Courtesy of Zombie Flash Mob:

From August 30 to September 2, the streets of Manhattan will be overrun by mindless ghouls whose only goal is to suck the sweet, delicious marrow from the bones of your beloved city. Will you stay quiet while they take over or will you resist?

ZOMBIES OF NEW YORK, RISE UP AND REPEL THE REPUBLICAN MENACE -- THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2nd AT 11PM!



The plan is simple: to illustrate the mindlessness and murderousness of the Republican Party and George W.Bush, and to celebrate their finally leaving our fair home, we will:

- gather at 11PM in a public place near the convention
- act like zombies* for five minutes
- creep out everyone who happens to be watching
- stop and calmly leave like nothing ever happened
- get stinking drunk at a nearby bar

TO PARTICIPATE: you must write an e-mail to zombieflashmob@yahoo.com in order to receive an automatic confirmation and to receive final instructions on the afternoon of September 2nd. You may also receive additional information from this address should events require.

NO ONE BREAKS ANY LAWS, NO ONE GETS ARRESTED.

Costumes/Makeup are encouraged, but remember: minimalism is better as extensive costuming may violate the NYC Mask Law, which prohibits more than three people from wearing "disguises" in public. They may also hinder a quick getaway, if required, so be careful! (Maybe a little powder and some blood running from the mouth? That's always a lovely touch.)

TELL YOUR FRIENDS! TELL YOUR FAMILY! TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW IN NEW YORK CITY! (UNLESS THEY'LL BUST US OR SOMETHING!) POST THIS ON FRIENDSTER AND MYSPACE! WE NEED AS MANY BODIES AS WE CAN GET!

Yours,
Bub the Zombie

* We mean Romero-style zombies here, not those new-fangled "28 Days Later" zombies that run andscream and stuff. Slow, creepy, lurching, moaning-type zombies -- that's what we're after, OK?

about the cutesy "New York Is from Venus, Republicans Are from Mars"-type stories that have been appearing in the Times, like this one and this one and this one.

The only reason the Republicans are coming to our city is to sell a product. That product is the murder of 3,000 of our fellow New Yorkers by terrorist attacks which occurred on Bush's watch.

So keep it on the light side, Times! Our weirdo-friends from the Red States are poppin' in for a visit!

One of the most depressing emails I've ever received; nonetheless, at their prompting I give you this:

The Democratic Party is standing up for John Kerry and actively repudiating this vicious smear campaign. Today we took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times asking readers to join us in this fight -- and we need you to join us as well.

We want to show George W. Bush that the American people aren't going to stand for this kind of negative, lying smear. Sign the Democratic Party's petition today and tell Bush to reject these gutter tactics, and listen to John McCain by smearing the ad.

www.democrats.org/StopTheSmear

Tell Your Friends

Spread the word about the vicious lies in this smear ad. Encourage your friends to take action by signing the Democratic Party's petition to George W. Bush.

www.democrats.org/tellafriend/

MoveOn writes:

[T]oday we're upping the ante and launching a 10-week countdown featuring creative, funny, and beautiful ads from some of America's top directors and actors, including Rob Reiner, to Scarlett Johanssen, John Sayles, Matt Damon, and many more. We call it 10 Weeks: Don't Get Mad, Get Even! Each week, we'll pair one new ad with a couple of actions we can all take to make a difference as we speed toward the finish line.

Check out the breathtaking first "10 Weeks" ad, Benny Boom's "Everybody," now at:

http://www.moveonpac.org/10weeks/

If you like it, please show it to your friends. Anyone who signs up for MoveOn will be invited to watch each ad as it's debuted.

Then help us put it on TV by donating at:

https://www.moveonpac.org/donate/everybody.html

From the front page of the Times website:

Bush Dismisses Idea That Kerry Lied on Vietnam

Translation:

Bush Promotes Idea That Kerry Lied on Vietnam

And the lede?

President Bush said on Thursday that he did not believe Senator John Kerry lied about his war record, but he declined to condemn the television commercial paid for by a veterans group alleging that Mr. Kerry came by his war medals dishonestly.

Translation:

President Bush said on Thursday that anyone listening to him ought to believe Senator John Kerry lied about his war record, and so declined to condemn the television commercial paid for by a veterans group alleging that Mr. Kerry came by his war medals dishonestly.

