PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.—"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they've replaced the written oath with a verbal one.

Every time I met Harmel he was quite friendly. After a few visits I finally decided to ask the question we all wanted to ask. "Heinze, I would like to ask you a personal question if I may." He agreed and so I asked "You must have known when we were fighting around Linnich that the war was lost. Why did you continue to fight?" His reply was that "Yes, I knew the war was lost, but you must realize the situation I was in. I believed Germany was fighting for a just cause, and believed Hitler was a good leader. I joined the SS and as an officer I made a pledge to fight for my country and its leader, Hitler, until the very end, even with my life if necessary. As the war progressed I began to realize that Germany could not win, and also began to believe that even Hitler could be wrong. However, I am a man of my word and I had taken the oath to fight and I could only do my best as a member of the Waffen-SS." The Waffen-SS pledge is "Loyalty Is My Honor.

All officers of the SS were required to take the loyalty oath. Raising their right hand and their left hand placed on their officers sword the oath went as follows. "I swear to thee, Adolph Hitler as Fuhrer and chancellor of the German Reich, my Loyalty and Bravery. I vow to thee and the superiors whom those shall appoint, obedience until death, so help me God."

It took about 3/4 of a pound to commit the Lockerbie attack. The total explosive power of what was stolen is enough to commit 4000 Oklahoma City-size bombings. The death toll would be measured in the tens of thousands, possibly the hundred of thousands - more in a crowded city like, say, New York.

But it doesn't matter, because it's only .00095% of the total. Let's look at Russia's nuclear arsenal - a nuclear attack inside a crowded city would likely also result in tens-hundreds of thousands dead. Suppose that a terrorist got one weapon. Just one. Russia has around 10,000 nuclear weapons. A single weapon would be merely .0001 of their entire arsenal - nearly ten times less, percentagewise.

And therefore, friends, absolutely nothing to worry about. Hell, we might as well just give al-Qaeda a nuke, and stop fucking worrying about it altogether.

I'm still here. You haven't caught me. And you went after the wrong guy. I just thought I'd remind you.

So I don't know where he [Osama Bin Laden] is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him...I truly am not that concerned about him.

PARK SERVICE STICKS WITH BIBLICAL EXPLANATION FOR GRAND CANYON
Promised Legal Review on Creationist Book Is Shelved

Washington, DC — The Bush Administration has decided that it will stand by its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Despite telling members of Congress and the public that the legality and appropriateness of the National Park Service offering a creationist book for sale at Grand Canyon museums and bookstores was “under review at the national level by several offices,” no such review took place, according to materials obtained by PEER under the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, the real agency position was expressed by NPS spokesperson Elaine Sevy as quoted in the Baptist Press News:

Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie said he was "disconcerted" by claims that supporters of Democratic challenger John Kerry are clogging early voting locations and attempting to dissuade backers of President Bush from voting.

"Some folks have been intimidated to the point where they turned away from the lines," Gillespie alleged.

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

Bush administration lawyers argued in three closely contested states last week that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 election.

Veteran voting-rights lawyers expressed surprise at the government's action, saying that closing the courthouse door to aspiring voters would reverse decades of precedent.

Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, individuals have gone to federal court to enforce their right to vote, often with the support of groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters and the state parties. And until now, the Justice Department and the Supreme Court had taken the view that individual voters could sue to enforce federal election law.

But in legal briefs filed in connection with cases in Ohio, Michigan and Florida, the administration's lawyers said the new law gives Attorney General John Ashcroft the exclusive power to bring lawsuits to enforce its provisions. These include a requirement that states provide ``uniform and non-discriminatory'' voting systems. They also must give provisional ballots to those who say they have registered but whose names do not appear on the rolls.

When Catherine Herold received mail from the Ohio Republican Party earlier this year, she refused it.

The longtime Barberton Democrat wanted no part of the mailing and figured that by refusing it, the GOP would have to pay the return postage.

What she didn't count on was the returned mail being used to challenge the validity of her voter registration.

Herold,who is assistant to the senior vice president and provost at the University of Akron,was one of 976 Summit County voters whose registrations were challenged last week by local Republicans on behalf of the state party.

