From:  

This was put out by Merrill Lynch the other day:

By: John Chuckman  

This government has given America corruption, poor appointments to important posts, a huge and wasteful increase in military spending, not a single worthy humanitarian initiative, and it has set its jaw in grim contempt for the sensibilities of virtually the rest of the planet. It is determined to launch a war for which there is not one sound reason, a war that promises to send the world into a downward spiral of resentments, uncertainty, and death.

Yet Americans have given it a vote of confidence.

A political party that in one generation has included as prominent spokesmen and leaders Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay, Phil Gramm, Dick Armey, John Ashcroft, Bob Barr, Pat Buchanan, and Newt Gingrich, that attracts vultures like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and whose spokespeople include genuine hate-mongers like Ann Coulter, cannot be regarded as harmless. There is a large enough cesspool of ignorance and arrogance here to threaten all people who regard human decency and rationality as important.

"If Democrats know what's good for them, they will do whatever they can to encourage President Clinton to speak on their behalf in the next two years. Americans should see constant reminders of what their country was like when they had competent, intelligent, moral, and elected leadership."

- MWO

New touch-screen voting machines may look spiffy, but some experts say they can't be trusted.

By: Farhad Manjoo  

A fast-talking, fact-toting woman, who can recount dozens of stories of voting machines going disastrously haywire, Mercuri goes into a region whose election has been held up and proceeds to hold forth. Mercuri tells everyone she can, from election judges to county supervisors to the local media, that the supposedly "state-of-the-art" machines they've all been sold are nothing but a "a bill of goods".

So far, Mercuri has had little success in convincing local leaders to slow down their drive to purchase new voting machines. By late evening on Election Day 2002, though, people other than electoral losers may start to see some sense in Mercuri's arguments.

In the two years since Florida's first bungled election, dozens of local municipalities - and the entire state of Georgia - have thrown out their antiquated voting machines in favor of touch-screen, "ATM-style" systems. According to some reports, more than 20% of voters will use such machines this year, and that number is poised to increase during the next decade. In October, without the slightest nod to the irony of the situation, President Bush signed into law a sweeping new bill that promises to end the voting problems that some say helped nudge him into office. The new law, called the Help America Vote Act, will provide almost $4 billion to states to allow them to purchase new machines.

But as Florida's Sept. 10 primary illustrated, the new systems are not a panacea...

Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans

By: John Markoff  

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe - including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store, and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

From:  

A Scurry County election error reversed the outcomes in two commissioner races.

A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans. Democrats actually won by wide margins.

The problem was discovered when poll workers became suspicious of the margins of the vote, Scurry County Clerk Joan Bunch said.

By: Eric Alterman  

George W. Bush does not lie about sex, I suppose - merely about war and peace. Most particularly he has consistently lied about Iraq's nuclear capabilities as well as its missile-delivery capabilities. Take a look at Milbank's gingerly worded page-one October 22 Post story if you doubt me. To cite just two particularly egregious examples, Bush tried to frighten Americans by claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used "for missions targeting the United States". Previously he insisted that a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed the Iraqis to be "six months away from developing a weapon". Both of these statements are false, but they are working. Nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed think that Saddam is currently helping Al Qaeda; 71% think it is likely he was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

What I want to know is why this kind of lying is apparently OK. Isn't it worse to refer "repeatedly to intelligence... that remains largely unverified" - as the Wall Street Journal puts it - in order to trick the nation into war, as Bush and other top U.S. officials have done, than to lie about a blowjob? Isn't it worse to put "pressure... on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates", as USA Today worded its report? Isn't it more damaging to offer "cooked information", in the words of the CIA's former chief of counterterrorism, when you are asking young men and women to die for your lies? Don't we revile Lyndon Johnson for having done just that with his dishonest Gulf of Tonkin resolution?

By: Howard Zinn  

And is it not a crime against the people of the United States to take the wealth of this country, which is needed for health care and housing and education and use it for war? We need a regime change, right here.

