DAMFA

So, until John Kerry is the nominee or is driven from the race, we will have a daily feature called "John Kerry buyer's remorse section" ...

... For those Kerry supporters who object to this section, we say: if you can't stand the heat of The Heat, how can Democrats expect you to stare down Rove and Gorbachev?

What we don't know yet is (reconciling) what we thought and what the Iraqi Survey Group has found, and we want to look at that

In early August 2001, Britain gave a categorical warning that the US should expect multiple airline hijackings. This warning was passed on to Bush a short time later. [Sunday Herald, 5/19/02] In June 2001, Germany warned that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack "American and Israeli symbols, which stand out." [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9/11/01, Washington Post, 9/14/01, Fox News, 5/17/02] In August, Russian President Putin warned the US that suicide pilots were training for attacks on US targets. [Fox News, 5/17/02]

A review of FEC and other data by The Washington Post found that Kerry has raked in millions from U.S. corporations, especially financial companies such as Citigroup and telecom firms, including Rubert Murdoch's News Corp., which also flew one of his Senate staffers to California for a meeting.

In the presidential race, Kerry has accepted contributions from the same "special interests" he accuses Bush of being too cozy with: HMOs, drug companies and energy firms. He has raised nearly $27,000 from oil and gas companies, tops of the remaining Democratic candidates; $34,000 from health maintenance organizations, second to Dean; and $18,500 from pharmaceutical companies, third behind Dean and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.). Even after subtracting money Kerry has raised for his presidential campaign, he ranks in the top four Senate beneficiaries of lobbyist cash, the CRP found.

One of Kerry's biggest -- and perhaps most controversial -- donors has been the Boston-based law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo. The group, which lobbies on behalf of the telecommunications industry -- and employs the senator's brother, Cameron -- is his single largest contributor over the course of his Senate career. David Leiter, Kerry's former chief of staff, is vice president of a lobbying company affiliated with the Boston-based law firm.

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected.

Further steps could be taken to ensure a safe general election in November, the report concludes. But ultimately, the report says, Diebold election software has to be rewritten to meet industry security standards and called for limited use of paper receipts to help verify voting. ...

... In a statement released today, Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, said this report and another by the Science Applications International Corporation "confirm the accuracy and security of Maryland's voting procedures and our voting systems as they exist today."

"Maybe people elsewhere trust machines more than they trust humans, but that would be totally out of the question here," said Secretary of State Bill Gardner, one of the longest-serving elections officials in the country. "I'm aghast that other places are considering touch-screen computers."

Indeed, if there's anybody who could make Dean attractive, it's Kerry.

Kerry is a miserable candidate, bereft of political skills, and possessing of a record and a persona tailor-made for Karl Rove. The Republicans will merely have to say about Kerry what they said about Gore--that he wants to be on every side of every issue, that he's culturally out of touch with mainstream America, that he's a pompous bore--and this time the sale will be easier, because all these things are far more true of Kerry than of Gore.

I'd love to see the Democrats nominate Wes Clark, who still has great potential as a general election candidate, or John Edwards, who has great potential not only as a candidate but as a president also. ... Failing that, I'd take Kerry over Dean, but it's a choice of defeat over disaster, akin to--as my colleague Frank Foer puts it--the Republicans selecting Bob Dole over Pat Buchanan in 1996.

But what a stellar crowd," Bush said. "It looks like the index of Paul O'Neill's book. Let me say something about that book. Paul said I was disengaged because he talked to me for 45 minutes and I didn't say a word. I wasn't disengaged. I was bored as hell and my mother told me never to interrupt. . . . "

" 'Boy, that speech in Iowa was something else,' Bush said, referring to Howard Dean's field holler after placing third in the caucuses Monday. 'Talk about shock and awe. Saddam Hussein felt so bad for Governor Dean that he offered him his hole.'

" 'Then we have Senator Kerry. I think Kerry's position on the war in Iraq is politically brilliant. In New Hampshire yesterday, he stated he had voted for the war, adding that he was strongly opposed to it.'

DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. (Reuters) - Wesley Clark captured eight of the 15 votes cast for Democrats in the first balloting of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday in the northern hamlet of Dixville Notch, giving his candidacy a symbolic boost before the rest of the state goes to the polls.

"I'm grateful to be here and for the support here at Dixville Notch. This is a big step for me," said Clark, who is making his first bid for any elective office. ///

/// The first votes were cast in ritual fashion shortly after midnight in the northern hamlets of Dixville Notch and Hart's Location. Clark had 14, Kerry eight, Edwards and Dean four each and Lieberman one.

It confirms what I have said for a long period of time, that we were misled — misled not only in the intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war," Kerry, a White House contender, said on "Fox News Sunday." "I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception."

Presidential Address: Lowest Rated Since 2001

President George W. Bush's State of the Union address, the last of his current term, drew a 28.0 rating and 43.4 million viewers 2-plus on the eight networks that carried it live: ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CNN, CNBC, FOX News Channel and MSNBC. It was the lowest rated address since the 27.6 for Bush's first on Feb. 27, 2001.

MATTHEWS: You know, what is this story? We had Chris Lehane on, who is working now for General Clark, attacking his old candidate he was fired by or whatever when he left his campaign - that's Kerry - saying that Kerry ought to release his financial records.

MATTHEWS: But isn't this kind of a pissant campaign, to spend your time saying who had the higher rank in the military and who is the richer or the poorer of the candidates? Is this what it's come down to?

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair.

"I like John Kerry. I consider him a patriot," said Clark. "It's up for the voters to decide." ...

As a former Massachusetts resident, however, [John Walt] found much to agree with in Hardy's criticisms of John Kerry. "If you want anything done in Massachusetts, you went to Kennedy's office, you didn't go to Kerry's office to get it done."

Kerry can't win because he seems aloof and again, he's from New England. Also, his military credentials, although admirable, include an episode where he returned from Vietnam and threw his medals at the capital. Unfortunately, it also turns out that he actually threw a friend's medals and his turned up later on his office wall. This will confuse his image.

In April 1971, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he asked the question of his fellow citizens, 'How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

NASA's Spirit rover has successfully driven to its first target on Mars, a football-sized rock that scientists have dubbed Adirondack.

[I]t is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

Speaking to a crowd of about 1,000 people on the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol, where the Confederate battle flag waves atop a flagpole at the entrance to the grounds, General Clark called the flag a divisive symbol.

"I've seen that flag, I've seen it all my life," said General Clark, who grew up in Little Rock, Ark. "It's a flag of the past."

Then, pointing behind him to an American flag, he added: "This American flag is our flag, and that's the flag of the future. And I want to recommend to all the people of South Carolina, come together under the American flag and honor it." ...

Earlier Monday, at a commemorative service at Zion Baptist Church in Columbia, the Rev. Dr. Sheila B. Koger delivered a fiery sermon about equal rights and Dr. King - and also took a shot at homosexuality. "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," Dr. Koger said to applause from some of the several hundred people attending.

General Clark, who sat through the sermon, later told reporters: "I don't support those views. I believe we have to have equal rights for every American regardless of race, color, gender, sexual orientation or any other discrimination."

There are a lot of good Democrats in this race. But Wes Clark is the best Democrat. He is a true progressive. He's the Democrat's Democrat. I've been around the political block - and I can tell you, I know a true progressive when I see one. And that's why he has my vote.

According to Bush advisers, this is the gist of his speech, which will have solemn passages with an overall tone of optimism:

We are a nation at war. My bold decisions have made America safer, but we are not yet safe. At home, my administration's policies have made us better and more prosperous. But I am not satisfied, and Congress must pass more of what I have proposed.

There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

"Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative."

In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

In 2000, researchers for the Gore campaign uncovered a Bush advertisement that, for one-thirtieth of a second, flashed the word "rats" on the screen. Michael Feldman, then a senior adviser to Mr. Gore, recalls how Mr. Lehane went about offering the story, first to The New York Times and then to the networks.

