Just took out my pen, turned up “America” loud, and filled out by ballot. Just don’t let me down now, guys, all right?

As early voting begins in Florida, the Tampa Tribune declines to endorse the Republican ticket for President – for the first time in forty years:

As stewards of the Tribune’s editorial voice, we find it unimaginable to not be lending our voice to the chorus of conservative-leaning newspapers endorsing the president’s re- election. We had fully expected to stand with Bush, whom we endorsed in 2000 because his politics generally reflected ours: a strong military, fiscal conservatism, personal responsibility and small government. We knew him to be a popular governor of Texas who fought for lower taxes, less government and a pro-business constitution. But we are unable to endorse President Bush for re- election because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, his record deficit spending, his assault on open government and his failed promise to be a “uniter not a divider” within the United States and the world…

As it turns out, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration were bamboozled by dubious sources named Curveball and Chalabi, whose integrity and access to real- time information was repeatedly questioned by our own intelligence services. But groupthink took hold among the neocons, while those with contrary points of view, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, were sidelined until after key decisions were made. It was almost as though someone who asked tough questions was seen as siding with the terrorists. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, then Army chief of staff, said that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure a postwar Iraq, his argument was dismissed and the general summarily pushed aside. But after Baghdad fell, we saw how insufficient troop numbers led to the looting of hospitals, businesses and schools – everything but the Oil Ministry, which our forces secured. At the time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said with great hubris that the uprising was “untidy” but not unexpected. And the president himself challenged the enemy to “bring it on.”

Someone, presumably not psyched abou the handling of the war, leaks a letter from Sanchez to the Post:

Sanchez, who was the senior commander on the ground in Iraq from the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004, said in his letter that Army units in Iraq were “struggling just to maintain . . . relatively low readiness rates” on key combat systems, such as M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, anti-mortar radars and Black Hawk helicopters. He also said units were waiting an average of 40 days for critical spare parts, which he noted was almost three times the Army’s average. In some Army supply depots in Iraq, 40 percent of critical parts were at “zero balance,” meaning they were absent from depot shelves, he said.

He also protested in his letter, sent Dec. 4 to the number two officer in the Army, with copies to other senior officials, that his soldiers still needed protective inserts to upgrade 36,000 sets of body armor but that their delivery had been postponed twice in the month before he was writing. There were 131,000 U.S. troops in Iraq at the time. In what appears to be a plea to top officials to spur the bureaucracy to respond more quickly, Sanchez concluded, “I cannot sustain readiness without Army-level intervention.”

As Matt Yglesias observes:

This was as of December 2003, so while “senior Army officials” may say “that most of Sanchez’s concerns have been addressed in recent months” one has to ask oneself why most of them weren’t addressed a long time ago and how it is that some of them still haven’t been addressed today. It would also be nice to know which concerns, exactly, are the ones they haven’t gotten around to addressing.

San Francisco hotel workers hold out for a decent settlement that protects their health security:

The San Francisco hotel stalemate dragged on Friday, when a negotiating team for union hotel workers criticized a revised health care proposal as inadequate. The 14 hotels had described the offer as “very rich.” “It doesn’t have specifics. There are a million unanswered questions,” Mike Casey, president of Unite Here Local 2, said Friday before returning to the negotiating table at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and taking up the union’s counterproposal, details of which were not available. The subject of increasing workers’ burdens of health care coverage is crucial not only in the San Francisco hotel workers’ negotiations but in discussions about employer-supported care throughout the nation.

The Times exposes conditions at Guantanamo:

Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases. The people, military guards, intelligence agents and others, described in interviews with The New York Times a range of procedures that included treatment they said was highly abusive occurring over a long period of time, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators.

One regular procedure that was described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels, said one military official who witnessed the procedure. The official said that was intended to make the detainees uncomfortable, as they were accustomed to high temperatures both in their native countries and their cells. Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who described the treatment after being contacted by The Times. “It fried them,” the official said, who said that anger over the treatment the prisoners endured was the reason for speaking with a reporter. Another person familiar with the procedure who was contacted by The Times said: “They were very wobbly. They came back to their cells and were just completely out of it.”

Media Matters critiques MSNBC’s debate coverage:

As MMFA noted before the first debate even began, Buchanan (teamed on a panel with three reporters) criticized Senator John Kerry and forecasted a quick electoral victory for President George W. Bush. Ginsberg, who has provided legal counsel this year for both the Bush-Cheney campaign and the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, consistently spun for Bush during coverage of the debates and even erroneously claimed that the 9-11 Commission “insinuat[ed]” that there were connections between Iraq and 9/11. For his part, Scarborough proclaimed that all viewers who indicated that Senator John Edwards won the vice presidential debate in an online poll must have been “drinking vodka.” Then, apparently after silently reading the results of a CBS poll that also showed that Edwards had won, as MMFA noted, Scarborough crumpled up the paper showing the results and threw it away without reporting the outcome.

