So far, it’s been a week of high-profile defections from the Bush-Cheney Campaign and the Bush agenda.

Paul Bremer, who ran the American occupation, is calling the administration out on costly errors:

White House officials today found themselves explaining recent remarks by the former top American administrator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, that the United States did not have enough troops in Iraq and had “paid a big price” for it. In a speech on Monday to an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, West Va., Mr. Bremer said that when he arrived in Baghdad on May 6, 2003, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, there was “horrid” looting going on. “We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” Mr. Bremer said. “We never had enough troops on the ground.” In a Sept. 16 speech at DePauw University, Mr. Bremer said that he raised his concerns about inadequate troop levels a number of times within the administration, but that he should have been `even more insistent” when no action was taken. Mr. Bush has asserted a number of times that there were as many troops in Iraq as the military deemed necessary. Mr. Bremer, whose remarks were first reported Monday in The Washington Post, served for more than a year in Iraq, up until the handover of power on June 28.

Senator Chafee is voting for a write-in:

For Mr. Chafee, who was a prep school buddy of the president’s brother Jeb and whose father, the late Senator John Chafee, was close to the first President Bush, that day was the beginning of an estrangement with the president, whom he had worked to elect. In the months since, he has opposed Mr. Bush on everything from tax cuts to gay marriage and the war in Iraq. Now, this life-long Republican has concluded that he cannot cast his ballot for the leader of his party. “I’ll vote Republican,” he said, explaining that he would choose a write-in candidate, perhaps George Bush the elder, as a symbolic act of protest. Asked if he wanted Senator John Kerry to be president, Mr. Chafee shook his head sadly, as if to say he could not entertain the question. “I’ve been disloyal enough,” he said.

And John McCain’s Communications Director for the past few years is voting for Kerry:

A man who until last week was one of Sen. John McCain’s top aides is endorsing John Kerry for president, asserting that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have “waged an unprecedentedly cynical and divisive campaign.”…Wittmann said the point he is making is that the Bush administration has “betrayed” efforts to create a new politics of national greatness and unity in the aftermath of 9/11 through its divisive tax policies and the war in Iraq. Bush did not invent our enemies, Wittmann writes. “But, despite all his bravado and swagger, he has made it more difficult to build a domestic and international political coalition to ultimately prevail against our terrorist adversaries. He has bred distrust by driving a cynical partisan agenda that seeks to reward the wealthy, while branding his political adversaries as vaguely unpatriotic.”

This is probably not how Bush and Cheney were hoping to go into this week’s debates.

My op-ed in today’s YDN, responding to the Yale – New Haven Hospital’s media spin on critics of its development strategy, is on-line here:

Two weeks ago, feeling the heat from mobilization by community members, New Haven’s City Plan Commission denied a rubber stamp to a Yale-New Haven Hospital project for the first time in recent memory. Sharing his view of hospital critics who had turned out with concerns about the its development program, hospital spokesman Vin Petrini told this newspaper in a Sept. 23 article that they “can’t have it both ways. Either they support the cancer center, or they don’t.” Petrini’s is a clever rhetorical trick and a shameful political smear: Paint whoever stalls your chosen development approach as soft on cancer. The hospital owes all of us – most of all, those neighbors whose quality of life is affected by every hospital expansion – more candor and less bluster. The hospital’s concerned neighbors, who want to see cancer treated as much as anyone, deserve an honest dialogue about the impact of the hospital’s plans on their access to jobs, housing and health care.

Democrat Brad Carson on Oklahoma Senate opponent Tom Coburn in the debate going on right now:

Plenty of times we’ve sent someone to represent us in Washington who hasn’t done anything for us. But we’ve never sent someone whose platform was that he wouldn’t do anything for us.

Pretty much sums up the problem with compassionate conservatism: Few Americans really believe, as Dr. Coburn just said he does, that government can’t do anything to create jobs (/improve healthcare/provide housing/redress discrimination etc.). But a whole slew of Republican candidates do.

Going after Coburn from the hard right on weapons systems and the PATRIOT ACT? Less visionary. Especially the trying to pull Republicans into your corner by accusing their candidate of not giving enough support to the President part.

The Labor Research Association offers a timely reminder of the impact this election will have on the future of the National Labor Relations Board:

The five-member NLRB is now controlled by Bush appointees. The winner of the November election will control new appointments for all five seats plus the crucial general counsel position. One NLRB member s term expires in December of this year; two expire in 2005, one in 2006, and one in 2007. The general counsel’s term expires in June 2005. The composition of the NLRB members over the next presidential term will set the direction for the board at a crucial juncture in its history. Within the next four years, 33 percent of the entire NLRB staff will be eligible for retirement, and one third of those are supervisors. Hiring and training replacements for this large group of NLRB staffers will heavily influence the fairness and quality of the agency’s work for decades to come.

The next president will also determine if the NLRB will be rebuilt as a viable agency or will continue to be limited by low budgets and understaffing. Bush’s 2004 budget increased the agency’s funding by only 2.2 percent despite an estimated 6.7 percent increase in the NLRB’s caseload for the year. The number of full-time staff at the NLRB has declined from 1,946 in 2002 to 1,875 this year. With rent and salary increases pushing costs significantly higher, the NLRB faced an $8.7 million shortfall this year. Budget shortfalls forced the agency to cut back on the time and funds devoted to unfair labor practice investigations and trials and preparations for representation elections. In 2004, the NLRB handled an estimated 30,000 unfair labor practices and 6,000 representation cases. Although workers’ rights have been weakened under the Bush administration’s NLRB, it essentially remains the court of last resort for most workers and their unions. The composition of the NLRB over the next four years will also shape the agency’s position on the crucial issue of card-check recognition. The Bush-controlled NLRB has weakened this important vehicle for workers’ representation rights and is planning to review the legality of card-check recognition within the next year.

