vociferous

\Vo*cif"er*ous\, a. [Cf. F. vocif[`e]re.] Making a loud outcry; clamorous; noisy; as, vociferous heralds. -- Vo*cif\"er*ous*ly, adv. -- Vo*cif\"er*ous*ness, n.

Stunningly, Bush opened up with 9/11.

Now he's dodged the question about if Kerry's election would cause another attack.

And the podium is too tall for him.

This is looking good so far.

Could this be any more corrupt?

"An influential employee of voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems left the company recently to take a job as elections manager for a California county.

Deborah Seiler, a sales representative for the beleaguered voting company, was hired a week ago and started Monday in Solano County, northeast of San Francisco in California's wine country. The position puts her second in command of elections in the county, under the registrar of voters.

The move raises eyebrows because Seiler played a role in a recent scandal involving Diebold and the county. As the Diebold sales rep, Seiler sold Solano County nearly 1,200 touch-screen machines that were not federally tested or state certified. When the state banned the machines because of Diebold's business practices, the county had to find a replacement for the machines and pay Diebold more than $400,000 to get out of its contract."

Things are getting better, aren't they?

Does this mean we're winning yet, W?

Car Bombs in Iraq Kill at Least 42, Wound 140: "Insurgents detonated three car bombs near a U.S. military convoy in southern Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 35 people and wounding around 140, many of them children, officials and doctors said.
The apparently coordinated blasts came hours after a suicide bomber killed two Iraqi policemen and a U.S. soldier by detonating his car at a U.S. checkpoint west of the capital. Another car bomb blew up in the north, killing four people.
Instability is mounting in Iraq just weeks before the U.S. presidential election in November and four months before Iraq is due to hold its own nationwide polls. Attacks on American troops have risen to around 80 a day from 40 a month ago."

Via TalkLeft comes the latest example of liberal media:

L.A. Weekly has learned that CBS, NBC and ABC all refused Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD advertising during any of the networks’ news programming. Executives at Sony Pictures, the distributor of the movie for the home-entertainment market, were stunned. And even more shocked when the three networks explained why.

“They said explicitly they were reluctant because of the closeness of the release to the election. All three networks said no,” one Sony insider explains. “It was certainly a judgment that Sony disagrees with and is in the process of protesting.”

Insider Leaks to Reporters Spread as CIA Turns Wary on Iraq

According to this article, there is essentially a war raging between the Pentagon, State, CIA, FBI, and the Administration.

I've seen something like this before. And the reason always a lack of leadership at the top.

Something similar happened when I was stationed at Greenham Common in the UK.

We had a Group commander (in charge of the security for the missiles), a Wing commander (in charge of the missiles) and a base commander. No chain there, they all reported off base to someone else.

And they were all O-5 Colonels. Someone (probably the base commander) needed to have a star. Because what happened was a pissing match, and the enlisted caught all the crap.

One example: In one building (these were all small buildings on base, btw) there were two barbershops. One was a "beauty shop", a place to get a nice haircut. The other was a classic barbershop, staffed by a bunch of ancient Germans who would butcher your hair.

I recall one of these FULL BIRD COLONELS standing in the hallway between the two, catching guys coming out of the better shop with haircuts that didn't quite meet his approval, and sending them in to see the Germans.

A full bird colonel worrying about this?

Lack of leadership. Nobody's in charge. Everyone worries about minor crap that doesn't matter.

I'm firmly convinced at this point that Bush is in a bubble. He's being fed a certain world view that matches the predictions made by the neo-con element of his cabinet. So he really doesn't know how bad things are in Iraq.

And if the titular leader doesn't have the facts, how can he lead?

So, apparently the only thing the Patriot can manage to shoot down is our allies' planes? Hell of a system there.