She went to the Board of Elections on Thursday morning to defend her right to vote and found herself among an angry mob -- people who had to take time off work to defend their right to vote.

[snip]

``Why'd you do it?'' one challenged voter shouted out at Calhoun. ``Who the hell are you?'' the man asked.

``What the hell do you care?'' replied Calhoun, an attorney.

We have 24/7 satellite surveillance on the most sensitive WMD sites in Iraq, a virtual Pentagon Security Camera. WE SEE EVERYTHING. WE RECORD EVERYTHING. Al Qaqaa was THE BIGGEST MUNITIONS site with the most sensitive materiel in Iraq. The reason for the dissembling on behalf of the White House on this, the reason Bush took over 36 hours to respond is... the Bush Administration is BUSTED. I believe the NYTimes article tomorrow with Iraqi chemist eyewitnesses who were employed at Al Qaqaa describing the looting of Al Qaqaa is correct. The Pentagon possesses photographs (and I suspect video footage) showing that the site was looted after the invasion, after our troops had been there twice and abandoned the site for lack of adequate security forces. There is an internal struggle within the Pentagon, of epic proportions and the truth is leaking out. The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld faction literally are fumbling to cover this up now, and Kerry knows it. Give it another day or two and it's going to break wide open.

Some, such as Wendy Skroch, a 51-year-old mother of three who prays regularly at the evangelical Elmbrook Church in this heavily Republican Milwaukee suburb, blame Bush for failing to fix a "broken" healthcare system and for "selling off the environment to the highest bidder."

Others are like Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, where more than 2,000 people worship each Sunday. He is undecided, troubled by the bloodshed in the Middle East.

"It's hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there," Urcavich said.

"I'm very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion," he added. "If I'm a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war."

Liqaa Abdul-Razzaq, a popular Iraqi TV reporter, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Baghdad. She was assassinated while returning home from her offices of the local ‘Al-Sharqiya’ TV network, which she had worked for since last year after a long period with the State TV as news conductor during the regime of Saddam Hussein. Two months ago, her husband was killed in analogous and still unclear circumstances. Liqaa Abdul-Razzaq was mother of a 6-year-old boy and just a month ago gave birth to a girl. This assassination is however not the only episode of violence of today in Iraq: in the capital the day in fact began with yet another car-bomb, which exploded at the passage of a US marine convoy. An American soldier and an Iraqi bystander were killed and another 2 soldiers wounded in the explosion. In Buakuba, north-east of Baghdad, three Iraqis were killed and four injured in two separate attacks. In the first, armed men stopped a taxi and shot dead the two police officers and driver onboard, wounding another two. In the second attack, unidentified gunmen opened fire against an Iraqi national guard patrol, but without claiming victims. Local medical sources also report three people killed in Falluja, the rebel city west of Baghdad, for months target of US air strikes. A US incursion shortly before dawn struck a home in the neighbourhood of Joulan. The US claims that Falluja, aside from militants, is also the hideout of members of the terror group headed by the Jordan Al-Zarqawi.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew bunker after bunker of material labelled explosives. Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get in and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

Of the 666 (!!!!!!) incidents reported in Florida, 33 have been linked to alleged voting machine malfunctions in Broward, Duval, Lee, Marion, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach, Sarasota and Volusia counties.

In Broward County, for example, some voters complained of electronic touch-screen systems that presented incomplete ballots.

Alia Faraj, spokeswoman for Florida Deputy Secretary of State Dave Mann, said contrary to news reports, there have been no problems during early voting related to any of the touch-screen electronic voting systems in Florida. The only problems that did occur, she said, involved laptop computers that were used to check voter registration rolls in some of the counties.

Those problems were fixed immediately by a simple reboot of the computers, said Faraj. "The touch-screen systems have been operating as planned," she said.

[Note from me: But what was "planned"???]

Will Doherty, executive director of the San Francisco-based Verified Voting Foundation, said despite Florida's assertion that the malfunctions of the laptops handling voter registrations were minor, his organisation is aware of dozens of voters who were turned away from the polls "because of that minor system crash". Doherty also said there have been multiple reports related to touch-screen calibration problems. Some voters have reported that when they touched the screen next to their candidate's name the screen highlighted the opposing candidate, according to Doherty.

