Sam Smith points out the striking absence of Wangari’s Maathai’s founding of Kenya’s Green Party in media accounts of Nobel Peace Prize:
The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, BBC, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times – among others – all eliminated the fact that Maathai had founded the Kenyan Green Party. The fact that the often maligned and more often ignored Greens were being honored for setting an example to the world was certainly news.
Looks like Bush ally John Howard has narrowly won re-election in Australia.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s election is proving just how “messy” democracy is:
After a relatively peaceful and orderly start, Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential election was thrown into chaos Saturday after 15 candidates opposing President Hamid Karzai declared the results invalid, complaining of multiple vote-casting and other improper procedures. The contretemps threatened to ruin the credibility of an historic poll that has cost the international community almost $200 million to stage, attracted more than 10 million Afghans to register as voters, and been viewed as a crucial milestone in Afghanistan’s emergence from 25 years of war and turmoil into a stable, modernizing country. The candidates’ complaints stood in sharp contrast to the enthusiastic spirit of hundreds of thousands of Afghans who lined up outside village schools and mosques on a chilly, windswept morning to cast the first vote of their lives. Whoever won, they told visitors over and over, they hoped the election would bring peace and security. The national election commission said in mid-afternoon it would allow the election to continue despite the candidates’ protests but that it would investigate any complaints of irregularities. Ballot-counting was expected to take days because many polling stations were located in remote areas.
President Bush himself would have qualified as a “small business owner” under the Republican definition, based on his 2001 federal income tax returns. He reported $84 of business income from his part ownership of a timber-growing enterprise. However, 99.99% of Bush’s total income came from other sources that year. (Bush also qualified as a “small business owner” in 2000 based on $314 of “business income,” but not in 2002 and 2003 when he reported his timber income as “royalties” on a different tax schedule.)
That’s the analysis from Cheney’s favorite website.
Live-blogging the debate:
0:01 “A few” things is all you want to change about the PATRIOT ACT? Gonna be a long night…
0:03 Bush doesn’t see how you can lead this country if you change your mind…I think a lot of Americans are coming to realize you can’t lead the country so well if you never change your mind…
0:05 Touting that 75% of Al Qaeda leadership captured figure was probably more effective before Condi admitted we don’t know how many Al Qaeda leaders there are. That must be some amazing math…
0:06 “I wasn’t happy when we found out there wasn’t weapons there.” I understand, electorally, why that would be the case, but on some moral level, shouldn’t that be a relief?
0:09 No, he didn’t say “we must pass a global test before we use force” – he said we must pass one after we use force. Not much to tout from that first debate for you, is there?
0:10 Kerry appealing to what voters see about Iraq on TV is much more effective, somehow, than Bush appealing to what he sees about Iraq on TV…
0:13 Bush saying he’s more optimistic than Kerry about Iraq: Effective rhetoric. Bush saying Kerry’s copying his plan: Not so effective rhetoric.
0:15 “I’ve made some decisions that have caused people not to understand the great values of our country.” What? Whose fault would that be? I mean, is that just because the great values of our country are really hard to understand?
0:17 True, people love America who don’t like America’s decisions. That’s why so many of them are hoping Kerry wins. But doesn’t acknowledging the difference between criticism and America-hating remove one of your justifications for ignoring the criticism?
0:18 Calling Bush on broken promises from 2000: Key. Keep at it. And combining that with the firing dissenters angle is a key move too.
0:19 “The military’s job is to win the war. The President’s job is to win the peace.” Amen. Stick it to him for claiming criticizing the policy demoralizes the troops.
0:21 “…Iraq, where there wasn’t a threat,” is probably a poor turn of phrase after repeating that you agreed there was a threat.
0:22 Nuclear proliferation in Russia – hammer on this one. And commititng to halt any kind of development of any kind of weapon during a Presidential campaign is, to Kerry’s credit, a more courageous move than some Democratic Presidential nominees have made.
0:23 So now being a partner to the world, according to Bush, means renouncing nuclear aspirations. Someone should tell that to, I dunno, maybe President Bush…
0:26 “We need to be lighter and quicker and more facile.” More facile? Well, Bush is doing all he can for that goal…
0:27 OK, Kerry, we get that you’ve got a lot of military support…
0:28 Reagan’s foreign policy? Come on.
0:28 George Bush sure does love Poland. Which is heartwarming, especially now that they’ve said they’re backing out.
0:29 Anne is really excited to be at this debate. And not to have been attacked by terrorists.
0:30 “What was it, 1993 or so?” Way to make the Democratic Party’s job harder.
0:31 Slam him on saying tax cuts for the rich are more important than security for everyone. Clobber him. Please. Yes. Keep going.
