THE FULCRUM

• G.W. Bush: 23%


• J.F. Kerry: 70%


• Tie: 7%

17096 votes

Bush, allegedly, is tough. Instead of being tough, he looked weak and small compared to the Presidential-looking Kerry. And that isn't just spin, Kerry seemed to gain in stature as Bush lost his. If the situations were reversed, and Bush was the challenger, his campaign would be all over but the voting.

The provision would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to issue new regulations to exclude from the protection of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, any suspected terrorist - thereby allowing them to be deported or transferred to a country that may engage in torture. The provision would put the burden of proof on the person being deported or rendered to establish "by clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured," would bar the courts from having jurisdiction to review the Secretary's regulations, and would free the Secretary to deport or remove terrorist suspects to any country in the world at will - even countries other than the person's home country or the country in which they were born. The provision would also apply retroactively.

• On the morning drive-time radio show my wife likes to listen to, the female in the duo is a Republican and likes to make herself sound well informed - as you'd like to be if you were spouting off every morning on the radio. This morning however, after being informed that about 1 in 4 viewers of the Presidential debates change their minds afterwards, she said "do you think 1 in 4 people watch the debates?" She had absolutely no idea that her concept of the statistics involved were completely wrong.


• Two of my co-workers were speaking, one of whom is a rare Democrat in the office. She was speaking with the other person about recent events in the news and he replied that he didn't watch the news. My Democratic friend, incredulous, asked if he intended to vote and he replied, "of course." But he was nonplussed when asked how he could vote if he knew nothing about the issues. When pressed, he admitted that he was going to vote Republican because, "I've always voted that way and my family votes Republican."

Sen. Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country. I will vote for him enthusiastically.

I celebrate, along with other Americans, the diversity of opinion in this country. But let it be based on careful thought. I urge everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, to avoid voting for a ticket merely because it carries the label of the party of one’s parents or of our own ingrained habits.

But what the administration had hoped would be a triumphant achievement is clouded by doubts, even within the Pentagon, about whether a system that is on its way to costing more than $100 billion will work. Several key components have fallen years behind schedule and will not be available until later. Flight tests, plagued by delays, have yet to advance beyond elementary, highly scripted events.

The paucity of realistic test data has caused the Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator to conclude that he cannot offer a confident judgment about the system's viability. He estimated its likely effectiveness to be as low as 20 percent.

"A system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible capability," said retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, who headed the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s. "I cannot recall any military system being deployed in such a manner."

[snip]

"We're in this hugely expensive race to build something, but we don't know how much it'll cost in the end or what it'll do," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee.

An audit by the Government Accountability Office, released in April, cited an absence of reliable, complete baseline estimates of system performance and cost. Without this information, the GAO said, policymakers in the Pentagon and Congress "do not have a full understanding" of the system's overall cost and actual capabilities. The audit concluded that the system being fielded this year remains "largely unproven."

Democratic lawmakers opposed to Bush's program concede the debate has shifted. It is no longer an ideological battle, centered on arms control concerns, over whether to deploy at all. Now, they say, it is a more practical argument over how much to build and how fast.

"The debate is now about whether or not we continue to press ahead at the full speed we're going, with record amounts of money being spent, despite the fact that there's been no realistic testing," said Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Under Saddam, Beytool's school was only allowed to teach the strict, state-approved curriculum. But now, it's a private school and they are free to teach whatever they like. And in a sign of the changing times here, the focus is now overwhelmingly on Islamic education. Instead of teaching the alphabet, the goal in Beytool's class is to memorize 28 basic verses from the Koran, and learn how to wash before prayers.

The school's director says: "the most important thing for a child to know is religion."

At universities too, religious hard-liners are taking hold — at Baghdad's Mustansiriya, self-appointed morality police now guard the campus gate. They recently sent a grad student away because she was wearing pants.

"What we risk having 10 or 15 years down the line is an absence of lawyers, an absence of technicians, doctors, engineers who are able to push the country forward," says Middle East analyst Turi Munthe.

