PA Senate Race: Hoeffel Closing. Donate Now

In 24 hours on Wednesday, dKos readers contributed over $7,000 from a pair of diaries about tight races in Pennsylvania. The first diary was up for a few minutes. The follow-up got recommended.

Thank you to all who donated as well as those who took a minute to read and recommend said diary. Together we raised $5,200 for Joe Hoeffel. Plus $1,000 for Ginny Schrader (House, PA-08), $800 for Lois Murphy (PA-06) and $600 for Joe Driscoll (PA-15).

I discovered late that night that Joe Hoeffel and his campaign were following our progress, and they were thrilled. And Thursday evening the next United State Senator from Pennsylvania called me up to personally express his gratitude. He told me that what we did really helped.

Please consider donating now.
Arlen Spector's number are plummeting, but Joe Hoeffel NEEDS CASH NOW. In the latest Keystone Poll, Specter was only polling at 44% and dropping. Hoeffel is still trails, but is within striking distance and closing fast. Pennsylvania does this. In 2000, Dem. Ron Klink finished with 46% of the vote against Rick Santorum, when he was polling at 35% with less than a week to go in the election. We may never get a better opportunity to dump Specter because he has a challenger on the right who is pulling 7% to 10% of the wingnut vote.

Can Hoeffel do it in time? Only if WE HELP.

A New Terrorist Threat?

Pakistanis are hunting Abdullah Mehsud, one of the most wanted and dangerous militants. Mehsud is Taliban commander with ties to al-Qaida. Where did he come from? See if you can guess. He was being held by the U.S. at Guantanamo for two years. Yes, that's right, a former Guantanamo detainee has turned to terrorism.

Experts say it's possible Mehsud was always a hardcore militant and deceived his captors.

"The other possibility is that the two years in captivity was itself a radicalizing experience," says terrorism expert Brian Jenkins.

A defiant Mehsud now claims he's avenging cruelty against Muslims. He vows to fight to the death against Americans and Pakistanis under American influence.

Oh great. Just what we need in this world, more terrorists. Howard Dean was right. We are no safer with Saddam out of power. John Kerry is right. Bush's disasterous handling of Afganistan and Iraq is creating more terrorist. The concentration camp at Guantanamo is actually creating terrorists.

Can we please fire this guy and elect someone with some brains who understands war.

Good People Supporting a Bad President

"How can anyone support Bush," we ask.

FOX News is the common denominator.

My neighbor is a wonderful person. She sends her teenage daughter over most afternoons to help out with my two young boys. While I've been laid up with a back injury, she's made dinners for us once a week. She is a college professor and cares about a lot of things I care about, but defines herself as a "conservative.". She is voting for Bush. Fox News is on all the time in their home. I mean all the time.

My father and step-mom are strong Kerry supporters. My dad just finished reading Richard Clarke's book and is starting Kevin Phillips'. My step-mom worked for Planned Parenthood in the 1980s. She is really close to her two sisters. One is a reseacher for NIH, the other is a doctor. Fox News is on in their homes All The Time.

My husband recently wrote a story for our local paper about how people feel about the election in our county here in central PA. Among the Bush supporters were sweet little old ladies worried about prescription drug costs, hard working guys in construction who have a hard time paying for health insurance for their workers, veterns whose benefits are eroding, and moms who note that the schools are getting worse and worse. They're voting for Bush because "he's a strong leader," etc. But all of those reasons sounded word-for-word, like BC04 talking points, and everyone of them told him that their main source of news and information was FOX news. In fact, they told him that they usually had FOX on ALL THE TIME.

FOX is everywhere. If you make a pit stop at a travel center on an interstate highway, and run in for a cup of coffee and maybe a sandwich, FOX is on. If you work out at a health club, FOX is on. My husband told me that it is even on in the newsroom at the paper. It always bothered him, but after seeing "OutFOXed", he is starting to demand that they switch back to CNN or MSNBC,, which are much better.  

