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

…“100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration.”

John Lehman, a 9/11 Commission member and Reagan’s former Navy secretary, claims the Pentagon knows just where Osama is.

…Florida election fraud!

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.

…isn’t getting a lot of Presidential commercials anymore, here’s the Philly Daily News’s look at the latest deceptive, fear-mongering Bush ad.

…indie political commercials from an outfit called “Win Back Respect,” questioning the effectiveness of the Administration’s talk-tuff foreign policy.

…the rhetorical question, “Will the Florida vote-count be fair this time?” and answers himself, “don’t count on it.”

…the Orlando Weekly has a handy list of “94 Reasons Not to Vote for Bush.” They’re compiled from different sources. Some have contradictory opinions to my own. #18 cites an Evangelical website that claims Bush hasn’t done enough, beyond rhetoric, to stop abortion and “the homosexual agenda.”

Matthew Yglesias claims a better choice of world leader to compare Bush to: Vladmir Putin.

…it apparently doesn’t matter that Iraq had no WMDs and wasn’t tied to Al-Qaeda; they’ll still believe it did anyway.

…the short reminder that acting “tough” does not, by itself, win any wars.

…have nothing to do with the wholesale bashing of Christians. Jesus is just alright with me, and many of His followers have done, and still do, astounding works on behalf of a better world.

Ayelish McGarvey, however, writes that he sees few if any such evidence of good works among Bush and his team. McGarvey even suggests, “Bush is no devout evangelical. In fact, he may not be a Christian at all.”

…a similarity between the already-infamous White House snub against “the reality-based community” and an Orwell line about “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”

…offer a brief yet thorough intro to the origins of the neocon think tanks and their ongoing efforts “to quietly influence American public policy by identifying, training, and churning out conservative journalists, thinkers, and  pundits – many of whom now hold positions of power in the media.”