Do you believe in omens?

A Redskins loss at home is supposed to portend a defeat for the incumbent president. So check this out! The Redskins just scored to make it a nailbiter -- figures.

UPDATE: This headline says it all -- "Packers Win -- Kerry's In!" Got a laugh from the always-good Glen Macknow on WIP, who wondered whether Bush would go ahead with the election, or just concede now.

Pa. undecideds break for Kerry

This just moved on the AP wire -- we will post a link when we get one:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A panel of once-undecided Pennsylvania voters has tilted toward Democrat John Kerry, saying they are fed up with the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and what they called an untrustworthy White House.

"I've lost my trust in him, and I can’t support him," Tabiz said.

30 seconds over the race -- weekend edition

Apparently, the winner on Tuesday depends on whether the Redskins win or lose today. We guess we've been just wasting our time, then. Here's the ponderous pre-election preview you've come to expect on pre-Election Sunday. Electoral-vote.com is predicting a Bush victory with 280 votes, if you believe that the GOP carries Michigan and maybe New Jersey, something no expert does.

Slate has Kerry up with 272 electoral votes, thanks to a beltway from Ohio to Minnesota. Josh Marshall explains why the Osama tape probably isn't helping Bush, despite the media blather. Maureen Dowd reaches the same conclusion independently. And "the Most Trusted Man in America" thinks the OBL tape is a Karl Rove production.

Here's a few questions to ask in the voting booth. Why didn't Bush & Co. kill Zarqawi when they had the chance? Did Bush really talk about invading Iraq back in 1999? Why did the Pentagon harass a Halliburton whistleblower? Why are we still learning about unprotected weapons sites in Iraq? Why do "senior Bush officials" call the new bin Laden tape "good" for them? Why does it look like the Pentagon is getting ready for a draft? Is Ohio really the new Florida?

N.Y. Times: 9/11 cover-up

Earlier this week, we told you the story of two Ground Zero workers, including a NYC firefighter, who allege that three of the four "black boxes" from the planes that struck the World Trade Center were recovered. We hope that when the silly season ends, these claims will be investigated more fully, by Congress or a Kerry administration if there is one.

Now, comes a former colleague -- and one of the hardest-working and best reporters in the business -- Jim Dwyer of the New York Times. This morning, he's reporting that the Bush administration is covering up a section of the 9/11 commission report that alleges lies and holes in the official version of how the FAA and NORAD responded to the hijackings.

It's taken three years, but people are finally waking up to this. Even Osama bin Laden -- who will burn in hell some day but does know a little more about 9/11 than we do -- said in his videotape yesterday that he was amazed the U.S. military didn't respond sooner.

This is from the New York Times story:

One last chapter of the investigation by the Sept. 11 commission, a supplement completed more than two months ago, has not yet been made public by the Justice Department, and officials say it is unlikely to be released before the presidential election, even though that had been a major goal of deadlines set for the panel.

The commission, in its final report, said that the true picture "did not reflect discredit" on individuals, but that unreliable testimony about the events had made it harder to understand the problems.

OBL Addresses American People

(October) Surprise! We're not making this up. Here's the bulletin:

Oct 29, 3:09 PM (ET)

It said the tape, to be aired at 4 p.m. EDT, would discuss the reasons behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and their repercussions. It gave no further details.

He's probably tricking the cable networks, and he's just going to give his standard stump speech.

UPDATE: Yup, he's baaaaaaaaaaack. Looks like he's gained a few pounds since we last saw him. We wonder if he was waiting for the markets to close at 4 p.m.

UPDATE: Actually, the Dow shot up about 30 points the instant that the Osama tape was announced, so apparently terror is good for the economy. Also, the wingnuts over on the far-right Web site, Free Republic, are saying things like: "This is terrific news for the President." Disgusting.

Bush's shameless 9/11 ploy in Pa.

One of our favorite Web sites, the Raw Story, has a scoop about a new mailing that the Bush-Cheney camp's been sending out here in Pennsylvania. It shows a number of newspaper front pages (almost all from swing states, for what it's worth) that show the World Trade Center ablaze and even the second plane striking the South Tower.

It's probably the lowest moment of a low campaign. If any of our readers (hello?) in Pennsylvania have recieved this, we'd love to hear from you. The Raw Story has downloaded the images. Here some of their story.

On the front side, the ad asks in red print, “How Can John Kerry Lead America In A Time of War?” It adds three subsequent lines, “Kerry: Changing Positions,” “Kerry: Cutting Defense” and “Kerry: Slashing Intelligence.”

The third side details the programs Kerry allegedly voted “to cut.” These programs were part of broad Defense Department packages, which Kerry is believed to have voted against in protest of excessive Pentagon spending .

October surprise -- new Clinton sex scandal

OK, maybe it's not THE October surprise, but it's interesting to learn that in the same week that Bill Clinton hits the Pa. campaign trail for John Kerry, a new hanky-panky charge comes out against the Big Dawg, right here in Philadelphia.

Former Miss Arkansas Sally Perdue -- a long-rumored Clinton paramour -- filed a federal sexual harassment suit here yesterday, not against the ex-president but against a Quaker meeting house in West Chester, Pa., where she worked from 2001 to 2003.

The lawsuit states that her problems resulted because she "was involved in a sexual relationship with former President William Jefferson Clinton" before she took a job as director of fundraising and PR with the Quaker group. It says she suffered from sexual and religious harassment because people knew about her affair with Clinton -- and that she was fired after complaining to the federal EEOC about it.

The story was broken in the Daily News today by reporter Jim Smith. The lawsuit was filed under the name of Myra Belle "Sally" Miller. Although the one-time beauty queen has gone under the name Sally Miller Perdue in the past, it was difficult late last night to confirm with 100 percent certainly that Myra Belle Miller and Sally Perdue are the same person. Smith called the plaintiff at her current home in Alexandria, Va., and was told "in a distinct Southern accent" to contact her lawyers.

This morning, some additional research by Campaign Extra! seems to leave little doubt that the plaintiff is the former Arkansas pageant winner who once appeared in a Playboy centerfold. (see UPDATE below.) One advanced search engine shows that a 65-year-old "Sally M. Perdue" lives in Alexandria, used to live in West Chester, Pa., and was issued a Social Security number in Arkansas in the mid-1950s.

The lawsuit would be legal confirmation of an allegation that Perdue reportly aired on the Sally Jessy Rafael show some years back. She said the affair with Clinton took place in 1983 when he was governor of Arkansas, and was aided and abetted by state troopers. But she vanished again after the interview and avoided the hoopla of the Monica Lewinsky era.

Is the timing of the lawsuit political? There's no evidence to suggest that, although at a time when the GOP is eager to drum up a big turnout among social conservatives, what better reminder of what they saw as the moral squalor of the Clinton years.

The suit claims that supervisors suggested she date a 91-year-old Quaker board member, placed photos of "elderly and scantily-clad men" on her desk, handed her "unsolicited religious literature" and implied she was a "fallen woman, told her to wear "longer skirts and less makeup", stole her mail, vandalized her car and said she'd be "better off if she learned Quaker ways."

It states that she was told by one of her managers in February 2001 that a school board member knew of the sexual relationship with Clinton.

"The relationship had in fact occurred but ended before" Miller started working with the Quakers, the suit notes. "Despite the fact that" Miller "made it clear she did not wish to discuss same, they began subjecting" her "to a continuing pattern of harassment and discrimination based on her sex and religion," the suit alleges.

It also alleges that she was told she was too friendly with male parents of schoolchildren.

She claims the defendants "sarcastically" advised her when she received phone messages and calls that "Bill Clinton" was on the phone.

UPDATE: This correction will run in the 11/2 Daily News: A story in Friday's newspaper reported on a suit that Myra Belle Sally Miller, filed against her employer, the West Chester Meeting of Friends, for alleging discriminating against her after learning of her prior sexual relationship with President Clinton. That article stated that Ms. Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, had appeared as a Playboy centerfold. That statement is incorrect. We apologize to Ms. Perdue for this incorrect statement.

It's the Great Pumpkin, George W. Bush! W.'s Pa. blunder

The only place that George W. visited more times as president than his beloved ranch in Crawford is right here in Pennsylvania -- a whopping 43 times. And yet, how fitting is it that Bush ended his Quixotic quest for Pa.'s 21 electoral votes in a pumpkin patch in Bucks County, waiting for a victory about as likely the Great Pumpkin's arrival Sunday night.

Al Hunt, our favorite member of the "Capital Gang," nails it in the Wall Street Journal. He writes:

Almost immediately following the cliffhanger 2000 election, Bush strategists identified the Keystone State as an opportunity target. Much of that was based on the theory they could walk a delicate line and improve the Republican candidate's standing in the populous four-county Philadelphia suburbs -- which lean Republican economically, but are socially liberal -- and at the same time do better than last time in western Pennsylvania, with its sizable pro-gun and pro-life constituencies.

"A lot of my people who are usually talking about guns and abortion in October," says veteran Western Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha, "now are talking about outsourcing and prescription drugs."

30 seconds over the race -- Pre-Recount Friday edition

It doesn't matter who wins Tuesday -- America only has one Boss. In the end, will Halliburton put Kerry over the top? Or will it be the White House's ever-unraveling story line on those missing explosives in Iraq? (This photographic lie unraveled yesterday, too.) Here's our proposed title for a Bush campaign documentary -- "Bad News Dogs." But that hasn't stopped thousands of voters from taking "The Bush Pledge." We knew there was some reason that that electoral-vote.com has Bush in the lead with 281 electoral votes.

You can't believe how much block-the-vote crap is going on. Salon.com goes to NASA to prove that Bush really was wearing something on his back in the debates. (Non-subscribers click "Day Pass" and watch a short ad). And a Princeton math professor has a proposal for reforming the process...oops, that's the World Series he's talking about. Spreaking of math, Krugman just about sums it all up.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's -- "What, there's an election next week, too?" -- Daily News: Identical triplet cousin William Bunch (no relation) tells the electorate to take a chill pill. Chris Brennan goes to Yardley to wait for the Great Pumpkin -- and President Bush shows up instead! Teresa Heinz Kerry woos her fellow African-Americans here in Philly.

Signe Wilkinson raises the terror-alert level -- on possible Supreme Court vacancies. How seriously can you take an endorsement of Bush from a politician everyone called Francis "The Talking Mule" Rafferty. But Elmer Smith is deadly serious about the election, and he thinks Bush is going to win.

9/11 "black box" cover-up at Ground Zero? -- a Campaign Extra!/PDN exclusive

Thanks for visiting -- when you're done, please check out our new blog, called Attytood. It's got more on Gannon/Guckert, and all the same fair but dangerously unbalanced political commentary you came to expect from Campaign Extra! -- just with a new name and some new features.

This is the more comprehensive version of our story appearing in today's Philadelphia Daily News.

Two men who worked extensively in the wreckage of the World Trade Center claim they helped federal agents find three of the four “black boxes” from the jetliners that struck the towers on 9/11 - contradicting the official account.

Both the independent 9/11 Commission and federal authorities continue to insist that none of the four devices - a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) from the two planes - were ever found in the wreckage.

But New York City firefighter Nicholas DeMasi has written in a recent book -- self-published by several Ground Zero workers -- that he escorted federal agents on an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and helped them locate three of the four.

His account is supported by a volunteer, Mike Bellone, whose efforts at Ground Zero have been chronicled in the New York Times and elsewhere. Bellone said assisted DeMasi and the agents and that saw a device that resembling a “black box” in the back of the firefighter’s ATV.

Their story raises the question of whether there was a some type of cover-up at Ground Zero. Federal aviation officials - blaming the massive devastation - have said the World Trade Center attacks seem to be the only major jetliner crashes in which the critical devices were never located.

A footnote to the 9/11 Commission Report issued this summer flatly states: “The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175” - the two planes that hit the Trade Center - “were not found.”

And officials for the FBI - which oversaw the cleanup at Ground Zero - and the New York City Fire Department repeated this week that the devices were never recovered.

The “black boxes” - actually orange - could have provided valuable new information about the worst terror attack to ever take place on American soil.

The cockpit voice recorder uses two microphones to capture the sounds of the cockpit for the last 30 minutes of a doomed flight on a tape loop. In the case of the hijacked 9/11 jetliners, the devices should have captured any conversations or actions involving the hijackers, as well as radio transmissions.

The flight data recorder records things like airspeed, heading, and altitude. Both devices - located in the tail of the airplane - emit loud “pings” so they can be located even in ocean jetliner crashes, like the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island.

They are built to survive an impact of enormous force - 3400 Gs - and a fire of 1100 degrees Celsius for one hour, somewhat higher than official estimates of the World Trade Center blaze.

“It's extremely rare that we don't get the recorders back. I can't recall another domestic case in which we did not recover the recorders,” Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, told CBS News in 2002. However, officials said little of the jets was recovered.

DeMasi was with now defunct Engine Company 261 in 2001. He wrote up his recollections of the Ground Zero recovery in a glossy book self-published by a group that calls itself Trauma Recovery Assistance for Children, or the TRAC Team. The book was published in 2003 but received little notice.

(There's more on the book and how people can get it at this site.)
DeMasi, an all-terrain vehicles hobbyist - said he donated 4 ATVs to the clean-up and became known as “the ATV Guy.”

“At one point, I was asked to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes,” he wrote. “We were getting ready to go out. My ATV was parked at the top of the stairs at the Brooks Brothers entrance area. We loaded up about a million dollars worth of equipment and strapped it into the ATV...”

“There were a total of four black boxes. We found three.”

Efforts over several days to locate and interview DeMasi, who is now said to be with the FDNY’s Marine Unit, were not successful.

But his account was verified by another member of the so-called TRAC Team, recovery site volunteer Bellone. He recalled FBI agents arriving for the search one day in early October, setting up their equipment near Brooks Brothers. He said he didn’t go out with them on the ATV but observed their search.

At one point, Bellone said he observed the team with a box that appeared charred but was redish-orange with two white stripes. Pictures of the flight recorders on the NTSB and other Web sites show devices that are orange, with two white stripes.

“There was the one that I saw, and two others were recovered in different locations - but I wasn’t there for the other two,” Bellone said. He said the FBI agents left with the boxes.

If the account by DeMasi and Bellone is true, it’s not clear what motive federal authorities would have for claiming they weren’t found.

By the same token, however, it’s not clear what incentive either man would have to lie.

An FBI spokesman in New York, Jim Margolin, said after checking with the leader of the Ground Zero investigation that none of the boxes were recovered.

Frank Gribbon, the FDNY spokesman, also said “no one in the Department is aware of the recovery of any of the airline "black boxes" at the WTC site.”

Bellone has encounted some unrelated problems in connection with the TRAC group, however. In April, the New York Post reported (story not available online) that TRAC owned money to a number of creditors, including the company that published the book. Fire officials also told Bellone, who was made an honorary firefighter by a New York engine company, that he couldn’t wear an official uniform on school visits.

Red Sox Millionaires for Bush

The Bush-Cheney campaign, in its latest attempt to change the topic, is sending out an email to journalists with the subject heading: "In Case You Missed It: Red Sox Hero Endorses President Bush."

The hero in question is pitcher Curt Schilling, who threw in a political plug when talking to Charles Gibson of "Good Morning America": "And make sure you tell everybody to vote, and vote Bush next week."

We're all thrilled by the Red Sox win, and marvelled at Schilling's ability to pitch with pain. But it should be noted that on top of his $12 million salary this season, the ex-Phillie (sigh) guaranteed himself an additional $15 million down the road with the World Series win.

Hello? Of course Schilling wants Bush, who enacted the biggest tax cut for multi-millionaires in American history! Thanks for reminding us, Bush-Cheney campaign. Schilling supports the guy who'll keep his taxes low, while his working-class fans get stuck with the bill for Iraq.

It's a good thing we can admire athletes solely for what they do on the playing field.

30 seconds over the race

Breaking news: Pigs can fly! Now, what about the political curse of the Washington Redskins? Today's must-read story: The Washington Post chronicles the goon-squad tactics at Bush campaign rallies. Please Mr. Postman: Don't screw up the voting in Florida.

The latest spin from the White House on those missing weapons is just that -- Josh Marshall explains why. Here's why Hawaii, West Virginia, and Arkansas are back on the political radar screen. Maureen Dowd looks at what's really scary this Halloween: Dick Cheney.

Confused by the polls? Slate tries to help. And the New York Times has learned that most bloggers hate journalists, so we guess we must hate ourselves. But finally, we'd like to thank all the little people out there.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's dog-eat-dog Daily News: Political trickery is everywhere, and Erin Einhorn is on the case! John Baer is fretting again today -- this time about whether Pennsylvania will be the next Florida. If P. Diddy wants voters to show up at the polls, he'd better learn to start showing up himself! Those darned surrogates are running Chris Brennan ragged. Bush and Kerry Halloween masks -- almost as scary as the real thing! Michael Smerconish goes fishing for red herring -- and catches a military absentee-ballot scandal. And the Jon Stewart fame clock: 14:45 and counting.

Yes!

One curse down, one to go.

Buried in the Wash. Times: al-Qaeda wants Bush!

Here's a translation of a story from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times that's getting prominent play on the Drudge Report. (shocking, right?) The headline: "Terrorists hope to defeat Bush through Iraq violence."

The truth is, there's thousands of insurgents in Iraq (more every day, in fact) and yes, it wasn't hard for a WT reporter to find a couple to spout their desire to see an American president go down in flames, politically speaking, in next week's election.

"If the U.S. Army suffered numerous humiliating losses, [Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John] Kerry would emerge as the superman of the American people," said Mohammad Amin Bashar, a leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line clerical group that vocally supports the resistance.

Resistance leader Abu Jalal boasted that the mounting violence had already hurt Mr. Bush's chances. "American elections and Iraq are linked tightly together," he told a Fallujah-based Iraqi reporter. "We've got to work to change the election, and we've done so. With our strikes, we've dragged Bush into the mud."

We won't dwell on the fact that "liberated" Fallujah isn't safe enough for an American to go and do interviews. But we will point out this: The Washington Times buried the lead of the story! If you keep reading, you'll find that al-Qaeda actually supports Bush. Here's the real news:

Mowafaq Al-Tai, a London-educated architect and intellectual, said different types of resistance fighters have different views of the U.S. election. The most pro-Kerry, he said, are the former Saddam Hussein loyalists — Ba'ath Party members and others who think Washington might scale back its ambitions for Iraq if Mr. Kerry wins, allowing them to re-enter civic life.

The most pro-Bush, he said, are the foreign extremists. "They prefer Bush, because he's a provocative figure, and the more they can push people to the extreme, the better for their case."

Foreign extremists inside Iraq? Who might that be? Hmmm, could they possibly mean...al-Qaeda? You bet! So there you have it. America's most conservative newspaper says that the folks who killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11 want four more years of Bush in office.

Can you interpret that any other way?

www.undecided.com

Who could possibly be undecided at this point in the race? Nobody, right? Well, that nobody -- if you believe the polls -- is somewhere on the order of 7-10 million American voters, give or take.

This week, we learned that undecided voters even have their own Web site, called (unsurprsingly) undecided.com.The site carries articles both about, and for, undecided voters, and insists that unlike almost all other political sites, it's not "preaching to the choir."

Who's undecided? Here's what the editor of undecided.com, Pete Gray, told us in an email:

One type are looking for reason to believe that the challenger would be
preferable to the incumbent. They know the incumbent, and if they liked
him, they wouldn't be undecided. If the challenger can't impress them,
they'll stay home.

The other type has 'loyalty' to one party, but is unimpressed with that
party's candidate. They may never vote for the other party's candidate,
but they may stay home in droves.