When (not if) Kerry wins in November, our job is not over. No Way. We don't get our country back until we put FOX News out of business.

Jon Stewart Endorses Kerry

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Comedian Jon Stewart, whose nightly cable television show is popular with the young voters considered key in the upcoming presidential election, said on Thursday he prefers Democrat John Kerry over Republican President Bush.

"It looks like Kerry," said Stewart, host of "The Daily Show," a satirical late-night review of politics on Viacom Inc.-owned cable channel Comedy Central. "I would be stunned if something happened to change my mind."

He called the U.S.-led war in Iraq a "mistake" and said he failed to understand the "Bush doctrine" of preemptive strikes against perceived security threats.

"If one guy drove me into a ditch and said, 'Don't worry, I know how to get us out of this,' I'd give the keys to a 7-year-old," Stewart said during a media event sponsored by Syracuse University's Newhouse School.

Stewart's no-holds-barred lambasting of the U.S. political scene has won him a strong following, particularly among young male voters coveted by both parties in the tight presidential race.

The Emmy-award winning "Daily Show" is a regular stop for politicians on the campaign trail, including Kerry, and its "Indecision 2004" coverage of the presidential race has become a must-see for twenty- and thirty-something voters.

Stewart roasted both candidates for their repetitive stumping during their final public debate.

"I thought both men took rhetoric to another level," he said, adding that Bush appeared "well coached."

"He wasn't the angry Bush of the second debate or the retarded Bush from the first," Stewart said.

Stewart also took aim at the mainstream U.S. media -- which he mocks regularly -- and said it fails to take politicians or big business to task.

"The press has bravely and nobly eroded the public trust," he said. "What I'm advocating is the media come back and work for us again. ... The bias of the media is not liberal. It's lazy and sensationalist."

Reuters
Oct 14 2004 7:40PM

Bush Wired for Debate Three?

Judge for yourself. From NBC Footage:

Bush Refusal to Meet with Congressional Black Caucus

Letter to President Bush from the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Elijah E. Cummings, on his repeated refusual to meet with the CBC. Click here for entire Press Release from Rep. Cummings' office.

July 16, 2003

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500


Dear Mr. President:
(snip)
I do wish to again invite you to meet with the entire Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) prior to the U.S. House of Representatives' August District work period that begins on July 25, 2003.

Mr. President, I need not remind you that the CBC's requests for meetings with you have gone unanswered for more than two-and-one-half years. As a result, you and your Administration have had less opportunity to receive the expertise, wisdom and insights of our 39 Members on a wide variety of significant national and international issues including: the current crisis in Iraq, the double-digit unemployment in the African American community and the overall state of the American economy, homeland security and our defense against terrorism, our bilateral relationships with African nations, and the many other domestic and international challenges facing our country.
(snip)
Thank you for your consideration of our request, Mr. President. We look forward to meeting with you as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Elijah E. Cummings
Chair, Congressional Black Caucus

Video Clip Bush "I'm Not That Concerned About Osama."

Video clip from debate, followed by clip from press conference when President Bush said,"Again, I don't know where he is. Um..Ah...I repeat what I said, I trully am not that concerned about him."

John Kerry: Save the Coral Reefs

Click here or scroll down to read about how massive voter registration is driving local GOP to dirty tricks.

Save the Fiji Reef (and the rest of them) Vote for Kerry *George Bush gets sno-cones *as a consolation prize I guess. Have to ask my four-year-old about that. It's his sign.

Local GOP Desperate

Local Republicans picked the wrong sign to steal.

Last night our Kerry/Edwards/Hoeffel sign was stolen as were signs up and down our block. When we filed a police report, the officer said that in his ten years on the force, he has never seen anything like this. They are getting reports of stolen signs almost daily. While the police say both sides claim to be losing signs, the Centre Daily Times, our local Knight Ridder paper, aka the CDT, has received mostly letters about Kerry signs being stolen.

