[Quote:]

During a campaign forum in the Cleveland suburbs last month, President Bush was asked whether he likes broccoli, to disclose his “most important legacy to the American people” and to reveal what supporters can do “to make sure that you win Ohio and get reelected.”

The “Ask President Bush” forums, which on television look like freewheeling sessions with the commander in chief, are tightly managed by the Bush-Cheney campaign, with the president calling mainly on people sitting in sections filled with his most loyal supporters. At one such event, a veteran’s question was whether Bush would permit him “the honor of giving our commander in chief a real Navy salute, and not a flip-flop.”

Several Bush advisers said the president may well pay a price for his decision to remain isolated from tough or unexpected questions when he faces Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), whose events are notably less scripted, in a town-hall-style debate tonight at Washington University in St. Louis. The questions are likely to be tougher than those he faced when he taped an interview about parenting for the “Dr. Phil” show this summer.

The debates, which will conclude Wednesday in Arizona, have brought new scrutiny to Bush by tens of millions of people who are accustomed to seeing him only in brief clips or formal settings. Bush received poor ratings in polls after television shots from the first debate showed him fidgeting and grimacing under challenges by Kerry, and his remarks became repetitious and at times peevish.

Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University, said the first debate showed Bush had been overprotected. “If you don’t talk to the press and deal with audiences with some degree of skepticism, you can’t build understanding so people have confidence in you in hard times,” Fields said. “His handlers think they’re doing him a favor, but they’re not.”

This is what the news reports from Yahoo:

[Quote:]

U.S. payrolls grew by just 96,000 workers in September, the government said on Friday in a surprisingly weak report that will sharpen criticism of President Bush in a looming debate and may hasten a pause in U.S. interest-rate rises.

[..]

After factoring in the projected change, about 585,000 jobs have been lost since President Bush took office in January 2001. Without the expected revision, a total of 821,000 jobs have been lost since Bush took office.

And here’s the spin version:

[Quote (campaign site):]

Over 1.9 Million Jobs Created Since August 2003 with 13 Straight Months of Job Gains

[Quote:]

About a year ago I took a good friend to the airport (yeah I am a guy she is female ). We stayed together till just before the metal detectors where they we checking passes. I then stayed at this point while she went through security. She put her laptop on “the belt”. Someone then jumped ahead of her in the line and “beeped”. In the meantime someone who had already cleared security came up to the belt and tried to leave with her brand new laptop.

I saw this and yelled for the TSA people to stop the person. They did nothing. A cop did stop the person. The TSA gal then came over to the cop they had a discussion with him. The laptop was returned to the belt but the person allowed to go on there way. I then got quite a lecture on my failed patriotism. How I had put our nation at risk because I was in love with a laptop. I should know how to behave in an airport. I asked why the people were not arrested. I was told the only person who might be arrested was me. I was disrupting the nation’s security, and these two were not. TSA, I was informed, does not enforce laws and they are in charge around the metal detectors, so they were not going to have their operations disrupted by an arrest.

Makes one wonder what other crimes are allowed at the security points at the airport.

JibJab has a great new parody. Poking fun at both candidates…

I’ll take “Stuck in my head all day” for 800, Alex

Google has a new “print” function – for some searches, it will find books, and offer pages of the book for you.

If you search for “Economic Development”, for example, you get this.

Here’s what Google has to say about this:

[Quote:]

What can I do with books that I find?

Well, you can browse a few pages, learn more about the topics explored by the book, buy it, or commit a selection to memory. To further protect your book content, printing and image copying functions are disabled on all Google Print content pages.

Yeah. Right. If you believe that I’ve got some Real Estate in Florida for sale for you.

Let’s see….

1. Do a “View Source”
2. Search for “theimg { background-image:url”
3. Copy the URL from that place into a new browser window
4. (optionally remove the search words from that url)
5. Print. Copy. Drag. Drop. Or any other action Google thinks they stopped.

Scripting this should be easy.

[Quote:]

Officials in one Missouri county are reprinting absentee ballots for the Nov. 2 general election after discovering that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were left off.

The ballots were mailed beginning Sept. 21, and Carter County Clerk Becky Gibbs said several voters noticed the oversight.

“We are rectifying it,” she said. “There was no intent to leave them off.”

Fewer than 500 of the erroneous ballots were sent out, and some have already been returned.

[Quote:]

When Hurricane Charley slammed into Florida in mid-August 2004, battering the state with up to 100 mph winds that knocked over signs, uprooted trees, and left thousands of homes destroyed or uninhabitable, one billboard on Sand Lake Road in Orlando survived the onslaught relatively unscathed. The storm peeled off the most recent advertising message displayed on the board, however, revealing in its place an ad from an earlier campaign:

[Quote:]

The plane in these pictures is still officially the Air Vehicle Number 1, a prototype, onboard the *USS George Washington CVN-73 for catapult fit checks. Not exactly still Top Secret but certainly not yet made public.