We took a look at some of Pennsylvania's undecideds in today's Daily News. We found a small sample to be intelligent and informed -- but either stressed by work and family, waiting to hear Bush or Kerry address their issues, or just alienated from the process.

You can read the entire report below:

They're the rarest breed in the 2004 presidential election — and they’ve been unfairly stereotyped as apathetic, lazy, uncurious and out-and-out dumb.
They’re undecided voters, and the reality is they’re not that easy to pigeonhole. Listen to a real on-the-fence voter like Nancy Kelly of Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill.

Kelly, 56, an assistant to the pastor in a Catholic church, has been watching the candidates closely but is still waiting for one to address the issues that matter to her.

“I have yet to hear them say anything about compassion for the poor in this country,” she said. “I’m concerned about jobs, health care and children not being insured.”

There aren’t too many voters like Kelly, either in Pennsylvania or around the nation. This week’s Daily News/CN8 Keystone Poll — which had Kerry ahead in the state by a 49-44 percent margin — found just 7 percent of likely voters still haven’t made a decision about whom to vote for next Tuesday. That’s similar to the undecided numbers in nationwide surveys.

This year, with America’s partisan divide deeper than ever and with stark contrasts between Bush and Kerry both in style and on many of the key issues, the level of undecideds is very small, and relatively unchanged since summer.

So just who are these people?

The Keystone Poll numbers shed very little light. Not surprisingly, the undecideds tend to be moderates and independents, and they are slightly less educated than other voters, although it’s hard to generalize with such a small sample. They are more likely female — 10 percent of female voters vs. 4 percent of male voters — which could reflect busy schedules that leave precious little time for digesting the political debate.

The Keystone Poll director, G. Terry Madonna, political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College, said the undecideds also are more likely suburbanites, middle-aged and middle-class. “Some of them would be more with Kerry on the social and cultural issues,” he said, “but are more with Bush on security.”

The Daily News interviewed a handful of voters who told the pollsters they were undecided.

Sarah Smith, of Philadelphia’s Tacony neighborhood, would seem the archetypical undecided voter — 42 years old, mother of three children under the age of 10, and a waitress on weekends.

Smith said she was leaning toward Kerry, in part because she feels that too many jobs have been lost to outsourcing overseas under Bush’s watch.

But she’s just not sure about Kerry, saying there’s just something visceral she doesn’t like about the challenger. “He’s got a sneaky face or something,” she said.

For Robert T. Frederick, 78, a retiree living in Acme, Pa., in western Pennsylvania’s Fayette County, there’s a different problem. Until recently, he was a decided voter — for independent Ralph Nader, who failed to qualify for the ballot.

He said Nader “wanted to exorcise all the things in Washington — the corporations and the lobbyists and whatnot. I thought that was a good idea.”

Frederick said he’s been following the race closely, in part because he has two grandsons in the military — one of whom recently served in Iraq. He said he was leaning toward Kerry because “it seems like it’s time for a change.”

David Chao of Pittsburgh’s South Hills represents yet another type of undecided voter — alienated from the system. The 32-year-old computer-systems administrator admitted that he hasn’t cast a ballot for president since Bill Clinton in 1992, and there’s a good chance he won’t this year.

He thinks that large and corrupt corporations like Enron and Adelphia have tainted the political process in America.

“Those who are in power, whether political or economic, often lack the integrity and responsibility that comes with such power,” he said. “When is the last time that any president came out and said, ‘This is my fault’?”

But for every voter like Chao, there’s one like Kelly across town who’s still checking out the candidates and looking for some statement that finally will close the deal.

“Maybe the problem is my fault,” she fretted. “I haven’t been able to read everything I can get my hands on.”

30 seconds over the race

Why does the BBC uncover all the political dirty tricks in Florida? This just in: Bad news helps Kerry. If you haven't been reading uberblogger Josh Marshall as he picks apart the Iraq missing weapons story, now is the time to start. The New York Times, with ace Jim Dwyer on the case, also blows away the White House spin. The Washington Post analyzes those 527 TV ads that go straight for the gut. Jonathan Alter finds that Halloween has come early in the presidential race.

This fascinating story explains how John Edwards could become George W. Bush's vice president -- seriously. Has the "Block the Vote" campaign now spread to college campuses? Get this: Conservatives are mad at Bush -- over gay marriage! And how Christian is Bush, anyway? Finally, Nicholas Kristof catches Bush in a lie -- over cats and dogs!

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: We make our endorsement: Terrell Owens. Chris Brennan tries to answer the question that's been gnawing at America: Who's a better speaker, Jesse Jackson or Andy Card? If you're having trouble getting your Pa. absentee ballot in its envelope, you're not stupid, and you're not alone. Ronnie Polaneczky finds that political feuding can be all in the family. Identical cousin Trail Mix asks whether "60 Minutes" missed its chance for an "October Surprise." The editorial board weighs in on Iraq's missing weapons: It's bad, it's bad. And you won't believe what voter is still undecided!

We get Bill, they get Bruce? No fair!

We've been gypped! Why does Ohio get all the cool stuff? Via Atrios:

Madison, WI – The Kerry-Edwards campaign announced today that rock legend Bruce Springsteen will hit the campaign trail for the Kerry-Edwards ticket in the closing days of the 2004 campaign.

Springsteen will join John Kerry at campaign rallies in Madison, WI, and Columbus, OH, on Thursday, October 28th, and join the Democratic nominee for an election-eve rally in Cleveland, OH, on November 1st.

Springsteen is expected to perform one or two songs.

The failure of Bush's "Spanish Inquisition"

There's a new Daily News/CN8 Keystone Poll out in the newspaper (what is this?) this morning, and shows what most people have been seeing for the past several weeks, that the state has been trending ever so mildly for John Kerry. He leads by five points among likely voters (49-44) and among registered voters (51-46), and with undecideds breaking for the Democrat there's not much time for President Bush to catch up.

Our writer Erin Einhorn captures the real story, which is that Bush's appeal to fear -- as dramatized by the "Wolves" TV ad -- is just not working. The voters who are most scared about another terrorist attack are voting for Bush -- a whopping 82 percent of them.

But those people are only about one-quarter of the electorate. The majority of the Pennsylvania electorate (52 percent) cares most about one of three things -- the economy, health-care, or the war in Iraq. In each of those areas, nearly two-thirds, or more, are with Kerry.

It's amazing: Bush really is becoming more and more like "the Spanish Inquisition" on Monty Python -- amongst their weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear (vote for Bush or the terrorists will kill you), surprise (hey, October's not over yet), ruthless efficiency (ruthless, yes -- efficient, no), an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope (on abortion and stem cells, anyway), and nice red uniforms (ever see the women at a Bush rally?).

UPDATE: An earlier link to the F&M Web site for poll results was to their next to last poll, from early October. We saw the news release on their homepage and, thinking like deadline reporters, assumed since it was under "news" that it was the latest one. But everything in the item and the DN story is, and was, correct.

30 seconds over the race

Philly is the center of the political universe! But can Kerry follow up with the black vote? Will the missing weapons in Iraq stay on the front burner as a campaign issue? NBC and Matt Drudge try to shoot the story down, but they're refuted here and here. Condi Rice isn't actively campaigning for Bush, is she?

Slate gives the best look at whether Chief Justice William Rehnquist's cancer scare will affect the race. Will Catholics vote for fellow Catholic John Kerry? Paul Krugman -- need we say more? Ohio hasn't gotten this much attention since the heyday of CSNY. Forget about Rock the Vote -- here's Votergasm.org.

Daily (News) Show

Politics rules in today's DN: Is football season over already? Can't get enough of Bill Clinton and Philly? -- Chris Brennan takes you inside the VIP mosh pit (today's oxymoron). Jill Porter looks at what Bill Clinton and the Pope have in common (Hint: It has nothing to do with celebacy.) Our identical triplet cousin, William Bunch, tells why Clinton came to Philly in five easy pieces.

In Bucks County's congressional race, the GOP stoops to a new low with a brand of terror McCarthyism. Signe Wilkinson takes us to W.'s weapons lost and found in Iraq. The DN editorial board picks apart claims that Gov. Rendell is suppressing the military vote. What are the odds for next Tuesday? We bring in a Princeton mathematician to explain it all. That doesn't matter to the archbishop of Denver -- he has faith.

Toxic Drudge -- why Iraq missing weapons knockdown is a fraud

Nothing indicates panic in Bushworld more than a flashing red siren atop the Drudge Report. Tonight, the mega-popular site tries to knock down the big story of the week. That would be the disappearance of some 380 tons of high explosives from a facility south of Baghdad, explosives now being used to kill American G.I.s.

The story is said to be based on an NBC News report, although there's no link.

Let's set it up so we can tear it down:

The [New York Times] urgently reported on Monday how the Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives are now missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

"The U.S. Army was at the sight one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.

There's several holes in this account that you can drive a Bradley personnel carrier through. In fact, it's hard to know where to begin:

1) As numerous news accounts show, the al Qa Qaa facility was liberated by American troops not on April 10 but on April 3, 2003 -- one full week earlier that the NBC reporter is said to claim. This AP story, filed on April 5, describes some of what troops found there two days earlier.

2) As the articles also make clear, UN weapons inspectors had been all over the site, as recently as March 8, and had verified that the HMX and RDX was intact that winter. Why are these dates significant? Because the weapons inspectors were warned to leave Iraq on March 17. They were warned to leave not because of any imminent danger from Saddam Hussein's weakened regime, but because the Bush administration had already decided to launch the invasion there.

How can one say this any more clearly? These weapons were secured and carefully watched over by weapons inspectors on our side -- until we told them to leave. At some point after that, the weapons were stolen and used to kill American soldiers.

3) There substantial evidence that the entire story on Drudge is baloney, as discussed in detail tonight by Josh Marshall, who's been way ahead of the pack on this story.

He notes: A Pentagon "official who monitors developments in Iraq" told the Associated Press today that "US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact."

That of course would mean that the explosives were not removed from the facility until some point after the war. And that would be in line with what the Iraqis two weeks ago told the IAEA.

What's more, Marshall points out that even if the weapons were removed in late March or early April, the U.S. government's various accounts of how it learned of the thefts are riddled with lies.

The only thing we're totally sure of is that there'll be more attempts like this to divert attention from what really happened between now and Nov. 2. Don't sink in a vat of Drudge.

Wonder who that "top Republican official" is.

Philly Block the Vote -- "keep that number down."

The most powerful Republican in Philadelphia (how's that for an oxymoron) is now caught up in the GOP Block the Vote scandal here, all because of a comment he made to U.S. News & World Report.

The official in question is Pennsylvania House Speaker John Perzel, who represents a rowhouse neighborhood in Northeast Philly and is considered the most powerful GOP figure in Harrisburg. He's also very active in local politics. Here's what he told the magazine:

"The Kerry campaign needs to come out with humongous numbers here in Philadelphia. It's important for me to keep that number down."

Perzel's remark comes just a week after Republicans launched an unsuccessful effort to move -- at the last possible minute -- 63 polling places in Philadelphia, 53 of them in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods.

Campaign Extra! reached Perzel on his cell phone last night, and while he refused to respond directly to Democratic allegations that he wanted to suppress urban votes, he insisted he was only talking about boosting the GOP tally from 2000, when Bush received just 100,000 votes here. “Our goal is to get more Republians out this time than last time.”

OK. But as the article also notes: “Perzel is challenging many of the more than 100,000 registered Democrats in Philadelphia. His campaign office sifts through city databases for double registrations, people with the same names and same birthdates--but maybe different addresses--who are registered twice. He's finding plenty and filing challenges to them all. "

Democrats say urban vote suppression is exactly what Perzel is talking about. "Surely Perzel cannot be proud to belong to a party whose success depends on people not voting," said Rebecca Kirszner of the Democratic get-out-the-vote drive, America Coming Together.

Will Rehnquist cancer affect race?

It's just been announced that Chief Justice William Rehnquist is hospitalized for cancer. Here's the AP bulletin:

URGENT
WASHINGTON (AP) — Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has been hospitalized with thyroid cancer.

The 80-year-old Rehnquist spent the weekend in Bethesda Naval Hospital in suburban Maryland, and underwent a tracheotomy on Saturday, the Supreme Court said Monday in a statement.

We all wish him a speedy recovery. But the political question instantly becomes, how will this news affect the race in its closing days? Control of the Supreme Court was a huge issue in the 2000 race, overshadowed now by Iraq and terrorism.

Will this indicator of possible changes on the High Court remind those suburban female "Soccer Moms" who broke for Clinton and Gore that the next president is likely to name at least one and possibly several new justices, and maybe a new chief? Or will it energize evangelical Christians who want to keep the court in conservative hands?

Goodfellas for the Truth

From the Smoking Gun:

While the Mafia is not in the habit of endorsing presidential candidates, two Colombo family soldiers have spoken with their bulging wallets--and they want four more years for the Bush/Cheney ticket.

They later switched back to the Persico camp after a jailhouse heart-to-heart with their mob superior, one Dominick "Donny Shacks" Montemarano.

The GOP's "Chicken Littles"

Can you believe those Philadelphia Democrats? Some of them had the nerve to die recently and not contact the Board of Elections before they left this earth.

In a story that's dull and ponderous even by usual Inquirer standards, the state Republican Party claims that Democratic voter fraud will run rampant in Philly because it mailed out cards to 130,000 registered voters, and about 10,000 of the cards were undeliverable.

It's hard to believe, but the voter rolls don't stay 100 percent on top of everybody who dies or moves, or lives in substandard housing. The problem's probably worse because of motor-voter laws and other moves to increase registration. But that doesn't mean that 10,000 people are out there lurking to vote twice. Seriously, it seems to be hard for people to find time to vote even once nowadays.

How silly is the state GOP? Listen to the Republican leader of Philadelphia County, Michael Meehan, whose family once ran things around here in the mid-20th Century and knows a thing or two about how things actually work here.

Meehan said his state counterparts were being "Chicken Littles" about a problem he doesn't think is as bad as they do. "The fear is that having names that shouldn't be on the rolls leaves open the possibility that skulduggery will be afoot," Meehan said. "I don't know they're necessarily fraudulent."

30 seconds over the race

If you're reading this, you're probably suffering from Pre-Election Anxiety Disorder. Bush tells the World Tribune: 'The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now'... Obviously, it's not being wrtitten today. The latest outrage: The mishandling of 380 tons of dangerous explosives in Iraq.

Forget those Eagles -- it's a "Super Sunday" for John Kerry -- on the endorsement front. Bob Herbert says there's a lot of bad news and that's bad news for Bush. Jimmy Carter says Bush has been exploiting 9/11 for political purposes. The LA Times tries to figure out who all these new voters really want. Newsweek tries to figure out if black voters are that excited about Kerry. But in the end, it's all about Ohio.

UPDATE: Does anyone else see the elephants in the woods?

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's Daily News: You know all those polls showing how close the race is in Ohio? It doesn't get any closer in Ohio than this. Now, from Cleveland's Dawg Pound to Big Dawg in Philly. We never thought we'd see congressional candidate Lois Murphy and "The Big Nasty" in the same headline. Signe Wilkinson explains Bush's health-care plan. Flavia Colgan has the flu. And self-hater Michelle Malkin shows that she doesn't just hate her fellow Asian-Americans, but she hates her fellow women, too.

Miserable failure

This is a story all Americans need to read between now and Nov. 2, courtesy of the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

Bunny devours a pack of wolves

Ever hear of a woman named "Bunny" Greenhouse? You will now. This former Pentagon official seems to be the Halliburton whistleblower that we've been waiting for.

Time magazine had the scoop:

In February 2003, less than a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Bunnatine (Bunny) Greenhouse walked into a Pentagon meeting and with a quiet comment started what could be the end of her career. On the agenda was the awarding of an up to $7 billion deal to a subsidiary of Houston-based conglomerate Halliburton to restore Iraq's oil facilities. On hand were senior officials from the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and aides to retired Lieut. General Jay Garner, who would soon become the first U.S. administrator in Iraq.

Read what happens next. You'll be dismayed -- but not very surprised.

30 seconds over the race -- weekend edition

Nine days, 11 states. Actually, some folks are voting already. And at least somebody from Boston is winning. Not in the polls, though. But this is the only tally that counts: the Electoral College. Assuming, of course, that everyone's vote is counted in Ohio. Or in Florida, for that matter. But Maureen Dowd is obsessing about geese and wolves. Did Jon Stweart announce his candidacy? Everybody's writing about him. Question of the day for W.: where was he in '73?

3 to go

11-9.

Ralph's new nadir in Pa.

It's over.

More on the "1984" election

A lot of folks have been talking about "Animal Farm" in the wake of the "Wolves" and "Eagle" ads, but the Orwell motif that dominates this election is still "1984."

Now comes news from here in Pennsylvania that you can be barred from a Bush campaign rally and even bodily searched if you're identified as "a Democratic supporter." No signs, no yelling, no snarky T-shirts. Just a known Democrat (We guess they all look alike.)

"The spotters, and eventually police, asked the Democratic supporter to remove a jacket, a sweater and some other articles of clothing in what was described as basically a police search."

Even worse, a U.S. Army soldier who's bound for Iraq in two weeks -- a registered Republican, no less -- was barred from the rally for apparently associating with this Demo sympathizer.

It happened yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, and was written about in the Citizens' Voice newspaper there.

According to the account, the 27-year-old soldier from the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre region -- who didn't want to be identified by name for obvious reasons -- was an undecided voter who wanted to hear what the president had to say.

While waiting in line, he noticed a stranger standing alone and invited the person to stand with him. 'I didn't think that would be a problem,' he said. It turned out to be. Individuals from the Bush campaign spotted the individual with the soldier and identified the person as a Democratic supporter.

Amazingly, the unnamed Democrat -- who didn't complain about being searched -- had a ticket to the rally but still wasn't let in. And then it gets even creepier.

The Bush people claimed the Democrat wasn't on a "master list." The soldier asked to see this list but the organizers said "they didn't have it." But, they soon told the solider that he wasn't it, either -- and they turned him away from the event as well.

The story says that the soldier who came to the event undecided walked away vowing to volunteer for the Kerry campaign.

"I thought the whole Bush message was compassionate conservatism. I didn't see anything compassionate from the Bush people."

Tonight, tonight....

One American curse comes to an end.

Quote, unquote...moron

All week, we thought there couldn't be a dumber quote than Philadelphia GOP ward leader Matt Robb, who said during a failed effort to move polling places in Philly's black neighborhoods:

"It's predominantly, 100 percent black. I'm just not going in there to get a knife in my back."

But now we have a new winner -- James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County. Here's how he explains why the GOP is paying hundreds of folks to challenge voters in Cleveland's mostly black areas.

"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems."

How better to sum up the GOP's utter contempt for the democratic process -- to describe thousands of people newly motivated to take part in the American political process as "quote, unquote, new voters." After Nov. 2, we hope some of these GOP vote blockers get sent to quote, unquote, jail.

Who's afraid of big bad "Wolves"?

Not Wolfpacks for Truth:

When the camera crew showed up, we wondered why they were all driving Hummers. Our agent assured us it was a Greenpeace commercial and they paid TWICE our hourly steak rate. Little did we know we were being tricked into this vicious campaign attack ad.

Meanwhile, reader Joseph Gumina sends us this:

It takes a special kind of nerve to use Gray Wolves as props in a campaign commercial when your administration has worked hard to scale back
federal protections of the species.

Flaunting the isolated success of a Gray Wolf reintroduction program in Yellowstone National Park implemented under (guess who) President Clinton, the Bush Administration leapt to the conclusion that Gray Wolf populations all across the America were once again fit to be harassed, pilfered, and exterminated.

And you thought Campaign Extra was dull!

Read this:

The. Dullest. Blog. In. The. World.