US friendly fire report 'insidious cover-up'. 30/09/2004. ABC News Online: "The Pentagon has covered up major flaws in the US Army's Patriot missile system that prompted a battery to shoot down a British Tornado during the Iraq war last year, a top US scientist says.
Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says 'every one' of the claims made by a Pentagon probe into the shoot down was false.
Postol led an MIT research group to analyse the success of the Patriot systems in the first Gulf war.
After that conflict, the US Army claimed the Patriots had intercepted 96 per cent of the Scuds they had engaged.
'The real intercept rate was almost certainly zero. Now we have discovered a similar but far more insidious cover-up following Operation Iraqi Freedom,' says Professor Postol, in a commentary published in the next of New Scientist."

Read the whole article. Then send it to any Republican friends and family you may have.

John Eisenhower - Why I will vote for John Kerry for President: "The Presidential election to be held this coming Nov. 2 will be one of extraordinary importance to the future of our nation. The outcome will determine whether this country will continue on the same path it has followed for the last 3+ years or whether it will return to a set of core domestic and foreign policy values that have been at the heart of what has made this country great."

Sept. 11 Widow Joins Campaign (washingtonpost.com)

Kristen Breitweiser joins up with Kerry.

I'll see your "security moms" and raise you a 9/11 widow.

GOP leader wants to boycott United Way over scavenger hunt stop:

"A Republican leader is calling for a boycott of the United Way of Summit County after a fund-raising scavenger hunt sent participants into a local Democratic Party office.
County GOP Chairman Alex Arshinkoff says he also will try to get United Way's federal tax-exempt status revoked because of its partisan involvement.
The employer-sponsored scavenger hunt sent participants to the Akron office of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in search of a piece of campaign literature about a Democratic candidate for common pleas judge.
'This is a classic example of the liberal bias of the social activists,' Arshinkoff said on Monday. 'I'm upset, and I'm going to be leading the effort unless there is an apology to the president of the United States and Judy Hunter.'"

"They were just trying to do something nice ... and they feel terrible about it."

Salon.com News | Houston CBS affiliate boots Rather show: "Dan Rather's daily CBS radio broadcast is off the air where he grew up. Houston CBS radio affiliate KPRC hasn't been running it for the last couple weeks in reaction to his '60 Minutes' report questioning President Bush's National Guard service.
'I felt no anchor ... should ever be the story or bigger than the story,' Ken Charles, program director of the news-talk station, said Monday. 'I thought it was appropriate to take him off the air.'

Rather last week apologized on behalf of CBS News because it could not authenticate documents used in the Sept. 8 story that suggested Bush got preferential treatment. The apology wasn't sufficient to put Rather back on KPRC in the nation's 11th-largest media market.

'For right now, I'm not convinced there's any reason to put him back on the radio station,' said Charles, whose station lineup includes opinion-based talk shows of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. 'Until CBS or somebody is able to do that, I feel like there's no place for Dan Rather on KPRC.'"

I'm going to have read the Colonel on a regular basis now.

MilitaryWeek.com: Karen Kwiatkowski: Without Reservation: "An absence of leadership qualities in our military leaders gives rise to terms like 'Seagull' Colonels and Generals, a species known to swoop in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything, and then fly away. But our seagulls had an advantage over Bush and Cheney. Regardless of the mistakes made and not remedied, regardless of the illogic, stupidity and sheer idiocy of our present unit's existence under a seagull commander, at least we could be 100% sure they wouldn't be around for long.
High level incompetence seems to be the natural sea-state of our militarized foreign policy, launching forth with the proud Guardsman George W. Bush at the helm and Dick 'Other Priorities' Cheney as navigator.
This track record of sheer stupidity, hubris and other seagull qualities is marred only by the existence of rare officers, like retired Marine General Tony Zinni, who knew their job, led their men and women, and spoke the truth to power about the inanity of the plan to invade Iraq early on. Looking further for aberrations to the rule, we find retired Army General William Odom, conservative through and through, who speaks the truth about Bush's fantasy adventure in Iraq, politely but publicly calling it 'a strategic error.'"

We are soooo much safer now:

"Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings have not yet been translated by linguists at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and computer problems may have led the bureau to systematically erase some Qaeda recordings, according to a declassified summary of a Justice Department investigation that was released on Monday."

