snow wants to stay, but he is one who really ought to leave. Treasury's power as a powerful policy institution in town has simply imploded.

The rate of change among senior economic staff in the White House is thus at least twice as fast as senior defense and security policy officials -- very few of whom have departed.

Is the problem for these talented professionals that there is no economic policy to speak of coming out of the White House?

John Kerry has been hitting on this slightly in the debates but I hope he turns up the volume in round three. The absence of strategy is not strategy; and on the economic front -- tax cuts alone only just get us deeper in debt.

I return from Caen and the shores of Normandy tomorrow.

For any of you who have the means to travel here want to visit an ancient chateau, visit the Chateau de Fontaine-Henry, a castle-home which has been in the same family from roughly the time of William the Conqueror nearly a thousand years ago until today.

It's the finest home I've ever seen -- with each layer from the deep ground up representing completely different architectural styles from the 12th century through the Renaissance at the top of the house. It also boasts the highest roof in vertical ascent of any home in France and is an engineering wonder.

The folks I met at this conference and I had an incredible dinner there last night with the Marquis who owns this place. I'm trying to get him to consider building some kind of conference center on his estate like the one the Rockefeller Brothers Fund maintains at the John D. Rockefeller mansion, Kykuit.

Anyway, it's worth a trip.

-- Steve Clemons

I THOUGHT THAT WATCHING THE 2ND PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE IN FRANCE might make a difference in how I saw things as compared to being inside the beltway. I certainly had no access at all to the post-debate spin here at 4:30 a.m. Caen time.

However, I saw the night as a draw -- and think I would have seen it that way in Washington as well. What struck me most is how both candidates were trying to be a lot alike, rather than a lot different.

I would have liked to have heard Kerry say to Bush (when he was talking about allies in Iraq) "You forgot Japan tonight, Mr. President. You can't forget the Japanese," just to get him back for Poland.

Here is my take published by UPI on Bush-Kerry Round 2. All I can say is that Round 3 looks like it will matter.

Have you noticed that Bush is the only one wearing blue ties?

-- Steve Clemons

THE SECOND PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE HAS MANY IN FRANCE ON EDGE. Chirac is on a state visit to China. There are still two French journalist kidnap victims being held by Iraqi insurgents. And last night and this morning, there was a rocket attack aganst the Sheraton in Baghdad; deadly bombings at beach resorts in Sinai; and a bombing outside of the Indonesian Embassy in Paris.

But a chief editor of a major French media conglomerate at the conference I am attending says that the U.S. presidential race remains the top story and issue of concern.

Interestingly, most of the speakers here, the European ones, had largely acqiesced to the likelihood of a Bush victory next month. Some even gave the problems with Bush uniquely positive spin. Their argument runs that because of Bush, Franco-German relations have never been better.

At Le Memorial de Caen (visit if you ever have the chance), in fact, Gerhard Schroeder recently met with French President Jacques Chirac in a commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion on the Normandy beaches here. The presence of the German Chancellor at this particular historical punctuation point was wildly controversial but in the end a huge success.

I have heard from many residents how they really respect Schroeder for coming to Normandy and for owning up to the atrocities committed by Germans. They now take odd pride in the fact that Chirac and the Chancellor meet every two to three weeks.

I was here two years ago -- then with Richard Perle, Edward Luttwak, and others -- and the venom those in this war-ravaged region felt against Germany far outweighed negative feelings towards the U.S.

Attitudes have definitely shifted. If there had been a part of France that was dependably supportive of America, it would be Normandy. Everywhere, there are posters, models, books, and other parapernalia depicting Jeep-driving, candy-carrying, helmeted-but-smiling American GIs. But the resentment of Bush & Co. here has become palpable.

The bottom line is that many of the more constuctively optimistic folks here think Bush will keep the Germans and French working together, while a Kerry victory will sour relations between Paris and Berlin.

I have been telling French pessimists at this conference to look at the huge swing in the projected electoral vote outcome at Electoral-Vote.com, which after new poll results shows Kerry beating Bush 280 to 239. Just three days ago, Bush had a projected 300 electoral votes. Kerry's gains in near-parity states have been impressive, but his lead is very thin and fragile.