Brits surrender...again

The Guardian is abandoning its misguided-at-best, moronic-at-worst effort to lobby voters in Clark County, Ohio.

We love this, however:

One senior local politician, speaking off the record to avoid offending his neighbours, said: "They picked the wrong county for many reasons. One is, we're very parochial. When people talk about The Guardian of London, they think you mean London, Ohio, which is in the next-door county. Another is, we have some issues with literacy round here."

Don't bogart that vote

Is the apparent effort on college campuses in Pennsylvania to trick students into registering Republican a harmless scam, or something more devious? As we discussed in the Daily News today, it's clear that -- based on reports from two Pa. colleges 100 miles apart -- that registration tricks like telling students they were signing a petition to legalize medical marijuana were not an isolated prank.

We now have these reports from the Philly suburbs and from Indiana University of Pennsylvania on other side of the state. In addition, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has learned that something similar happened in Oregon -- there, students were led to believe they were signing a petition for lower car insurance rates.

The real question is whether the GOP registration changes -- which in theory won't prevent the victims from casting ballots on Nov. 2 -- is the handiwork of Sproul & Associates, a GOP-funded outfit that's been linked to a scandal in Nevada and was also active in Oregon and Pennsylvania. And was the motive money -- some workers were paid for each new GOP signup -- or something more nefarious.

Our two main weapons are fear and fear...and fear.

"The populace, I think, is really scared. The Twin Towers -- if that's a prelude to what's going to come, we better do something."

-- Charles Stirzel of Richboro, Pa., a Bush supporter, quoted in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Quick -- name some famous presidential ads before this year. Let's see, there's LBJ's 1964 "Daisy" ad (with the mushroom cloud), Reagan's good-cop "Morning in America" and bad-cop "Bear" in the woods ad in 1984. What they had in common a Madison Avenue car-ad feel -- trying to evoke a mood rather than make an intellectual point.

Today, the Bush-Cheney campaign unveils a major new ad it calls, simply, "Wolves." It may become the most talked about spot of the 2004 race -- especially if Bush wins. Moody and ominous, the 30-second ad mines the shadowy light-and-dark world of a mysterious forest, with an occasional nano-second flash of danger, before showing the large pack (sleeper cell?) of wolves ready to attack at the first sign of weakness. At the end, the pack is rousing, ready to pounce on....the election of President Kerry?

"Wolves" is the Democrats' worst nightmare -- slick, evocative, memorable, and utterly misleading. Like Bush's other terrorism spots, it seeks to make hay of a Democratic effort to cut intelligence funding after "the first terrorist attack on America." How many discerning viewers know that's a reference to the 1993 attack that killed 6 people, not the devastating suicide attack of 9/11? More to the point, the ad debuts on the very day that the Washington Post rips apart the real Bush record on fighting al-Qaeda, marked by stupidity and blown chances.

Doesn't matter. In the rock, paper and scissors of presidential politics, fear is rock. And the Bush people are getting this message out. A new MSNBC-Knight-Ridder poll of Pennsylvania finds that -- in spite of a lagging economy -- terrorism and homeland security is now the No. 1 issue here. It's cited by 25 percent of voters, compared to 20 percent naming the economy (which was No. 1 last month) and 13 percent saying Iraq.

And who are these newly fearful voters supporting? Guess. In September, terrorism was the No. 1 issue for 36 percent of Bush voters. Now, it's the No. 1 issue of 45 percent of W.'s backers. (Overall, the Mason-Dixon poll had Bush up a point in Pennsylvania, while Kerry had been up a point here one month earlier).

Don't get played, Pennsylvanians. The main reason that al-Qaeda remains a threat to America is largely because of the inept and inadequate Bush response to it. Don't be fooled by a pack of wolves.

UPDATE: In an earlier version we misquoted the ad, it's actually the even more misleading "first terrorist attack on America." (thanks to alert reader John B. Gaffney.
The DNC (which probably knew the ad was coming -- reportedly it's been in the can for a while) has an amazingly rapid response called "Eagle," which contrasts a bird that knows when to change direction to an ostrich with its head in the sand. (You can decide who is who. Maybe one of the campaigns will re-release "Animal Farm.")
UPDATE II: Josh Marshall (who probably sent you here in the first place) views the ad and finds it not that scary, although he agrees it's very misleading. He also links to further refuting of the Kerry-weak-on-terror charge.

30 seconds over the race

As part of their marathon drive to lose the White House, John Kerry's campaign takes a break from trashing daughters and wives of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to go on an embarassingly phony goose-hunting photo op. While Kerry was out hunting geese, the Washington Post makes a compelling case that Bush screwed up a slightly more important hunt: For al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, Bush ventured outside the Daily News' 5-mile coverage radius to lobby Catholics in the Philly suburbs. And: Election lawsuits in Florida -- already? Sigh.

The Herald-Palladium of Benton Harbor, Mich., either has itself a major scoop -- former CIA boss calling the Iraq war "wrong" -- or a cub reporter who needs to go expense a tape recorder. Here's the October "no surprise" -- the inevitable column speculating that the Red Sox saga will help fellow Massachusettian (is that what you call them?) Kerry. Here's something that is surprising: A pundit who wants Kerry to be more like Al Gore. OK, now back to non-surprising stuff: Nobody likes Ralph Nader anymore. GOP Block the Vote 2004: Paul Krugman stays on the case. Burger King tells Sinclair Broadcast Group: "Have it your way."

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's Daily "Go Eagles" News: Clout's Gar Joseph wonders if the Bush administration is on a hunt for Orange October. John Baer learns that when you're the only pundit in America to call Debate One for W., that you've got mail.

Our identical cousin, Trail Mix, has the New York Times saying nice things about "Stolen Honor" and other campaign absurdities. Elmer Smith has some interesting nuggets about ACORN. Do you think that Kerry and Bush are "Tweedledum" and "Tweedledee"? Jim Foster of Philadelphia does.

Four Moe Years!

October surprise update

Sometimes the biggest surprise is no surprise:

WASHINGTON -- The US general who predicted Osama bin Laden would be captured or killed this year struck a decidedly cautionary note yesterday, saying he doesn't know when or if the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks will be brought to justice....

"We obviously don't know where he is or we'd have him in custody," Barno said. "So it's probably not helpful to speculate since we really don't know."

Clinton: the Love connection

More details are dribbling in about Bill Clinton's much-ballyhooed visit to Philly. The lunchtime rally with John Kerry (who?) will be held in Center City's Love Park, once the stomping ground of skateboarders and still occasional home to Democratic rallies. The gates for the event will open at 10 a.m.

Frankly, we're a little surprised at all the fuss. During his eight years as president, the Big Dog came to Philly more often than a traveling salesman for Cheese Whiz.

Question of the day

From a Knight-Ridder article, and noted by Kevin Drum:

President Bush will end his four-year term having fulfilled about 46 percent of the promises he made during the 2000 presidential campaign, according to an analysis by Knight Ridder.

A similar Knight Ridder analysis found that, during his first term, President Clinton had fulfilled about 66 percent of the 160 commitments that he made during his first presidential campaign.

Here's the question -- is Bush not keeping his promises a bad thing...or a good thing?

30 seconds over the race

Do you believe in curses? No!!! (and why didn't the NY Post call it: "Best Sox I Ever Had"?) In boring news, the Bush campaign continues to pull out of Pennsylvania, with a visit today to Chester County. Will he still be wearing that box on his back? -- here's a great compendium of all the theories, conspiracy and otherwise. Of course, maybe Bush's biggest problem isn't a box, but a bubble.

When will the Democrats ship Teresa to an undisclosed location, before she opens her mouth again? Or will the Republicans steal the election before she can lose it for her husband? Not if all the Democrats who don't really exist go to the polls in Ohio. Speaking of leaps of faith, Maureen Dowd rips apart W's. Other women we love -- those Clear Channel-dissin', Sinclair boycottin' Dixie Chicks.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's Daily News: How lame was that now-failed GOP request to move 63 polling places in Philly? -- even the city Republican boss was against it. John Baer takes a visit to a scary place called Specterworld. Were you a fan of the TV show "SWAT"? -- then you might enjoy John Kerry's big plans for Nov. 3 and beyond. In the world-gone-mad department, the DN editorial board tells you how to buy "Stolen Honor," while Michael Smerconish defends Bill O'Reilly -- somebody had to do it.

The Big Dog is coming to Philly

Bill Clinton wasn't just the first black president, but the Arkansan (is that what you call them?) was also the first Philadelphia president. People here (except for a few people who regularly email us) loved the Big Dog, both for his appetites (wink, wink) and his genuine man-of-the-people shtick.

So maybe it's not surprising that Philadelphia will be the first place where Clinton -- recovering, of course, from heart bypass surgery -- will head when he hits the campaign trail for John Kerry sometime early next week. (The latest word is a lunchtime rally with Kerry on Monday.)

But does it make sense? Yes, there's a huge push here to energize the Democratic base in the city. But Kerry and Edwards have already been here a lot more than expected, and the state is beginning to trend Democratic as many thought it would. There could be other places where the ex-prez could be even more useful to the Dems.

Like Arkansas. Few experts had the Razorback State in play -- Gore lost there in 2000, although not by a lot -- but polls show that Kerry's in the running even without campaigning there. Survey USA has Bush up by 5 points -- 51-46 -- which is the exact tally that Gore lost there by four years ago. And Zogby has it even closer.

Surely BC's popularity should win some votes, in tandem with a strong Democratic Senate candidate, incumbent Blanche Lincoln. He can swing by Philly on his way home to Chappaqua.

Just as long as he stays away from Pat's and Geno's.

UPDATE: Apparently, someone's reading Campaign Extra! up in Chappaqua. Scoop-master Chris Brennan tells us that the Big Dog is indeed Arkansas bound, sometime after Philly.

More on GOP Block the Vote in Pa.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette follows up on our report yesterday that Nathan Sproul and Associates -- the firm that the GOP hired to, allegedly, only register Republicans.

A lower portion of the form also advises the canvassers to ask undecided voters two questions: "Do you consider yourself pro-choice or pro life?" and "Are you worried about the Democrats raising taxes?" If voters say they are pro-life, the form says, "Ask if they are registered to vote. If they are pro-choice, say thank you and walk away."

What crawls under a Stone

The campaign of Arlen Specter is confirming what Campaign Extra! and Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Daily News reported late last week: That GOP political dirty trickster Roger Stone is the man behind those mysterious "Kerry-Specter" yard signs that started appearing in Philadelphia's blue-collar neighborhoods.

Specter campaign manager Christopher Nicholas said yesterday that he called Stone last weekend and asked him to put an end to the campaign. "I made the call Saturday morning," Nicholas said. "We asked him to stop and he agreed." Nicholas continues to insist he knew nothing of the independent effort until we called him.

Of course, they probably had Stone's number in their Rolodex -- since the controversial Stone (linked to a riot during the Florida recount and maybe even the apparently forged '60 Minutes' memos) was the manager of Specter's short-lived 1996 presidential campaign (which was so short-lived it ended in 1995).

(Explainer to our out-of-town fans: The yard signs help Specter because Kerry's going to get a whopping 80 percent of the Philly vote, and so the only way the "moderate" Bush-backing Specter can defeat Democrat Joe Hoeffel is with ticket splitting in the city's white neighborhoods. Kerry, of course, is actually backing Hoeffel.)

Today, the Daily News has an interesting new angle. It turns out that Stone's former business partner and an ex-Specter aide, Craig Snyder, had formed an independent group last spring to place ads on Christian radio in central Pennsylvania attacking Specter's primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, as being soft on abortion. Dirty trick? Well, Toomey was actually the anti-abortion candidate of the two.

Snyder says he hasn't worked with Stone in three years. That may well be true. But it sure is interesting how these ex-cronies of Specter just happen to know, on their own, how to help their pal get elected -- with signs that link a Bush supporter to John Kerry and with ads that accuse a candidate of being soft on abortion, when Specter allegedly supports abortion rights himself.

But then, politics makes strange bedfellows.

30 seconds over the race

Before we get to anything else: What's the CIA hiding about 9/11? Best headline of the day: "Bush Receives Endorsement From Iran" (seriously). Dana Milbank profiles the Bush White House's guy-behind-the-guy-behind-the-guy. As part of their effort to woo young voters, Bush and Kerry are bickering over flu vaccine and Social Security.

Do Bush and Kerry actually (gasp) lie in some of their TV ads? Sinclair won't be airing the entire Kerry-slamming "Stolen Honor" -- which liberals are claiming as a victory even though they're still going to run a show saying Kerry caused POW torture. But revenge is sweet, as Sinclair stock continues to plummet. Condi Rice may be coming soon to a swing state near you -- and some experts think that's a dangerous precedent. (Not to be confused with a dangerous vice president.)

The NYT is worried about something else: Shadowy groups want people to go out and actually vote. Is President John Kerry worth $1 million to you? It is to Matt Damon (or so he claims). And William Safire defines chutzpah by accusing Kerry of fear mongering.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's Daily News: Elmer Smith slams the GOP for its block-the-vote campign here in Philly. How many times will we use the joke about Ralph's nadir? Depends on how many times the courts rule against him. In today's Trail Mix, we look at Dick Cheney and Jesus -- not necessarily at the same time. Kevin Scott of Willingboro calls the president on his 9/11 failures -- but then what do we know, we're a bunch of liberal crybabies?

Suppressed in Scranton

You'll be shocked, shocked, to learn that Philadelphia isn't the only place in battleground state of Pennsylvania where Republican officials sought to move polling places in heavily Democratic neighborhoods at the last minute -- a move that could cause some confused voters not to cast ballots on Nov. 2.

Campaign Extra! is reporting (some of this appeared in our story in this morning's Daily News) that officials in Scranton, PA's Lackawanna County last week successfully moved 21 polling places over both citizen and Democratic objections. The GOP had just grabbed a 2-1 majority on the county's board of commissioners.

Unlike Philly, there's no racial angle. But Democrats say that each one of the polling places are in districts that vote at least 60 percent Democratic. The Republican majority that approved the changes says the move is merely an attempt to deal with the Americans with Disabilities Act (a similar argument was made for many of the GOP's proposed switches in Philly).

But that doesn't seem to be a factor in some of them. One of the axed polling places was an easily accessible first-floor building, that happened to be owned by the Lackawanna Democratic chair. (Here's a local account of the move.)

Voters were actually able to prevent four proposed moves -- including one (we're not making this up) that would have taken a polling place out of a convent with 130, mostly elderly, nuns. Still, opponents say the relocated voting spots will affect as many as 10,000 voters, and they fear that as many as 10 percent, or 1,000, might be thwarted by the moves.

Given the importance of the Pennsylvania votes, it's almost surprising that political stunts like this didn't surface earlier. Campaign Extra! also spoke yesterday with Holly McCullough, an official with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, said that a couple of months ago the library was approached by representatives of a group calling itself America Votes seeking registration tables at branches.

She said that officials OK'd the planning - believing that the group was a nonpartisan outfit by the same name. Only later, she said yesterday, did officials learn that Kelly temporary-agency workers had been hired by an Arizona company called Sproul and Associates - and that the temps were asked to only sign up Bush voters.

"A Kelly worker said they were trained to ask people who they were voting for, and if they said Bush they'd give them a form," McCollough said.

Electoral College: Reversal of fortune

This morning in the Daily News, Campaign Extra!'s cousin, Trail Mix, joined a growing obsession among the obsessive classes in speculating that George W. Bush will win the popular vote on Nov. 2, but John Kerry will triumph in the Electoral College.

Of course, 2000 showed that it's very possible in the 21st Century to win one and lose the other. There would be a rich irony if Bush were the victim in 2004 of the system that rewarded him in 2000. But the joke will probably be lost on Americans who'll face four more years of carping that their president wasn't truly elected.

Right now, the leading polls show the national horserace anywhere from even to an 8 point lead for Bush. But a tracking site called electoral-vote.com predicts that Kerry would win the election if it were held today with 284 electoral votes -- more than the 270 needed for victory.

How could Bush, who received more than half million less popular votes than Al Gore in 2000, be more popular this time but possibly lose votes in the Electoral College? Here's how -- by gaining lots of votes in non-battleground states, but losing ground in the states that actually determine the winner.

A quick guide:

New York, New Jersey and Connecticut: Bush should do much better here than in 2000. Blame the terrorists. Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center won him some converts in these three deep-blue Democratic states, especially among the now almost mythical "Security Moms" who are now more worried about al-Qaeda invading their kid's grade school than the Supreme Court invading their wombs. So Bush gains popular votes, but no electoral votes.

California: Gore won big here in 2000, but since then voters were so angered by their Democratic governor that they kicked him out of office and replaced him with a Republican who's very popular right now (even though that's partly for differing with Bush in so many issues). So again, more GOP popular votes, nothing in the Electoral College.

The Deep South: Every year, more of the oldtime "Yellow Dog Democrats" die or switch parties, making these conservative states more and more Republican. So what? Bush had these electoral votes already.

Florida: The Democrats need only gain 538 votes to win 25 27 electoral votes. Can they do that? You bet. Cubans aren't as mad at the D's as they were in 2000, over the Elian Gonzalez case. The Dems say they've registered scores of new voters here, and they're got more lawyers than a SEPTA bus accident to back that up.

Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa: Rust never sleeps. These are the real battleground states and, unfortunately for Bush, they just happen to be the ones most hard-hit by the outsourcing of jobs overseas and the general decline of manaufacturing. And Ohio -- which has 20 big electoral votes -- and went narrowly for Bush in 2000 -- seems to be the most badly hit of them all. Will Kerry sweep here?

So let's review. Lots more votes for Bush in states that don't matter. A few more votes for Kerry in the few states that do matter. And a reversal of fortune from 2000 to 2004.

Who'll be asking to scrap the Electoral College in 2005?

30 seconds over the race

You know Election Day must be getting close when people start listing five nightmare scenarios. Memo to John Kerry: Try to avoid speaking French when you're on the campaign trail. To make matters worse, the Times looks at whether Kerry exaggerates the Bush record, and says, "Oui." Having trouble making sense out of the polls. So is the New York Times. But that doesn't stop them from offering us another one. The LA Times also makes a run at explaining why polling is so screwed up. So does "The Mystery Pollster."

Here's a novel approach toward increasing voter registration, out of Ohio. If you want a more fair and balanced look at voter registration, the Washington Post has one of those. A journalist for the embattled Sinclair Broadcast Group discovers that his bosses can't handle the truth.

Al Gore finally gets the hang of this running for president thing, four years too late. Do you feel a....oh, nevermind: Here's Paul Krugman writing about the draft. Generals engage in "Crossfire": On the right, Tommy Franks, while on the left (sort of) John Abizaid. And finally, here's something for you ladies who can't get enough of John Edwards, or his hair. It will distract you from this morning's bad news out of Iraq.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: We do our Mary Tyler Moore impersonation -- "Who can take a nothing quote, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?" In non-made-up political news, Bush comes to South Jersey and says that, Kerry is so, you know, September 10. But John Edwards, doing Philly, says that it's Republicans who are "up to their old tricks." Meanwhile, the DN and Campaign Extra! learn that in Scranton and Pittsburgh, Republicans are, well, up to their old tricks.

Bank robbing is "hard work"

From the Smoking Gun:

Police in the battleground state of Pennsylvania are looking for a man who robbed a bank Thursday night wearing a George W. Bush mask. The holdup man, who did not flash a weapon, demanded the money from a teller at a Commerce Bank near York. As seen in the below bank surveillance photos--provided to TSG by the Northern York County Regional Police--the robber wore gloves, a ski hat, and a fixed grin. A police spokesman would not say how much the Dubya doppelganger got away with.