In President George W Bush's home state of Texas, some Travis County and Austin County voters complained of touch-screen voting systems that marked a vote for Bush even though they voted Democratic across the board. In Houston, only five voting machines out of approximately 20 were operating, causing long lines and forcing some voters to leave polling places without voting.

"If [these] problems come up on 2 November, and they most certainly will, voters can expect to stand in long lines or not vote," said John Gideon, cofounder of Votersunite.org. "The fact that elections officials are again beta-testing our voting system in a live election is incomprehensible."

"And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.

And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar." --Arlo Guthrie

The clip shows him smoothing his hair for the camera, complaining about an off-camera aide believed to be Hughes. "She's still tellin' me what to do," he says, before he flashes his middle finger. As worried aides murmur about whether the camera's running, Bush dismisses his gesture as a "one-fingered victory salute."

Then, there's this:

I remember how vivid the sounds were as the troopers rushed toward us -- the clunk of the troopers' heavy boots, the whoops of rebel yells from the white onlookers, the clip-clop of horses hooves hitting the hard asphalt of the highway, the voice of a woman shouting, `Get 'em! Get the n*****s!'

That's John Lewis's account of how things began on Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1965. I quote it here to remind all those sleek, oh-so-clever dicks in the Republican vote-suppression business on which side of history they're presently lining up. I also quote it as a caution to the many people who will be covering what could be a volatile aftermath of an extremely close election.

One of the latest incidents came when John Sachs, 18, a Johnston High School senior and Democrat, went to see Bush in Clive last week. Sachs got a ticket to the event from school and wanted to ask the president about whether there would be a draft, about the war in Iraq, Social Security and Medicare.

But when he got there, a campaign staffer pulled him aside and made him remove his button that said, "Bush-Cheney '04: Leave No Billionaire Behind." The staffer quizzed him about whether he was a Bush supporter, asked him why he was there and what questions he would be asking the president.

"Then he came back and said, 'If you protest, it won't be me taking you out. It will be a sniper,' " Sachs said. "He said it in such a serious tone it scared the crap out of me."

Sachs stayed at the event, but he was escorted to a section of the 7 Flags Events Center where he was surrounded by Secret Service and told he couldn't ask questions. "I was just in a state of fear," he said. "I was looking at the ceiling and I didn't know what to expect, I was so scared."

What will happen if my right to vote is challenged?

The challenger will have to state why your right to vote is being challenged. The four reasons they can challenge are that they believe you are either not 18 or older, not a U.S. citizen, not a Ohio resident for the past 30 days or not a resident of the county and precinct in which you are trying to vote.

One of the poll workers and you will move no less than 10 feet from the challenger.

You will be asked to take this oath: "Do you swear or affirm that you will fully and truly answer all of the following questions put to you, touching your place of residence and your qualifications as an elector at this election?"

You will be asked a series of questions about one of the four areas in which you are being challenged.

If you refuse to answer fully all questions or are unable to answer them fully, or your answers indicate you are too young, not a resident or a citizen, you will not be able to vote.

If you answer the questions to the satisfaction of the poll worker, you will be given a ballot and will be allowed to vote.

What if you want to appeal? The decisions of the poll workers are final.
What if the challenger appears to be attempting to cause delays or intimidate voters? The chief poll worker, the presiding judge, can expel them from the polling place.

I half expect that by tomorrow we'll be watching a grainy video of Ken Mehlman, decked out in a phony beard a la Woody Allen in Bananas, bellowing that he and his boss OBL are about to take over America with one mammoth terror attack and institute compulsory gay marriage before forcibly converting everyone to Islam.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A huge explosion rocked central Baghdad late Tuesday.

There was no immediate explanation for the blast, and the U.S. military had no immediate comment.

Earlier Tuesday, a low rumble from multiple explosions sounded across the capital. At least six blasts were heard in the distance.

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot.

They may then only vote "provisionally" after signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter "in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections."

"Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day; and discourage voters from voting."

Sancho calls it "intimidation." And it may be illegal.