0:32 “We’re doing everything we can to defend the homeland.” Really?
0:32 “If Iraq were to fail it would be a haven for terrorists.” As supposed to now, when it’s a, well, a…
0:34 “…the tax cut for the middle class.” First-class chutzpah. Did you just say you’re only concerned about working Americans being targeted by terrorists?
0:36 If Bush is for generic drugs, does that mean he’ll be reforming his AIDS policy?
0:37 “The President just didn’t level with you right here again.” Yes. “…into the pockets of the drug companies, right out of your pockets.” Yes.
0:38 Somehow, one President who managed to erode Medicare isn’t an impressive comparison to one Senator who didn’t completely positively transform the Medicare system.
0:41 Is there really polling out there that says that the only Doctors women are concerned about are OB/GYNs? Cause these two sure make it sound like it.
0:42 Did you just call him Senator Kennedy? Much like confusing Saddam and Osama – is this a screw-up or a subliminal message? Or maybe my reception just isn’t so good.
0:43 If “defensive medicine” means being extra careful to stay within regulations, maybe there are worse things Doctors could do.
0:44 Compassionate conservatives: Neither compassionate nor conservative. Disucss.
0:45 “We have a deficit.” How in touch of you. But wait – it’s all Bill Clinton and Osama 0bin Laden’s fault.
0:46 Bush citing today’s economic report? I come from the school of thought that calls that chutzpah (also the one that says if you want to increase demand by giving people money, it has to be the folks who are low-income enough to change consumption habits based on the extra money).
0:48 Kerry channels Robert Reich’s argument that real patriotism requires sacrifice. Or rather, he dances around it. So close…
0:50 Kerry calls Bush on the broken promise of $5 million jobs. And Enron. Nice.
0:51 Kerry’s long stare at the camera to promise never to raise taxes on folks making $199,000 a year, even if necessary to get healthcare for those making a hell of a lot less, is anything but comforting to me. And, I suspect, to a bunch of the low-income folks I registered this summer to vote.
0:54 Has Bush read the jobs report he’s citing?
0:55 Funny thing is, actually he did, by statistical fluke, get named the most liberal Senator because he missed so many votes.
0:56 Bush is actually citing the “Clear Skies Act” as if it helped, you know, clear skies. And now the “Healthy Forests Bill”! He should be slammed for this in, say, 30 seconds.
0:58 Instead, Kerry’s touting how many Republican/Clintonian things he voted for. Oy. Now he’s slamming him though. Somewhat.
0:59 “The halls of Europe”? Wonder what those look like.
1:01 “How can the US be competitive in manufacturing and maintain our standard of living?” “A reviewed, muscular, transnational labor movement.” Sorry – just fantasizing.
1:04 If anyone doubted that Bush’s plan is for the US to compete with third world dictatorships for deregulation and exploitation of labor, well, why did you ever doubt that?
1:05 I’d say “That’s news to me” is one of those expressions Bush should be careful about using, joke or not – it’s a little close to home.
1:06 I really, really wish that we had a Democratic candidate who could do more to comfort the man who’s worried about his rights being watered down than the incumbent is doing right now.
1:09 Well, this is a somewhat better answer on the PATRIOT ACT than we got from Kerry at the beginning. And good call on not letting terrorists re-write the constitution. But when you mention Dick Durbin, my main thought is, “Shouldn’t he (or, say, Barack Obama) be running for President?”
1:11 “Parapeligic” shouldn’t be such a hard word for Kerry to say. But framing the research as a sign of respect for life is a good, George-Lakoff-approved move.
1:13 “Science is important, but so is ethics.” Since when is that the choice?
1:16 If by “allowing personal opinion to enter into constitutional process,” you mean allowing the constitution to enter into the constitutional process, then yes?
1:17 Dred Scott? Newdow is our generation’s Dred Scott? Screw you. And sorry to break it to you, Mr. President, but the mid-nineteenth century constitution wasn’t exactly ideal when it comes to equal rights for African-Americans. Nice to hear Bush doesn’t actually think property rights always have to trump human liberty though.
1:20 Good that Kerry’s tying abortion to class and to international family planning. Don’t particularly need him or his wife counseling me out of abortion.
1:21 If by “reduce the number of abortions in America,” you mean reduce access to safe and legal abortion, then yeah.
1:23 When Kerry explains the problem with Bush’s argument, and Bush responds by saying it’s actually simple and not responding to the criticism, I wouldn’t say straight-shooter is the term that comes to mind.
1:24 Is Bush’s biggest mistake an appointment he made?
1:25 So now, contra Cheney, there may have been little military mistakes made – they’re just not that important.
1:26 And it was apparently a mistake to appoint people principled enough to call him out on his mistakes.