The investigation blamed in part the F.B.I.'s computer systems, long derided by Congressional critics as antiquated and unwieldy. The investigation found that limited storage capacities in the system meant that older audio recordings had sometimes been deleted automatically to make room for newer material, even if the recordings had not yet been translated.

Britain's Prince Harry to Join the Army

Jenna, Barbara, your country awaits.

And George P is about the right age, isn't he?

And yet the poor in the South keep voting Republican. Just stunning ignorance on their part.

Bid to Save Tax Refunds for the Poor Is Blocked (washingtonpost.com): "Congressional negotiators beat back efforts yesterday to expand and preserve tax refunds for poor families, even as they added $13 billion in corporate tax breaks to a package of middle-class tax cuts that could come to a vote in the Senate today.
The House-Senate negotiations concluded last night with the approval of a five-year $146 billion tax cut, the fourth tax cut in as many years. By the end of this week, Republican leaders expect to pass extensions of three tax cuts primarily aimed at middle-income taxpayers -- a $1,000-per-child tax credit, tax breaks for married couples and a 10 percent income-tax bracket that was expanded last year.
But the fight over the child tax refunds during the negotiations revealed a split among GOP tax writers.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) sided with Democratic leaders in pushing for changes in the child tax credit to ensure that millions of poor families would not see their credits shrink or disappear next year.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) opposed the move, as did Sens. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.). That effectively scuttled changes to existing law.

Sniff, sniff. Is that a deportation I smell?:

"The head of the Police Department's counterterrorism bureau was detained by federal authorities Thursday after trying to board a flight at Los Angeles International Airport with a handgun in his carryon luggage."

EPA Wording Found To Mirror Industry's:
"For the third time, environmental advocates have discovered passages in the Bush administration's proposal for regulating mercury pollution from power plants that mirror almost word for word portions of memos written by a law firm representing coal-fired power plants.
The passages state that the Environmental Protection Agency is not required to regulate other hazardous toxins emitted by power plants, such as lead and arsenic. Several attorneys general, as well as some environmental groups, have argued that the Clean Air Act compels the EPA to regulate these emissions as well as mercury."

Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and one of the senators who called for the probe last spring, said the revelation that the EPA adopted the same wording as an industry source "no longer comes as much of a surprise."

"The Bush administration continues to let industry write the rules on pollution, and this is just one more example of how they abuse the public trust," he said.

1918 killer flu virus to be tested in UW lab: "University of Washington scientists plan to infect monkeys with a killer flu virus grown from tissue exhumed from victims of the 1918 epidemic.
They hope the insight they gain will unravel the mystery of why tens of millions of people worldwide died from the virulent flu strain and lead to development of better vaccines and drugs that may save lives in the future.
'This was the most deadly infectious disease in the history of mankind, killing at least 40 million people,' said Dr. Michael Katze, a UW microbiologist and principal investigator for the local arm of the project.
'To this day, nobody understands why the virus was so deadly.'
Most experts believe another killer flu pandemic is overdue, Katze said, so it's critical to gain information about the disease."

In other countries, this is big news. Here? Cheney and Bush are still running around claiming they did have them. And if they didn't, it's the CIA's fault. But they did.

Guardian Unlimited - Iraq had no WMD: the final verdict: "The comprehensive 15-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded that the only chemical or biological agents that Saddam Hussein's regime was working on before last year's invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations.
A draft of the Iraq Survey Group's final report circulating in Washington found no sign of the alleged illegal stockpiles that the US and Britain presented as the justification for going to war, nor did it find any evidence of efforts to reconstitute Iraq's nuclear weapons programme."

"I think we know exactly how this is going to play out," said Joseph Cirincione, a proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"You'll see a very elaborate spin operation. But there's not much new here from what the ISG reported before," he said. "There are still no weapons, no production of weapons and no programmes to begin the production of weapons. What we're left with here is that Saddam Hussein might have had the desire to rebuild the capability to build those weapons."

"Well, lots of people have desire for these weapons. Lots of people have intent. But that's not what we went to war for."