GOP in Philly: Block the Vote

"It's predominantly, 100 percent black. I'm just not going in there to get a knife in my back."

-- Matt Robb, Republican ward leader in South Philadelphia, on his last-minute request to move five Philly polling places in African-American neighborhoods.

Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes are the second-biggest "battleground" prize after Florida. John Kerry can't win here without a huge turnout in Philadelphia, especially in black neighborhoods that vote 90 percent Democratic. As a result, it's the first place you'd expect a GOP voter suppression effort.

And now it's here.

Chris Brennan (with a big assist from Dave Davies) has the scoop in today's Philadelphia Daily News. They learned that high-ranking state GOP and Bush operatives asked local Republicans to try to move 63 polling places at the last minute. Some 53 of the 63 polling places are in districts less than 10 percent white.

The complaints against the polling places vary -- the bulk are for alleged handicapped accessibility problems, but 17 charge that the polling places are in homes or businesses where voters might feel intimidated.

Deborah Williams, a Republican candidate for Congress, who is black, said the Republican state committee asked to use her name on 28 of the complaints. Nevertheless, she defended the move, saying that "this is not about creating some stir in the election or denying anyone the right to vote."

Democrats feel otherwise. If the polling places were moved at the last minute, it could lead to massive confusion on Election Day -- and thwart some people in mostly black, heavily Democratic neighborhoods from voting.

Bob Lee, Philadelphia's voter registration administrator who's normally not given to partisan statements, said flatly: "They're trying to suppress the vote."

The move is almost certain to fail -- especially now that it's been exposed. Lee said it appears that the applications came into his office too late to allow for a hearing before Election Day.

In addition to Robb, the GOP ward leader who acknowledged that race played a role in the request, another Republican ward leader behind the effort was North Philadelphia's Listervelt Ritter, who is black. He said the move isn't aimed at suppression, but he adds:

"The black neighborhoods are the ones that do the funny stuff. What are you supposed to do?"

Stay tuned. There's still 15 days between now and the election.

Yahoo! News Headline of the Day

Bush Hopes N.J. Hears His Terror Message

Did Bush release a new audiotape to al-Jazeera?

30 seconds over the race

Are Republicans starting to panic? If not, why is Matt Drudge trying to change the subject and boast that Republicans have a better sex life? Here's a more nuanced argument that Kerry might not be losing, in spite of a slew of new polls suggesting just that. (The highly regarded Zogby today has it tied).

They're already voting in Florida -- you'll be shocked to learn that there's already complaints. Kerry has a big lead -- in newspaper endorsements. (That, and $4.25 will get you a cup of coffee, at Starbucks). Who really shot themselves in the foot -- John Kerry or the good people at the Kerry-bashing Sinclair Broadcast Group? And William Safire still can't get over this whole Mary Cheney-lesbian thing.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's Daily News: A mixed day for Kerry-Edwards fans, as Boston wins but Carolina loses. In more pressing political news, is Bush sending a secret shout-out to Pennsylvania -- by going to New Jersey? Are you sick of journalists asking,"Do you feel a draft coming on?" The DN editorial board gives us another excuse to write that. And today Michelle Malkin's whining about a handful of isolated attacks on GOP offices. (Just wanted to make sure our conservative friends are still reading us.)

Sinclair family: Down $14 mil

Another day, more fallout on the Sinclair Broadcast Group and its unprecedented plan to air a John Kerry-bashing documentary just days before the election.

Mitch Albom gets unsentimental in blasting the right-wingers who own 62 television stations across America. Leaders of a boycott of Sinclair advertisers claim there have been 50 pull-outs so far -- although it's impossible to confirm that.

But even if there's not a single pullout, the bad publicity is hitting the Smith family, which owns Sinclair, where it hurts the most, Family members who are owners and officers of Sinclair have collectively lost $13,969,498.50 in stock value since the anti-Kerry plan was first publicized.

David Smith (Chair/CEO): $5.2 million loss
J Duncan Smith (VP/Sec): $5 million loss
Robert Smith: (Director) $3.4 million loss
Frederick Smith(VP): $230K loss

The Sinclair stock has experienced a 5-day total loss of .80 a share -- or 10.2 percent of the company's value since Oct. 8, when news of Sinclair's plans to broadcast "Stolen Honor" first came out.

And Wall Street analysts are starting to take note of the carnage.

You forgot Sweden!...here's what's really scary

It's easy to laugh at George W. Bush, or imply that he's stupid. That's why this anecdote, from Ron Suskind's lengthy NYT Magazine profile of W., is getting so much play. In involves a WH meeting on the Middle East, and a comment by Democratic congressman Tom Lantos:

Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said, with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''

Heh heh. But we worry the fuss over the Sweden quote will obscure the real news of the story. Regardless of Bush's IQ, he has a well thought-out plan for a 2nd term. And he's not talking about it on the campaign trail. But you need to know about it:

According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that ''Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . . then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil.''

''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.'' The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ''two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.''

Did you hear any of those things during the three debates? We sure didn't.

One more big question

Watching John Kerry right now on TV with CNN's Candy Crowley -- why did Kerry forget to shave this morning? Don't his advisors know what 5 o' clock shadow did to Richard Nixon? Or is he just growing a beard until he passes Bush in one national poll?

30 seconds over the race -- weekend edition

So many questions -- such little time.

The big question the mainstream media isn't covering: Why is George W. Bush so afraid of seeing a doctor? The other big question that Campaign Extra! has been pondering -- why is Kerry slipping in the polls if he won all three debates? Slate wonders the same thing. And most importantly -- what's going on in Delaware?! The Washington Post asks this: What is Karl Rove's "strategery" for the campaign's final days?

Is there really a campaign for president? Not if you live in 42 out of the 50 states. Can John Kerry cure cancer -- and does it matter? Is is voting for Kerry a one-way ticket to eternal damnation? Think McCain-Feingold got big money out of politics? Think again. Is the New York Times really biased? Two interesting views here. Did W. accidentally speak the truth on the draft? Even if there's not a draft, why does Kerry seems to be catching the flu?

World's worst blogger

Michael Moore is a great filmmaker (just our humble opinion) but he has got to be the world's worst blogger. We were cruising the blogosphere and stumbled across a link to "Michael Moore's blog."

Here's his "Recent Blog Entries."

July 4 (!!): My first blog entry...."Hey, my first blog entry! Welcome fellow bloggers and blog readers! Blog doggers and blog loggers. Blogging away for the common good or just to keep from watching whatever crap is on TV right now. What is on TV right now? No new 6 Feet Under tonight. The Practice has been bounced. Can't Jon Stewart do a Sunday show?

Wow. From there, he lamely settles a personal score with Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post, goes into a not very surprising rant about the Saudis, then it's: "Time to head back outside to watch the rest of the fireworks...More later..."

Two days later, July 6: Theater hopping....Most of this post is devoted to proving his torso will never expand to a size capable of containing his ego: "Yes, it's true, I'm on the cover of Time magazine this week. And Entertainment Weekly. Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is next!!...Tigers were in town tonight and I didn't even know it. THAT'S how out of it I am." Sleeeeeeep!!!"

Three days. Two posts.

The rest...is silence.

We guess he should stick to ice cream trucks.

Where's the new Woodward and Bernstein?

This week's must-read Frank Rich:

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar?

The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.

Arlen's spectre: Roger Stone

This is running in tomorrow's Philadelphia Daily News. It is a joint effort of Campaign Extra! and ace Daily News reporter Dave Davies (who's also the substitute host of NPR's "Fresh Air.") We wanted to get this online before the weekend officially starts:

Lurking behind those mysterious John Kerry-Arlen Specter yard signs in Northeast Philadelphia is yet another spectre: Notorious national GOP consultant Roger Stone.

A political operative with some ties to Stone told the Daily News last night that the consultant — who chaired Pennsylvania GOP senator Specter’s abortive 1996 presidential bid — had been actively recruiting people to join a group called the Philadelphia Education Project.

The group’s lawyer - who contacted the Daily News yesterday — is another political operative named Paul Rolf Jensen, who has worked with Stone on several campaigns. Jensen is also known for his efforts to file lawsuits against gay and gay-friendly Presbyterian ministers.

The treasurer and assistant treasurer of the committee — a so-called 527 advocacy group — both have connections to candidates also closely linked to the Florida-based Stone.

Efforts to contact Stone, whose phone numbers are not listed, were not successful last night. The 52-year-old GOP stalwart was in the headlines most recently to deny widespread rumors that he was behind the likely forged memos about President Bush’s National Guard service aired by CBS News.

Stone, who started in politics as a youthful aide to Richard Nixon, has also been tied to a 2000 melee in Miami that disrupted the Florida recount. (Web only: Stone also has a somewhat interesting personal history.)

The yard signs have been slammed by the campaign of Specter’s Democratic rival, Joe Hoeffel, as a trick aimed at the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic ticket. Kerry has campaigned with Hoeffel in his visits to Philadelphia.

Specter’s campaign again insisted last night it had no knowledge of either the Kerry-Specter yard signs or any campaign role for Stone. In 1995, Stone chaired a presidential bid by Specter, who dropped out before the 1996 primary season.

“Everything I know is from you guys [reporters],” said Specter campaign manager Christopher Nicholas.

Jensen, the lawyer for the Philadelphia Education Project, said in an e-mail to the Daily News last night, that its activities and those of California-based assistant treasurer Carla Bartz, are not “‘shadowy’ or improper under the law.’ He said it is no different from liberal committees funded by billionaire George Soros.

“It is the committee's position that Senator Kerry and Senator Specter have both supported policies that are beneficial to working families including expanded stem cell research, health care reform, tax reduction for the middle class and raising the minimum wage,” wrote Jensen.

A New York state Democratic operative said he was contacted by Roger Stone several weeks ago and asked to participate in a political commitee Stone was forming, which would support both Kerry and Specter. The operative declined the offer.

The Democratic source said committee treasurer Gary Parenti, who has worked for former Erie County Democratic chairman Steve Pigeon, got to know Stone two years ago when they both worked on the gubernatorial campaign of Tom Golisano. Stone hosted a fundraiser for Specter in Buffalo last year, the source said.

Parenti and Stone also worked on Rev. Al Sharpton's presidential campaign earlier this year -- a bizarre turn of events that some saw as a plot to disrupt the Democratic Party. Jensen, the Philadelphia committee lawyer, donated $250 to Sharpton's campaign. Parenti did not return repeated phone calls this week.

Bush and Pa. -- Part 3

There's new confirmation of the rumor that the Bush campaign is cutting back its efforts here in Pennsylvania, or even pulling out. It comes from The Hill, a D.C.-based publication that keeps its ear close to the ground. They reported this morning:

Swinging no more

The Bush/Cheney campaign is pulling its resources from Pennsylvania, according to a source with close ties to the campaign, in order to focus on Florida and the upper Midwestern states, such as Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, where the Kerry campaign has been losing ground since the Republican Convention.

The money shift will have surprisingly little effect on Pennsylvania's tight House races, though, because none of the seats is expected to change hands. Current polling favors the status quo, with Republicans surviving three significant challenges and Democrats holding two seats of their own.

In fairness, we'll repeat what Bush-Cheney local honcho Guy Ciarrocchi told us in an e-mail: "The facts fly in the face of your opinion column. The VP spent all day in pa on wed. 10 county dinners will have surrogate speakers today, including the president's chief of staff. President bush #41 is in pa today--in philly & delco. Next week, we have the vp, the first lady and the president--several times. Our e-day budget was just increased, as was our staff."

More cheesesteak ignorance

With the election 17 days away, those damning pictures of John Kerry eating a South Philly cheesesteak just won't go away. Yesterday, we told you about a local GOP front group, Cheesesteak Veterans for the Truth. (A cheesesteak veteran -- wouldn't that make you 350 pounds?).

This morning, we watched in horror as "Good Morning America" previewed an investigative piece on what the candidates eat. It showed a still of Bush eating a raw ear of corn (good judgment there) and then flashed the awkward shot of the silk-tie wearing Kerry trying badly to maneuver the giant sandwich into his mouth.

Kate Snow: "And here's John Kerry with a slice of pizza."

Charlie Gibson: "I think that's actually a hoagie."

Snow: "Oh, is that the Philly cheesesteak?"

Sigh.

30 seconds over the race

Did you know that Dick Cheney's daughter is a lesbian?! We guess you probably do now. Did you know that President Bush sometimes doesn't tell the truth? And Slate catches him in another one. The FCC may be able to exact revenge for Janet Jackson's breast, but it won't stop the airing of anti-John Kerry propaganda.

And are you ready for some fraud? Apparently, the Justice Department isn't. Paul Krugman checks out Block the Vote 2004. Do you know about the third-party spoiler who might swing the race? Yep, Michael Badnarik. And Maureen Dowd has the final word on Bush and Kerry. She's just not that into them.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: It's payback time for the football battleground state of North Carolina. Politically, the boycott of Sinclair Broadcast Group is gaining fuel. Have you seen any of these? -- a Kerry-Specter yard sign. Dave Davies has -- and he tells us about the shadowy Florida woman behind them. The editorial board thinks that is just so wrong. Hey, at least those yard signs weren't stolen! And in the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up department, the letters page has "An Hispanic Take on the American Election" -- from a woman named Emile Levin.

Gee (Cheese) Whiz

Way back in August, we suggested a 527 advocacy committee called South Philly Cheesesteak Makers for the Truth.

We thought we were joking. But we were close. It's here, and it's actually called Cheesesteak Veterans for the Truth. Frankly, it's what John Kerry deserves for ordering Swiss cheese on a cheesesteak in August 2003.

But you know what: George W. Bush doesn't know to how eat a cheesesteak, either!

Note: Thanks to tipster and ace pundit Larry Ceisler.

The president's health

Why is President Bush delaying his annual physical?

Let's be clear: We know of nothing that's wrong with the president, and (stating the obvious, I think) we certainly hope his health is perfect. On the other hand, it's also a legitimate campaign issue for both Bush and Kerry (who recently released extensive medical records). Bush's failure to get the exam normally done this time of year (in August, to be exact) has fueled a lot of talk on "the internets," and understandly so.

There's been all kind of speculation this morning about things like what seemed to be weakness on one side of Bush's face in the debate last night, and even about what Bush and Kerry said to each other when it all was over. It's just that -- speculation. The campaign says he's busy -- and that's pretty hard to dispute.

There have been two well-thought and very nuanced posts recently about Bush's health that we think are worth reading. The first is from Josh Marshall over at talkingpointsmemo.com, who raises some of the key questions.

The more involved and most interesting one is from one of Philly's top bloggers and a new friend, Jim Capozzola of Rittenhouse Review. He zeroes in on the removal of a number of spider angiomas from his nose in August 2003, and wonders whether Bush could have some type of liver ailment.

Speculating about a stranger's health is always dangerous. But then, if Bush had submitted to his annual physical for 2004, we wouldn't be here speculating, would we?

We have friends

Campaign Extra! would like to introduce you to one of our regular readers, now that we seem to be in double-digits on that front. His name is Peter Sinclair and he's a top-notch cartoonist who's been written up in the New York Times and who has turned his attention to drawing some really funny political cartoons. Please visit his Web site -- greenmanstudio.com and check out more here.

Actually, he's not the only person to visit the site. Yesterday set an all-time record for traffic at Campaign Extra!, with 17,365 visitors. Just 15 more and we could have sold out a Flyers game at the old Spectrum.

We've also now had one purchase of "Jukebox America: Down Backstreets and Blue Highways in Search of the Country's Greatest Jukebox" because of the blog. Any others out there?

And unless those 25 Chechen terrorists strike or something, you'll be able to see us on national TV today -- on Fox News Channel (!!!) -- shortly before 1:30 p.m. Hope we don't get outfoxed.

We have...uh, not friends

Yesterday we asked whether the Bush campaign was giving up or scaling back in Pennsylvania. The Bush-Cheney folks have been vigorously denying it, which means either a) the intial report from the New York Daily News was not true or b) it was true...but it's dumb politics to admit such a thing. Political insiders tell us that Kerry's poll numbers here continue to rise -- especially in the western part of the state.

There are certainly Bush TV ads and appearances by key players (but not Bush himself) here in the state this week, but those things may have been in the pipeline. The next week will tell whether a) or b) is right.

Since we're fair and dangerously unbalanced, here the email we got this morning from Guy Ciarrocchi, the executive director of the Bush-Cheney campaign in the state:

When the ny daily news wrote their misguided article on wednesday, they at least could say that they didn't have their facts, they were reporting a rumor. They were wrong. We corrected it, both nationally and in pa.

Its not only inexcusable, its sad

30 seconds over the race

Will reading about last night's debate be any more interesting than watching it was? Especially when "facts took a holiday"? But instant polls show Kerry winning. Slate.com says it was "a grand slam" for Kerry (maybe the Red Sox should insert him on the lineup...) Keith Olbermann gives it to Kerry on points (why all the sports metaphors, when every red-blooded American male was watching baseball?) Josh Marshall says it most clearly: Kerry won. Was Bush's lie that he'd never said he was "concerned" about Osama fatal? And how much damage did Kerry do himself with a gratuitous mention of Cheney's gay daughter?

Tom Friedman writes his best column in years -- on Bush's "addiction to 9/11." They're having problems with computerized voting -- in Palm Beach! And how did the White House help Halliburton? Let us count the ways.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: The paper's editorial board looks back on last night's debate and doesn't sound too impressed with either of these guys. John Baer looks forward to Nov. 2 and doesn't sound too impressed with either of these guys, either. But we're impressed -- by what a fool Bill O'Reilly is! Clout's Gar Joseph agrees with us that the only thing people will remember about these debates four years from now is: "Need some wood?" Ralph Nader in Pa.? -- no way! Trail Mix ties it all together -- with highlights from the GOP voter registration scandal.

Duel in the desert -- the live blog

8:51 p.m.: We're suffering from debate fatigue -- we couldn't even think of a funny headline. Maybe someone from our pool of loyal readers will suggest one. Teresa must be bored -- she's brought back the ketchup-colored dress.

UPDATE: 8:59 p.m.: Wolf Blitzer is annoucing that CNN will use Nasdaq's 96-screen tower in Times Square for special Election Night broadcast. Just what America needs -- a riot in Times Square in the wee hours of Nov. 3.

UPDATE: 9:03 p.m.: OMG! Matching red ties and navy jackets.

UPDATE: 9:05 p.m.: Kerry's looking like he missed last week's Botox injection. "Keeping our ports safe" -- haven't we talked about this before?

UPDATE: 9:09 p.m.: You gotta be kidding. First Bush makes sure he blames the flu vaccine shortage on Britain (our only remaining ally) and then says he's working with Canada -- weren't they the folks who were going to kill us with prescription drugs last week.

UPDATE: 9:07 p.m.: Bush: "Three-quarters of al-Qaeda has been brought to justice." Jeez, doesn't Bush read factcheck.org -- or factcheck.com even? First mention of the word "nuisance." Many more to come. And what's with the "egggg" in exageration.

UPDATE: 9:14 p.m.: Did Kerry just talk about "a plan for MY kids to get better college loans." Didn't he just hit up Teresa? Getting bored again. Frankly. we're just waiting for a shot of Bush's shoulder blades.

UPDATE: 9:15 p.m.: OK, why is W. talking about "pago." Does he mean Pago Pago? Are they importing those killer drugs now, too?

UPDATE: 9:18 p.m.: LOL -- according to Bush, the guys whose job's been outsourced to China is named "Bob"!!! What's up with that?

UPDATE: 9:20 p.m.: The little voice inside Bush's ear is explaining to him what "The Sopranos" is.