I will be watching the debates at 3 a.m. here French time and publishing my review of whether Bush stifles Kerry's surge or not shortly after.

This will be the second installment in a three-part series of articles I am doing for UPI (after the editor read my first debate review at The Washington Note). You can read my comments on the first debate here; and the VP debate which includes a link to the UPI article here.

On other fronts, do check out Bruce Ackerman's very interesting article noting that the oath that Don Rumsfeld made civilians reviewing the military tribunals convened at Guantanamo Bay was not an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Is it me? Or does Don Rumsfeld have a really, really hard time behaving as if the rule of law matters?

-- Steve Clemons

I AM WATCHING GEORGE W. BUSH SPEAK LIVE IN WILKES-BARRE, PA. I realize that while Cheney made Bush disappear last night, Bush is back -- and there are two more debates to remind people that the guy in charge is this glib person who seems to be disturbingly detached from the gap between his policy vision and policy results.

I will be writing about the next two debates from Europe, where I'm speaking at a national security and defense policy conference in Caen, France. I should be posting every day, but I will be working on a European keyboard, so be patient with inevitable typos, which I'll fix when I return.

-- Steve Clemons

OK, I AM GOING TO UNINTENTIONALLY FRUSTRATE MANY OF MY READERS TONIGHT. Like Josh Marshall, I tried to stay away from the spin -- assemble my thoughts fast before they became infected by others.

Josh provides a great summation of the debate on his site and he sees the entire evening as a huge victory for John Edwards.

I don't. Yes, I know that Cheney goofed, or lied, about meeting John Edwards. Here is the proof.

I also think that Cheney's comment -- that suicide bombing is on the decline because the Hussein funds have dried up to incentivize people to blow themselves up and kill others -- is quite inane...but probably not something that many Americans will get wrapped up in.

Cheney's comments on the costs and casualties in the war were mostly fabricated, but Edwards -- despite being armed by truth and youthful vigor -- seemed steam-rolled in the end by Cheney's convictions, rigid certainty, and righteousness.

Edwards got a lot of good blows in, but not enough to win the debate, which in my view was not a memorable debate to begin with.

The biggest reason why I think that George Bush won tonight is that Cheney made him disappear.

Bush was mentioned only 9 times tonight -- 4 times by Cheney, twice by Edwards and 3 times by Gwen Ifill.

In contrast, Kerry was mentioned 64 times overall -- 34 times by Edwards, and an additional 30 times by Ifill and Cheney. Two of the times Edwards invoked Kerry's name he was breaking Gwen Ifill's rules in the debate.

This night became about what Kerry was for or against, but Bush as a target simply vanished.

That is the most important reason why I think Bush/Cheney won tonight. They got what they wanted.

I expect a lot of feedback on this, much of it pretty angry.

You can read my UPI article on this here. Three other UPI stories ran tonight -- all of them at odds with my own take. So, in the spirit of fair and balanced, see the following:

Judges: Attack-dog Edwards Won Veep Debate by Donna Borak

Commentary: Edwards Ekes Out Veep Debate Victory by Martin Sieff

Outside View: George Bush -- Out of Sight, Out of Mind by Steven Clemons

As promised, I will share here on TheWashingtonNote.com analysis I see it -- whether it runs with the conventional current or the contrarian.

-- Steve Clemons

THE BUSH CAMPAIGN SAYS GEORGE BUSH IS FOR STEM CELL RESEARCH -- BIG TIME -- according to a statement titled "Embryonic Stem Cell Misinformation."

Who knew?

In the roster of "facts" provided in the statement, Bush-Cheney 2004 states:

President Bush delivered the first funding ever for embryonic stem cell research. Prior to the President's announcement of new funding, federal funding of embryonic stem cell research was $0.

The President did announce the first ever federal funding of stem cell research with ethical requirements on which stem cell lines are funded.

What is interesting about this statement is not a micro-analysis of what Bush has technically done to enhance or hinder stem cell research.

What amazes me is that this Bush-Cheney statement is kind of like Kerry's straddle that he voted for the $87 billion Iraq bill before he voted against it. Or Clinton's famous line of defense that it wasn't really sex, technically speaking.