A friend with a child in the Richland County,WI high school where George Bush appears today reports the following. Students were told they could not wear any pro-Kerry clothing or buttons or protest in any manner, at the risk of expulsion. After a parent inquired, an alternative activity will be provided, probably a movie being shown in an auditorium. (The school secretary reportedly said that students had the choice of just staying home if they didn't want to attend the Bush rally, but the principal subsequently offered an alternative.)

I believe the president invaded Iraq to secure liberty and democracy for the Iraqi people. I believe he had compelling evidence that Iraq was a significant threat to America and the world, and presented that evidence in a complete and balanced manner. Like 42 percent of Americans – and 62 percent of Republicans – I believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks.

I believe we have enough troops on the ground in Iraq to ensure stability. I believe the rising American fatality rates, the rising casualty rates, and the rising American share of those coalition fatalities and casualties testify to the undeniable progress we're making there. I believe it is inappropriate and traitorous, however, for the media to broadcast pictures of American flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq.

[snip]

I believe the best response against an Islamic fundamentalist network operating from a South Asian cave which used boxcutters to attack us is to invade a secular Arab dictator living in 11 palaces in a Middle Eastern country whose (supposed) weapon of choice was nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. I further believe that the best way to accomplish that mission was to land on air aircraft carrier in military garb and stand in front of a banner declaring it so.

I believe the president was right to oppose the formation of the 9/11 Commission, to change his mind but then oppose fully funding it, to change his mind but then oppose granting its request for an extension, to change his mind but refuse to testify for more than an hour, to change his mind but then testify alongside Vice President Dick Cheney so long as transcripts and note-taking were prohibited. I believe the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows it was the fault of a handful of misguided underlings who simply misunderstood a memo signed by the Secretary of Defense which authorized the use of dogs to interrogate prisoners.

• Consumer Confidence Hits 7-Month Low - U.S. consumers turned more gloomy in October, beset by soaring energy prices, relentless violence in Iraq and the increasingly bitter end of the presidential election campaign.


• Washington Post tracking poll shows Kerry up by 1


• The Gropinator is distancing himself from the Idiot Dauphin, preferring instead to do the job people elected him to do. AmericaBlog quotes him telling the LI Times, "But I'm not going to hop around from state to state because the people did not elect me to do that."


• Remember a couple of weeks ago when Bush mouthpieces were all over John Kerry for saying that the Iraq War was costing over $200 billion? Well, the additional $70 billion of YOUR DOLLARS that Danny Dickwave is asking Congress for will push the total up to $225 billion.


• And finally, from the Hoist on his own Petard file, we have President Sock Crotch Puppet backsliding on the issue his maniacal faux-Christian hatemonger base regard as the most important one in this election, gay marriage and the Constitutional Amendment he touted so energetically not so long ago: "I view the definition of marriage different from [sic] legal arrangements that enable people to have rights. And I strongly believe that marriage ought to be defined as between a union between a man and a woman. Now, having said that, states ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people to be able to have rights like others", sayeth the AWOL blow monkey puppet of the Cheney neocon death cult.

LONDON (Reuters) - Doughnut-chomping, beer-guzzling Homer Simpson may not be the model father but he has won the hearts of British TV fans who want the nuclear power plant worker to be the next U.S. president.

Former president George Bush (news - web sites) notoriously said American families should be "closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons" but Homer was overwhelming favorite in a Radio Times magazine poll on which U.S. TV character should take over at the White House.

As Americans ponder tax and security pledges from President Bush (news - web sites) and Democratic rival John Kerry (news - web sites) ahead of the November 2 poll, television fans have been considering Homer slogans such as "No big government, just big waist sizes."

In a manifesto compiled for the magazine by The Simpsons' writing staff, the bumbling animated TV hero also pledges: "I promise there will be fewer nuclear disasters with me as your mayor than with me as your nuclear safety inspector."

Homer got 24 percent of the vote in the poll of more than 2,000 readers. Second place went to the more obvious choice of Josiah Bartlet, the president played by Martin Sheen in "The West Wing."