UPDATE: 9:23 p.m.: All of America is asking the same question at once: Is Bush drooling? Wait 'til the bloggers get ahold of this one. Oh wait, we're a blogger... Bush says Kerry is from "the far left bank." Is that a French joke? Subtle.

UPDATE: 9:28 p.m.: Is Dick Cheney's daughter the only lesbian in America? Jeez.

UPDATE: 9:35 P.M.: "The buggy-and-horse days." Where does W. get this stuff? (UPDATE UPDATE): Wonkette just asked: "Is he talking about the gays again?"

UPDATE: 9:38 p.m.: The danger of the low-expectations game (for Kerry). Bush set the bar lower than a limbo stick at a supermodel convention in the first two debates. Now that he's somewhat coherent and and not angry (and only occasionally drooling) it'll probably get scored as a victory for the prez. Especially when no one is listening to what they're actually saying.

UPDATE: 9:45 p.m.: Still Yankees 1, Red Sox 0, bottom of the 5th. Not much offense tonight at Yankee Stadium -- or in Tempe.

UPDATE: 9:51 p.m.: Border patrol question. Wonder if anybody's going to mention those Chechen terrorists coming in from Mexico?

UPDATE: 9:55 p.m.: "People from the Middle East"...4 minutes.

UPDATE: 9:56 p.m.: "I'm tired of politicians who talk about family values but don't value families." -- Kerry. Best line of the night. Just saw Bush cock his head in a funny way. Voice in ear: "Can you hear me now.?"

UPDATE: 10:03: Prediction: Pundits and polls will score it a slight win for Bush. But the blogs are dominated for the next two weeks with questions about Bush's health (he's missed his annual physical so far). Oh-oh, we feel a draft question coming on.

UPDATE: 10:07 p.m.: They're talking foreign policy -- is that allowed?

UPDATE: 10:11 p.m.: Kerry's "a gunner." Is that good? We're going to Barnes & Noble tomorrow to buy "Osama bin Laden's Handbook."

UPDATE: 10:16 p.m.: Bush: "I pray for my daughters." we'll bet! Did you know that Bush's faith makes him calm. So where was God last Friday night?

UPDATE: 10:19 p.m.: Kerry: "Frankly I think we a lot more loving of our neighbor to do." OMG! -- what's Wonkette gonna say?

UPDATE: 10:21 p.m.: Seriously...Kerry gave a great answer on the 9/11 aftermath -- gracious to Bush while at the same time skewering him. Now Bush is bragging how he worked with Ted Kennedy. Not after tonight!

UPDATE: 10:23 p.m.: Bush is beating the living daylights out of that podium with his open palm. What did it ever do to him? Now he's getting laughs -- it only took him 2 debates and 85 minutes. If only every question for W. was about his wife. Kerry comes back good with Teresa joke...whew.

UPDATE: 10:29 p.m.: Atrios has the video of Bush saying that he's not concerned about Osama bin Laden.

UPDATE: 10:30 p.m.: It's all over but the bloviatin'...thank God. Jeff Greenfield says debate was drowning in wonkery.

UPDATE: 10:35 p.m.: Carlos Watson thinks Kerry won. We were going to say he's so predictable -- but then you could say that about us. Candy Crowley also calls it "a wonkfest."

UPDATE: 10:39 p.m.: Spokespeople for the campaigns -- why do the networks bother?

UPDATE; 10:44 p.m.: Wow -- CNN's Bill Schneider is destroying Bush on the Osama bin Laden thing -- it looks really bad for Bush. First they play the clip where he says it's "an egggg-xaggeration." Then they show him in 2002 saying exactly what Kerry said he did, that he's not "concerned" about Osama.

UPDATE: 10:51 p.m.: CNN's 24 undecided voters -- 10 now for Kerry, 7 for Bush, 7 still undecided. Judy Woodruff: Kerry people very happy, and some carping about Bush, answers on flu shots and demeanor during the drooling phase. Jeff Greenfield is a toadie...he wants to "wait 48 hours" to react, i.e. "see what all the other pundits say."

UPDATE: 10:57 p.m.: ABC actually has Kerry up by 1, even though a lot more Republicans were watching. Good news for Kerry. Larry King's coming...I'm going. Thank you...good night!!!

Dick Cheney: Defender of a free press

From the Quad-City Times in Iowa:

Cheney’s comments were taken from a transcript of the meeting [with editorial writers and executives from Lee Enterprises and its newspapers]. No political reporters were allowed to participate.

Cheney’s meeting with Lee executives gave him the opportunity to have an impact on newspapers in a handful of battleground states, among them Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon and Iowa. In Iowa, the chain owns five newspapers, including the Quad-City Times.

Four years ago, after a speech at the Valley Forge Military Academy, both Dick and Lynne Cheney sat down with us and answered a bunch of questions. What happened, Dick?

Are you ready for some foot?

"I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry's throat."

Duel in the desert -- live blogging

Don't forget to grab a six-pack and a laptop and come right back here at 9 o' clock sharp, when we'll be blogging the debate live. If it gets dull, we'll start blogging Red Sox-Yankees.

Breaking news: Bush saying goodbye to Pa.?

Those of us here in Pennsylvania may not have George W. Bush to kick around anymore -- at least not in person. The New York Daily News -- which is traveling with the President in Arizona today -- says that no Pennsylvania TV markets were in Bush's top-ten spending list last month, and an aide has told the newspaper that no visits from W. to the Keystone State are in the works anytime soon.

If true, it would be a remarkable development considering that Bush has visited Pennsylvania as president some 39 times -- more than any other state. With 21 electoral votes, it's also the second biggest of the so-called battleground states after Florida. The Bush campaign, while acknowledging no trips are planned here as of today, said a pull-out is just "a rumor."

Recent polls have shown that Kerry may have pulled ahead here -- but not by a lot. While the Daily News' Keystone Poll shows the Democrat now up by 7 points, Kerry's lead in the recent Quinnipiac Poll is just 2 points, within the margin of error. But Al Gore did win Pa. by about 4 points in 2000, so it's possible that the GOP sees the writing on the wall in 2004.

UPDATE: You can read a response from the Bush-Cheney campaign here.

Today's (scary) thought

Something to think about the next time between now and Nov. 2 that Tom Ridge raises the terror alert level...

From today's Washington Post:

A Cornell sociologist says he has found scientific evidence that, whenever the government issues a terrorism alert, President Bush's approval ratings go up, even on domestic issues, such as his handling of the economy.

He tracked those with 131 Gallup polls taken during that time up until May. Willer, a doctoral candidate in sociology, found that, on average, each warning prompted a 2.75 point increase in the president's approval rating the following week.

Meet our new cousin! Trail Mix

Break out the cigars! Campaign Extra! has a new little cousin. It's called Trail Mix and -- unlike us -- it's genetically engineered to fit inside of a newspaper (what is this?)

Today, there's a cool little item about a new site called breakbushoff.com. It's a new campaign brought to you by the Media Fund, the anti-Bush outfit funded by George Soros and other rich folk. They have an incredibly inflamatory ad about the president that....well, it's a good thing that Republicans don't listen to black oriented stations!

Read the whole thing below -- or (please!) if you live in Philly, make a 60-cent-a-day investment in free speech, and buy the paper. The Internet rocks -- but in the end, content ain't free.

President Bush and John Kerry will square off for the third and final time at 9 tonight at Arizona State University in Tempe. The moderator is Bob Schieffer of CBS, and the questions will be limited to domestic policy.

The candidates don't need our advice, but here goes.

Bush: Stop yelling! It's scary.

Kerry: Don't look straight into the camera again. It's really scary.

'Foreign' report

It's official: Bush was wearing "something foreign" under his suit jacket during the first debates. At least that's what master tailor Frank Shattuck is telling the New York Daily News.

But Shattuck doesn't think the hump is a transmitter for an electronic earpiece, as many have theorized on the Internet. He thinks it's either a back brace or some kind of body armor.

Also "something foreign": Bush's own tailor - George de Paris. Yep, he's French! We wonder if Bush's new suits have to pass "a global test."

Today's Web site

www.breakbushoff.com.

The Media Fund - backed by billionaire George Soros and other wealthy Democrats - hopes to light a fire under young black voters with this hip-hop inspired site and television and ad campaign.

Their radio ad says "don't get played" by Bush, and it doesn't pull any punches. It says Bush "stole the election" in 2000 and opposes affirmative action because "it discriminates against white students."

It adds of the president: "Why should he and wealthy white boys be treated like everybody else and have to join the Armed Forces? That's why Daddy got him a special assignment to guard Alabama during the war while John Kerry was fighting the Viet Cong."

Quote of the day

"This is a powerful story. The networks are acting like Holocaust deniers and pretending these people [the POWs] don't exist. It would be irresponsible to ignore them."

- Mark Hyman, spokesman for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, defending the decision to air an anti-Kerry documentary on its 62 stations shortly before Election Day.

Yuck, Yuck (Nader edition)

Do you know there are now dating services that fix people up based on their political leanings? If you're a Republican they fix you up with a Republican. If you're Democrat they fix you up with a Democrat. And if you're a Nader supporter, they actually fix you up with Ralph Nader.- Jay Leno

Political activist Ralph Nader's eleventh-hour decision to run for president of Afghanistan has plunged that nation's first democratic election into chaos, raising fears that a final electoral result may not be known for months, if ever. - borowitzreport.com

Prez polls

Kerry 49%

Bush 48%

Nader1%

CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll; margin of error - +/- 3.5 percentage points; 793 likely voters; Oct. 9-10.

Bush 45%

Kerry 45%

Nader 1.6%

Reuters/Zogby daily tracking poll; 1,223 likely voters; Oct. 9- 11; margin of error - +/- 2.9 percentage points.

30 seconds over the race

Debate night: Can Bush get over the hump? Are you registered to vote? If you signed up with an outfit called Voters Outreach of America, you'd better double-check. You might also need to double-check if you're an African-American living in Duval County, Fla. Also, you also need to check if you're buying any products advertised by Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Remember those foreign leaders who secretly support Kerry? Could Germany be among them? Do Bush and Cheney deliberately lie? Richard Reeves thinks so. Do you know what unemployed workers here in Pa. think about the presidential race? The Washington Post claims that it does.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's Daily News: Buy this paper or animal-control will kill this dog. In campaign news, the editorial board drives into Sinclair (Broadcast Group, that is) and lights a match. Do you know the real story of George Bush vs. John Kerry? We don't -- but Andrew Bradley of Philadelphia says he does. Do you understand the Medicare drug plan? We don't -- but Elmer Smith tries. And it turns out that Bush and Cheney aren't the only politicians who can't handle the truth. How about...Ed Rendell.

Drinking Liberally

You didn't forget, did you? Tonight at 6 p.m. at the Ten Stone -- 21st and South.

Fire in the blogosphere -- the Sinclair boycott

If you hear hissing coming from your computer, that's the firestorm on the liberal web over plans to boycott any advertiser on Sinclair Broadcast Group -- the folks planning to air an anti-John Kerry documentary on all 62 of its TV stations just before the election.

Josh Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com is out front on this one. He and some of his readers are working the phones in outposts like Dayton, Ohio, tracking down sales managers and saying they'll boycott automalls and pizza joints that advertise on a local station owned by Sinclair. One Daily Kos reader claims he's already getting results.

There's already a boycott website -- but we've had trouble getting through and so have others.

Raw Story has another scoop: that Sinclair is a major investor in a company that won a contract from the Bush administration to fight "the war on terror."

The "October surprise" nobody expects

You've probably been hearing the debate about an "October surprise" that might swing the election. There are even Web sites like octobersurprise.net and Mark Green's nametheoctobersurprise.com. Any time people vote on their predictions, the No. 1 winner is always the capture -- or de-thawing -- of Osama bin Laden. And God knows that could happen (although we prefer to think that's he's already burning in hell, and that Delta Force finds his rotting corpse -- on Nov. 3!).

But no one mentions the most obvious surprise of all: A stock market crash. Why is this obvious? The two most memorable Wall Street collapses took place in October. There was the legendary "Black Tuesday" of 1929, the crash that signaled the Great Depression (and which will be in the news a lot around this Oct. 29 -- the 75th anniversary). On Oct. 19, 1987, the Dow suffered its biggest one-day drop ever -- although the long-term effects were not as bad as feared.

Coincidence, right? Not necessarily. Although this isn't the worst overall month for stocks (September is), several other major drops in the Dow have also occurred in October. This article from Time lists a couple of theories of why that might be. They run from investors cashing out to pay off summer vacations to companies getting more realistic about their annual profit projections as the end of the year draws near.

The Time article also notes that October "marks the end of the fiscal year for most mutual stock funds, and their managers often sell poor-performing stocks to tidy up portfolios and take some losses that will reduce the tax liabilities of the funds' shareholders.

What about 2004? Although the major averages -- especially the high-tech Nasdaq -- are down sharply since Bush took office, they've been on a nice upswing since a bottom was hit in early October (!) 2002. What goes up must come down, right?

Most problematic is the rising price of oil, which today topped $54, a record (though not when adjusted for inflation). The supply-and-demand factors driving this spike are more worrisome than the political crises the precipitated the oil crises of 1973 and of 1979. Will Wall Street react to that? One would think.

Today, the Dow hangs by thread above 10,000 -- a psychological barrier that's been breached a couple of times this year but won't help Bush if it's breached again. How many undecided swing voters are already unhappy about the drop in their retirement accounts since January 2001. And how will they feel about the incumbent if there's a full-blown crash this October.

Today is the second Tuesday in October. It's not a "black" one.

Yet.

30 seconds over the race

Who's winning the race? That depends whether you believe these guys, or these guys. Slate.com thinks that lump between George W. Bush's shoulders is "probably benign." What novelists are backing Bush for president? You'd be surprised. Probably not Philip Roth, though. Will the latest news out of Iraq help boost the president? Not this news.

Of course, black voters already lost Bush at "hello." But then, a group of bishops apparently lost fellow Catholic John Kerry at "abortion." Paul Krugman goes psychic and chronicles Bush's lies in Wednesday's debate before it happens. As the late Warren Zevon might have said of Bush: "Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor!" But you'd have to go all the way to cheese-eating surrender-monkey land.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: John Baer takes the power vested in him as a political columnist and declares an end to the Vietnam War. This, after a Swift Boat skirmish at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial here in Philly, where our man Chris Brennan was caught in the crossfire. And some guy named William Bunch weighs in on Sinclair -- not the oil dinosaur, but the political Neanderthals showing the anti-Kerry movie. David L. Crawford, the president of Econsult Corp., looks at George W. Bush as a CEO and declares: You're fired!

Things they don't talk about, Part 2

Someday, we'll live in a nation in which a presidential candidate can raise this issue in a debate and not be called "a wuss."

But not today.

From the Associated Press:

Report: Al-Qaida prisoners have ‘disappeared’
Human Rights Watch cites U.S. for ‘ghost detainees’

NEW YORK - At least 11 al-Qaida suspects have “disappeared” in U.S. custody, and some may have been tortured, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued Monday.

In refusing to disclose the prisoners’ whereabouts or acknowledge the detentions, Human Rights Watch said, the U.S. government has violated international law, international treaties and the Geneva Convention. The group called on the government to bring all the prisoners “under the protection of the law.”

Things they don't talk about

When (or if) our great-grandchildren sit down (on the "Internets"?) to write the story of the 21st Century, the big issue will be how we dealt with the end of fossil fuels and with global warming. Don't hold your breath waiting for either Bush or Kerry to talk passionately about this on Wednesday. They probably won't even be asked about it.

Maybe we should email this story from the UK Independent to the debate moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS.

Surprise CO2 rise may speed up global warming

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

The rate at which global warming gases are accumulating in the atmosphere has taken a sharp leap upwards, leading to fears that the devastating effects of climate change may hit the world even sooner than has been predicted.

Such a development would mean the worldwide droughts, agricultural failure, sea-level rise, increased weather turbulence and flooding all predicted as consequences of climate change would arrive on much shorter time-scales than present scenarios suggest, and the world would have much less time to co-ordinate its response.

UPDATE: Now the Guardian also has something on this.

The 2 percent solution

What is the surge in voter registration in Pennsylvania worth to John Kerry and the Democrats? Probably about 2 percentage points -- more than enough to tip a close race, and deliver the state's 21 electoral votes.

That's the analysis offered by Campaign Extra! in today's Daily News. It looks like as many as 100,000 new voters are on the books in Philadelphia, and almost all of them are Democrats (now, it's the party's job to get them to the polls on Nov. 2). Elsewhere in Pa., a good showing by Dems in the Philly suburbs and Pittsburgh, and on the state's many college campuses, seems to offset any GOP gains in central Pa.

The overall vote in presidential elections here is usually about 5 million people, so 100,000 votes is equal to 2 points. Click below to read the entire article:

Jessica Smith is a junior at Penn, and she knows a lot of people on the campus in West Philadelphia. But she says she can't think of a single one who isn't registered to vote.

"It was hugely successful," Smith, a poli-sci major from Washington, D.C., said of the registration drive by the Penn Democrats that she headed.

With tables on Locust Walk every day since the semester began and a floor-by-floor operation that reeked of old-time ward politics, her group registered more than 1,200 students, the majority voting here in Philadelphia.

While voter registration is up across the state, there's anecdotal evidence that the surge of applications is highest in urban areas and on college campuses - which could be very good news for Democrat John Kerry. Polls show that he'll win large cities in a landslide and is leading President Bush among the young.

With Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes a key battleground in the 2004 race, registration and turnout may prove to be the "X" factor.

At the city Board of Elections on Delaware Avenue, workers continued to work all weekend on trying to tally the flood of new registration forms.

Bob Lee, who administers voter registration, said it looks like there'll be close to 1,050,000 registered voters in the city. He said the voter rolls were just 965,000 in the spring, and since some of them were purged the actual number of new Philly voters could top 100,000.

With new registrations in the city running 9-1 Democratic, that could add somewhere close to 100,000 extra voters for the Kerry ticket. With statewide turnout likely to be in the vicinity of 5 million voters, that could add two percentage points for the Democrats.

Statewide, the total number of registered voters in Pennsylvania was said to be hitting 8 million, much higher than the 7.7 million registered to vote in the state's April primaries or the 7.8 million who were registered to vote in 2000.

Officials said earlier this month that counties were inundated with registration forms - so much so that Officials were working overtime and on Saturdays to handle them all.

Without final numbers, they said statewide tally seemed to be leaning Democratic. Democrats already had a roughly 500,000-voter edge over Republicans this past spring.

G. Terry Madonna, the Franklin and Marshall University political scientist and pollster, said it may be too early to tell if enough new voters signed up in the heavily Republican and rural "T" of Pennsylvania to offset the urban gains for the Democrats. He would say that voter interest is high - reflecting the nation's deep partisan divisions.

"We're seeing interest levels in registration that we haven't seen in decades," said Madonna. He predicted that the number of eligible Pennsylvania adults who cast ballots will likely surpass 55 percent - a level of voter participation that hasn't been seen since the 1960s.

One thing that has amazed experts like Madonna is the high rate of participation among college students - many of whom hail from other states but are signing up in Pennsylvania because the contest is so close here.

Nobody asked us but...

In today's Daily News, Campaign Extra! offers our unsolicited advice to both campaigns, whether they want it or not.

Bush needs to stay cool, and Kerry needs to stay consistent. The Dems need to get black voters and college kids out, while the GOP must boost turnout from Christain evangelicals. W. needs Florida (for real, this time). JFK's got to have Ohio. And you can throw it all out the window if Osama gets captured (or "captured," as some liberals would say), or if the terrorists strike the United States.

Here's the entire story below:

The election for the White House will be decided — God, and Florida, willing — in 22 days, and the conventional wisdom is that after Wednesday’s final debate there will be very little the candidates can do to change the dynamic of the race.
But most polls are now showing the contest between President Bush and John Kerry is so close that the candidates’ end game may very well decide the contest this time around.