General Clark has attracted backers as different as Madonna and Sherron Watkins, the whistleblower in the Enron scandal. Other "Clarkies" include Alan Alda and Christopher Guest.

At a house party thrown by Story County Democrats, Yarrow summoned Kerry to the living room where he had just started playing "Puff the Magic Dragon." At one point, as Yarrow sang the word "puff," Kerry quickly gestured as if he was smoking pot.

Carol Mosely-Braun also motivates the Black vote but particularly, she bends the ears of women who feel strongly about the female pursuit of real power in America. She has made some bad gaffes, including frank misstatements of the law and contradictory policy positions. She was the first and only Black female Senator. She will be the second to go.

Mr. Clark, a political rookie of no discernible ideology who is running entirely on his military resume. ... There is also his -- let's be kind -- mercurial temperament. Mr. Dean often shoots from the lip ... Mr. Clark, who has never held office before and until recently was a Republican ... This puts him well to the left of Mr. Clinton, but above all it reveals a candidate who simply hasn't thought about very much.

Dean and Clark are the angriest Democrats in the race, the ones who will say the nastiest things about President Bush and Republicans. Mr. Dean has floated the "theory" that Mr. Bush knew about September 11 in advance, while Mr. Clark insists the President could and should have stopped the attack.

Meanwhile, volunteers for Mr. Kucinich were handing out leaflets at the Judiciary Square Metro Station, urging people to vote.

But few probably heard Mr. Kucinich's volunteers, because supporters for candidate Lyndon LaRouche, packed into a cargo truck cab and parked about 50 yards away, were shouting their message into a megaphone that could be heard for four blocks.

Bush has held only eleven solo press conferences, fewer than almost any modern President. Over a comparable period, his father held seventy-one and Bill Clinton thirty-eight. The Bush White House claims that they have answered thousands of press questions, but the bulk of those answers come from the handful of questions allowed a couple of times a week after photo opportunities, and from joint press conferences, where the President gets only one-quarter the number of questions and few follow-up questions are permitted.

We're disappointed that our efforts to increase the efficiency standards of air conditioners by 20 percent was overturned. We are currently reviewing the court's opinion."

This is a vindication of good energy policy, good environmental policy" and shows that a new administration "can't simply ignore" rules that already have been put in place, said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, one of those who challenged the Bush standard.

Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged.

The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

By accepting the government's vague, poorly explained allegations, and by filling in the gaps in the government's case with its own assumptions about facts absent from the record, this court has converted deference into acquiescence.

Harkin also said he would like the Democratic nominee to be "someone who comes from a working-class background, someone who's had life experiences that most normal people might have had."

That would better describe Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, whose father, among other jobs, drove a milk truck, than Dean, son of a Wall Street financier.

Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark said "the two greatest lies" of the last three years were that the Sept. 11 attacks could not have been prevented and that a future attack is inevitable.

"If I'm president of the United States, I'm going to take care of the American people," Clark told the Concord Monitor for a story published Friday. "We are not going to have one of these incidents."

In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones ...

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.

But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.

The programs of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.

Visiting a second-grade class at a new charter school in Rochester, Lazio was asked by little Victoria Fagan, 7, if he really wanted Clinton to "sign that piece of paper" - a reference to the soft-money pledge

There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than 100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward questions.

"I'm running not because I've been scheming and plotting to climb the political ladder; I'm running because I think the nation is at an incredible crossroads," Clark said. "We're bogged down in Iraq, the world is angry about our unilateral position ... we have a foreign policy that is not sustainable. We need to help Americans help Americans, and then we can help Americans help the world," Clark said.

Thielmann says the nuclear case was filled with half-truths. So why would the Secretary take the information that Thielmann's intelligence bureau had developed and turn it on its head?

"I can only assume that he was doing it to loyally support the President of the United States and build the strongest possible case for arguing that there was no alternative to the use of military force," says Thielmann.