THE WRONG PRIORITY

Bush signed another tax cut today.

This is a President and a Party whose priorities are completely screwed up. We're at war. We're not funding homeland security enough to get our shipping containers checked and our air marshall program working on even a moderate fraction of flights. The Coast Guard can't get what it needs to get itself fully up to par. We've got loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union that can get into the hands of terrorists.

But what is Bush's priority? Tax cuts.

Bush can't possibly pay for all of the basic homeland security, let alone Iraq and Afghanistan. We're already in hock up to our neck. The long term damage to the economy with such debt is frightening. And the short and long term damage to homeland security due to the lack of urgency by Republicans is simply wreckless.

Today on Al Franken's show, a woman asked Franken who would be in the cabinet under Kerry's Administration?

This is an interesting thing to kick around, IMO.

Personally, I think Elliot Spitzer would be THE choice for US Attorney General. I think Al Gore would be excellent to head the EPA. I'd love to see Rubin back as Treasury head...but so far he's said he won't return to government service.

What do you think? Who would Kerry choose for Secretary of State? What about Secretary of Defense? Secretary of Education?

And while we're talking staff, Brad DeLong tries to dissect Bush's.

I realize that the "liar" theme is running heavy on this blog over the last couple of days...but holy crap...these guys are reaching levels of ridiculous I had no idea existed.

At the September 23 joint press conference with Bush, Iraqi interim leader Allawi informed the American people, "So, really, if you care to look at Iraq properly, and go from Basra to Nasiriyah to Kut to Diyala to Najaf to Karbala to Diwaniya to Samaraa to Kirkuk to Sulaymaniyah to Dahuk to Arbil, there are no problems. It's safe, it's good.

Samarra? Is this the same Samarra that US forces have been pounding for the last several days?

Reuters is basically doing it anyway.

During Allawyi's visit last week, Bush boasted about Iraqi elections to be held in January. Bush said that the Iraqi electoral commission is up and that the UN electoral advisors are on the ground in Iraq. Bush also said that nearly 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are already at work, and that would rise to 125,000 by the end of this year.

And he promised more than $9 billion will be spent on reconstruction contracts in Iraq over the next several months.

Apparently, Pentagon documents don't back up with what Bush is saying:

The documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.

Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."

Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralised training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.

And it's not just the soldier/police issue:

While Bush said the commission has already hired personnel and begun setting election procedures, congressional aides said preparations in other areas were behind schedule.

According to a one-page election planning "time line," registration materials are supposed to be distributed in early October and initial voter lists to go out by the end of October, which is during the holy month of Ramadan.

So far, the United Nations has been reluctant to send staff back into the battle zone. It only has 30 to 35 people now in Baghdad, no more than eight working on the elections.

These people have spent so much time lying to us. There's no way to tell anymore if they've ever told us the truth.

Josh Marshall has become like a dog with a bone on the Carl Cameron/Fox News posting of a fabricated story on John Kerry.

Josh isn't just going after the Cameron story, tho. It looks to me like he's just going to take the Fox News Network on full steam.

Between Marshall and Media Matters for America, Fox (and CNN) are having a tough time getting their slant toward Bush to stick.

Cheney and Rice KNEW.

They knew the aluminum tube story they were telling was not the truth, and they told it anyway:

In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb "fairly soon." The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had "irrefutable evidence"- thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.

The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets.

But Ms. Rice, and other senior administration officials, embraced a disputed theory about the tubes first championed in April 2001 by a new analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Senior scientists considered the theory implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as an administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.

They fabricated this mushroom bloud BS knowing that there was a big pile of evidence to the contrary...and they LIED to us.

Anyone who still supports this administration has a very fundamental problem with good judgement.

Carla had asked me to write this last night, but we didn't have our results compiled. For those who don't know, I am part of one of the largest studies in the country on Presidential Debates. I will give you some of the highlights from the Press Release we wrote Friday, and then some of my own research on their debate strategies and how they played out in the debates.

We had focus groups in 19 states, with over 3500 participants on the early returns. Here is some of what we learned:

1) Predebate, our sample had about 14% undecided voters. Post debate, it was down to about 9.5%. Of that movement, some of it was people going from decided to undecided. My analysis: Kerry will get a bump in days to come, and Bush will take a hit, but not a large number on that.

2) Three most significant topics of discussion in the debate that participants found to be the most important: Iraq (how to get our troops out), N. Korea, and Nuclear Proliferation, in that order. My analysis: They were Kerry positions that came out as significant. That would indicate he was the best at reaching voters in general, and shifted the debate ground to his issues, further helping him.