But let's not say anything mean about the Republicans. After all, both sides do this sort of thing, right?

GOP mailing warns liberals will ban bibles: "Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November."

The RNC also is running radio ads in several states urging people to register to vote.

"There is a line drawn in America today," one ad says. "On one side are the radicals trying to uproot our traditional values and our culture. They're fighting to hijack the institution of marriage, plotting to legalize partial birth abortion, and working to take God out of the pledge of allegiance and force the worst of Hollywood on the rest of America."

"Are you on their side of the line?" the ad asks before making the plea to "support conservative Republican candidates."

I blogged a bit light the past couple of days for a personal reason: I had a custody hearing. I've lost round one on a jurisdictional issue, so my daughter's been taken from her friends and school and given back to her mother.

For now.

Things have really gone way too far.

local6.com - News - Teacher Arrested After Bookmark Called Concealed Weapon: " A weight may soon be lifted off a Maryland woman charged with carrying a concealed weapon in an airport.
It wasn't a gun or a knife. It was a weighted bookmark.
Kathryn Harrington was flying home from vacation last month when screeners at the Tampa, Fla., airport found her bookmark. It's an 8.5-inch leather strip with small lead weights at each end.
Airport police said it resembled a weighted weapon that could be used to knock people unconscious. So the 52-year-old special education teacher was handcuffed, put into a police car, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon.
She faced a possible criminal trial and a $10,000 fine. But the state declined to prosecute, and the Transportation Security Administration said it probably won't impose a fine.
Harrington said she'll never again carry her bookmark into an airport."

Kerry has already created more net jobs than Bush:

Democrat John Kerry has a new campaign worker helping him drum up support in Alabama after hiring a woman who was fired for displaying the presidential candidate's bumper sticker on her car.
Kerry called Lynne Gobbell on Tuesday after reading a newspaper story describing how she had been fired last Thursday from her job packing cellulose insulation at a Moulton, Ala., plant.
Gobbell said her former employer had told her she could either work for him or Kerry. She said Kerry told her, ``Let him know that as of today, you're working for John Kerry.''

Rule of Law II:

"Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader's name can appear on Florida ballots for the election, despite a court order to the contrary, Florida's elections chief told officials on Monday in a move that could help President Bush in the key swing state.
The Florida Democratic Party reacted with outrage, calling the move 'blatant partisan maneuvering' by Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's younger brother, and vowed to fight it.
In a memo to Florida's 67 county supervisors of elections, Division of Elections director Dawn Roberts said the uncertainty of Hurricane Ivan, which could hit parts of the state by week's end, forced her to act."

Moulton woman says she lost job for sporting Kerry sticker on car

Nice to see the Republican spirit is spreading...

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Jeebus, could this guy be any more cold blooded?:

"Mr. Cheney said Monday that last week's massacre at a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan had caused some foreign leaders who have been skeptical of America's aggressive foreign policy to reconsider.
'Some of our European friends have been somewhat ambivalent,' Mr. Cheney told a town hall meeting inside an airport hangar on the outskirts of this small town in southeast Iowa. He mentioned no nations by name.
Some foreign countries have probably been thinking that 'if they kept their heads down,' their citizens would not suffer terrorist attacks, the vice president said. 'Well, Russia got his anyway,' he said.
As a result, Mr. Cheney said, 'people are reassessing now' whether they should shed their ambivalence and openly support Mr. Bush's policies."

US troops announce curfew: "US troops on Monday patrolled Baghdad's Haifa Street, where at least 13 people were killed and 55 wounded in clashes between insurgents and US soldiers the day before, heralding a strict night-time curfew.
Shouting in Arabic through loudspeakers mounted on military vehicles, soldiers said the curfew would come into effect from 20:00 to 04:00 along most of the busy commercial street, said shopkeeper Alaa Mohammed.
'Keep away from windows and doors. Stay at home to ensure the safety of your sons. Anyone spotted during this time will be considered a terrorist and lethal force will be used against them,' the message said."

Shopkeepers were unhappy with the curfew.