Here’s a look at the things that Republican Bush and Democrat Kerry need to do, plus a few factors beyond their control.

5 things that Bush needs to do

1. Keep your cool. While many GOP partisans were thrilled with Bush’s combative style in Friday night’s debate, some undecided voters might have found his hyper-aggressive tone a bit off-putting.

In an article headlined “Try a Slice of Humble Pie,” Newsweek pundit Jonathan Alter says Bush’s unwillingness to admit mistakes “reinforces the arrogant image that makes Bush so unpopular in the rest of the world, which in turn reminds voters of Kerry's message that we need a fresh start.”

2. Get Christian evangelicals out to the polls. While Bush is overwhelmingly favored by these fundamentalists, GOP strategists like Karl Rove think too many of them see voting as a secular activity.

Rove has said on several occasions that 4 million evangelicals stayed home in 2000 — some, perhaps, because of news about Bush’s drunk-driving arrest that came out in the final weekend. This year, groups like Let Freedom Ring, a non-profit based in the Philadelphia suburbs, are spending millions to boost turnout in this group.

3. Don’t flub Wednesday’s debate. OK, this one seems pretty obvious. But with rumors runing rampant on the Internet — denied by the Bush administration — that the president was wired with an earpiece in Debate 1, voters may watch his performance even more closely than usual.

4. Win Florida. The electoral math gets a lot trickier for Bush if he’s not declared the winner again in Florida, where his margin (as you may recall) was just 537 votes in 2000.

Republicans are optimistic about a clearer Bush win, with the president’s brother Jeb still in the statehouse and former Cabinet official Mel Martinez, a Cuban-American, running for the U.S. Senate. But the Democrats have been very successful in recruiting new voters here. In Palm Beach County — home of the famed “butterfly ballot” — only 326 of some 65,000 new voters registered Republican.

5. Keep the focus on Kerry. Despite the morass in Iraq and a net loss of nearly 600,000 jobs during his administration, Bush soared in the polls when he and his surrogates labelled Kerry a flip-flopper and questioned his record in Vietnam. Expect that drumbeat to get louder between now and Nov. 2.

5 things Kerry needs to do

Be consistent. One reason Kerry scored as such a clear winner in the first debate was that he seemed steady -- not the “flip-flopper” he’d been portrayed as by the Bush campaign.

Political experts say it’s important now that Kerry maintain both the same tone and the same policies that he espoused in that debate — or he really will seem inconsistent.

2. Engage young voters. Only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-old Americans went to the polls in 2000, but thanks to that close election, the sharp differences between the candidates and organized efforts like MTV’s Rock the Vote, there are signs that will rise substantially.

The race for this vital bloc has been close, but there are signs that Kerry may be pulling ahead, especially with fears the situation in Iraq will require a return of the draft. A recent poll found 51 percent of young voters thinking Bush would reinstate the draft, and only 8 percent for Kerry.

3. Win Ohio. Al Gore nearly carried the state — without campaigning there — in 2000, and since then no state has been harder hit by the “outsourcing” of jobs overseas. Democrats have the added edge of massive registration in Cleveland and elsewhere.

4. Get out the urban vote. It’s becoming clear that large cities like Philadelphia have seen a surge in registration in 2004, but now the real work begins: Getting these new and inexperienced voters to the polls on Nov. 2. The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network has targeted new young black voters.

5. Talk up the Supreme Court. Fear of Republicans naming conservative justices to rule on abortion and other social issues fueled Gore’s success in affluent areas like the Philadelphia suburbs in 2000.

Incredibly, Kerry has only started mentioning the Supreme Court in the last week or so. It’s probably no coincidence that his numbers have risen among women voters since then.

5 things beyond their control

So widespread is the theory that a major event — a so-called “October surprise” — will jolt the race that there are several Web sites devoted to it, including octobersurprise.net and nametheoctobersurprise.com.

Some possibilities:

1. Catching Osama bin Laden. This is the “October surprise” getting the most attention from the public, including the Internet theory that the terror chief — who hasn’t been heard from in a while — is already on ice.
Outside of conspiracy fans, this would be a huge boon for Bush, creating a wave of public goodwill and blunting the Democrats’ most effective criticism of him.

2. A new terror attack on U.S. soil. While there’d certainly be questions about whether it could have been prevented, most experts believe it would create a rally-’round-the-flag effect that would help the president politically.

3. Very bad news from Iraq. There’s already been a flood of negative reports, from daily car bombings to increased U.S. casualties to more evidence that there are no weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraq developments already seem to be fueling the Kerry resurgence, and a new round of bad news could accelerate that.

4. A new war somewhere else. Given the tensions elsewhere in the Middle East — especially in Iran or Syria — and Korea, this possibility can’t be ruled out. The impact would likely be similar to No. 2.

5. Rising prices at the pump or a stock market crash. Oil prices are already out of control, but no one knows how high it has to go before voters get angry.

30 seconds over the race

Less than two days after he's invoked by John Kerry in the debate over stem-cell research, "Superman" star Christopher Reeve dies at age 52. The story knocks a lot of political nonsense off the front page -- including the raging debate over whether Kerry was wrong to want terrorists to become just "a nuisance." Apparently, America didn't agree with Campaign Extra!'s assessment of the debate Friday night, since the Washington Post tracking poll has W. up by five points now. What is a "provisional ballot," and is it the "hanging chad" of 2004?

Holy Toledo! If you think there's too many political ads here in Philly, check out Ohio. Are Democrats working overtime to get black voters to the polls? They are in the Florida Panhandle. And both campaigns are slugging it out in Iowa. Bob Herbert still thinks that Bush is living in fantasyland, but William Safire thinks W. won Friday's debate.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: What does a gruesome arson fire that killed six people -- four of them children -- have to do with Philadelphia's political corruption probe? More than you'd think. If you like politics-as-mud-wrestling, you'll like Dave Davies' story about the down 'n' dirty Philadelphia congressional race between Democrat Allyson Schwartz and Republican Melissa Brown. Michelle Malkin carries the right wing's torch for the political issue of immigration. And isn't everyone in the presidential race forgetting something else? Uh, the Supreme Court?

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse

We've all seen some mind-blowingly bad stuff in the last four years, but playing politics with the lives of American soldiers as well as Iraqis -- and brazenly admitting it -- is the lowest thing yet.

From tomorrow's Los Angeles Times:

Bush Administration Plans to Delay Major Assaults in Iraq

By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration will delay major assaults on rebel-held cities in Iraq until after U.S. elections in November, say administration officials, mindful that large-scale military offensives could affect the U.S. presidential race.

"Once you're past the election, it changes the political ramifications" of a large-scale offensive, the official said. "We're not on hold right now. We're just not as aggressive."

www.was W. wired? -- the update

Just a couple of notes on the still raging debate over what's becoming the "Rathergate" of the liberal blogosphere: Whether Bush was "wired" to give answers in the first debate.

1) It's easy in the blogosphere not to give credit where credit is due, and so we goofed when -- in a hastily done post -- we failed to credit and give kudos to The Raw Story for breaking the story in the first place. It's a great site and it's been very supportive of Campaign Extra!, so you should make them one of your favorites.

2) Now there's a brand new site devoted exclusively to the scandal. It's called, not surprisingly, isbushwired.com. It's a great read, although it might boost the site's credibility if the blogger posted his (or her) profile. Unless somebody is giving them some instructions through a hidden earpiece.

30 seconds over the race (weekend edition)

Is that a bulge under George W. Bush's jacket, or is he just scared to see us? On the campaign trail, it's getting ugly out there, but it's also getting kinda gross. It's also getting personal. Bush says, very presidentially, of Kerry: "Who is he trying to kid?" To which Kerry replies "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah." Back in the world of adults, here's an excellent state-by-state guide to the race.

Everybody's talking about terrorists disrupting the election -- is such talk a self-fulfilling prophecy? Everybody's also talking about media bias, including the paper that both conservatives and liberals love to hate, the New York Times. Media Matters for America and ABC News wonder how to stay balanced when one side lies more than the other. At least we know exactly where the far-right wingnuts at Sinclair Broadcasting are coming from.

Why is the rest of the media so biased against "Furious George" when he's never made a mistake? Tom Friedman learns that WMD don't kill people, people kill people...especially when they're suicide bombers. Mo Dowd loses us with her repeated use of the world "Oedipal." And "Security Moms" have a new voice: Anita Hill.

OMGIFriday --live blogging the debate

8:48 p.m. In honor of Dick Cheney, we're blogging from an undisclosed location tonight. We're also using a laptop, so don't expect rapid fire postinglike last time. We do have a secret transmitter under our shirt, though. Is that legal?

UPDATE: 8:52 p.m. Wolf Blitzer needs to be put out to pasture. I'm tired of this "but Bush is so likable" story line. As the latest polls show, voters like Kerry just as much.

UPDATE: 9:00 p.m. Question of the night -- will Bush get nasty? If he does, he's toast.

UPDATE: 9:02 p.m. We didn't know the Red Sox game was still on...? Damn.

UPDATE: 9:03 p.m. Why does Charles Gibson and his little white cards remind us of the Amazing Carnac? We hope he holds them up to his forehead. Bush with a blue tie -- very bold.

UPDATE: 9:06 p.m. Kerry's "weapon of mass deceptions" line -- how eager was he to get that out? Also, the Dems need to lose that 1.6 million jobs figure. The number that counts is about 600,000.

UPDATE: 9:08 p.m. OK, is it me, or is Bush greatly exaggerating his Texas accent to show he really is "a man of the people."

UPDATE: 9:10 p.m. George W. Bush -- saving the world from "gaming the oil-for-food prgram." Can you believe these guys?

UPDATE: 9:12 p.m. W. looks like he really needs that transmitter. And that "global test" line is a loser.

UPDATE: 9:15 p.m. Enough on Iraq already!!!!!

UPDATE: 9:17 p.m. Both these guys seem way too angry for the town hall format. Bush: "I know how these people think." Vote for me -- I have psychic powers! W. needs to stop with that goofy head-cocked look -- it's killing him. At least his advisors finally told him to stop pretending that Osama doesn't exist.

UPDATE: 9:21 p.m. Heaven forbid our troops could be bright in front of "an unaccountable judge." They might have to actually behave at Abu Ghraib.

UPDATE: 9:25 p.m. OK, maybe we're biased, but it really does seem that Kerry is engaging the audience a lot better than Bush -- and that's what it's all about. It's funny, though, to watch them angrily storm back to their stools after each answer. And wow -- Bush's "scowl" joke really fell flat! Tough room.

UPDATE; 9:32 p.m. Best Bush comment over on Atrios: "I think he winked at me." Man, does Bush look confused. Very mad: "Tell Tony Blair we're going alone!!" He's really losing it. This will be the sound bite that's going to be played over and over again. And great Kerry comeback that Mo. would be third largest in the coalition.

UPDATE: 9:39 p.m. Charlie Gibson: "We're all worried about our kids." That's
true -- but what about us grownups! We don't want to get killed either. Just wanted to point that out.

UPDATE: 9:42 p.m. Blame Canada!! Their drugs could kill ya! And what is a "third world"? We guess we'll have to look it up on the "internets."

UPDATE: 9:46 p.m. Did we say stop talking about Iraq? We meant keep talking about Iraq. This is putting us to sleep. And we're not even playing a debate drinking game.

UPDATE: 9:52 p.m. This just in! Bush comes from "a school of thought." Who knew?!

UPDATE: 9:55 p.m. Kerry wants to do the nation's budget "just like you do it." He's never seen our checkbook -- very bad idea! Hey, Kerry just got a laugh! Only 56 minutes into this thing. And we've got "battling green eyeshades." Has someone alerted Tom Ridge?

UPDATE: 10:01 p.m. Only W. can prevent forest fires. Good Orwellian reference by Kerry -- he nailed it. But Bush supports the use of "technologies" -- I guess he means like the "internets." Now Kerry's getting a big fat softball on jobs. Lets see if he pulls a David Ortiz and hits it out of the park.

UPDATE: 10:08 p.m. Is it our imagination, or is Bush inventing some new words here. Also, anyone notice that Kerry has addresed some of the questioners by name -- haven't seen W. do that.

UPDATE: 10:12 p.m. Great to see a questioner hit W. on the Patriot Act. If only our Washington press corps would do that.

UPDATE: 10:15 "This is in our country, folks, the United States of America." That's the real issue, in a nutshell.

UPDATE: 10:18 p.m. Michael J. Fox. "Chris" Reeve? Memo to Kerry -- watch the name dropping. Finally, a question about the Supreme Court. Bush would pick somebody who would uphold the Constitution of the United States -- we guess those five guys who made him president wouldn't make the cut. Now he's talking about the Dred Scott case -- boy, he really did study for this thing.

UPDATE: 10:23 p.m. Just noticed that Kerry really hasn't mentioned Vietnam, except sort of alluding to it now. Pretty smart.

UPDATE: 10:27 p.m. Time for Kerry to run out the clock. Well, if the pundits and the public thought Kerry won the last debate, we can't wait to see how they'll score this one.

UPDATE: 10:35 p.m. Breaking news!: Kerry wins.

UPDATE: 10:41 p.m. Jeff Greenfield: "Either the president was assertive, or he was shouting." Uh, shouting...Carlos Watson just called Kerry the winner. Jon King says Republicans are happier with his performance. We don't think the polls will reflect that.

UPDATE: 10:45 p.m. Candy Crowley making a big deal about something Kerry said about "not necessarily' getting Saddam out of office. Didn't strike us as that big a deal.

UPDATE: 10: 54 p.m. Bill Schneider is calling Bush on the 75 perent of al Qaeda thing. But Wolf Blitzer is obsessing on Kerry and the generals. Women in CNN's focus group liked Bush! Women....

UPDATE: 11:00 p.m. OK, the pundits are saying the winner will be decided on "Saturday Night Live." That means its time for us to sign off. We still think that TV is a cool medium, and Bush just wasn't cool. Thank you, and good night!

Friday night whites -- blogging the debate

Hey, everybody -- just because it's Friday night doesn't mean we won't be live blogging the debate. Where did you think we'd be? -- watching a high school football game? This ain't Texas (last time we looked). So fire up the laptop, grab a case of Yuengling, and we'll see you tonight at 9 p.m. sharp!

www.was-w-wired?

You probably already know this already, but the 'net is buzzing with speculation that the prez was wearing an earpiece, with possibly a transmitter underneath the back of his suit jacket, in last Thursday's debate. That would explain some of his odd behavior, especially when he blurted out "Let me finish!" in the middle of an answer when he had plenty of time left.

We gotta run this p.m., but you can read all about it here and here (you'll need to watch an ad through Salon Day Pass if you're not a subscriber).

JibJab misses with a right hook

As you may have heard, the folks at JibJab.com are out with a new video today -- undoubtedly millions of bored office slackers are downloading it as we write this. To the tune of "Dixie" (an interesting choice), the new animated number called "Good to Be in DC!" has some decent yuks, although just like almost any movie sequel it's shorter and not as memorable as the original.

More importantly, and at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man (scroll down), we thought it was kind of...oddly homophobic. Our first introduction was while we were getting dressed today and watching ABC's "Good Morning America." They played a clip that we later learned is roughtly the first 15 seconds of the film. It starts by lampooning Dick Cheney and Halliburton -- a pretty wide target.

Then "Kerry" appears to sing: "I'm sensitive -- I cannot lie."
"Edwards": "I love to hug and kiss this guy."
Swishy looking Jim McGreevey: "Are they gay?"
"Kerry" and "Edwards": "We won't say..."

OK, so millions of GMA viewers, including a lot of folks with no Internet access, only saw a snippet in which a demonstrably provable fact -- that the vice president was CEO of a company under investigation for corruption -- is equated with the suggestion that a "sensitive" Democrat and his running mate won't confirm or deny that they're gay lovers (...not that there's anything wrong with that).

Ha ha. "Nobody would think that Kerry and Edwards are gay!" True -- except your average American TV viewer -- the folks watching "GMA" while dashing off to work like I did -- is part of a public where 42 percent still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 terror attacks. And for whatever reasons, manliness has taken on an outsized (paging Wonkette) importance in this race.

What's more, the folks at JibJab have a bizarre idea of what constitutes "balance." And so later on, John Ashcroft appears to exclaim "I'm gay! I'm gay!" (the only thing we've never accused him of) and then builds to a finish in which John McCain appears in a silky robe to proclaim, "We go both ways in D.C.!" (politically, get it?).

At least they didn't bring up McCain's "illegitimate black daughter." But is it a little weird when, in such a short video, four men who (to the best of our knowledge) are heterosexuals are accused of being gay? Maybe the folks at JibJab are feeling a little insecure about their own masculinity.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

UPDATE: It takes several viewings to catch everything that goes on with these, so now we see that "Are they gay?" is asked by a lavender-clad Jim McGreevey, who returns briefly to "prance" (there's no other word to describe it) across the screen.

Well, at least McGreevey really is gay. Thank God there's no, like, African-Americans or anything in these videos.

30 seconds over the race

There's a debate tonight -- didn't we just have one of these? And whose idea was it to schedule a debate on a FRIDAY NIGHT!!! W. will have to defend today's weak job growth numbers. Newsweek's Howard Fineman looks which way the political winds are blowing -- and decides that Bush is "beginning to sound desperate." Paul Krugman says that too, but more harshly. The NYT says in a news story that W. is "pushing the limit on facts." The LAT's Ronald Brownstein piles on, wondering if this week's no-WMDs-in-Iraq report is the "tipping point." (For the record, the NYT has Paul Bremer's CYA on Iraq.)

But hey, what about the mounting federal debt? And what about outsourcing of jobs? -- the LAT questions whether Kerry's plan will really help there. (John and Teresa also squander some of the high ground by going on "Dr. Phil!" Voter fraud in Florida? -- we're shocked. That would be like voter fraud in...Pennsylvania.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: Everybody has an opinion about something. John Baer takes the lid off a little noticed provision in a new Pa. law that allows for "roving poll watchers" -- and wonders whether there's a voter intimidation issue involved. Our editorial board takes the lid off Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program -- and wonders why anyone ever thought he was a "compassionate conservative." Jill Porter looks at lies and the lying liars who tell them -- for some reason the name Cheney pops up a lot. Is George W. Bush the new Harry S Truman? We don't think so, but Glenn D. Porter does.

"Fahrenheit 11/2" -- terrorizing the vote

A Bush adviser said the president hopes to change the dynamics of the race with more biting attacks on Kerry's record and trustworthiness and on what Bush charges is Kerry's reluctance to use U.S. military force to defeat terrorism. The strategy is aimed at stoking public fears about terrorism, raising new concerns about Kerry's ability to protect Americans and reinforcing Bush's image as the steady anti-terrorism candidate, aides said.

-- today's Washington Post, by way of Americablog and Buzzflash.

If you haven't been following the news today, you should be very fearful about what's going on in George W. Bush's America right now. It's no coincidence that these four things just happened -- we think they're all connected:

1) The above quote, in which a "Bush advisor" makes the mindboggling comment that the new campaign strategy "is aimed at stoking public fears about terrorism." Yesterday, the Bush campaign told "prospective GOP donors in an e-mail pitch that a Kerry presidency 'would make for a more dangerous world.'"

2) Polls show that Kerry has now taken a slight lead in the race.

3) USA Today had this story on the front page this morning: "Election warning causes anxiety."

