…has a list of “The ten worst cover songs.” Its #1 choice is the same as mine. I haven’t heard several of the runners-up.

…“The unmaking of the president” (Blumenthal presumes the president is already unmade).

Andrew Sullivan, who infamously once predicted that “blue state” residents would form “a fifth column” of pro-terrorist subversion, now calls Kerry “the lesser of two risks.”

…watches Fox News and rhetorically asks, “Are conservatives pre-rationalizing a Bush defeat?”

…”it’s not clear whether President Bush is running a campaign or plotting a coup d’etat. By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own.”

…that mag that’s not as funny as it used to be and never was, has issued its first-ever Presidential endorsement editorial. As you might expect, it’s well-reasoned and lucid, but not obtuse.

…asks us to view the election not as a referendum on Bush but as a referendum on Bush’s ace political strategist Karl Rove, whom Gabler calls “America’s Mullah”:

“Rovism is not simply a function of Rove the political conniver sitting in the counsels of power and making decisions, though he does. No recent presidency has put policy in the service of politics as has Bush’s. Because tactics can change institutions, Rovism is much more. It is a philosophy and practice of governing that pervades the administration and even extends to the Republican-controlled Congress. As Robert Berdahl, chancellor of UC Berkeley, has said of Bush’s foreign policy, a subset of Rovism, it constitutes a fundamental change in ‘the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this country….’Rovism is government by jihadis in the grip of unshakable self-righteousness — ironically the force the administration says it is fighting. It imposes rather than proposes.

Rovism surreptitiously and profoundly changes our form of government, a government that has been, since its founding by children of the Enlightenment, open, accommodating, moderate and generally reasonable.

All administrations try to work the system to their advantage, and some, like Nixon’s, attempt to circumvent the system altogether. Rove and Bush neither use nor circumvent, which would require keeping the system intact. They instead are reconfiguring the system in extra-constitutional, theocratic terms.

The idea of the United States as an ironfisted theocracy is terrifying, and it should give everyone pause. This time, it’s not about policy. This time, for the first time, it’s about the nature of American government.”

…Sojourners, is running an ad in big papers with the headline “God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat.”

…that the Bushies “want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.”

…Congressional candidate Dave Reichert’s hair.

…in the LA Times (free registration required) against “Bush’s Empty Rhetoric on Democracy”:

“Bush and his supporters act as if anti-Americanism is simply the necessary and worthwhile price we pay for our principled advocacy of freedom everywhere. The truth is that anti-Americanism has prevented us from consistently advocating democracy throughout the world. And the inconstancy of our belief in democracy — which the citizens of pro-American dictatorships everywhere have noticed and exploited — makes anti-Americanism all the worse. There may be a way out of this dilemma, but preaching the universality of democracy and practicing otherwise is surely not it.”

Of course, this is hardly the first administration to play power-politics under the guise of “promoting democracy.” The story of the Cold War era is awash with the names of brutal despots and murderous regimes who invoked the sacred mantle of anti-Communism, and received oodles of US support in return.

It’s probably not “our freedom” that anti-American troublemakers loathe, but something else.

…a nice, handy roundup of the first round of electoral dirty tricks.

Christopher Hitchens, that professional Brit gadfly who’s previously referred unironically to Iraq and Afghanistan as wars for liberation, repeats his assertion in the essay “Why I’m (Slightly) for Bush.”

My response:

In Afghanistan, the decentralized warlords are arguably better for democracy, and certainly better for women, than the Taliban had been. Too bad the warlords let Osama get away so swiftly and silently. And too bad the country’s rebuilding has gone so slowly. But hey: At least the junkies panhandling on Broadway might get a break in their junk prices, now that opium production’s back on the rise.

As for Iraq, the situation’s iffier. Jihadist factions, some with imported mercenary soldiers, are capturing or attempting to capture large segments of Iraq’s geography. Women outside Baghdad are being “encouraged” to cover up and shut up, to appease local clerical feifdoms. (Saddam, as part of his brutally efficient megalomania, had suppressed hardcore Islam’s cultural influence.) The reconstruction, as in Afghanistan, has proven easier to talk about than to accomplish.

Even if you believe it was right to go into these places, it’s time to ask who’d be best at cleaning up these respective resulting messes.

Air America Radio, “America’s Progressive Talk Radio Network” and home to Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, comes to Seattle starting Monday. It’ll be on 1090 AM, most recently the site of “Young Country” KYCW, and previously the longtime frequency of the old KING-AM.

It won’t be on in time to strongly affect the elections here. (Washington ceased to be a “swing state” weeks ago, as evinced by the recent paucity of Presidential campaign commercials on local TV). But, with any luck, it’ll be around long enough to drum up public support for progressive ideals, no matter who’s occupying the seats-O-power.

…(free registration required) offers the most lucid parsing I’ve seen of the question, how’s that war-on-terror thang really goin’?