Thanks, Times! Fuck you! Fuck the lying war-criminal John Kerry! And most of all, Fuck America!!!!

Have you heard the news?

President Bush and Sen. John Kerry bowed to the wishes of popular maverick John McCain on Thursday, as the president embraced the Republican senator's legal fight against big-money special interest groups airing negative ads and the Democratic nominee scrapped a commercial that featured McCain.

Have you heard the other news?

Their bitter fight over Vietnam-era military service took a compelling new twist...

Are you ready, folks, for the compelling new twist? The new twist, from what I can gather based on the information contained in this news information story, is that

a) Kerry, "bow[ing] to the wishes of popular maverick John McCain," has withdrawn an ad which featured--get this--a piece of footage of John McCain speaking to then-candidate Bush. The ad makes no claims which could be criticized for their truth-value; it simply shows McCain saying what he said to Bush, which was that Bush ought to be ashamed.

b) Bush, "bow[ing] to the wishes of popular maverick John McCain," "will join forces with McCain in legal action to crack down on political ads aired by outside groups, dubbed "527s"."

Thus, "With their actions Thursday, Bush and Kerry satisfied McCain's demands."

Great! So--if I am interpreting this news information correctly--Kerry will be pulling an ad that consists only of truth, while there is no indication that Bush's ad--consisting only of lies--will not continue to run. But--Bush will have "joined forces" with McCain in "cracking down" on campaign finance loopholes and abuses.

Well, I guess both Bush and Kerry have "bowed" to McCain and made their equally painful concessions--which leads us to the other news:

The only obvious winner is McCain, a former Vietnam War hero who emerged from his 2000 defeat as one of the nation's most popular politicians, beloved by independent voters and courted by both presidential candidates. He has welcomed the attention, often instigating it, with an eye toward a possible run for the presidency in 2008.

Isn't that great? Everyone wins when McCain wins. Everyone's satisfied when McCain's satisfied.

Oh, and also:

But Kerry lost half the support of people who said they would vote for him based on what they learned about his military experience during his convention last month.

Fuck this sick worm-eaten country. Fuck the corpsified media. Fuck the stupid, suicidal voters. I wish you all an eternity being tortured by John McCain's VC doctor.

I think I figured it out. If I remember correctly, the core of the 2000 smear campaign against John McCain was spreading the word that he was crazier than a shithouse rat. (Yes, there was the stuff about his adopted Bangaladeshi child being his own illegitimate child, McCain being gay, McCain being black, etc.--but I think the main smear was the crazier-than-a-shithouse-rat innuendo.)

So, we're all wondering how this man could have so little honor and integrity as to be gleefully licking the asshole of Bush, the man who smeared him and his family, even as he (Bush) presently heads smears against McCain's fellow veteran Kerry. How could he be doing this? How could the man be associating himself with such disrace, such filth?

I think it is because McCain is crazier than a shithouse rat. You see, in light of that fact, the smear of 2000 wouldn't really be a smear--it would be an announcment of fact, namely, that McCain's unfortunate years of torture at the hands of the Viet Cong rendered him, well, at least as crazy, if not crazier, than a shithouse rat.

So there was no offense taken. So now McCain is free to join Prince Shitface in smearing his fellow veteran Kerry, because he bears no grudge, and is in fact nuts, and is pissed, perhaps, that Kerry's wounds didn't make him nuts. Wouldn't you be pissed if the enemy made you nuts and the other guy got off with some shrapnel in the leg?

So there you have it. QED. Permission to reprint granted.

There are going to be tons of interesting events around town beginning on Saturday--some of them protests, some of them art/music/theatre events, some a kind of hybrid.

Here's an interesting one.

NYC DEFENDS THE HONOR OF JOHNNY CASH

AUGUST 31 at 4:00 P.M

Sotheby's on York Avenue and 71st Street

The RNC Tennessee delegates are having some sort of Cash Bash at Sotheby's sponsored by the American Gas Association (yep, the old AGA). So this group is holding an event on the sidewalk outside--they're calling on supporters to bring guitars and boomboxes and wear hair grease, pompadours, black clothing, bolo ties, jailstripes, or skeleton costumes. There will be music, singing and shouting. And Cash-loving. Sounds fun.