The article says that because of the repeated warnings from the Bush administration, some elections officials in the hinterlands are even debating moving polling places away from schools or similar areas. From the story:

In Tippecanoe County, Ind., chief election official Linda Phillips says she will move an undisclosed number of the county's 81 polling places out of elementary schools to "less vulnerable" sites. She acknowledges that Lafayette, Ind., "may not appear on any terrorist's road map," but she says that "it occurred to me that terrorists could get a double hit if they wanted to strike the election by taking out a school."

4) This afternoon comes this story from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - The Education Department has advised school leaders nationwide to watch for people spying on their buildings or buses to help detect any possibility of terrorism like the deadly school siege in Russia.

The safety advice is based on lessons learned from the Russia incident. But there is "no specific information indicating that there is a terrorist threat to any schools or universities in the United States," Hickok said.

There's some major stuff going on here. The most obvious to some people is that by stoking fears of an attack on Nov. 2, the Bush administration could suppress turnout.

Maybe so. But we think it's more subtle, and more political. There's been a raging debate all year about whether there's such a thing as "security moms" -- affluent suburban female voters who like Bush because they think they'll keep their kids safe. Regardless of whether they exist, it does seem like suburban women are more in play in 2004 than most voting blocs.

These are the voters that Bush and Karl Rove want to keep reminding about 9/11 -- especially when they walk into the booth and cast their ballot 26 days from now. What better reminder of the war on terror than traveling to a new polling place because al-Qaeda might be planning to attack your son's grade school in Indiana or battlegound Ohio.

What's more, the flurry of memos and advisories coming out of D.C. seem to suggest that some polling places will have heavy security, with FBI agents and God knows what else in the way of law enforcement. What a powerful reminder of the war on terror -- the issue where Bush is strongest in polls and focus groups -- right on Election Day.

Imagine what it would mean for Kerry if the pollworkers were laid-off steelworkers, or wounded veterans from Iraq. But that won't happen on Nov. 2. Instead, voters will see cops and FBI agents, protecting grade schools, making America safe -- just like George W. Bush.

If you didn't understand before why this election is so important, you'd better understand it now.

Putting on our tin-foil thinking cap

With the election less than four weeks away, the chattering classes must be getting nervous about 9/11 again. Today's Washington Post has another one of those aren't-conspiracy-theorists-wacky stories -- focusing mainly on the folks (and there's more than you probably realize) who've convinced themselves that something other than the real Flight 77, a Boeing 757, struck the Pentagon that morning.

In case you didn't already think these people come straight from the looney bin, reporter Carol Morello (ex- of Philly) tracks down one Flight 77 conspiracy theorist:

Interviewed by telephone from what she said is a 17-bedroom castle outside Toulouse, where she lives with her Polish physicist husband and five children, Knight-Jadczyk acknowledged that her group is considered "fringe." Knight-Jadczyk, 52, a Florida native, has been a psychic and a channeler. She is now involved in experiments in what she calls "superluminal communication," which she described as involving "time loops" that would enable people to communicate with their former selves.

Here's the thing: Of course it's really true that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon on 9/11! Numerous eyewitnesses saw it happen, and there's supporting physical evidence as well. If the Washington Post wanted to kill this thing off once and for all, it could have done a much better job by addressing it head on: i.e., talking to the witnesses, etc.

Instead, this piece is a textbook "straw man argument." By knocking down the most ridiculous 9/11 theory (well, one of the most ridiculous) with its most ridiculous advocates, then anyone with legitimate questions about the unfortunate events of Sept. 11 becomes too embarassed to voice them. Because anyone who does is a "conspiracy theorist," which is just a fancy way of saying "nut."

And so only "a nut" would ask how come the government refuses to release key information from that day -- such as the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from Flight 93 (whose fate is a lot more dubious than Flight 77). And only "a nut" would wonder why an air-defense system with well-established guidelines for intercepting hijacked jets failed so miserably on that day. Only "a nut" would wonder where the hell Donald Rumsfeld was on 9/11 -- aside from hatching plans to blame it all on Saddam Hussein. Or wonder whether Bush and Cheney lied to the 9/11 Commission about who was calling the shots. Or why Bush's EPA lied to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers about the air quality in lower Manhattan.

Or why Bush failed to ask any questions or even utter one word when he was informed the nation was under attack.

There was a time when people who thought that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy were also considered "nuts" -- and there are a lot of people who still think that. The funny thing is that -- as Salon editor David Talbot showed us recently -- some of the "nuts" who thought there was a conspiracy in Dealey Plaza included LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and the leadership of the Soviet Union, France, etc.

Then this week there was this fascinating story on Slate.com -- an interview that Ann Louise Bardach scored with ex-CIA man and Watergate convict E. Howard Hunt, who's 85 (and with his wife Laura):

Slate: I know there is a conspiracy theory saying that David Atlee Phillips—the Miami CIA station chief—was involved with the assassination of JFK.

Laura Hunt: Howard says he wasn't, and I believe him.

Do you believe him? Or are you another one of those "nuts"?

Campaign Extra!'s lie detector test

When Dick Cheney's involved, it's never too late to talk about lies -- which is why Campaign Extra! is finally weighing in with our own fair and dangerously unbalanced look at the various misstatements and out-and-out lies from Tuesday's debate.

At first glance, it does look pretty "balanced" -- but read it closely and decide for yourself which candidate had a deeper problem handling the truth:

Ronald Reagan once said, after a false start, that "facts are stubborn things." And they still were in Tuesday night's vice-presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards.

The "truth squads" were out even before Cheney now famously misspoke about "factcheck. com." Here is some mangling of the truth:

Cheney: He said: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11..." Yet he has made that exact suggestion on several well-documented occasions.

In December 2001, he said on "Meet the Press" that it was "pretty well-confirmed" that one of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammad Atta, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, a claim that's been pretty much discounted since then. Even so, Cheney continued for a long time to repeat the dubious charge.

Edwards: He said that the Iraq war has cost $200 billion, but only $120 billion has been allocated for it so far. However, most experts think the cost will get that high eventually.

Cheney: Best line of the night came with what was supposed to be a zinger regarding Edwards' Senate attendance, saying: "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."

The problem with that assertion is that Cheney has indeed met Edwards on several occasions - captured on film! One was at a National Prayer Breakfast in February 2001. Another was at the January 2003, swearing-in of Edwards' GOP North Carolina counterpart, Elizabeth Dole.

Cheney: Related to that same point, the vice president said: "Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session."

Except that he's not. Records show that Cheney has presided over the Senate just twice in his nearly four years in office. In fact, Edwards also presided over the Senate twice.

Edwards: He claimed at one point that while troops were fighting overseas, President Bush and Cheney "lobbied the Congress to cut their combat pay."

But according to the now legendary factcheck.org, there was some talk at the Defense Department of allowing a combat pay hike in Iraq and Afghanistan to expire, but that never took place.

Edwards: He said of the current administration: "In the time that they have been in office, in the last four years, 1.6 million private- sector jobs have been lost, 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost."

That's accurate but it's also arguably misleading, because there's been a lot of government hiring, and so the total number of lost jobs, which is what most folks care about, is only 913,000.

Cheney: He said: "Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you Senator Gone." But Edwards' actual hometown newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer, said no such thing. Cheney was talking about a small weekly publication 20 miles away.

Edwards: He said that Halliburton, the corporation for which Cheney was chief executive officer in the late 1990s, "did business with Libya and Iran, two sworn enemies of the United States."

Well, Halliburton did do business with our enemy, Libya. It pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid a $3.81 million fine in 1995 - before Cheney went to work there.

30 seconds over the race

The only consultant that Bush needs today is the late Satchel Paige: "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you." But then, it is Boston's year! Maybe that's why W. is becoming the King of Denial -- at least as far as John Edwards is concerned. Meanwhile, both campaigns are spinning the latest no-WMD report -- wonder who'll get the better of that one?

Also, opinions are breaking out like rashes today. Mo Dowd returns to her Oedipal obsession with the Bush family. Hell hath no fury like a Tom Friedman scorned: Today it's W's (lack of) energy policy. Frank Rich hits one out to left field today -- going after James Baker. Apparently, the only people who don't have an opinion all work for CNN.

And maybe Dick Cheney should study up on Satchel Paige quotes as well, since the great pitcher also said: "Mother always told me, if you tell a lie, always rehearse it. If it don't sound good to you, it won't sound good to no one else."

Daily (News) Show

Today's DN wishes a very special Happy Anniversary -- to a bug! Lots of political stuff -- our new Keystone Poll shows that John Kerry is apparently fit for command with Pa. voters, who've put him back over Bush by 7 points. We've worked here for 9 years and the first time we met Chris Brennan was yesterday when he walked into the newsroom -- we swear! He works overtime, with some billionaire Bush-bashing in Philly by George Soros and the strange but true story of factcheck.com.

Meet Cornel West, democratic socialist. Then, pour a draft with our cartoonist, Signe Wilkinson. The letters page gives us the presidential race in living black and black. If you're paranoid about electronic voting -- and who isn't -- then read this. And nobody asked Michael Smerconish, but....

You call that a major policy address?

You call that a major policy address?

You forgot Poland!

You forgot Poland!

OK, maybe George Soros isn't as smart as we thought...maybe we're not as smart as we thought

ABC News now reports this weird twist -- a lawyer in Philly (where else?) claims it was his idea -- not Soros' -- to re-direct the factcheck.com traffic to georgesoros.com. That doesn't make a lot of sense -- seems like getting a lot of traffic was the whole idea behind factcheck.com to begin with. But here's the alleged explanation:

The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.

Soros was not advised of the switch and did not know it had taken place until Wednesday, said a spokesman, Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Our ace reporter, Chris Brennan, is speaking to Soros today -- we'll bring you more on this major breaking story as it unfolds.

Why Dick Cheney is a loser -- and you're not!

More on the factcheck.org/factcheck.com fiasco:

Even if voters do successfully find the Penn-based Website, factcheck.org, the vice president shouldn't be too thrilled. The site's headline right now is: "Cheney and Edwards Mangle Facts." From our reading, it looks Cheney mangled a few more than Edwards, and the most damning stuff concerns his tenure at Halliburton:

It notes that some of the bad stuff at Halliburton happened before Cheney arrived, and some fines related to actions there while Cheney was CEO weren't levied until after he left (a little hairsplitting, we thinks). But do you think Cheney wants undecided voters to read this?...

Iran: Indeed, Halliburton has said it does about $30 million to $40 million in oilfield service business in Iran annually through a subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services Ltd. The company says that the subsidiary fully complies with US sanctions laws, but the matter currently is under investigation by a federal grand jury in Houston.

Bribery Investigation: U.S. and French authorities currently are investigating whether a joint venture whose partners included a Halliburton subsidiary paid bribes or kickbacks to win a $12 billion construction project in Nigeria.

Why George Soros is a billionaire -- and you're not!

Financier George Soros already has billions in the bank, but the move he just pulled today is priceless! You may remember our favorite moment in last night's debate -- when Cheney asserted he didn't have time to bore listeners with a defense of his actions as CEO of the corrupt Halliburton Corp., but that viewers could get all the info by clicking on a Web site: "Factcheck.com."

The episode was the ultimate metaphor for Cheney's twisted relationship with the truth. The Web site he was apparently trying to tout -- you never know with these guys -- is actually factcheck.org, a non-partisan political information site run right here in Philly, by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications. The Cheney misinfo led thousands of viewers to a site that didn't really exist.

Of course, the name -- like most viable domain names -- had been earlier snapped up by the Domain Name Sales Corp. located in the Caribbean. (Which is probably where Cheney should stash some of the millions he made at the oil-services giant).

Enter George Soros: the Hungarian-born hedge-fund genius who made billions on the American stock market, and has spent millions of that fortune on trying to get George W. Bush -- whose Iraq invasion Soros considers an outrage -- out of the White House. In recent weeks, Soros has kicked it up a notch with an anti-Bush book, a speaking tour (which stops in Philly today!), and now a highly charged, highly promoted Web site, georgesoros.com.

Well, Soros or his "people" must have been watching last night, because within minutes of Cheney's gaffe, the billionaire went out and rented the address from the good folks down in the islands. And so now, anyone who watched the debate and wants to learn more about Cheney and Halliburton, instead gets this headline:

"President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests and undermining American values."

Let's amend the Constitution: Soros vs. Schwarzenegger in 2012!

UPDATE: Except that the plot thickens with a report by ABC News that Soros DIDN'T buy or rent the site, that a Philadelphia lawyer (why is it always Philly?) for "Factcheck.com" decided on his own to direct the heavy flow of traffic during the debate to Soros' site. Here's a new post on this odd development.

30 seconds over the race

Campaign Extra! is always happy when the Yankees lose, whether it's 2-0 or 22-0. Some people (not us...we're unbiased, remember?) are also happy when Dick Cheney loses, which is what happened when CBS talked to undecideds in Ohio after the great debate. Other pundits stuck with the official line -- draw, draw, draw, blah, blah, blah. Can you handle the truth? The Washington Post thinks so. And while Cheney insists he's never met Edwards before, why did he have this weird sense of deja vu? Meanwhile, Matt Drudge and the GOP try to divert your attention by accusing Michael Moore of underwear bribery. And in non-political news, famed astrologer Joyce Jillson died yesterday at age 58. She should have seen it coming.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: "Nasty Boys" Edwards and Cheney make the cover, which can mean only one thing -- that it's Eagles' "bye week." Our fair and balanced (no, seriously) Gar Joseph walks us through the debate highlights, including the fact that Vermont's Patrick Leahy -- back from taking Cheney's heartfelt advice? -- was in the front row...maybe to rattle "Nasty Boy" Dick? If you didn't get enough campaign vitriol last night, check out our letters page! We thought there was another column about Bush's debate performance when we saw this headline: "Story of a Meltdown." Turns out it's about the Phillies!

Fun with Dick and John -- blogging it live

8:53 p.m. So CNN has this "Countdown to Debate" clock -- how geeky is that? If you're obsessing on the minutes leading up to a vice presidential debate, maybe you need a "Countdown to Getting a Life" clock. Especially when the hated Yankees are playing on Fox. Do they have commercials on this thing?

UPDATE: 8:59 p.m. Two red ties. They're gonna play it safe!

UPDATE: 9:00 p.m. LOL -- Tucker Carlson just said listening to Cheney is like "taking a sedative." Or was it suppository?

UPDATE: 9:03 p.m. Gwen Ifill rocks -- asking tough questions on Jerry Bremer and Rumsfeld no-Iraq-al Qaeda links! Uh oh -- the "established relationship with al-Qaeda" and Saddam Hussein is back! When is Cheney ever going to learn?

UPDATE: 9:05 p.m. "Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people." The first words out of Edwards' mouth!

UPDATE: 9:07 p.m. Edwards is being very direct, simple -- really taking it to Cheney. How long before Cheney starts saying that "Vice President is a tough job."?

UPDATE: 9:13 p.m. We're really surprised by Cheney's tone and demeanor. We thought that -- with a lot of coaching -- that he would return to the avuncular style of the 2000 debate with Joe Lieberman. We were wrong. He's snarly and a little scary looking, and still putting it out there that Kerry's a wuss who'll get us all killed.

UPDATE: 9:16 p.m. Now Cheney's hailing our support of the death squads in El Salvador as a shining moment in democracy. We're waiting for him to praise the Japanese interment camps.

UPDATE: 9:20 p.m. OK, are we biased, or is Edwards cleaning Cheney's clock? His courtroom background seems to be really helping -- even seated in a chair. He's sticking to a common theme -- that Bush and Cheney can't be trusted to tell the truth -- and is working all those answers around it.

UPDATE: 9:23 p.m. Cheney's talking point: "Your rhetoric would be a lot more credible if you had the record to back it up."

UPDATE 9:26 p.m. Cheney is making a bizarre charge here: that Kerry and Edwards couldn't stand up to the pressure of Howard Dean! Actually, as we remember it, Howard Dean couldn't stand up to the pressure of Howard Dean. Edwards lands a left hook: "A long resume does not equal good judgment."

UPDATE: 9:31 p.m. Cross talk! As Ian Hunter once said: "Cleveland rocks!"

UPDATE: 9:36 p.m. I'm sorry -- Dick Cheney is full of it. Once again, he mentions the terrorist camp that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ran in Iraq -- that camp was in the northern section of Iraq that was under control of the Kurds, not Saddam. The strong link between Zarqawi and Saddam just doesn't exist.

UPDATE: 9:41 p.m. Unbelievable -- instead of answering allegations about Halliburton, Cheney directs listeners to a Web site (run here in Philly by U. of Pennsylvania). How many viewers will go there. Even worse -- and I need to double ckeck this -- I beleive Cheney called it "factcheck.com." That's wrong. It's factcheck.org!

UPDATE: 9:47 p.m. Politically, Cheney had his best line when he said that after presiding over the Senate that tonight's the first time he met Edwards. But Edwards comes back with some serious truth-telling on Cheney's record in Congress -- voting against Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela!

UPDATE: 9:57 p.m. Man, Cheney just flashed a snarl that scared the bejeezus out of me. That said. it seems like it's more of a draw on domestic issues. Cheney almost sounded reasonable talking about small businesses and tax cuts. Almost.

UPDATE: 10:01 p.m. Good Edwards line: "We just don't value wealth in America -- we value work." Maybe went a little overboard on Cheney's gay daughter, though. He was trying to make a subtle point -- many Americans don't get subtlety when it comes to homosexuality.

UPDATE: 10:05 p.m. Asking John Edwards a question about frivilous lawsuits is like throwing a hanging curve to Barry Bonds. Who can say anything bad about his efforts on behalf of the 5-year-old girl?

UPDATE: 10:09 p.m. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ...Can't we go back and talk about Halliburton some more?

UPDATE: 10:14 p.m. Twins 2, Yankees 0 (6th inning)! Minnesota, Edwards...everybody hits! Whaaa hoooo!

UPDATE: 10:17 p.m. Edwards: "I would find terrorists where they are, and stop them, and kill them." Did Edwards just volunteer to go personally to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region?

UPDATE: 10:19 p.m. Bush picked Cheney? We thought Cheney picked himself.

UPDATE: 10:21 p.m. Cheney's talking about all the similarities in his upbringing with Edwards. Really? You mean Edwards was busted twice for drunk driving and got five draft deferments?

UPDATE: 10:27 p.m. This is just like watching an Eagles game -- a slowly building but decisive rout. And Edwards is just running out the clock now. It is a little stunning, though, how little they've talked about domestic issues -- including nothing on energy policy, which will likely prove the defining problem of the 21st Century.

UPDATE: 10:29 p.m. Cheney's taking credit for Zell Miller -- not sure I'd brag about that.

UPDATE: 10:35 p.m. We're into stoppage time (that's for all you soccer fans) now. I'm really interested to see how the media calls it. In terms of demeanor, I thought Edwards did well but Cheney was also a heck of a lot more poised than his so-called boss. Will reporters look deeper at some of Cheney's misleadiing statements on Iraq.

UPDATE: 10:43 p.m. OK, the "draw" talk is beginning on TV, although Carlos Watson on CNN noted that Edwards "landed some blows" on terrorism that might appeal to swing voters. Wolf Blitzer is a disgrace -- he's obsessing on Edwards' "inexperience" here.

UPDATE: 10:52 p.m. Candy Crowley makes a good point -- that since there is some question about whether Edwards is ready to be president, even a "draw" is a sort of a win for Edwards.

UPDATE: 10:55 p.m. CNN focus group -- Cheney got his best spike when he talked about gay marriage -- the one issue he disagrees with Bush about! (Edwards' biggest spike came when he attacked "outsourcing.")

UPDATE: 11:00 p.m. THE PUNDITOCRACY HAS SPOKEN! It's a draw, and a draw is a "win" for Edwards. We think Edwards wins when you take into account Cheney's credibility gap on Iraq, but that's just us. When Larry King comes on, it's time for us to log off. Thank you very much, Philly! You've been a great audience! See you tomorrow...Good night!!!