The Netherlands’ government plan to cut social spending ignites the largest protest there in decades:

Thousands have taken to the streets of Amsterdam to demonstrate against plans to cut public spending – the largest protest there for over two decades. Among the 200,000 people taking part, were many carrying black balloons bearing the slogan, “The Netherlands Deserve Better”. Government austerity reforms aim to control the country’s budget and give the economy a new lease of life. But angry unions say the changes would erode the country’s welfare state. Reforms to welfare support and health coverage, as well as a freeze on civil service salaries and the minimum wage, have sparked a wave of discontent across the Netherlands.

“They’re taking away our social security, which we’re very proud of in the Netherlands,” Sjerp Holterman, a negotiator a trade union told the Associated Press. The plan includes 2.4 billion euros ($2.9bn) of previously announced spending cuts and income measures. The BBC’s Geraldine Coughlan, in The Hague, says a poll by national radio found that 60% of the Dutch public opposed the plans but the government hopes to have the budget approved by the end of the year. The unions, our correspondents says, have accused the government of abandoning the traditional Dutch model of consensus-based labour relations. Union federations have been boycotting talks with government and employers since last month and demonstrated in several parts of the country where strike action is normally rare.

10 San Francisco hotels respond to the UNITE HERE strike by locking out workers:

Thousands of casino hotel service workers at more than half of Atlantic City ’s 12 casinos walked off their jobs onto picket lines Friday. The workers, members of Local 54 of UNITE HERE, chanted and carried picket signs that said, “No Contract No Peace” outside seven casinos starting at 6 a.m. Union negotiators reached agreement late Thursday with Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts, thereby averting a strike at Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Marina and Trump Plaza . At Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino, hundreds of striking workers marched outside the casino’s entrances. Kamal Sabbagh, 43, a bartender at Caesars, carried a red and white picket sign that said, “On Strike.” “We’d like to go back as soon as possible, but not without obtaining our goals. We mean business, 100 percent,” he said. Elsewhere throughout the resort, everyone from bell captains to bartenders, pastry chefs to porters walked picket lines at Harrah’s Atlantic City , Showboat Hotel-Casino, Bally’s Atlantic City , Caesars Atlantic City, the Atlantic City Hilton, Resorts Atlantic City, and the Tropicana Casino and Resort.

And he seemed like such a nice guy:

Representative Tom DeLay, the majority leader rebuked by House ethics officials for pressuring a fellow member to switch his vote on a health care bill, still faces potentially more serious accusations, subjecting him to a new scrutiny that even some Republicans say could complicate his political future. Mr. DeLay, the take-no-prisoners Texan known for maintaining strict discipline in his caucus, is entangled in a series of inquiries here and in Texas regarding his fund-raising and other activities. In Texas, three of his top aides have been indicted; in Washington, the House ethics panel is deciding whether to initiate a formal investigation.

On Friday, Republicans publicly rallied around their leader, though some said privately that the surprise ethics rebuke on Thursday – the second for Mr. DeLay, who was previously chastised for pressuring interest groups to hire Republicans – could hinder the leader if he tried to become speaker. Democrats, who are already making Mr. DeLay an issue in their campaigns, attacked him on Friday for what Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, called a “continued abuse of power.” She said there was “an ethical cloud over this Capitol because of how he is conducting business here.”

I’d say this means they’re nervous:

So the Fox reporter covering the Kerry campaign puts together this Kerry-bashing parody right out of the RNC playbook with phony quotes intended to peg him as girlish fool and somehow it found its way on the Fox website as a news item. Imagine that.

This letter posted to Andrew Sullivan’s site is instructive:

So I put the TV on mute, and spent the next hour or so talking on the phone and just watching the candidates. It was pretty interesting, actually. It’s often said that part of what people look for in the debates are facial expressions, posture, body language and just relative poise, and at least on that measure, Kerry won in a landslide. Watching on C-SPAN’s split screen there was a stark contrast between the candidates. Kerry looked confident, stood fully upright throughout, even looked commanding. Even when being criticized (and you could guess when that was happening), Kerry just smiled, nodded and took it. Bush on the other hand often looked irritable, kept oddly twitching his lips (which was pretty noticeable on mute), rolled his eyes, hunched over the podium, sighed (that horrid crime Al Gore was convicted of), and basically looked insulted that he had to be there—as if he was thinking “but I’ve already TOLD you that talking point.”

As is this one:

Last night about 40 minutes into the debate my son, a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, called from his barracks room. He let me know Kerry had just earned 5 votes from him and 4 other troops watching the debate in his room. He got back from Iraq in April. He was at a FOB just south of Fallujah when he was there.

UNITE HERE employees stage an Atlantic City walkout:

Hotel employees at 7 of Atlantic City’s 12 casinos walked off the job at 6 a.m. today, just as weekend crowds were beginning to arrive. The workers, whose ranks include housekeepers, bartenders, waiters and porters, began picketing outside while guests inside continued to throw down their bets or slip quarters into slot machines. The strike did not affect dealers and other employees of the gambling operations, who remained on the job. The casinos affected by the walkout are the Tropicana Casino and Resort, Resorts Atlantic City, Harrah’s Atlantic City, Showboat Casino-Hotel, Bally’s Atlantic City, Caesars Atlantic City and the Atlantic City Hilton. The striking workers are members of Local 54 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, whose contract with the casinos has expired. The most significant issue separating the two sides is the practice of subcontracting by casinos, which lease space to restaurants and bars without requiring them to use union workers. “We have 10,000 people on strike and thousands on the picket lines,” said Chris Magoulas, a spokesman for the union. “I think the message is that we are completely serious about achieving our goals of keeping middle-class jobs in the gaming industry.”