Check out the new MoveOn ad featuring some choice quotations from some of our favorite Republicans:

http://www.moveon.org/pac/news/webvideo.html

and while you're at it, shell out a few bucks for the five Senate candidates MoveOn is endorsing: Bowles in NC, Tenenbaum in SC, Salazar in CO (running against the evil slimebag Pete Coors), Carson in OK and Knowles in AK. These five are all in tight races, they all can win, and we need at least three of them to win to have any chance of taking back the Senate. I just gave 'em $10 each.

If you live in NYC and want to help somehow in the campaign but can't get out of the city much between now and November 2, this could be a good way to do it:

NYC Swingers.net promotes events like phone bank sessions and bus trips to swing states. You can sign up to get their regular email update of events, or you can go to their events page to find out more about what's going on now.

Kerry at Cooper Union's Great Hall. AmCop staff in full attendance. One AmCopper described the speech as a "gentle pushback" at the swift boat smears (which we now know--as if anyone needed proof--have been coordinated directly with the Bush re-election campaign), while sticking limpet-like to the core-message Stronger at Home, Respected in the World themes.


Sez the Times:

Speaking in New York City just days before it plays host to the Republican National Convention, Senator John Kerry on Tuesday painted the election as a stark choice between a mudslinging incumbent and "new leadership" bursting with plans to help the middle class.

"The Bush campaign and its allies have turned to the tactics of fear and smear because they can't talk about jobs, health care, energy independence and rebuilding our alliances," Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, told a handpicked and partisan crowd in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan.

[cont'd.] Having surrounded himself with veterans last month at his own nominating convention, where he started his speech with a salute, Mr. Kerry received a standing ovation on Tuesday stretching nearly a minute with a single sentence summarizing his service: "I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president."

[cont'd.] Later, at a fund-raiser in Philadelphia, Mr. Kerry called the attacks "so petty it is almost pathetic" but then responded to their substance more directly than he had. Noting that some have criticized him for staying in Vietnam for just four months, Mr. Kerry said: "Well, I was there longer than that, number one. Number two, I served two tours. Number three, they thought enough of my service to make me aide to an admiral.

"The Navy, 35 years ago, made the awards that they made under the normal process that they made, and I am proud of them," he continued. "And I am proud of my service, and I am proud that I stood up against the war when I came home, because it was the right thing to do."

[cont'd.] Initially, some Democrats expressed concern that Mr. Kerry was too slow to respond to the charges of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, allowing them to eat away at his Vietnam history, which he has used as a cornerstone of his case for becoming commander in chief.

But he and his aides now seem to be embracing the contretemps, with advisers arguing that any mention of his Vietnam record is helpful and that they will be able to use the Swift boat group to tar the Bush campaign with a dirty-politics label.

These guys think so, at least. I spoke briefly to these members of Republicans for Kerry (the guy in the red shirt is a Vietnam vet) outside Cooper Union after the speech. Because of my shitty camera you can't see that one of the signs on the flag post reads something to the effect of "Bush couldn't defend shit." The red-shirted guy is pretty confident that the swift boat lies--being so egregious, and coming from (or in support of) such an egregious coward as Bush--can't have a long life, and will blow up on Bush.

I sure hope he's right.

Bastards!

MoveOn writes:

The Bush administration has announced plans to open 60 million acres of America's last pristine wild forests to logging, drilling, and mining. It's the biggest single giveaway to the timber industry in the history of our national forests.

Will you join me in helping to save these forests from development? The US Forest Service is now accepting public comments, at:

http://www.moveon.org/roadless/

"In defense of Kerry, aides distributed a copy of the candidate's comments on NBC's Meet the Press earlier this year, when he conceded the language was sometimes excessive."

-- Washington Post, 8/21/04


In anticipation of the coming attacks on Kerry's heroic testimony to the Armed Services Committee in 1971, his aides have started apologzing preempmtively.

Death. Certain death. Death embraced, with a bow and a scrape. Self-immolation on the national altar of demented patriotism and the hallowing of bloodshed for its own sake. Humiliated suicide in the face of an imminent murder.