Tonight: Drinking Liberally and debate blogging

OK, here's the recommended plan of action for tonight. Start out at 6 p.m. by Drinking Liberally at the Ten Stone at 21st and South. No apocalyptic floods in the forecast, and thus, no excuses this time. Well, OK, I'm going to be a "soccer dad," but the legendary Atrios will be in the house.

You can watch the debate at the Ten Stone, or you can stay warm in front of a glowing computer screen, and watch Campaign Extra! as we blog the debate, live and also in real time, which is the same thing, starting at 9 p.m.. We'll tell you who won and who lost. And if you disagree, we'll tell you what Cheney told Patrick Leahy.

Pork Belly Futures: Fall of the Bacon Thief

Remember our rant on Sunday against Michael Kostiw, the Republican former oil lobbyist who was about to become the No. 3 guy over at the "non-partisan" CIA? (Of course you do.) We asked if it was too late to stop this thing -- and it wasn't! Kostiw won't be getting the job.

Of course, none of the credit belongs to us -- it all goes to the most excellent Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, who learned that Kostiw had been bounced for...bringing home the bacon? Well, here's the bizarre nut of the story:

The change came after The Washington Post reported Sunday that, in late 1981, Kostiw was caught shoplifting a $2.13 package of bacon from a supermarket in Langley, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the incident. At the time, Kostiw had been a CIA case officer for 10 years.

In a CIA polygraph test, Kostiw's responses to questions about the incident and his past tours abroad led agency officials to place him on administrative leave for several weeks, according to four sources familiar with the events. Kostiw has told friends he decided to resign during the leave. Agency officials arranged for the misdemeanor shoplifting charge to be dropped and the police record expunged in return for his resignation and agreement to seek counseling, a former official said.

For some reason. we suspect there's more there than meets the eye. As we said in our rant, the shoplifting doesn't bother us -- what does are his ties to the oil lobby and to a group backing the U.S. occupation of Iraq with dubious poll numbers.

And, it's not a total victory. Kostiw will still serve as a senior advisor to the new CIA chief, GOP political hack Porter Goss.

Matt Drudge's panic attack

Forget the polls. You know that the White House folks are panicking when Matt Drudge spends 19 hours a day roaming the World Wide Web, desperately trying to find ANYTHING that might make John Kerry look bad. So far today, he's hyping a quote from John Edwards who apparently said, "I'd say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you've lost your mind." (And your point is?...) Also, the president of Poland apparently took a short break from getting his troops the hell out of W.'s Iraq ASAP to say something bad about Kerry.

Yesterday, it was the ridiculous claim that Kerry had a debate cheat sheet -- blown apart by bloggers who found that if anyone had cheated it was W. The only folks who seem to be panicking more than Drudge: The Israeli air force, which apparently forced down a Lufthansa jet for no good reason, except maybe to (insert Cheney-ism here) with Germany.

Will new voters "Kerry" Pa.?

Voters register yesterday at Board of Elections on Delaware Avenue. (Elwood P. Smith / Daily News)

It seems certain that the number of new Philadelphia voters will be the second highest ever -- topped only by the stark-contrast 1983 mayoral primary between "law-and-order" rowhouse champ Frank Rizzo and W. Wilson Goode, on his way to becoming the city's first black mayor.

And 2004's new Philly voters are registering Democratic over the GOP -- by an astounding 9-1 margin! The Philly suburbs and Pittsburgh -- the two major battlegrounds within Pa. -- are also seeing Democrats sign up at a greater rate than in past years.

Here's a special report from Campaign Extra!:

Mike Verzella, a 23-year-old student at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, used to be registered to vote in his native South Jersey, but in 2004 he wants to be where the action is.

So about five hours before last night’s midnight deadline, Verzella joined a steady stream of first-time voters and transplants at the city Board of Elections — the tail end of the biggest flood of new voter sign-ups here in more than two decades.

“It’s going to be such a battle here,” Verzella said. “I felt that Pennsylvania needed my vote more than New Jersey,” where experts think Democrat John Kerry is already a lock.

That’s not the case here in Pennsylvania, a tossup battleground state where both Kerry and President Bush are spending millions of dollars on voter registration and TV ads in pursuit of 21 electoral votes that could decide the whole election.

In particular, the Democrats and a number of pro-Kerry committees have poured a lot of that effort into Philadelphia. Here, the Massachusetts senator is likely to get nearly 80 percent of the vote, but poverty and large numbers of students and other transients have in the past held down voter turnout.

Although the final tally won’t be known until later this week, city election officials expected new and changed registrations to probably surpass 225,000 — the most registration activity since the 1983 mayoral primary between the late Philly icon, Frank Rizzo, and W. Wilson Goode, the city’s first black mayor. That year, 293,000 applications were processed.

Of the 204,808 new registrations processed through Sunday, Democrats held a nearly 9-1 edge on the GOP. There were 157,433 Democratic forms, 28,925 no-party or third-party, and just 18,450 Republicans. What’s more, 1,717 Philadelphians switched parties to become Democrats, and just 927 joined the GOP.

The heavy number of new voters was mirrored in the suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia, where officials also reported near-record sign-ups. So far, Democrats have had an edge in Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks and Chester counties.

Experts say that both the closeness of the 2000 election and the deep partisan divide between Bush and Kerry is driving the high levels of interest. A number of organized groups — some very partisan, some independent like MTV’s Rock the Vote — have made more of an effort to register voters than any year in history.

Steve Gulick, 56, who teaches remedial reading at Philadelphia Community College, was one of several faculty members who led a registration drive there. He pulled three voter forms from his backpack, and had hand delivered 26 other registrations earlier in the year.

Gulick — wearing a button saying “Dissent is Patriotic” — said scores of students had registered, including many who mailed in their forms. Some of his students, he noted, are “vociferous in their opposition to Bush.”

Most new voters said they planned to vote for Kerry — with varying degrees of enthisiasm. Verzella, the art student, called the Democrat “the lesser of two evils.”

30 seconds over the race

Campaign Extra celebrates the newest entry in the Political Cliche Hall of Fame: "It's Hard Work!" Matt Drudge's main headline today is: "Waiting for the Blow." We thought it would link to an expose of Bush's National Guard years. Unless you read the Washington Post for some reason, the race for the White House is a " dead heat. " Maybe that's why tonight's veep debate between Cheney and Edwards seems so important: Watch it and decide which one looks "dead" and which one gives off "heat." Paul Krugman discusses the Laffler curve -- just kidding! He bashes Bush...duh. But here's someone you wouldn't expect to Bush-bash: former Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer.

Daily (News) Show

The Phila. Daily News -- just like today's main sports story: "No Respect, I Tell Ya." Contrarian John Baer, the only columnist in America who thought that W. really won last week's presidential debate, applies his psychic powers to tonght's veep debate. In a related matter, a letter writer asks: "What has John Baer been smoking?"

That Chris Brennan doesn't let up, does he? Today, he's with John Kerry as the candidate bashes Bush's weird science on stem cells. And Signe Wilkinson shows us what she really thinks about W.'s Iraq policy. And in the name of piling on, Flavia Colgan tells us what she really thinks about the president's stance on domestic violence (he has one?).

CNN -- the "good news" (for Bush) network?

Lately, a lot of left-leaning, pro-Kerry types have been wondering why CNN has been dubbed the "liberal" counterpart to Fox News, when often it seems about as liberal as an old "Yellow Dog" Democrat from Alabama. Just today, Atrios had a good example of Fox News-style "balance" at CNN.

Now, Campaign Extra! is wondering why CNN's polling director, Keating Holland, seemed to be twisting himself like a pretzel to find something positive to say about Bush -- in the wake of polls showing that Kerry clobbered the president in last week's debate and is now back at or near the lead in the horse race.

Let's start with this bizarre statement, as posted in the artlcle on CNN.com about its poll by the Gallup Organization, which shows the race is now a dead heat:

"It's obvious that the debate helped Kerry. What's less obvious is how."

Wow, where do you start with that? "How" the debate helped Kerry is that a majority of those who watched thought he was more in command than an annoyed and whiny sounding Bush. Most people liked the substance of what Kerry said and didn't see the "flip-flopper" portrayed by the Bush campaign.

After the debate, a Newsweek poll found people view Kerry as the stronger leader 47 to 44, and as more likable by 47 to 41. On the economy, the Gallup poll showed all voters favoring Kerry 51 percent to Bush's 44 percent, almost exactly the opposite of what the September 24-26 poll indicated -- Bush with 51 percent and Kerry with 45 percent

But, according to the article, Holland said that winning the debate could be a problem for Kerry -- because "the expectations game has shifted."

"So the pressure is on Kerry to meet expectations. And let's not forget the good news for the White House in this poll: Bush is still seen as a stronger leader who would better deal with Iraq and terrorism."

But, as CNN's own article goes on to note: "Bush's numbers on the Iraq and terrorism, however, have fallen since the previous poll. He leads Kerry 51 percent to 44 percent on the question of who would do a better job in Iraq. That was down from 55 percent for Bush in the previous poll and up from 41 percent for Kerry."

So, what would Holland and CNN have said if Bush actually had won the debate?

The McCain smear -- a Tom Ridge connection?

We tend to buy Vanity Fair every other month or so, but we're definitely going to pick up the November issue, and not just for the latest Princess Di conspiracy theories. According to the New York Daily News, there's an excellent and timely re-visiting of the atrocious smear campaign that the Bush people pulled on John McCain in 2000. (No links -- Vanity Fair doesn't do that sort of thing).

The most surprising thing in the NYDN synopsis is the hint that an aide to political-Boy-Scout Tom Ridge -- who was the two-term governor of Pennsylvania -- had something to do with the malicious gossip that McCain's wife has a drug problem or that the Arizona senator had fathered a black child.

Here's the anecdote -- of course, it's impossible to confirm, or to find out if someone who was smearing McCain was falsely claiming a Ridge tie that didn't exist:

Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen recounted that shortly before the primary election, he received a phone call from a man who said "he was on leave from Gov. Tom Ridge's staff in Pennsylvania and down here working on the Bush campaign."

"The man said, 'I understand you're for McCain,' and I said, 'Yes,' " Thigpen recounted, "and he proceeded to tell me that Cindy was a drug addict and this kind of stuff."

We will post an update if there's any more on this.

30 seconds over the race

We're learned in the last month that blogging is just like being the president: "It's hard work!" But you don't hear us whining about it...yet. Insiders have been saying for a while that the Gallup poll has been skewed against Kerry, so when their new survey shows a dead heat you know it's really bad news for W. But "The Mystery Pollster" insists that the Kerry bounce is not all it seems.

Meanwhile, both the NYT and Knight-Ridder (who?) are saying the same thing, that voter registration is goin' nuts! In a related matter, Dick Cheney is getting ready for a debate against John Edwards that might really mean something. Bob Herbert is writing about "Bush and Reality" -- now there's a debate we'd like to watch. Also, the NYT profiles an anti-Bush voter who might surprise you: He's a Republican U.S. senator.

Daily (News) Show

Inside today's DN: Did the Eagles play yesterday or something? If you live in Pennsylvania (and who doesn't) then TODAY is the last day to register to vote! Chris Brennan -- fresh off driving Ed Rendell to the looney bin -- finds out that registration forms are going like hotcakes. When Kerry backers aren't busy registering, they're writing letters to the editor. Our bored editoral board -- having endorsed Kerry months ago -- goes crazy and endorses Joe Hoeffel for Senate. Meanwhile, all of Philly is talking about a man who's been arrogant, self-righteous, has made a ton of mistakes since arriving on the job in early 2001 and now is going to find himself unemployed next year. No, not him. HIM!

Oil, politics, and the CIA

One of the issues that's been lost in the blur of a fall political campaign has been the politicizing of the CIA under its new chief, ex-GOP congressman Porter Goss. Today, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus -- one of the best in the business -- has a scoop about Michael Kostiw, a top aide on Goss' committee staff who's been named executive director, the No. 3 post, at the spy agency. Kostiw, a former CIA agent, is to be sworn in tomorrow.

Pincus' scoop is that Kostiw apparently resigned under pressure from the CIA more than 20 years ago. The odd reason: an allegation of shoplifting that Pincus isn't able to fully explain. But Campaign Extra! thinks there's more serious reasons to be alarmed about the selection of Kostiw.

For one thing, when he left the CIA, for whatever reason, he ended up as a vice president for international affairs and a major lobbyist for ChevronTexaco, the oil GIANT. In a sense, it doesn't matter so much how close Kostiw has remained to the oil lobby, but the appearance of such a tie is the last thing this country needs when most of the world believes Iraq was a big oil grab.

But wait, there's more! He also "served as vice chairman of the International Republican Institute, a group made up of GOP foreign policy experts that works with the National Endowment for Democracy on political and economic development projects."

Does that group sound familiar? The IRI are the people who did the now infamous "right track-wrong track" poll of Iraqis this summer that George W. Bush cited at his recent joint press conference with Ayad Allawi. That's the poll in which 51 percent of Iraqis thought the nation was on "the right track" -- a finding that really hasn't been duplicated in any other survey.

So, let's review: We have a former oil lobbyist linked to a group that did a controversial poll seeking to prove that Iraq is on the right track -- who's now going to be a key player in providing "objective" intelligence about the Middle East. Oh, and he may be a shoplifter, too.

Is it too late to call this thing off?

Update: NOPE!!!

Secret Service vs. free speech: Round 2

Last month, we railed against the actions of the Secret Service at a rally in the Philadelphia suburbs, where agents reportedly blocked journalists from interviewing anti-Bush AIDS protesters. Now, it's getting worse -- according to a report out of Wisconsin.

The student newspaper the Daily Cardinal (you may have to register...pretty obnoxious for a college paper) says that three Racine, Wisc., residents were ejected by the Secret Service from a recent Bush rally not because they were a threat to the president or because they verbally disrupted the affair, but because they donned T-shirts with the word "liar" on them.

The story says: "Keith Rosenberg, Michael Goebel and James Bremner said they signed the required pledge stating they supported Bush. They said they did not put on the protesting shirts until Bush appeared on stage to speak."

"'But we weren't there to start a riot,' Bremner said, adding the intent of their actions was 'handing it to [Bush] because the guy is a blatant liar.'"

OK, you can debate which candidate has the better plan for Iraq until you're blue in the face, but all Americans -- regardless of ideology or party affiliation -- should be appalled and horrified by this. The Secret Service has an important role to play, which is protecting the president and other candidates from physical harm -- and only that. Any step toward restricting Americans' right to free speech, especially when it all seems to be on behalf of one candidate (Bush), is a small but frightening step toward becoming a police state. We know that sounds alarmist, but that's how it looks to us.

30 seconds over the race -- weekend edition

Is that Mount St. Helens that's about to blow, or just the composure of the Bush team? Here's more about that Newsweek poll that shows that it's Kerry's race to lose again. Here's a look at campaign strategy in the wake of Kerry's debate win. Meanwhile, Bush is out there railing against something called "the Kerry doctrine," even as folks in the red state of Georgia are calling him a flip-flopper. The NYT takes an close look at Kerry's internals -- and we're not talking about poll numbers!

Meanwhile, ace columnist Tom Friedman and his keen powers of observation are back with this pronouncement: "We're in trouble in Iraq." No wonder the man has two Pulitzers! If you can't get enough of the Florida hurricane-wrath of God angle, here's some more. If you're an unfortunate son like us and didn't push your editors for a press pass to the Springsteen-REM-Fogarty concert in Philly, here's what we missed (sigh). And if Bruce can make it to Philly, why can't "freeway blogging"?

Kerry -- back in the saddle

Many of you have been waiting for the first major poll to come out after Kerry whomped Bush in Thursday's debate -- and here it is, courtesy of Newsweek. You already knew that JK won the debate, and now he's back in the (margin-of-error) lead, 47-45. But don't take our word -- read it for yourself.

NEWSWEEK POLL: BUSH LEAD GONE
Sat Oct 02 2004 16:42:32 ET

New York-Sixty-one percent of Americans who watched the first presidential debate on September 30 say Sen. John Kerry won; 19 percent say President George W. Bush won and 16 percent say they tied, according to the latest Newsweek Poll which was conducted after the debate ended. Fifty-six percent say Kerry did better than they expected; 11 percent say so for Bush. Thirty-eight percent say Bush did worse than expected; 3 percent say so for Kerry, the poll shows.

During is 19-year career in the U.S. Senate, Kerry has changed his position on a number of issues. From what they know about Kerry, 47 percent of registered voters say this is because Kerry is thoughtful and changes position as circumstances change or he learns more about an issue; the same number (47%) say it's because Kerry is politically-motivated and changes his position when he thinks it will improve his image or help him win an election.

For this Newsweek Poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates International interviewed 1,013 registered voters on Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2004.

Foxgate -- the best fake news scandal yet!

It couldn't happen to a nicer network. There's a new "fake news" scandal, and this one's a doozy. And it happened on the web site of that fair and balanced cable network, the Fox News Channel. Kudos to master blogger Josh Marshall for uncovering it.

It all started when he stumbled across an item on FNC's Web site entitled: "Trail Tales: What's That Face?" It was based on a Kerry rally in Tampa, Fla., and attributed these quotes to the Democratic candidate:

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Kerry said Friday.

"It's about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures," Kerry said.

"I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy," the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.

Wild stuff -- so wild that it was easy for Marshall to verify in a matter of minutes that Kerry had uttered no such things (duh). It took several hours, but FNC finally posted this late yesterday afternoon:

Editor's Note

Earlier Friday, FOXNews.com posted an item purporting to contain quotations from Kerry. The item was based on a reporter’s partial script that had been written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast. We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice.

When it comes to excuses, "fatigue" is the new black. Bush aides are blaming it for their man's sour debate performance, while Kerry said it's the reason he boasted about how he "voted for the *87 billion before I voted against it." We're saving "fatigue" to explain our next correction.

So now the fake news wars are even, one for CBS and one for FNC. This may not be as significant as the "60 Minutes" fiasco, but it's a heck of a lot loopier.

UPDATE: From Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo:

So what happened?

Imagine that.

"Faces of Frustration"

For any of you who thought that, say, a meaningless September game between the Phillies and the Marlins was more important than watching the debate live, this short video from the DNC will pretty much fill you in on what you missed. Watch it here. (nice soundtrack!)

UPDATE: Or for the technologically challenged, you can watch this. It also gets the point across effectively.

30 seconds over the race -- unleashed!

Still recovering from blogging the way that those Iraqi insurgents fight: "Vociferously." Now, when will our editors step up to the plate with more "moolah"? You know things are bad for the Bush campaign when the RNC's best defense is saying that Kerry lied when he said he hadn't called Bush "a liar." So, wait...Bush is a liar, then? Meanwhile, the DNC is finding that even Republicans were calling Kerry the winner. Paul Krugman didn't wait for the debate to declare Bush a loser. Here's the story for folks who care about body language. Here's the story for people who care about substance. Here's the story for people who care about the truth. And in non-political news, Harpo Chico Marx returns from the dead to ask: "Vy ox? Vy not chicken?"

UPDATE: Yes, it's CHICO Marx. We were just trying to prove to our conservative readers that we're not really a Marxist!

Daily (News) Show

Today's DN looks at last night's debate and asks: "Are you ready for some football?!" In less-pressing matters of national importance, columnist John Baer watches the 2000 debate on C-SPAN Classic by mistake -- and declares Bush the winner! Clout's Gar Joseph says "Show Me the Moolah" as he sifts through the best and worst from last night. But the DN editorial board calls it for Kerry -- wonder if that will influence their endorsement? Oh wait, they did that already.