3) What participants want to hear: Domestic issues in general, including Health Care, Gay marriage, Abortion, Oil Prices, economy, and "outsourcing" with Homeland Security right behind it. My analysis: The issues, because Health Care and "outsourcing" were in those (and issues 3-6 were tied in number of references, but well behind 1 and 2), they seem to indicate a left leaning concern, thus Kerry issues where he can gain more ground.

Notes: The study did NOT ask who they were voting for or who they decided to vote for. That was not the mission of our study. Ours is voter education and the impact of debates, as well as how to improve them. Where I put "my analysis", it is exclusively my own thoughts and have zero link to the study. Additionally, these are PRELIMINARY FINDINGS based on the first debate. Some of the data has not been sent in completely at this point. But the trends seemed to be pretty clear across all regions of the country.

Why did Kerry beat GW?

Through my other research project, I have viewed each of them in previous debates and read research. I have figured out some of their core strategies, and it has helped me to explain what happened.

GW's core strategy is centered on the principle that people prefer certainty to uncertainty. This sounds rather vague and general, but it is the core of the 2 election strategies that have helped him win and this one. Against Richards, he ran on her as the "flip flopper" and himself as the candidate that you knew where he stood. Against Gore, Gore was the liar you couldn't trust what he said, thus, you didn't know what he would do; and GW was the honest, predictable one. Against Kerry, the Richards approach applies and some of the soundbytes and speech statements are so close that if you altered the name, the rest of the sentence would match exactly.

Kerry's core strategy is that of the counterpuncher. His former opponents have indicated they thought they landed "haymakers" only to find them thrown back at them even harder with the counterpunch. These counterpunches are like "halftime adjustments" in sports, and are usually based on one of two approaches: 1) lessons of Vietnam; or 2) using the opponent's strategy against them.

The debate had GW using the "mixed signals" (because I believe Flip Flopper was a banned term, along with "drunk", "Draft Dodger" and any other seemingly direct term (ok, not that bad, but still...) statements through the first half of the debate, but they tended to disappear in the second half. Kerry started to use the same terminology of "mixed signals" to describe certain key issues for GW in regards to nuclear proliferation and "bunker buster nukes", etc. This seemed to throw GW to an extent. Additionally, Kerry used the "Vietnam experience" to answer the dying soldiers questions. GW lost focus on his message.

One other variable I noticed was Lehrer himself. Lehrer was using "softball" questions in 2000 and is relatively known for the "softball" questions. In this debate, Lehrer did his homework and planning. The questions were precise, to the point, and made it harder to link them back to your stump speech because they were asking for candidates to go beyond the stump speeches. This seemed to explain part of why GW's stumbling largely happened at the beginning of questions, though not all of it. Kerry seemed to start a little slow, but adapted quickly when he realized how the questions were going to work better than GW did.

Overall: The domestic debate should be the key debate because people want to see how things play out where they perceive the issues to impact them more directly. However, the debate itself was perceived as far more informative than other results in previous debate years for our research group, which bodes well for both candidates and the debate process. Yes, this first debate was vital for Kerry. He had to do what he did... allow people to view him enacting the Presidency to stay in the race. GW has a second chance to hold on if he does well on domestic issues. However, if he doesn't, the debates may turn this race the way the Democrats hoped it would for Gore in 2000.

Final Note: The VP debates may have a lot of impact, more than traditionally viewed. GW got noticably upset in the middle portion of the debate, with calm on both sides of it, while Kerry seemed level, upbeat, confident. IF something similar happens in the VP debates and/or in the other Presidential debates, the image of the Bush Administration as "steady" and "predictable" or "certain" may disappear, and switch to the Kerry Campaign, due to the letting of emotions get to the Administration. I don't expect to see it happen, but then again, I didn't expect Cheney to cuss out someone on the Senate Floor either.

Seattle Mariners slugger Ichiro Suzuki just broke the hits in a season record!

258.

A ray of light in a pretty dismal season.

Wow. This one seems to be under everyone's radar:

The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned from the Homeland Security Department amid a concerted campaign by the technology industry and some lawmakers to persuade the Bush administration to give him more authority and money for protection programs.

Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec Corp., made his resignation effective Thursday as director of the National Cyber Security Division, giving a single's day notice of his intention to leave. He kept the job one year.

Yoran has privately confided to industry colleagues his frustrations in recent months over what he considers the department's lack of attention paid to computer security issues, according to lobbyists and others who recounted these conversations on condition they not be identified because the talks were personal.

The US Cybersecurity Chief has resigned because he couldn't get appropriate resources and broad enough authority to do his job.

It's pretty clear after last night's debate that Homeland Security isn't Bush's top priority. Not even close. The resignation of Yoran highlights the serious concerns many US citizens have about Bush. He doesn't understand that the FIRST PRIORITY of the federal government is to secure the homeland. It's the core reason for having a federal government in the first place.