Is Bush trying to convince some that he is for stem cell research -- and others that he is opposed?

Get John Edwards on the phone -- and get someone there tonight to prod Dick Cheney to issue a communique to the religious fundamentalists in the Republican Party that George W. Bush & Co. have fooled them and have been for stem cell research all along.

Maybe we can get the RNC to send a mailer to West Virginia and Arkansas to make clear President Bush's views on stem cell research.

Someone forward this blog entry to Ron Reagan. I'd love to hear his response.

-- Steve Clemons

I WILL BE REPORTING ON TONIGHT'S DEBATE FOR UPI and will provide the link here for those wanting commentary on whether Luke or Darth prevailed -- and whether smiles or snarls work best in debates.

In other news, I'm pleased to say that National Journal has profiled my "Stock Options for Soldiers" concept. I can't get a link from National Journal's site, and it is too self indulgent to post it here. However, I want to report that the concept is getting some traction in the media and some interest has been expressed by several House members.

If anyone would like the short blurb emailed, I would be happy to send it. Just send me a note requesting the piece at steve@thewashingtonnote.com.

I should have an article out about the concept, more fully explicating the notion, shortly.

-- Steve Clemons

ROCK THE VOTE REPORTS THAT IT HAS HELPED REGISTER more than 1,000,000 new young voters in the country. While it is true that America's elder citizens outweigh youthful voters at the polls, there is some evidence that greater election curiosity is stirring among students and young people.

EasytoVote.com is a great site for those of you out there who want a remarkably smooth and simple portal for voter registration laws and deadlines, along with applications.

This post is too late for those in Virginia, where registration closed yesterday as it did in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Washington, D.C. closed on Sunday, but Maryland's registration runs until October 12th - as is the case in several other states.

New Mexico, a key battleground state, closes registration today.

The site was developed by Ted Knight of Washington College in Chestertown, MD. College students, particularly those who are doing their studies out of their parents' home state, are often confused and have been fed misinformation about their voting rights. Sites such as this one help correct the confusion (and fraud. . .Fox News was bad again) out there about student voter registration.

Check out the site. You may have a week left to get on the voter rolls -- that is, if some nefarious list of sound-a-lot-a-like-felon names didn't get yours crossed off and your voting rights suspended.

-- Steve Clemons

CHALMERS JOHNSON PROVIDES A POWERFUL TEMPLATE FOR ATTACKING representatives in Congress who have escaped the gravity of constituent concerns and have flown upward into the care of lobbyists and special interests.

In an article, "The Military-Industrial Man" which is posted with a thoughtful introduction by famed editor Tom Engelhardt, Johnson demystifies his seven-term House member, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and illustrates how alien Cunningham's portfolio of interests is to the interests of his voters.

Johnson writes:

Cunningham has only one string to his mandolin -- the military-industrial complex and its interests. He has virtually no record at all on such issues as illegal immigration, water resources, ocean pollution, agriculture, mass transit, renewable energy, and unemployment.

As one of Cunningham's constituents, I hope we send to the House of Representatives a person who actually knows something about the communities of northern San Diego County. A Francine Busby victory this November would cause a political realignment in San Diego County comparable to Loretta Sanchez's 1996 defeat of "B-1" Bob Dornan in Orange County's 46th District.

The entire article by Chalmers is well worth reading -- not only because it serves up a brilliant indictment against one of the most repulsive personalities in the U.S. Congress but because it reminds the reader of the quality of leadership we really do deserve and rarely get in Congress.

Francine Busby is the right choice in California's 50th District.

However, I happen to know Chalmers very well and know that he and his wife Sheila are equal opportunity critics. They want leaders in office who are going to pragmatically address America's growing public policy morass -- on both the domestic and international fronts.

If they had a left-wing ideologue representing them and supported by funds from outside the district that far outweighed constituent contributions, Chalmers and Sheila Johnson would be working to unseat them as well.

I wrote about Cunningham some time ago -- and refer readers back to that. These guys (and they are mostly -- but not all -- guys) need to be shown the door.