It should go without saying that Kerry's only option in the face of the attacks on his antiwar activities is to assert proudly that he would have done no differently, that he had seen first-hand the consequences of a failed war policy and was obliged to speak out.

Apology is an admission of guilt and, worse, and an announcement of weakness and terror.

Kerry cannot be the commander-in-chief if he shows himself now to be terrorized, or if he sacrifices his corpse to the Republican terror campaign.

Jeb Bush pushed Florida Republicans to do it in 2000. (Read this mind-blower.) And the Florida Republicans are driving their people to do it again in 2004.

But AmCoppers and Democrats there, here, and everywhere should send away now for their absentee ballots. Anyone can vote absentee. Tell your friends and family to vote absentee. Make sure they do it.

In New York City, for example, to qualify for an absentee ballot, all you need is to "expect in good faith to be absent from the City of New York on such Election Day because my duties, occupation, business, or studies or vacation require me to be elsewhere." That pretty much covers it for everyone.

If you live in New York City, click here. For New York State, click here.

Most any excuse is valid for obtaining an absentee ballot. And if you’re still concerned that voting by absentee ballot somehow won’t work -- that they’ll reject your application, that your ballot won’t arrive in the mail -- there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re not able to successfully vote absentee, you simply get up on November 2 as you ordinarily would and vote at the polls, and if they say you already voted absentee (when you haven’t), you cast a provisional ballot.

So why should you vote by absentee ballot?

I attended a campaign organizing workshop a few weeks ago in New York City hosted by Democracy for America (the new embodiment of the Dean campaign) and a new Dean-oriented group called Latinos for America. Several seminars were led by a veteran political consultant and vote counter who was director for absentee operations for the Oregon Democratic coordinated campaign in 2000 and director of voter operations for Pueblo, Colorado for Al Gore in 2000. He was also the director of get out the vote operations for Mark Warner’s winning 2001 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia.

His message is simple: vote by absentee ballot.

Here are some of his reasons, along with the insights I derived from hearing him speak.

1. It’s easy and safe and guarantees a vote for Kerry.

Assume you live in New York, where your vote "won’t matter" on November 2. If you send in your absentee ballot request now, your ballot will soon be waiting at the post office. (We’re 61 days out from the election now.) You’ll get your ballot about 30 days out from the election and have nearly 30 days to get it back in. That’s 30 days to vote, rather than an hour, or maybe a half hour on November 2.

And you get to vote from the privacy of your own home.

And you don’t have to skip work or school on November 2 to do it.

And you run no risk of having your vote go uncounted because of a broken punch card-, lever-, or optical scan-machine, or a Diebold touch screen voting machine that will be broken, at best, and rigged to count only Republican votes, at worst, on election day.

And you run no risk of encountering Republican thugs who will be out in force all over the country on November 2 trying to intimidate Democratic voters into not voting, whether by setting up phony police checkpoints (as they did in Florida in 2000), phony police investigations (as they’re doing now in Florida) illegally closing the polling places for lunch or early at the end of the day (as they did in Missouri, among other places), or illegally demanding that voters furnish one, two, three, or even four pieces of identification to prove citizenship or residency (as they did in Florida, and elsewhere).

[For example, did you know that the (ironically-named) Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, defers the passing of voting requirements to localities, enabling some areas require that voters provide identification in order to vote. This requirement, of course, can be enforced selectively, and unequally, and at the whim of local partisan voting officials.]

Plus, if you vote by absentee ballot, rather than being locked into your home city on November 2, you can be free to be anywhere, such as in a battleground state (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania) where hopefully, you’ll have been spending the previous month working to get out the vote for Kerry.

Plus (this applies mostly to swing state voters), if you vote absentee, you can save the Kerry campaign time, money, and resources:

Once you’ve submitted your absentee ballot some 30 days before the election, when the Kerry campaign (which will have registered Democrats on its call lists) calls you to ask who you’ll vote for, you can say you already voted, and they can take you off their list, which saves them the time and hassle of calling you 10 or 12 times up to election day to make sure that you vote, so they can instead harangue independents and undecideds to get them to vote for Kerry.