Media Matters gives us the scoop on how CNN's predebate spin (the debates are "make or break) and the post debate spin (Kerry won but it's doesn't matter because this debate wasn't significant.

And Fox is just making stuff up. But enough people are apparently on the ball to catch it and force a retraction.

Despite those two cable news channels best efforts however, the punditry is pretty much falling into line behind Kerry's debate victory.

Yesterday in the comments section of this post, Don asks the burning question:

"what dollar amount is needed to FULLY fund Homeland Security?"

This question seems especially relevant in light of the Kerry/Bush exchange of last evening regarding Bush's failure to fund the necessities of Homeland Security. At one point, Kerry declared that 90% of the shipping containers that come into Florida go uninspected. And Bush responded with:

I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises.

This is one of the fundamental differences between the two candidates. Bush's message is one of continual tax cuts and shrinking of the government. But as Bush is also fond of saying, "9/11 changed everything.". As a nation, we can no longer afford to make tax cuts the top priority. We were attacked by a group (Bush calls them 'folks'..and Jon Stewart noted that it makes them sound like the people you see at the Olive Garden..LOL) of individuals who murdered 3000 people on our soil. And they'd do it again given the chance.

Our shipping containers go uninspected. Our air marshall program has suffered serious cutbacks after having never been fully funded. Our nuclear plants, energy facilities, water treatment facilities, etc are all going unprotected. Our roads, bridges and subway systems have been woefully ignored by this President. Our fragile electrical grid also goes unprotected.

How much is it going to cost? Good question. But the question you really ought to be asking yourself is...how much is it going to cost (not just in dollars) if we don't?

I've been nagging Matty to write up a piece for the blog for quite some time now....and last night he finally relented. Here are his thoughts on last night's Presidential debate:

If tonight's debate had been a championship fight, Jim Lehrer would have stopped it at around 9:25 p.m. John Kerry's rhetorical shock and awe of blunt one-liners stunned the President and, at times, caused him to lose his temper.

Here are just a few of the shots Kerry leveled at Bush:

Bush ''outsourced'' the mission to capture Bin Laden at Tora Bora to warlords.
hinting that Bush was a flip-flopper by going to the UN after saying he wouldn't do it. Kerry said he only went after suggestions from Scowcroft and Baker, etc.

Three strong points on how ''successful'' we have been in Afghanistan - 1. Resurgence of Opium trade; 2. three postponed elections; 3. More US deaths in 2003 in Afghanistan than in 2002.

''Iraq was not the center of the war on terror before (Bush) invaded it.''

Kerry said W went to Iraq to divert from hunt for Osama.

''It was more important for Bush to give us a tax cut than to invest in Homeland Security.'' - Kerry said Bush found money for cops/firefighters in Iraq but not in America.

Kerry cited W's father's book where it explained why he didn't go to Baghdad because we would be occupiers and would have no exit strategy.

Kerry mentioned would only guarded the Oil Ministry in Iraq.

''I made a mistake in talking about Iraq and he made a mistake going to war.''

''I've worked with these world leaders longer than he has.''

The President had a couple of gaffes that I haven't heard much on TV. He said the people in Iraq were fighting vociferously. They're loud?

He also referred to a ''pre-Sept. 10th'' thinking on Kerry's part. How could have not remembered that date?

W made a total of 18 inexplicable facial expressions when he was either mad or confused.

In short, Kerry won in a rout. Will it help him win? Well, we will see. Kerry at least joined the fight after, in my opinion, vanishing for a few weeks.

Wow..where to begin? I went to bed last night feeling very good about Kerry's performance last evening. He was strong, decisive, intelligent, articulate, tough. In a word: PRESIDENTIAL. This is the highlight of the Presidential race to date for JFK.

Bush seemed fixated on just a few talking points last night, for the most part. The "it's hard work" phrase came out of his mouth constantly. Atrios notes that perhaps if it's so hard for Bush...maybe he should think about finding a new job.

The Washington Post set it's sights on finding the factual errors and truth stretches. In fact, Bush corrected Kerry on one item...saying Kerry forgot to mention Poland in the list of countries that helped in the inital invasion. Poland wasn't part of the initial invasion. Oops. Poland is also rather miffed at Bush.

Josh Marshall takes note of Bush's obvious attempts to hold his temper in check last night. And so does the DNC.

I especially like to read what the amateur bloggers have to say on stuff like this (amateur meaning those of us who really do this just for the love of doing it...not for advertising dollars). Check out:

Chuck Currie

Value Judgement

Rox Populi