The published police reports also refer mostly to Kerry signs. Meanwhile, there is a huge five foot Bush sign right near the mall outside town, surely an inviting target. No one has touched it.

Who is stealing our yard signs? Well, on Sept 28, the CDT reported

Political yard signs reported stolen

STATE COLLEGE -- State College police received three complaints of yard signs supporting Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry being stolen from a neighborhood over the weekend, and in two cases, "College Republican" stickers were reportedly left behind.

According to police, two signs for Kerry and vice-presidential nominee John Edwards were reported stolen from 849 Saxton Drive at 5:48 p.m. Sunday. A "College Republican" sticker had been placed on the home's front door, police said. A Kerry-Edwards sign was also reported stolen from 938 S. Sparks St. at 12:22 p.m. Sunday, according to police. A "College Republican" sticker was placed on another Democratic sign in this case, police said. A Kerry sign was also discovered missing Monday morning from 705 Storch Road, police said.

Likewise the Daily Collegian, the Penn State student newspaper, reported on Oct. 4 that

(Penn State College Democrats President Megan) Green also said many people come into the office looking for more bumper stickers because they have gone out to their car to find campaign stickers for President George W. Bush placed over their Kerry stickers. State College resident Selden Smith discovered last week that Penn State College Republican stickers had covered the Kerry bumper stickers on his car.

The local GOP is acting desperate if they are promoting a yard sign stealing campaign. Things are not going well for George Bush nationally, and things are not going well for him here. According to the CDT, since January, 5,000 new people have registered and as of October 5th, 2,000 were still waiting to be processes. However, in the last days before the deadline, between Oct 5th and 8th, 8,000 new registrations came in, half of which appear to come from students. While both parties are working hard to register new people, new Democratic registrations have outpaced Republican. Of the 5,000 new voters processed by Oct 5th, only 32% are Republican. 45% are Democrats and 23% are Independents, and we all know that Bush is polling poorly with that group.

What about those still to be processed? On October 5th, a volunteer for the local Democratic Party had about 500 more to deliver, while the local GOP had a “thick stack.” Hmmmm.

How about those who are registering? Check these quotes

At local Republican campaign headquarters on South Allen Street, Georgia-born Libby Lusht, a State College resident for 30 years, picked up a registration form to get it to someone she knows who was not yet registered Lusht sees Kerry and Bush as a choice between a diplomat and a yard dog when Americans face an imminent threat of violence. "Which do you want between you and the threat?" Lusht said. "I just don't see talking our way to safety."

I had to read that twice. Kerry is the diplomat and Bush is a “yard dog.” I guess that transplanted Georgia voter prefers “Furious George.” Personally, I’d prefer the diplomat. Meanwhile, at the local Democratic Headquarters,

Voters seeking last-minute registration Monday included Penn State graduate student Allison Morgan, 25, who voted in Maryland in the presidential election four years ago. Morgan hand-delivered her registration form to the Willowbank Building to make sure she got signed up here.

"I don't have a good feeling about the war -- why we went," she said. "That alone is enough to make me want to vote for Kerry."

Our New Sign

"Need Some Wood?"

From Debate number two:
Bush: "I own a timber company? That's new to me. Need some wood?"
Actually Mr. President, apparently you do own an timber company.

Check it out and be sure to visit the eBay auction links. Selling wood on the internets.

The 100,000 Trained Iraqi Police?

President Bush during the debate on September 30th said,

"There's 100,000 troops trained: police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year."

However, according to Reuters

...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.
(snip)
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.

Poland to Pull Out of Iraq

The Irish Times reported that Poland will follow Spain and pull its troops out of Iraq.

Poland is planning to withdraw its troops from Iraq in the coming months, dealing another blow to the US-led coalition forces there.

The revelation yesterday by a senior government adviser that Poland's 2,500 soldiers would leave Iraq comes just a day after the new Spanish Prime Minister, Mr José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, announced the pull-out of Spanish troops "as soon as possible".