Will we go to war because Iraq may have weapons of mass destruction. Because it may develop one nuclear bomb in two or five years? Israel has 200 nuclear weapons. The USA has 20,000 nuclear weapons. Yes, let's dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, everywhere.

It makes no sense to think that Iraq, a fifth-rate military power, already crippled by two wars and 10 years of economic strangulation presents a clear and present danger. At this moment, George Bush and his administration, preparing for war, are a clear and present danger to the peace of the world.

By: Arianna Huffington  

Memo to Tom, Dick, and Terry: The problem wasn't that the President was out there delivering his message. The problem was that you failed to have anyone out there delivering any kind of galvanizing, opposing message.

And it's not as if there weren't plenty of urgent issues to choose from: the limping economy, the soaring deficit, corporate corruption, an energy plan crafted by the oil industry, the undermining of virtually every regulatory agency, the insanity of Bush's tax cuts. Well, I guess that last one would have been a bit tricky since 12 Democratic Senators sided with Bush on it, including those two about-to-be-former Senators Jean Carnahan and Max Cleland, both of whom voted yes on the Iraq resolution. Pandering to the President didn't seem to help them much.

By: Paul Krugman  

Clearly, we're going to have an extended sojourn in the political wilderness. Even criticizing the Bush administration's policies will become far more difficult. It will be hard even to find out what it's up to; the most secretive administration in the nation's history will now be even less forthcoming. And anyone who criticizes the administration, even on purely domestic issues, will be accused of lacking patriotism. After all, that strategy worked even against Senator Max Cleland, a genuine war hero who lost three limbs in his country's service.

What hasn't changed is the fundamental wrongness of this administration's direction. Too many pundits, confusing politics with policy - or engaging in sheer power worship - imagine that a party that wins a battle must be doing something right. But it ain't necessarily so. Political victory doesn't make a bad policy good; it doesn't make a lie the truth.

By: Doris "Granny D" Haddock  

We are living in the harsh world invented by a handful of corporate raiders whose values were completely foreign to the fairness and moderation that had so long served as the proper foundation of American success and the American dream of plenty for all. They were not a new kind of person, for there have always been among us a few reptilian hearts of uncommon greed. What was new was the political permission they received for their rape and rampage, which continues.

And so a new world devolved as if from a virus. The new business hero, a Horatio Alger on crack, did very well. The new model CEO derived from that moment - the ruthless mercenary who would come in to reorganize a company and render it takeover-proof by rendering it inhumane. This executive was worth millions per year, we were told. In this way, a Darwinian system of corporate survival assured that the most carnivorous, rather than the most responsible, would rise to lead our most powerful commercial organizations. And if you need an explanation for Fox News or Enron, this is the history you need to remember.

These superwealthy predators now, through their political patronage, control both political parties. They control Congress and the White House. They control elements within your state house. They are not particularly smart people, as their current agent in the White House clearly demonstrates.

"I have never covered a President who actually wanted to go to war. Bush's policy of pre-emptive war is immoral - such a policy would legitimize Pearl Harbor. It's as if they learned none of the lessons from Vietnam."

- Helen Thomas

"Pray to the devils; the gods have given us over."

- Shakespeare (Aaron, Titus Andronicus Act IV, Scene 2)

Editorial from:  

Democracy can't afford falling into a depression over the Bush Cartel routing of the Democrats in a mid-term election.

Democracy demands that we continue battling for what is great about this country.

Democracy demands that we not be dismayed by those who would dismantle our government services; shred the Constitution; trample on our civil liberties; shift the nation's money even more to the wealthy; and create a permanent war, turning the young people of our country into cannon fodder.

By: Molly Ivins  

...I'm sure that when Webster was on the audit committee of U.S. Technologies and decided to fire the accountants who were questioning the books, he did not think to himself: "Holy cow, we've got to cover up dishonest transactions before anyone finds out." He probably thought the auditors were pettifogging about practices "everyone does" and that different auditors, say Arthur Andersen, wouldn't be so picky. After all, "our kind of people" don't do dishonorable things. But the net effect for the company was still disaster and ruin.