I believe it will be known as the the F/A-37 (Talon). Although specs are classified, it is believed to be a Mach 3.5 (top speed in the Mach 4 range), super-cruise stealth fighter / bomber / interceptor with approximately a 4,000nm range. Awesome!

Representative Tim Ryan explains why young people are still afraid of the draft despite repeated denials.

I’ll hug your elephant if you kiss my ass

[Quote:]

When the federal government issues a terrorist warning, presidential approval ratings jump, a Cornell sociologist has found. Interestingly, terrorist warnings also boost support for the president on issues that are largely irrelevant to terrorism, such as his handling of the economy.

Robb Willer, assistant director of the Sociology and Small Groups Laboratory at Cornell and a doctoral candidate in sociology who expects his Ph.D. in May 2005, tracked the 26 times that a federal government agency reported an increased threat of terrorist activity in the United States between February 2001 and May 2004. He also tracked the 131 Gallup Polls that were conducted during the same period. He then conducted several time-series and regression analyses on the relationship between government-issued terror warnings and Gallup Poll data on approval ratings of President George W. Bush

[Quote:]

AP is now saying the article was a “test article” (WTF?) that was “inadvertently” picked up by WBAY. Now, I’ve been a freelance writer/journalist for quite awhile, as have you, but I’ve never heard of writing “test articles” in advance, other than advance obituaries for celebrities. Have you? Furthermore, I Googled ‘”test article” journalism’ and came up with nada.”

[Quote:]

French officials were prepared to provide as many as 15,000 troops for an invasion of Iraq before relations soured between the Bush administration and the French government over the timing of an attack, according to a new book published in France this week.

The book, “Chirac Contre Bush: L’Autre Guerre” (“Chirac vs. Bush: The Other War”), reports that a French general, Jean Patrick Gaviard, visited the Pentagon to meet with Central Command staff on Dec. 16, 2002 — three months before the war began — to discuss a French contribution of 10,000 to 15,000 troops and to negotiate landing and docking rights for French jets and ships

[Quote:]

Ralph Nader’s access to the ballot has been a hard-fought battle in state after state, with Republicans helping him in hopes that he will steal votes from John Kerry, and Democrats pulling out the stops to prevent that. But no effort has been as complicated and fraud-ridden as the one here, with judges across the state examining more than 40,000 signatures that challengers have said are forged or otherwise invalid.

Already judges have declared invalid about 10,000 signatures collected statewide for Mr. Nader, and there are still 25,000 to be ruled on here in Philadelphia. Judge Colins has said he expects some 70 percent of the city signatures to be declared illegal.

Mr. Nader needs 25,697 signatures to qualify for the Pennsylvania ballot.

If there are no hanging chads, there is a black crayon, as well as handwriting experts, magnifying glasses and plenty of chaos. Two of Mr. Nader’s lawyers have quit, and while he does have several Republicans running between courtrooms on his behalf, he has had to rely on the occasional law student to make his case. A group of homeless people is suing the campaign, claiming they were not paid the money they were promised for collecting signatures.

[Quote:]

The FBI took the hard drives of Global IMC servers in the USA and the UK. It appears that a court order was issued to Rackspace (Indymedia’s service provider with offices in the US and in London) to physically remove the hard drives from Global Indymedia servers (backup servers are now in place). Rackspace was given no time to defend against the order before it was acted upon and turned over the hard drives, both in the US and the UK. The servers hosted numerous local IMCs, including UK Indymedia, Belgium, African imcs, Palestine, UK, Germany, Brasil, Italy, Uruguay, Poland, Belgrade, Portugal and others.

Free Speech is really a bitch, isn’t it?

[Quote:]

Since he can’t fly in style, Sean Hannity says he won’t come to St. Louis at all.

After promising to counter Michael Moore’s speech this Friday, the conservative commentator pulled out of the deal less than a week before his scheduled appearance-but reportedly asked that the media not be informed of his motivations for the decision.

Hannity cited personal reasons for his cancellation, said law student Ruth Hollander after speaking with the right-wing pundit over the phone yesterday. Hannity, Hollander said, requested a private jet to fly him to St. Louis for the speech, but then rejected “several” different jets offered by a private donor. He told Hollander about a “bad experience” with the prominent company that had manufactured all the jets offered for his trip.

“[Hannity's agent] said he thought we should say that because of the short time frame involved, it didn’t work out,” said Hollander. “I said I didn’t think that was the truth, and…I really felt we had met all of our commitments and we were going to be honest when asked.”

When Hollander and fellow law student Melinda Gorman failed to locate a jet manufactured by another company, they offered Hannity a first-class ticket on a commercial flight. He refused.

even mijn pc buiten zetten..