1:27 Ah, the $87 billion. How we’ve missed hearing about it.
1:28 “He wants you kids to pay for it. I wanted us to pay for it.” True that.
1:29 Please don’t screw this up, John.
1:31 Well, no memorable sound bytes in that one for us or for them. And “respected at home and stronger in the world” still makes me groan. But optimism is recommendable.
1:33 Nothing so memorable from Bush’s closing either. Fitting, maybe, for a debate which had fewer “moments” than the two before or, likely, than the last one next week. My immediate reaction is that Bush failed to halt Kerry’s momentum going in. Bush was certainly much, much better than the last time – meaning he wasn’t a train wreck. But Kerry did more to respond to his opponent’s arguments, and to the audience’s questions, than Bush, and did so more effectively. Still, he missed a good share of opportunities – or dropped them half-way. And my last question before signing off would have to be: Right now, walking off the stage, is this the first time in the campaign that Bush is walking into a crowd he couldn’t vet first?
As I see it, what Kerry needs to do tonight is call George Bush more strongly than ever on his out-of-touch mentality and non-starter agenda on the economy, healthcare, housing, homeland security, and foreign policy (really shouldn’t be hard to do given the mountains of evidence and the damning lived experience of Americans, so he better not screw it up), and connect personally with the voters in the room and thus vicariously with the ones on TV (doesn’t seem to be his strong suit, but I’m rooting for him).
Good news is, Bush can’t just make hopeful, earnest promises this time around. Unless, that is, he manages to convince America that he’s been born again again since the last debate, and so his record from his first term, like the way he spent the early part of his life, is off-limits. I honestly think a partial acknowledgement of some mistakes, domestically or abroad, would humanize Bush and pull some of his 2000 supporters back onto the reservation. But his strategists, based on the two debates so far, seem to think that would bring down the whole house of cards. So his marching orders seem to be denying all errors and pinning all problems on terrorism or Clinton. Which offers some great opportunities to John Kerry to take him down – if he knows how to use them.
This is likely not how Bush was hoping to go into tonight’s debate:
Nonfarm payroll employment continued to trend upward in September, increasing
by 96,000, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.4 percent, the Bureau of
Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Over the prior
3 months, payroll employment rose by 103,000 on average. In September, modest
job gains occurred in a few service-providing industries.
As Morgan Stanley’s Chief Economist observes:
This is a weak number, no matter how you cut it…That’s a pathetic pace of job creation by corporate America…If you look at jobs growth over the 34 months of this recovery, then private payroll growth is up about four-tenths of 1 percent over the entire span of this recovery. Normally, the gains are closer to 8 percent, so there is a profound disconnect between this jobless recovery and anything we have ever seen before in post-World War II history in a U.S. business cycle.
From the website to which Cheney meant – had he not confused “.com” and “.org” – to direct debate viewers:
Cheney got our domain name wrong — calling us “FactCheck.com” — and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton. In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn’t profited personally while in office from Halliburton’s Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney’s responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.
At least 35 people were said killed Thursday night and 135 wounded in three separate attacks on holiday resorts in the Sinai Desert that were packed with Israelis, according to Egyptian police and officials. However, Egypt’s Interior Ministry confirmed only 12 deaths around dawn. The most devastating attack occured around 10 P.M., when a blast ripped through the Hilton Hotel in the resort town of Taba, close to the border with Israel. Most of the dead were Israeli tourists, Israeli police said. Three other blasts occurred about two hours later in the area of the nearby resort towns of Ras Satan, a camping area full of Israeli tourists, and Nueiba, witnesses said. Israeli security sources said they suspected the explosions had been caused by explosives-laden vehicles.
Ralph Nader’s gotten a fair share of attention on this site, especially last spring around the time he announced his bid for President. My basic stance on this, set forth in this op-ed (and here here, here, and here), is that Nader’s run is misguided and attempts to appropriate him as a scapegoat for the recent failures of the Democratic party to energize voters are equally so. I would’ve liked to see Ralph Nader speak here last night, because he’s certainly, in my experience, a sharp and powerful speaker and more so because I’d like to see him defend his recent lurch to the right on immigration. But besides the scheduling conflict, I wasn’t going to donate money to his campaign to get in, a concern which I suspect kept many who otherwise would have attended (in his defense, Nader, unlike Bush, didn’t make anyone sign loyalty oaths to get in). According the YDN write-up, Nader said some things I agree with, like
“If you don’t make demands on [Kerry], he doesn’t get any better,” Nader said. “If he doesn’t get any better, he doesn’t get votes.”