"This means I have to close my shop at 19:00. What can I do? Since the Americans came, they have done nothing for us. When the Americans leave we will be all right, because without the Americans, who's going to fire?" said Mohammed.

Yes, Bush missed the deadline. Some people have agreed with the Florida official quoted in the article, that the deadline only applies to electors and the governor, etc. But read Chapter 99, section 061 of the Florida Code:

"(1) The provisions of any special act to the contrary notwithstanding, each person seeking to qualify for nomination or election to a federal, state, or multicounty district office, other than election to a judicial office as defined in chapter 105 or the office of school board member, shall file his or her qualification papers with, and pay the qualifying fee, which shall consist of the filing fee and election assessment, and party assessment, if any has been levied, to, the Department of State, or qualify by the alternative method with the Department of State, at any time after noon of the 1st day for qualifying, which shall be as follows: the 120th day prior to the first primary, but not later than noon of the 116th day prior to the date of the first primary, for persons seeking to qualify for nomination or election to federal office; and noon of the 50th day prior to the first primary, but not later than noon of the 46th day prior to the date of the first primary, for persons seeking to qualify for nomination or election to a state or multicounty district office.
(2) The provisions of any special act to the contrary notwithstanding, each person seeking to qualify for nomination or election to a county office, or district or special district office not covered by subsection (1), shall file his or her qualification papers with, and pay the qualifying fee, which shall consist of the filing fee and election assessment, and party assessment, if any has been levied, to, the supervisor of elections of the county, or shall qualify by the alternative method with the supervisor of elections, at any time after noon of the 1st day for qualifying, which shall be the 50th day prior to the first primary or special district election, but not later than noon of the 46th day prior to the date of the first primary or special district election. However, if a special district election is held at the same time as the second primary or general election, qualifying shall be the 50th day prior to the first primary, but not later than noon of the 46th day prior to the date of the first primary. Within 30 days after the closing of qualifying time, the supervisor of elections shall remit to the secretary of the state executive committee of the political party to which the candidate belongs the amount of the filing fee, two-thirds of which shall be used to promote the candidacy of candidates for county offices and the candidacy of members of the Legislature."

Democratic Underground Forums - WEB EXCLUSIVE: George W. Bush lies about Air Force Service



He served in the Air Force? Really? When and where, Bushies. When and where is all we need to know.

Oh, and another thing. Note that it says he served after receiving his degrees. We all know the timeline know: He went AWOL in part to go to college.

I still want to know how he jumped from Basic Training to officer. I'd have loved to pull that off after my basic.

Rule of Law! Rule of Law! Remember how they kept screaming about this in 2000?

Decision2004: Did Bush camp err on ballot papers?: "State law sets a Sept. 1 deadline for the governor to certify a list of presidential electors for each party's candidates.
But Sept. 1 was also the day President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were being nominated at their party' convention in New York. Consequently, some of their paperwork did not arrive at state elections headquarters until Sept. 2, a day after Gov. Jeb Bush certified the candidates for president.

Democrats said they aren't so sure, but they won't challenge the Bush campaign's papers.
Florida Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox said he knew the president's certificate of nomination did not reach the state until Sept. 2, but he said he decided not to make an issue of it.
'To keep an incumbent president off the ballot in a swing state the size of Florida because of a technicality, I just don't think would be right,' Maddox said."

Daily Kos has an excellent article up about this whole font brouhaha.

My two cents:

1. It's obvious that the wingnuts desperately need to debunk these documents. Notice that they haven't disputed any of the content, they're just attacking it on fonts, etc. Muddying the waters.

2. I remember doing proportional spacing on a 20 year old manual typewriter back in 1981. It's not that hard.

These wingnuts are both desperate and stupid.

FINALLY we hear a prominent Dem use The Word:

"US Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe accused President George W. Bush of lying about his military record during the Vietnam war, saying this raised questions about Bush's integrity to act as US leader.

'It has become crystal clear that the president has lied to the American public regarding his military record,' McAuliffe told a press conference about documents which indicate that Bush may have been punished for having refused to attend a medical visit in 1972."