During the past 30 days, more than 2,300 attacks have been directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north, according to comprehensive data compiled by a private security company with access to military intelligence reports and its own network of Iraqi informants.

The sweeping geographical reach of the attacks, from Nineveh and Salahuddin provinces in the northwest to Babylon and Diyala in the center and Basra in the south, a more widespread resistance than the isolated pockets of insurgency described by Iraqi government officials.

But most of all, military officers argue that despite the rise in bloody attacks over the past 30 days, the insurgents have yet to win a single battle.

"We have had zero tactical losses; we have lost no battles," said a senior U.S. military officer.

"We are at a very critical time," he added. "The only way we can lose this battle is if the American people decide we don't want to fight anymore."

Oil prices to 'cause global recession'

Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the president of Opec, the Organisation of Oil Producing Countries, today admitted that the cartel was powerless to halt spiralling oil costs, as the price per barrel broke through the $50 mark in New York overnight and in Asian deals earlier today.

The Indonesia official, reacting to the latest record oil prices, warned that constantly rising oil prices could bring about a global economic recession.

"Right now, Opec cannot do anything and the high oil price can cause a recession," he was reported as saying by AFP in Jakarta.

Detroit police searched Tuesday for a man who opened fire in a Detroit home day-care center, critically wounding three people, including a 3-year-old child, officials said.

Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings told reporters that the man was wearing a black jacket and black pants and was carrying a steel blue, automatic gun.

North Korea said yesterday that it has added to its small arsenal of nuclear weapons, saying all of the uranium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods had been weaponized.

If the assertion by the reclusive and unpredictable neo-Stalinist regime is accurate, Pyongyang may have sufficient fissile material for an additional six to eight nuclear bombs.

In addition, the audit by Glenn A. Fine, the agency's inspector general, found that more than one-third of al Qaeda intercepts authorized by a secret federal court were not reviewed with 12 hours of collection as required by FBI Director Robert Mueller.

[snip]

This backlog existed even though the FBI's language services funding had increased from $21.5 million in fiscal 2001 to about $70 million in fiscal 2004. The number of linguists has risen from 883 to 1,214 over that period.

Senior Army personnel officers, as well as top Army Reserve and National Guard officials, say the Army's ability to recruit and retain soldiers will steadily erode unless combat tours are shortened, to some length between six and nine months, roughly equivalent to the seven-month tours that are the norm in the Marine Corps.

But other Army officials responsible for combat operations and war planning have significant concerns that the Army - at its current size and as now configured - cannot meet projected requirements for Iraq and Afghanistan unless active duty and reserve troops spend 12 months on the ground in those combat zones.

One factor, which senior Army officers disclosed last week, is how to preserve the ability to maintain the current level of American troops in Iraq at least through 2007, if longer tours of duty end up discouraging recruitment and re-enlistment.

"Our all-volunteer force is the issue here," one Army officer said. "The volunteer forces and their families - when will they draw the line? That's the question uppermost on our mind."

The Alabama races in particular haven't gotten that much national press attention in the past. And one of the most lizardly passages in the article describes how Rove launched a whispering campaign against one Democratic opponent suggesting that the candidate -- a sitting Alabama state Supreme Court Justice, who had long worked on child welfare issues -- was in fact a pedophile ...

Secretary of State Colin Powell sees the situation in Iraq "getting worse" as planned elections approach, and the top U.S. military commander for Iraq says he expects more violence ahead.

[snip]

Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East, warned that voting may not be possible in parts of Iraq where the violence is too intense.

Stocks were likely to tumble at the start of trading Monday morning, as investors returned to Wall Street to find crude-oil futures nudging toward $50 a barrel.

About two hours before the start of trading, futures-market activity on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index indicated that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was likely to fall by about 20 points.

Crude-oil prices hovered near an all-time high of $49.40 Monday morning as supply fears in Iraq and other key producers roiled electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Violence in Iraq and Saudi Arabia put the market on edge, and OPEC's president said the cartel's recent decision to boost production by a million barrels a day from November has failed to have any "psychological impact on the market."