Francine Busby needs your support, in dollars and attention.

I just can't believe we have a Tailhook Association board member still thriving on Capitol Hill.

-- Steve Clemons

TODAY BEFORE THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, DONALD RUMSFELD backed off the assertions of an active link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

In Jamie McIntyre's CNN report, he writes:

When asked about any connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, Rumsfeld said, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."

Before the day ended, the Department of Defense issued a release stating that Secretary Rumsfeld did not mean what he said.

The DOD statement from Rumsfeld begins:

A question I answered today at an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations regarding ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq regrettably was misunderstood.

Today at the Council, I even noted that "when I'm in Washington, I pull out a piece of paper and say 'I don't know, because I'm not in that business, but I'll tell you what the CIA thinks,' and I read it."

Apparently, Don Rumsfeld committed heresy and wasn't free to think out of bounds. Good boy Don -- please do this again, and again.

This reminds me of a time when I worked for Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and we were exploring different ideas on how to incentivize long-term share holding and create speed bumps in short-term stock churning. The thinking went that the increasing short-termism in the expectations of investors was leading to underinvestment in long-term human capital needs and technology R&D by public firms.

Two of the most thoughtful economic minds who had written widely on the subject of these kinds of disincentives for stock churning, or short-term securities excise taxes, were Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz.

After getting my Senator to quote them a couple of times in speeches, I had a phone call from the Congressional Affairs office of the Treasury Department. The liaison said: "When Dr. Summers joined the Treasury Department, he changed his mind on that subject."

Rumsfeld's heretical revelations have occasionally been significant and show that he at least sees a gap between the Bush administration's line on things and what is real. Remember the Rumsfeld memo? It's worth another read.

I still think Rumsfeld should have resigned or been fired over Abu Ghraib -- but if he's not going to go, then at least we should get the chance to hear him speak more frequently without his Dick Cheney-approved scripts.

-- Steve Clemons

MICHAEL MOORE STATES THAT HE WAS OFFERED FRAUDULENT KILLIAN DOCUMENTS by the same source who provided them to CBS News while Moore was making Farenheit 9/11 and rejected them.

Speaking Sunday evening at the University of Central Arkansas, Moore was asked during Q&A about the "Dan Rather story." After expressing some reluctance about saying anything, he told the audience that while making Farenheit he had been offered the same fraudulent documents by the same source.

According to my correspondent -- BG -- who attended:

Moore said he looked into it at the time and concluded that they weren't reliable. Not surprisingly, he really didn't seem to have any sympathy for Rather's mistake. He mentioned Burkett's name during the discussion, but never said that Burkett was his source.

Moore said that he hadn't shared this information publicly before.

This is important information on at least two fronts.

First of all, 60 Minutes' source apparently shopped the forged documents around to others before the story ran.

Secondly, if someone like Moore, who seemed to be going after everything he could on Bush, didn't trust the documents, why did Dan Rather?

Does this mean that if there is a legal investigation into the source of the Killian documents that Moore will be subpoenaed?

This could turn out to be a replay of Tim Russert and other media types being subpoenaed to testify in the Valerie Plame case.

-- Steve Clemons

JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL BROKE THE STORY ON CARL CAMERON'S contrived John Kerry comments which were posted on Fox News' website.

However, Eric Lictblau of the New York Times in his report on the fabricated Kerry posting says nothing of Joshua Marshall's investigation or his reporting. Marshall is a media pro -- and has scooped or influenced the traditional media many times before. But the New York Times and other leading publications often think that they can just grab a story that someone else has developed and run it without credit or attribution.

The Post and the Times each have Ombudsman operations, and there should be some investigation of this tendency to rip off the major blogs. I will be writing to the ombudsman offices at these places and encourage others to do so.

Here is the link for the Washington Post Ombudsman. Daniel Okrent, public editor/ombudsman at the New York Times can be reached at public@nytimes.com. His office profile is here.

I had a small taste of this after writing about and posting the RNC mailer saying that Democrats would ban the bible. The Associated Press ran the first article about these mailers focusing on West Virginia but did not provide the flier.