Q She [Condoleeza Rice] was informed days after October 15th?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, and she informed the President. And the first priority, from our standpoint, was to make sure that this wasn't a nuclear proliferation risk, which it is not. These are conventional high explosives that we are talking about. And the President wants to make sure that we get to the bottom of this. Now, the Pentagon, upon learning of this, directed the multinational forces and the Iraqi survey group to look into this matter, and that's what they are currently doing.

[snip]

Q But after Iraqi Freedom, there were those caches all around, wasn't the multinational force -- who was responsible for keeping track --

MR. McCLELLAN: At the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there were a number of priorities. It was a priority to make sure that the oil fields were secure, so that there wasn't massive destruction of the oil fields, which we thought would occur. It was a priority to get the reconstruction office up and running. It was a priority to secure the various ministries, so that we could get those ministries working on their priorities, whether it was --

Look at the latest from Scott McClellan on Air Force One. This from CNN ...

****
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush wants to determine what went wrong.

McClellan, on Air Force One, stressed that the missing explosives were not nuclear materials, and said the storage site was the responsibility of the interim Iraqi government, not the United States, as of June 28, when the United States turned over the nation's administration to the Iraqis.
****

The president wants to determine what went wrong.

This reminds me of when I wanted to know why my Palm Pilot stopped working after I dropped it in the bath tub.

Doesn't this capture Bush's entire presidency?

The thing happened more than a year ago, his administration has taken active steps to cover it up and now that the truth finally comes out, he 'wants to determine what went wrong.'

The idea of accepting responsibility for anything is simply alien to the man. He doesn't even have the good grace to scam us by finding a scapegoat to pin the blame on.

And what about Scott McClellan trying to pin it on the Iraqis?

Does he not read the newspapers or does he think everyone else to too stupid to remember what they just read in them this morning. The stuff was taken more than a year before the Iraqis took over the US occupation authority. And even the highly-cautious Times piece makes clear that Jerry Bremer was told about it no later than May of this year.

So 380 tons of fairly decent explosives -- mind you, not nukes, not even on a daisy-cutter scale, and suitable for everything from construction to manufacturing nukes -- went missing some time between January of 2003 and the present. In a worst-case scenario, thousands of terrorists will have access to high-yield explosives without having the Iranians donate them free of charge.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but what's the big deal?

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 25, 2004

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

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

Security Council members deny meeting Kerry

By Joel Mowbray
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES


U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.

"This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable," Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein."

But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries' U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.

The former ambassadors who said on the record they had never met Mr. Kerry included the representatives of Mexico, Colombia and Bulgaria. The ambassador of a fourth country gave a similar account on the condition that his country not be identified.

• Kerry holds a commanding lead in the battleground states, according to post-debate polling.



• Undecideds break heavily for the challenger, especially in Presidential Elections. This will only serve to further increase Kerry's lead in the battleground states.



• According to Real Clear Politics, which regularly fishes for pro-Bush polls, Bush is under 47.5 in states worth 277 electoral votes. It will be very difficult for him to win any of these states, including Ohio where he rarely travels anymore. He is under 49 in states worth 316 electoral votes, and over 50 in states worth only 202 electoral votes.



• According to the most recent polls from the fifteen polling firms that have conducted polls entirely after the third debate, Bush is only at 47.3% simple mean to Kerry's 45.9% simple mean. The median is Bush 47, Kerry 46. In the history of Presidential elections since there was public polling, no incumbent has amassed a large enough percentage of undecideds to hold on to such a small lead.

• GOP-funded company caught shredding Dem registrations and lying to potential voters in a half-dozen states.



• Minority and elderly absentee voters fooled into relinquishing their ballots.



• College students nationwide tricked into changing their political registration and polling places.



• Elderly Ohio voters wrongly informed that their polling places have been changed.



• Minnesota voters told it's too late to register, even though the state allows voter registration all the way up to election day.



• Disgraced South Dakota dirty trickster Larry Russell brought on board by the GOP to bring his special brand of voter fraud to Ohio.



• The most aggressive voter-intimidation campaign waged by the GOP since the Civil Rights era. (Including massive pre-emptive voter registration challenges designed solely to gum up the works and make it more difficult to vote.)