Webster may or may not see that he has some responsibility for that - it is not easy for any of us, especially those with a strong sense of our own rectitude, to acknowledge error, much less base motive. But what kind of blind arrogance does it take to then accept a post overseeing the "reform" of the accounting industry? What kind of blind arrogance does it take for the accounting industry, with its record, to think it has a right to choose its own oversight board? What kind of blind arrogance did it take for Michael Oxley to call Harvey Pitt and pressure him to name Webster?

Another word for all this is denial. GeeDubya Bush to this good day thinks he did nothing wrong by unloading his Harken stock when he knew the company was going under. He's not the kind of guy who would ever swipe five dollars out of a till just because he had the chance. There's a difference, you see, between a business decision and dishonesty. You do see that, don't you?

By: Paul Krugman  

Of course, some pundits tell you that not much is at stake in this particular election, that the parties aren't really very different on the issues. I don't know what planet they are living on: in reality, the parties are further apart than they have been since the 1930's. The fact that anyone imagines otherwise is a tribute to the timidity of the Democrats, who are afraid to say what they really think, and the subterfuge of the Republicans, who show a disciplined willingness to pretend to hold positions they actually abhor.

Not only are there huge substantive differences between the parties, the background to this election means that it may determine the shape of America for decades to come.

"The people should elect a Democratic Senate and House of Representatives in order to keep the brakes on a jingoistic, saber-rattling, power-hungry administration headed by multi-millionaires from corporate boardrooms."

- Senator Robert Byrd

By: Paul Corrigan  

Bush appears unfazed by the growing public perception within the capital markets that his administration is incapable of corporate governance. Reneging on his promise to increase SEC funding only increases the negative perceptions. The capital markets have long accepted the role that regulators like the SEC and the Federal Reserve play in capitalism; they should be fearful of an ideologue like Bush. Bush doesn't need regulation in his black-and-white world. He just sends in the troops after the bad guys, whether they are Saddam Hussein or "Corrupt Corporate Kingpins". With Bush, we get cowboy diplomacy and cowboy regulation. The problem with that philosophy is that we are in the 21^st Century, not the Wild West.

From:  

Since the inauguration of George W. Bush, we have chronicled over 900 cases of conservative idiocy. So all we have to say this week is: get out there and vote Democratic on Tuesday. Bring your friends, bring your neighbors, get to the polls and punch a straight Democratic ticket. Because let's face it - we're always going to have conservatives to make fun of every Monday. But they don't have to be running this country, and they don't have to be leading us all down a slippery slope of no-holds-barred pan-American conservative idiocy. So read this list, think about the specter of a Republican grand slam, and then get out there and help your local candidates, help get out the vote, and maybe come Wednesday morning we can all feel a little better about the direction this country is heading. Here's to a Democratic victory on November 5!

By: Chris Floyd  

According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization - the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" - will carry out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by U.S. forces.

In other words - and let's say this plainly, clearly, and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan - the United States government is planning to use "cover and deception" and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Let's say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people - your family, your friends, your lovers, you - in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.

By: Carl Hulse  

With the contest for the Senate down to a handful of states, Republicans and Democrats intensified their feverish campaigns today, pouring their resources into races that polls show could be in the grasp of either party.

Seeking to influence the truly undecided voters - and to make sure those who have made up their minds go to the polls - both parties marshaled volunteers to ring doorbells and hand out leaflets. They also paraded big-name politicians and star-quality supporters before the cameras and drowned out commercials for consumer goods with advertisements extolling their candidates and assailing their opponents.

Politicians and strategists on both sides agreed that control of the Senate could not be forecast with any certainty. Still, Democrats said they were increasingly confident they could hold their one-seat margin, and perhaps even expand it. Some Republicans also said privately that Democrats had a thin advantage in these final days, if only because Republicans need to gain a seat to take control.

Hey 'Monkey Boy'! Where's Osama?

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