Josh Marshall highlighted this on his blog -- and then I acquired and posted an Arkansas version of the actual flier. This in turn led to Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias and many others to crosslink the piece -- and finally, CBS News and the Arkansas Democrat Gazette took it into the major media, followed by a flurry of other reporting.

Nearly all of the blog reporting on the RNC mailer referred to the images posted on my site and my report that this mailer had expanded from the single case of West Virginia to Arkansas and potentially other states. I also reported that this mailer might be attached to parish roster lists that the Republican National Committee had been soliciting. (Does anyone know if the Democratic National Committee was also soliciting parish rosters?)

Others have probably written about this cold shoulder that traditional media gives the good reporting on some blogs, but I haven't paid much attention to this behavior until recently.

However, the New York Times Magazine did do a major cover story on the influence of bloggers, highlighting Ana Marie Cox (aka Wonkette), Josh Marshall, Atrios, and others. Did they do this to boost readership of the paper. In other words, the Times wants to exploit the hipness of the blogger world on one hand -- but then deny its contributions in articles such as the one today on Carl Cameron's shameful act.

The Washington Post's marketing division, attached to Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, was also organizing a competition for the best political blogs in the country. When the first nominations were being solicited in banner ads via the Post's emailed news of the day, the links to make nominations did not work. I know because I had several dozen complaints from would-be nominators trying to get www.TheWashingtonNote.com into the line-up. After a week of hearing about this, I called WPNI and got them to fix the links.

The Washington Post said that it would announce the finalists in the competition on September 27th -- and as best I can tell -- there has been no release of a finalist list. When I called on Thursday and Friday this week, no human beings I spoke to knew about whether the competition was even proceeding. And I had no return phone calls.

I don't care that much about the Post's Blog Competition -- though as a new blogger, I admit that it would have been gratifying to have at least been nominated.

The issue here is that the major media are trying to exploit via marketing games and glitzy magazine cover ads the very high interest many have in political commentary on blogs. But then when it comes to the serious issues of reporting -- the major media sift through the blogs taking what they can use and not giving attribution.

In most liberal arts colleges, that kind of behavior would lead to an "F" or suspension.

-- Steve Clemons

THE HOUSE ETHICS COMMITTEE 'ADMONISHES' TOM DELAY FOR 2ND TIME in five years.

According to the Washington Post's Charles Babington:

The report's conclusion marked the second time in five years that the ethics committee has chastised DeLay. A third setback, which conceivably could come from a pending complaint, would fuel critics' claims that DeLay has crossed an ethical threshold, several analysts said yesterday.

Several DeLay staffers have also been indicted in the scandal surrounding the mid-term Texas redistricting case. DeLay's role in driving federal level government involvement as well as money into the Texas redistricting effort may be in the queue for the House Ethics Committee and could be the third strike that knocks DeLay from his powerful perch.

Babington's article reports that:

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, who often writes about congressional ethics, said, "I think the drip, drip, drip, drip may create a problem for him now."

Because the Texas indictments stem from allegations central to the pending complaint, Ornstein said, the ethics panel, known as the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, will be under political and and public pressure to at least launch a formal investigation before Congress adjourns for the elections.

The progressive and centrist communities need to ponder this. One more strike and DeLay may be out. Two would be even better.

If you ply Republican House members who belong to the politically moderate Republican Main Street Partnership with some alcohol, it doesn't take them long to start sharing stories about DeLay's fascist control techniques within the Republican caucus. I have heard these personal grievances about DeLay from numerous Republican House Members -- who while I think have been too timid in challenging DeLay may be quite enthusiastic about lending a hand to his overthrow. They, more than anyone, would benefit from DeLay being de-fanged and de-clawed.

These past few years, I've had the opportunity to speak about a very wide set of policy topics -- often to very liberal and progressive audiences concerned about some specific policy area -- like global environmental sustainability, wealth distribution, a more progressive foreign policy agenda, and lots of other less lofty policy initiatives.

After a while, I began to realize that if there was a "silver bullet" answer to making many of these areas they and I cared about better, it was the removal of Tom DeLay from his leadership position in the House and his party. Nearly all policy arenas improve with DeLay's resignation.