In addition, Honduras and Nicaragua are leaving, although a state department spokesman declared El Salvador was "holding fast," while Albania is planning to beef up its contingent of 71 non-combat troops in the city of Mosul.

My, what a great coalition of allies our president has assembled. And don’t forget Poland. Actually I guess we can.

For more on the role of Poland and our other "allies" please check out the story by Jerome Armstrong

Fight Back Against Tom Delay and Gerrymandering

Our soldiers are dying everyday in Iraq. The administration's latest reason is so that elections can happen soon. Yet, here in the U.S., our own democracy is broken. The Economist has a good article on some of the systemic problems with our elections. NO WAY TO RUN A DEMOCRACY (subscription required), September 16th 2000, declares that:

The country's electoral machinery is badly in need of repair and a rethink.

Among the problems with our democracy listed are the influence of money, the electoral college, corruption and all the issues Jimmy Carter raised about Florida. However,

Out of all these creaking bits of machinery, two look particularly deadly. The first is those voting machines. Despite being given a fistful of money by Congress, many American states have opted for dodgy electronic voting machines.

-snip-

The other great blot on American democracy--redistricting--has already made a nonsense of elections to Congress. Despite all the hoopla about the 50:50 nation, no more than around 30 seats of the 435 in the House of Representatives are competitive. In 2002, four out of five congressmen won their races by more than 20 points. This is because most states allow their politicians to determine the boundaries. The result is gerrymandering on a grotesque scale, with incumbents stitching up safe seats by drawing absurd districts that look like doughnuts, sandwiches and Rorschach tests.

This is not just unfair; it puts people off voting (why bother in those 400 districts where the result is a foregone conclusion?) and it drives politics to the extremes. With no chance of being unseated by the other party, a congressman's only threat is the partisans in the primary; so Republicans become ever more conservative and Democrats ever more left-wing.

I don’t know about Democrats becoming “more left-wing,” but I do know that with the latest round of redistricting in Pennsylvania, my vote here in PA’s 5th Congressional district is essentially meaningless. Yet of those rare competitive races, three of them are in Pennsylvania.

All three — Lois Murphy in the 6th, Ginny Schrader in the 8th, and Joe Driscoll in the 15th — are in the Philadelphia area, one of the most expensive media markets in the country. So even if my vote for Congress is meaningless, I can make a difference by contributing to these candidates. I’ve contributed to all the Kos dozen, and this is a chance to go the extra mile close to home. I am tired of being unrepresented in Congress. I want my voice back. If you are in a Congressional district which is not competitive and want to make a difference in the last weeks of the campaign please join me at ActBlue.com and contribute to these fine Democrats.

Bush Was "Afraid to Fly," Widow Says.

The widow of the man who took George Bush's place in the Texas Air National Guard remembers the reasons given for Bush's departure at that time when her husband, Jan Peter Linke, replaced him. Her husband was told at the time that "Bush's flying career was permanently disabled by a crippling fear of flying," probably because of a drinking problem. Janet Linke gave her interview before the most recent release of Bush's military documents, which corrobrate her account, especially the flight logs.

"He was mucking up bad, Killian told us," Linke says. "He just became afraid to fly."

Killian has become a major figure in Bush's unfolding "Guardgate." CBS news anchor Dan Rather produced a memo signed by Killian saying he was pressured to sugarcoat Bush's service, among other things. A few days after the report, CBS backed off when other media questioned the veracity of the documents.

But flight logs released by the White House three weeks ago in response to a lawsuit by the Associated Press show a strange retraction of Bush's air time around that period. In February and March 1972, Bush switched from flying the F102A fighter jet, which the guard used to patrol U.S. borders, to a two-seat T-33 training jet. His superiors also returned him to flight simulator practice sessions.

But records suggest the extra training sessions didn't help. Logs show that in March and April 1972, Bush twice needed multiple tries to land the F102 fighter. Days later, on April 16, Bush piloted a plane for the Texas Air National Guard for the last time.