Yahoo! News - Cheney: Economic Stats Miss EBay Sales

Indicators measure the nation's unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says it misses the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay.

"That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago," Cheney told an audience in Ohio. "Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay."

Powell Says Genocide Has Occurred in Darfur:

"In the strongest U.S. statement to date on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today said for the first time that 'genocide' has been committed there and that the government of Sudan and Arab militias 'bear responsibility.'
'Genocide may still be occurring,' Powell said in a statement submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."

The 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined the act as a calculated effort to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. The convention calls on signatories, including the United States, to prevent and punish genocide.

Beyond the Turnstile

I and some friends have started a sports blog. No politics over there at all, just sports. If you're a sports fan, check it out! (We're just getting started, so it's kinda sparse right now. We could use some links to sports blogs, etc.)

I'm bringing in a guest blogger for a post. This is an old buddy of mine from DU. Say hello to "the rebuttalist":

Dad Allegedly Attempts Son's Circumcision: "A father who allegedly tried to circumcise his 8-year-old son in the bathroom after reading selections from the Bible has been charged with first-degree assault of a child."

Voting for Barack Obama would make baby Jesus cry, according to Alan Keyes. This may be the funniest campaign ever.

Fred Kaplan takes apart Zell's and Dick's convention speeches in beautiful fashion. For instance:

"He declared at the Democratic Convention," Cheney said of Kerry, "that he will forcefully defend America after we have been attacked. My fellow Americans, we have already been attacked." Where in Kerry's speech did he say this? Nowhere.

On Sept 6, 1989, my son Trevor was born.

He was gorgeous. Red hair, like his daddy. He was sitting up unsupported at 6 weeks. Crawling at 7 weeks. At 2 months he had grabbed the side of his crib and was standing up.

2 months and 6 days after he was born, he died of SIDS.

He'd have been 15 today. And not a day goes by I don't think about him. But today, and November 12, are the worst.

I don't know that I'll be much good today, folks.

Sorry I haven't been around much lately. My computer fell down, went boom. I've got XP on it now, and I'm trying to get used to it.

Funny, isn't a "compassionate conservative" the governor of that state?

Newsday.com - AP News: "Charles and Laura Willis sat on a blanket in a high school hallway Friday because they had nowhere else to go to get away from Hurricane Frances. With a beat-up car and no money to even board up their house, they probably couldn't have gotten there anyway.

'Believe me, if I had any money I wouldn't be sitting here. I'd be sitting in a motel somewhere,' said Laura Willis, 42, who works sporadically at $5.15 an hour cleaning up construction sites to supplement her husband's disability check.

In this depressed fruit- and vegetable-producing area, sharecropper shacks are a thing of the present. About 11,000 of Fort Pierce's 38,000 residents live in poverty, according to the Census."

Arnold is as adept at recreating his own past as Reagan was, apparently.

Historians criticize governor for flubbing Austrian history at GOP convention
Austrian historians are ridiculing California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican National Convention that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and left a "Socialist" country when he moved away in 1968.

Recalling that the Soviets once occupied part of Austria in the aftermath of World War II, Schwarzenegger told the convention on Tuesday: "I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes."

No way, historians say, challenging Schwarzenegger's knowledge of postwar history -- if not his enduring popularity among Austrians who admire him for rising from a penniless immigrant to the chief executive of America's second-largest state.

"It's a fact -- as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria," the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.

Schwarzenegger, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born on July 30, 1947, when Styria and the neighboring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone. At the time, postwar Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the United States, the Soviet Union and France.

The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.

But Martin Polaschek, a law history scholar and vice rector of Graz University, told Kurier that Austria was governed by coalition governments, including the conservative People's Party and the Social Democratic Party. Between 1945 and 1970, all the nation's chancellors were conservatives -- not Socialists.

What's more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative-only government headed by People's Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists as well as the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.

Schwarzenegger "confuses a free country with a Socialist one," said Polaschek, referring to East European Communist officials' routine descriptions of their countries as Socialist.