So, my message has been to try and focus on legally challenging the man -- suing him for his misdeeds -- highlighting the lengths he has gone to undermine the checks and balances of the American political system and to controlling and corrupting many of the civil society institutions that surround policymakers.

For a reminder of his nefarious efforts to block Democrats from getting powerful trade association or lobbying jobs, see Nick Confessore's "Welcome to the Machine."

We may be getting close to taking DeLay out. Do the Dems have a cluster of thinkers and strategists marshaling efforts to make this third strike hit home? Maybe it would be wise to invite some Repubican Main Streeters into the effort.

Josh Marshall has written a huge amount about DeLay and the redistriciting scandal -- so search TalkingPointsMemo.com for more.

But this is the time to organize and remind the people and the press of the anti-democratic mischief this guy has been up to for a long time.

Remember when DeLay said "I AM the Federal Government!" If not, check out the cool website that inspires and informs, TakingonTomDeLay.com.

-- Steve Clemons

KERRY WORE A RED TIE. BUSH WORE BLUE.

The phrase, "War on Terror," was mentioned 17 times -- 7 by Kerry and 10 by Bush, although Bush's references were frequently repeated in a single sentence.

Bush said his job is "hard work" 11 times.

Sean Hannity said on Fox News last night that he had never seen Bush "more passionate, more articulate, more on top of his game." But every poll I have seen puts Kerry ahead as the winner. And since Fox News is pushing the notion that it was a draw. . .well, maybe that says it all.

This was Bush's victory to lose. Most Americans know that he is not a polished whiz kid debater. Expectations of Bush in these debates is always fairly low, but I don't think he met even those expectations.

Kerry carries the ball and chain of 20 years of Senatorial style with him. But while he can orate and debate, until last night Kerry never made the sale that he could be a strong chief executive. I think he gave Americans an important glimpse at a different John Kerry, one who can own and implement a credible policy agenda.

One of the people I was with last night -- and who had recently watched every single debate performance by both Bush and Kerry -- thought that last night was Bush's single worst performance.

Another seasoned observer and journalist in the room, who writes for the Washington Post, said that the headline of the debate could be: "The Professor vs. The Cowboy."

My family is from Oklahoma and Texas -- and I have lots of cowboys in my family tree, and I told her that last night, that the cowboy was "all hat and no cattle."

Let me go through some of my other notes. These may seem disjointed -- but I scribbled them as I watched. Like Josh Marshall, i have tried to keep my impressions of this performance unaffected by the spin commentary that has followed.

I also tried to watch the debate as an advocate for Bush, giving him credit for scores he got -- perhaps more frequently than I did for Kerry because I wanted to balance my own bias against the Bush administration.

The first thing that bothered me about Kerry is that he looked only at Jim Lehrer and not at the camera, not at you and me. Kerry didn't close his deal with his viewers until he looked at the camera in the last two minutes of the debate. Bush looked at the camera when he spoke -- but then was clearly out of control listening to Kerry and engaged in all sorts of silly body language reactions to Kerry's points. This was a lot like Al Gore's "sighs." Aesthetically, in terms of poise, Bush lost the contest with all that eyebrow action and crinkled faces.

Bush mentioned frequently that the A.Q. Khan network had been brought to justice? Really? When did that happen? In the pardon that the General Musharraf gave Khan? Kerry failed to hit Bush on the fact that Pakistan was a far greater threat to American security than Iraq. The Khan network proliferated nuclear knowledge, systems, and tools to North Korea, Libya, Iran, and possibly Brazil. Bush's failure to squarely address the Pakistan problem early on led to consequences that we are going to be dealing with for decades ahead.

Bush came off badly when he responded to Lehrer's query about whether Kerry's presidency would draw another 9/11 style incident. Bush said that he believed he was "gonna win," so we don't have to worry about that. Evasive and disrespectful. Indulgent. His comment that letting folks "know where I stand is the best way to win the peace" was bizarre. It kind of sounds like something the Pope might say; well maybe not even the Pope.