Absolutely, the left needs to hold Kerry accountable as a candidate, and im yertzach HaShem as President, and to do so forcefully, stubbornly, and persuasively, something the left manifestly failed to do with Clinton, as Randy Shaw recounts from an environmentalist perspective in his Activist Handbook, and Thomas Geoghegan recounts from a labor perspective in Which Side Are You On. But my break with Nader comes when he conflates those who’ll vote for Kerry with those who idolize him, and those who see unseating Bush as a first priority with those who see it as the only goal:
“Universities are a den of ‘anybody but Bush, leave Kerry alone, make no demands on him,'” Nader said. “That’s a brain-closer. Give me anybody who says ‘anybody but Bush,’ and they’re incapable of talking about any other strategies, variables, nothing.”
Condescension and self-righteousness (among the qualities, like gigantic bank accounts, which Nader, Bush, and Kerry share in common) aside, this argument is effective as constructing and beating up a straw man (I know very, very few folks who really believe that getting rid of Bush would solve all our problems), and phenomenally ineffective at speaking to the concerns of the millions of Americans who’ve born the greatest portion of the burden of the Bush presidency, those faced with losing their jobs, losing their healthcare, or having the constitution desecrated to write them into second-class citizenship. For all Nader’s arguments about long-term benefits and short-term costs, he hasn’t done much of a job of garnering the support of those most likely to pay the costs for the benefits he talks so compellingly about. The truly outrage slap in the face of those who’ve judged themselves unable to take another four years of the same, though, is this:
It really is political bigotry when people say, ‘Do not run.’ When they’re saying, ‘Do not run,’ they’re saying, ‘Do not speak, do not petition, do not assemble.
This sound byte follows in the proud rhetorical tradition of George Bush’s use of the term “political hate speech” to refer to those of us who criticize his policy record. It’s equally disingenuous, and equally cheapens the real bigotry which continues to bedevil this country and the real people who make and express empirical views on the best course for progressive change for this country. The fact of the matter is that most of us who’ve said to Nader, “Do not run,” have also said, affirmatively, “Speak. Petition. Assemble.” We desperately need, before this election and after it, to demonstrate resounding consensus behind progressive change. What absolutely must challenge the Democrats from the left. But voting is more than a symbolic aesthetic act. It’s an exercise of power, a power most effectively used at this juncture to elect a candidate who would be drastically better for this country. And there are far more effective means to articulate strong progressive stances than rallying behind an electoral campaign whose couple-percentage vote draw will only provide talking points for those who deny the existence of a broad progressive constituency – a constituency which has largely turned on Nader not out of bigotry, but out of urgent insistence on immediate change in the direction of this nation.
House Democrats get tough on the exterminator:
Top House Democrats today condemned Representative Tom DeLay, the leader of the Republican majority, declaring that the latest ethics case against him proved that he had been corrupted by power and was unfit to lead. “The ethical cloud that has been hanging over the Capitol has burst,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said at a news briefing. “Mr. DeLay has proven himself to be ethically unfit to lead the party.` Other prominent Democrats joined Ms. Pelosi in condemning Mr. DeLay and calling for his replacement during a question-and-answer session that seemed to signal a new level of partisan bitterness in the House with elections less than four weeks away. “Isolated incidents may be rationalized and minimized, but consistent patterns are powerful proof of corrupt practices,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip.
Memo to Dick Cheney:
Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles within months after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and its ability to produce such weapons had significantly eroded by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector for Iraq said in a report made public Wednesday. The report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, intended to offer a near-final judgment about Iraq and its weapons, said Iraq, while under pressure from the United Nations, had “essentially destroyed” its illicit weapons ability by the end of 1991, with its last secret factory, a biological weapons plant, eliminated in 1996. Mr. Duelfer said that even during those years, Saddam Hussein had aimed at “preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted.” But he said he had found no evidence of any concerted effort by Iraq to restart the programs.
More debate errata:
No surprise that Cheney’s relationship with the truth is about as close as his relationship with, say, Nelson Mandela. But while there’ve been plenty of more significant lies from him and his campaign, one is particularly easy to shoot down with one pic:
Speaking of which, it takes a special kind of chutzpah for someone on a ticket with George Bush to use the term AWOL to describe his opponent’s attendance Senate record rather than, say, his running mate’s attendance at one of those institutions which contextualize the expression AWOL (no, not Yale).
And speaking of strange imagery, who thought it would be a good idea to trot out Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) to announce that Cheney took Edwards behind a wood shed. Bizarre sexual imagery aside, is that really the Republican message to America? Now back to the bizarre sexual imagery…
Very good: “They value wealth. We value work.” I’ve always wished the Democrats would make more of the moral sinkhole behind having the government take a larger chunk of the money you make working than the money you make investing. That, and that they’d come up with better catch phrases. That one’s a keeper.
Josh Eidelson 