MSNBC - Protests accompany Bush acceptance speech
If they can't maintain security at their own convention, how can we trust them to keep the nation secure?

Damned straight:

"Iraq war veterans on the sidelines of the Republican convention say they are sick of the bickering over the Vietnam War records of President Bush and Sen. John Kerry and want a serious discussion of Iraq and veterans' issues instead.
'We want to force both candidates to give us some answers here,' said Paul Rieckhoff, a platoon leader in Iraq and executive director of Operation Truth, which is lobbying to highlight the Iraq war as an election issue.
'Bush hasn't really given us a clear focus on how he's going to change things and Kerry hasn't given us a clear idea what he will do differently,' he said. "

More Florida election hijinks:

Exclusion from absentee-vote recount angers Democrats: "Supervisor of elections officials growling on one side of the counter, telling Democratic Party activists they had to get out of Dodge - or at least off the premises.

The Democrats insisting on their rights, refusing to budge and risking arrest."

truthout, Republican Convention Coverage

This is a good place to catch some action on the ground, and stuff that the mainstream media won't offer up. My bud William Rivers Pitt is doing video reporting, and a damned fine job of it, too.

truthout, Republican Convention Coverage

This is a good place to catch some action on the ground, and stuff that the mainstream media won't offer up. My bud William Rivers Pitt is doing video reporting, and a damned fine job of it, too.

I'd like to order one gun, smoking, please:

"The widow of a Bush family confidant says her husband gave the future president an Alabama Senate campaign job as a favor to his worried father. Did they see him do any National Guard service? 'Good lord, no.'
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mary Jacoby

Sept. 2, 2004 | NEW YORK -- Before there was Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family's political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George H.W. Bush phoned his friend and asked a favor: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W. Bush?
'The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing,' Allison's widow, Linda, told me. 'And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal.'
Linda Allison's story, never before published, contradicts the Bush campaign's assertion that George W. Bush transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 because he received an irresistible offer to gain high-level experience on the campaign of Bush family friend Winton 'Red' Blount. In fact, according to what Allison says her late husband told her, the younger Bush had become a political liability for his father, who was then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the family wanted him out of Texas. 'I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him,' Linda Allison said."

I'm shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!

Oops! Mass. delegates forgot to feed homeless: "The spirit of compassion being touted by the GOP was missing in action yesterday as more than three-quarters of the Massachusetts delegation blew off a date to dole out meals for the homeless.

Just one of the Bay State's 83 delegates was on time for the event at the New York Rescue Mission and only 15 were on hand by the time meals were handed out at noon.

Delegates from Indiana were equally remiss as just eight of their 55 delegates showed for the event. "

Bizarre news from Lynddie England's torture trial:

"During closing arguments at Fort Bragg, Capt. Crystal Jennings, a military prosecutor, read from the 21-year-old Army reservist's own statements that she stepped on prisoners' toes and posed for and took photos of naked detainees piled in human pyramids and being forced to simulate homosexual acts.
'She was having fun,' Jennings said. 'There was no indication that she was there for any military purpose.'"

Wheee! Just got back from a mediation hearing in my custody battle. My ex never bothered to call or show up. Fun waste of time.

Dems fighting back:

New School president Bob Kerrey - a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and a Medal of Honor recipient in Vietnam - had choice words for the Swifties accusing Sen. John Kerry of volunteering for Vietnam combat duty to pad his political résumé.

"Oh, f-- them," he told the Daily News' James Gordon Meek. "Quote me on that. The idea that you'd volunteer for because you're thinking about a political career. ... That's what you think about doing if you want a posthumous political career."

Meanwhile, Creative Coalition co-president and "Dr. Vegas" star Joe Pantoliano wonders if FDR would fare better than Kerry if he were alive today.

"You'd have wheelchair veterans for truth coming out of the woodwork screaming, 'He's not really a cripple!'" the former "Sopranos" star told us at the coalition's party for former First Son Ron Reagan's collection of essays, "If You Had Five Minutes with the President."