I liked Bush's frequent mention of staying on the offensive; of spreading liberty. I thought that he made his best scores in the debate when he was lofty. He couldn't handle detail; and obviously works best in Hemingwayesque simple sentences -- that might explain a lot of Bush's unbudgeable support among citizens. Hemingway sells.

Kerry finally hit hard on Bush taking his eye off the ball and being distracted from day one by Iraq rather than staying focused on the advent of transnational terrorism and Osama bin Laden. Kerry got in a good line that when 1000 top al Qaeda operatives and Osama bin Laden were pinned down in Tora Bora, Kerry said that Bush "outsourced that job too."

Bush focused on Hussein. Kerry on bin Laden. Bush on Iraq -- and Kerry raised Afghanistan a lot, mentioning troop deaths in Afghanistan, the warlords there, opium production. All good scores.

Bush's best and only real score against Kerry was Kerry's flip-flopping on the resolutions and funding bills leading up to the war. But Kerry responded with the slightly modified adage from John Maynard Keynes: "When confronted with new information, I reassess and modify my position. What, sir, do you do when confronted with new information?"

Kerry made the case that if the war is going bad, if there are things to learn, that we need to be empirically aware and modify our course to win. Bush seemed to think that the emphasis was on dogma. He said over and over that the President could not inspire, could not lead the war, nor lead the world with a message that this was "the wrong war, the wrong place, at the wrong time."

Bush smiled, sort of impishly, a lot. I didn't like it. He said "We will Succeed -- We got a plan to do so." Where is the plan? Is it secret? Will it be leaked to us? Bush was too cryptic.

Kerry is clearly a detail guy -- a lot like Gore in the debates with Bush. The fact that we are sending Humvees and soldiers into harm's way without armor was an effective critique by Kerry. But Kerry failed to make more about the contrast between the soldiers going to risk their lives on behalf of the country -- and those like Richard Perle and James Woolsey who are not on the front line and making money off of the war. Kerry made virtually nothing of the conflicts of interest swirling around Bush's crusade against Saddam Hussein.

When Bush said that he had tripled the amount of funding devoted to Homeland Security -- $30 billion -- I was surprised that Kerry didn't immediately draw out the comparison with the $200 billion thus far spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. People have a hard time grapping with numbers that large -- but the contrast between what was spent on this adventure and the rather modest investment in defending the soft underbelly of America's civil infrastructure was a point Kerry failed to make.

Bush, when he critiqued Kerry's roster of suggestions on what he would do to defend the country, grumbled, "I'd like to see how he's gonna pay for all that." What? Was Bush saying that homeland security is too high a price for our budget? Again, Kerry missed an opportunity here.

Kerry mentioned Halliburton in a quick throw-away line -- 9:35 p.m.

When the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, offered the United Nations, he said, "No, no, we'll go do this alone." To save for Halliburton the spoils of the war, they actually issued a memorandum from the Defense Department saying, "If you weren't with us in the war, don't bother applying for any construction." That's not a way to invite people.

I thought Kerry did a good job puncturing the myth that America had assembled a genuine coalition. Bush's comment: "Well, actually, you forgot Poland" will go down as one of the memorable one-liners of the exchange. (By the way, I think that Poland deserves enormous credit for standing with America -- but has been given short shrift by Bush frequently and often making many Poles furious.)

Israel was mentioned by Kerry at 9:50 p.m. Kerry said:

Soldiers know over there that this isn't being done right yet. I'm going to get it right for those soldiers because it's important to Israel, it's important to America, it's important to the world, it's important to the fight on terror. But I have a plan to do it, he doesn't.

Bush will get criticized for speaking in religious 'code' in his remarks..."we have climbed the mighty mountain," but Kerry was sending signals on his reference to Israel. I think that he needs to remain resolute and that he will be a steward of American interests in the world -- and while it's good to be cognizant of other nation's interests, like Israel, the way that Kerry meshed Israeli and American interests in a throw-away line wasn't the best way to get into the complex subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Bush does see bin Laden and Hussein as the same threat. That's clear. His comment, "The enemy attacked us," which he used in his defense of the Iraq invasion, was appropriately attacked by Kerry. Kerry hit hard that the enemy is Osama bin Laden:

Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and, frankly, very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said the enemy attacked us. Saddam Hussein didn't attack us; Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaeda attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains, with American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best-trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords who only a week earlier had been on the other side, fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

Again, Bush seemed flustered and out of his element. He responded:

Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.