"He just couldn't cut it," says Linke. "I was let to believe he was kind of a coward."

Jan Peter Linke served briefly in the Texas Air National Guard's 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. He was admitted to the Guard in the summer of 1972 to replace George Bush. He served until his death the following year. He was 27.

[Update 9/30/04, 6:28 p.m. Thanks to John McCrory for his tip on a dKos thread that the Nation now has this story on its website.]

[Update 2 9/30/04, 7:32 p.m. From the Nation,

she (Linke) said that "Bush was mucking up his flying very badly and he couldn't fly the plane," Linke said. "Killan told us that he was having trouble landing, and that possibly there was a drinking problem involved in that"--which Linke took to mean a particularly debilitating one, since carousing was almost the norm in such units.
-snip-
Notably, Linke's contact with Folio occurred before the White House's lawsuit-generated release of Bush's flight logs, which appeared to corroborate the thrust of her claims. Those logs show Bush in the winter and early spring of 1972 having problems landing his plane and being placed into two-pilot training planes--from which he had graduated years earlier.
-snip-
Linke says her husband first heard about the opening for a pilot in Bush's unit on May 12, 1972. That date preceded Bush's recorded departure from his base, suggesting that superiors were already planning to replace him. Bush's last recorded flight came on April 16, 1972. Although his contractual obligation to continue flying would not expire for another two years, Bush would never fly again for the National Guard. In August 1972 Killian suspended the departed Bush from flying, ostensibly for his failure to take an annual physical exam. But Linke says that the physical was the result, not the cause. "He just became afraid to fly," she said.

Al Qaeda Endorsed Bush, Not Kerry, in Post-Madrid Letter

CNN’s Bill Schneider has joined FOX News Channel host John Gibson, joined House Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-IL), Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and even President Bush, himself, in declaring that al-Qaida "would very much like to defeat President Bush"

They are all making it up. Joe Conason in Salon comments that

Schneider didn't divulge how he knows that al-Qaida wants to defeat Bush. His expertise lies in the field of public opinion, not terrorist tactics, and he cited no poll that measured the preferences of Osama bin Laden's followers. To put it bluntly, the CNN analyst was talking out of his ass.

This assertion that al-Qaida wants Kerry isn't a hypothesis, an "estimate", or "guess." It is not even "a fantasy world of spin". It is a LIE. As I tell my children, a lie is when you know it is not true.

After the Madrid train bombing, an al-Qaida cell, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, issued a statement taking credit for the attack. In that letter the al-Qaida cell proclaimed

WE WANT BUSH TO WIN
The statement said it supported U.S. President George W. Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom."
In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:
"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation."
"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

The group is named after a close Osama bin Laden aide killed in the war in Afghanistan. Now there is some question about whether Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades is actually the group responsible for the bombings themselves. There really is no proof one way or the other. A conservative think-tank called the Jamestown Foundation, funded by several conservative foundations, has a paper which says this, as does the pro-Israel think tank, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Matthew Levitt, senior terrorist expert at the WINEP in an article for the Baltimore Sun (3/14/04), ties Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida, Zarqawi, the Madrid bombers and the authors of this letter altogether.

Osama bin Laden threatened to attack Spain and other countries cooperating with the United States in the war on terror in an audiotaped message released in October. Spain has been among Europe's most public and vocal partners with the United States in both the war on terror and the Iraq war.

Additionally, several key al-Qaida cells have been disrupted over the past 2 1/2 years, including a Madrid cell headed by Muhammed Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi that funded the Sept. 11, 2001, plotters in Hamburg, Germany, and conducted the pre-operational surveillance of the World Trade Center and other potential targets in 1999.

Another disrupted cell was connected to the now infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his network of poison plotters in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. Interestingly, that network is tied to at least two other attacks claimed - like the Madrid attacks - under the name of the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades in Istanbul and Baghdad. The group is affiliated with al-Qaida.

Could it be any clearer? The terrorists want Bush to win.