MSNBC’s debate panels did not feature any prominent Democrats or liberals to counter Buchanan, Ginsberg and Scarborough. In fact, many of the other pundits featured in debate coverage were just as adept at providing conservative misinformation. For example, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell distorted Kerry’s “much too accommodationist” Iran proposal after the first debate, and then cheered on Vice President Dick Cheney’s false assertion during the vice presidential debate that he had never met Edwards. After the third presidential debate, Mitchell criticized a Kerry comment that was critical of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan — Mitchell’s husband — but neither Mitchell nor anyone else on MSNBC disclosed this conflict of interest. NBC’s Meet the Press host Tim Russert also repeated without challenge Cheney’s claim that he hadn’t previously met Edwards, even though Russert knew it was false. The day after the third presidential debate, MSNBC anchor Randy Meier twice falsely claimed that the “context” around Bush’s 2002 remark that he was “not that concerned” about Osama bin Laden showed that he meant that bin Laden should be more concerned about us.

Activists suggest a new Bush slogan:

Looks like Bill O’Reilly doesn’t have to worry who’s looking out for him:

Scandal-hit Fox News moved yesterday to fire an employee who says she was sexually harassed by Bill O’Reilly – but wants a judge to declare the canning isn’t retribution. Andrea Mackris, 33, said she was served legal papers about her termination by a man lying in wait for her at her Manhattan apartment building. The documents said Fox had asked a judge to let the TV station dump her from a $93,200-a-year job as associate producer on “The O’Reilly Factor” – and to rule that the firing was not in retaliation for her accusations about the show’s host. Mackris sued O’Reilly and Fox News on Wednesday, saying her boss had made “disgusting” phone calls to her. O’Reilly sued Mackris the same day, alleging extortion.

“I was walking into my apartment and there was a man hiding inside my building,” Mackris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night. “I don’t have a doorman. He had somehow got into my building and he was hiding behind my stairwell. He said, ‘Oh, you’re her.’ He hit me in the chest with the papers and said, ‘You’re served.'” “They’re threatening me. They’re frightening me,” Mackris said. “Yes, I’m rattled, but I’m really strong.”

The Democratic Party could learn something from these folks:

The FBI wants to know who checked out a book from a small library about Osama Bin Laden. But the library isn’t giving out names, saying the government has no business knowing what their patrons read. The library in Deming isn’t much larger than a family home. Located in rural Whatcom County, it hardly seems the site for a showdown with the feds. “I think we all figure it’s places like the New York Library System that’s going to be one of the first we hear about,” said the attorney for the Whatcom County Library System, Deborra Garret.

At the center of the issue, a book titled “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America.” The FBI confiscated the original book after a patron reported than some one hand wrote a bin Laden quote in the margin that read: “Let history be witness I am a criminal.” The FBI demanded to know the names and addresses of everyone who ever checked out the book. “Libraries are a haven where people should be able to seek whatever information they want to pursue without any threat of government intervention,” said Director of Whatcom County Library System, Joan Airoldi. Because of privacy policies, the library does not give out circulation records without a court order. When the FBI got a grand jury subpoena, the library filed a motion to quash it — citing the rights of all people who use the library.

My Dad on the Bush back bulge:

I now think he was wearing one of those spacesuit type things that lets you fly around whenever you want. I guess he didn’t use it.

Makes sense to me.

Wal-Mart Watch: Wal-Mart makes threatening gestures towards its one unionized site in North America:

Retail powerhouse Wal-Mart said it was “concerned about the economic viability” of its store in Canada which is the only one of its outlets in North America to be unionized. “It has been several weeks since the Jonquiere store was automatically certified with the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), but no communication from the union has been received with regard to beginning talks with the company,” Wal-Mart said in a statement regarding the store in the province of Quebec. “The Jonquiere store is not meeting its business plan, and the company is concerned about the economic viability of the store. Wal-Mart Canada believes the unresolved labor situation at the Jonquiere store is proving detrimental to improving the performance of the store. The Wal-Mart associates in Jonquiere know their store is not meeting its business goals, and they would like the labor-relations process to move forward as quickly as possible so they can have certainty over operating conditions at the store.”

Wal-Mart’s ability to level threats against its one union store demonstrates why justice for all Wal-Mart workers ultimately depends on an international solution on the corporate level, in the form of a card-check neutrality agreement with Wal-Mart. For that to happen, labor has to be as well-coordinated as management.

Looks like independent media may not be illegal after all:

In a huge initial victory for Indymedia, the two servers recently seized by the FBI were returned this morning to Rackspace (the hosting service where the servers were first taken from). Indymedia is now weighing additional legal options after this illegal seizure of its servers.