I don't know what Kerry was thinking when he went off on this broad lesson about nuclear proliferation. The professor flew way over the heads of people there. While I agree that nuclear proliferation is enormously important -- it is the intersection between the collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and the empowerment and development of transnational terror groups that would have been a better answer. Kerry seemed to be stuck in the old groove of state-level thinking -- and worried about nuclear proliferation to states -- whereas it is the breakdown and failure of states with nuclear capacity -- or the activities of global crime and terror networks that make this proliferation a million times more scary. Kerry failed to make that point.

I thought Bush would clobber Kerry for his erudite but sterile response on what threatens America. And although he said the words "war on terror" a lot -- he failed to say that the most important threat and challenge facing America were terrorists. I was stunned. The fact that Bush didn't rely on his favorite line but instead got drawn into a lengthy and complex discussion about proliferation may be the biggest indication of Bush's failure last night.

Bush's response:

Actually, we've increased funding for dealing with nuclear proliferation, about 35 percent since I've been the president.

And that is another way to help deal with the threats that we face in the 21st century. My opponent is opposed to the missile defenses.

Wendy Sherman, Counselor to Madeleine Albright at the State Department and appointed Ambassador by Bill Clinton to serve as one of the key "fixers" of our problems with North Korea, has obviously had a huge and important impact on Kerry. A lot of what I heard from Kerry last night was vintage Wendy Sherman.

Kerry's sophisticated and strong commentary on how to fix our North Korea problems moved beyond the obvious, where Bush was stuck. Kerry didn't just propose bilateral talks with North Korea -- he pushed a comprehensive agenda, something close to what Nixon and Kissinger did in the opening of the People's Republic of China.

This was bold -- and his comments are of the same realist ilk of the Kissinger and Brzezinksi schools of thought. Kerry said:

I want bilateral talks which put all of the issues, from the Armistice of 1952 -- the economic issues, the human rights issues, the artillery disposal issues, the DMZ issues, and the nuclear issues on the table.

Bush stayed with the conventional -- and if anything, Bush argued that China would walk away if we had bilaterals with North Korea and that this would be terrible. This sounded completely out of sync with Bush's earlier comments that America would do what it needed to do and not give another country, like China, a veto -- in effect -- of our interest-driven policies. Bush wants China's leverage over North Korea -- but of course, China will charge America a fee for that leverage.

In contrast, Kerry properly stated that China would not walk away because it had 'interests' in the outcome. Kerry was dead on target.

Another unforgettable line from the President: "I've got a good relationship with Vladimir." And Kerry hits Bush with the fact that Putin controls all the TV stations and has many of his political opponents in jail.

Bush, who I was trying to favor, really lost me when he sent code to the evangelicals:

We've climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace. By being steadfast and resolute and strong, by keeping our word, by supporting our troops, we can achieve the peace we all want.

Ok -- enough.

One of the few comments I saw after the debate that I liked was from John McCain, who opened his spin session with the caveat that he was disappointed that he didn't hear a broader discussion of American foreign policy challenges, like environmental issues (though the Kyoto Protocol was discussed), immigration, and energy.

I agree with McCain -- though I was interested that the International Criminal Court was raised, as was the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Proliferation was a big topic. So, I get McCain's point -- but still, to be honest, the debate stretched beyond 9/11 and Iraq -- a good thing in my view.

So, was it Bush's worst debate performance ever? In my view, yes.

Bush's eleven-time mention of "It's hard work" sounded more like an excuse for bad behavior than something inspired.

Kerry's line, "We just read in the front pages of America's papers that there are over 100,000 hours of tapes unlistened-to," gives us an indication that Kerry reads the papers -- which Bush has acknowledged he doesn't do.

It's the Cowboy vs. the Professor. The commentator at the debate soiree I attended is probably right.

But the Professor won; and the Cowboy is still a greenhorn. . .even after four years on the job.

-- Steve Clemons