2. You should do it even if you live in a "safe" state.

Is there any doubt that you should vote, even in New York, even in California, even in Massachusetts, where Kerry is very likely to win the electoral tally?

Think about the rhetorical power of the more than half a million votes Gore won by in the popular vote in 2000. Obviously, this wasn’t powerful enough to overturn the corrupt result from Florida, but imagine if that popular vote margin had been 200,000, or 100,000 or zero? Imagine if 500,000 New York Democrats had simply decided not to vote in 2000. Surely, Gore still would have won the state by a wide margin, but his victory in the popular vote would have been zero.

Now assuming that Kerry is going to win on November 2, we need to run up the score in the popular vote as much as possible to give him the biggest perceived mandate as possible, and to this end, every vote in New York counts toward this margin.

No throwing away your vote for Nader this time. Not even in safe states. Kerry needs every vote in every swing state, and every vote in every state, period.

3. Surprising facts about absentee voting:

Think of it this way. In the 2000 election, of all 156,421,311 registered voters (Democrat and Republican) throughout the country, 67.5 percent of them actually voted.

But, as I learned at the Latinos for America seminar, 78 percent of those registered voters who vote by absentee ballot actually vote. In Oregon, for example, where 100 percent of voting is done by mail, 87.3 percent of Democratic voters voted.

Simply put, voters who vote absentee actually vote.

Imagine if 87.3 percent, or even 83 percent, or even 75 percent of the 3,803,081 registered Democrats in Florida had voted in 2000, rather than the roughly 60-70 percent who actually voted?

Gore would be president now.

And even assuming that absentee ballot voters vote at the same rate as election day voters, if Florida Democrats in large numbers had voted by absentee ballot in 2000, that many fewer Floridians would have been disenfranchised by being met with intimidation at polling places. That many fewer Floridians would have avoided police roadblocks on election day. That many fewer Floridians would have been asked, illegally, to furnish identification and proof of citizenship to vote. Plus, had the lion’s share of Democratic votes in Florida been cast in September or October, the 57,700 voters who were incorrectly listed as felons and who ought to have been reinstated to the rolls but had been unlawfully "scrubbed" from the rolls would have confronted that problem months before the election, rather than the day of the election, and the problem could have been rectified in time to allow them to vote by election day.

Now think about this year in Florida, and Ohio, and the other battleground states, where Republican efforts to defraud voters will be in high gear.

By casting their votes by absentee ballot, Democratic voters will avoid the police blockades and polling station intimidation, not to mention the corrupt touch-screen voting machines, they would inevitably face with an in-person vote on November 2. Think about having a huge of stack of Democratic votes, locked down, in the bank, well before November 2.

As with everything in politics these days, the Republicans are already doing this, they have been doing this for years, and they do this better than we do. It’s time for us to catch up, and time for us to start voting absentee.

Now that the latest turn in the story of the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth [sic]" story is unfolding, the nature of the GOP strategy has become clear. The first wave of ads has whipped up a controversy and attracted the media's attention; now the GOP lowers the boom: accusations that Kerry betrayed the troops in Vietnam in his testimony to the Armed Services Committee in 1971.

This will be an extremely powerful accusation. Kerry began his testimony with a litany of alleged war crimes that, according to international organizations, American soldiers had committed in Vietnam. The Swift Boat vets still hate him for this, and they are going to release a new ad that features clips of Kerry's lurid (but, of course, true) accusations, along with their own feelings of betrayal ("I never cut off anyone's ears," etc.). The veterans' feelings of betrayal will resonate, and the new phase of attack will end the debate about the accuracy and provenance of the old ads. Thus Kerry's new attacks on Bush for countenancing the ads will become irrelevant; the new ads will bring forward Kerry's old testimony, which cannot be contested.

The first set of ads will have served their purpose by creating the controversy. The second will foreground aspects of Kerry's testimony from which he has tried to distance himself (he told Russert he regretted the "anger" in his testimony). The GOP has prepared well for this new move. The evidence is Bob Dole's appearance on the scene, suggesting that Kerry apologize for placing 2.5 million Vietnam vets under the label of "war criminal."

None of this had to be very damaging to Kerry, but I am afraid that it will be--because he has played into the hands of the GOP. He has done so first by letting the initial phase of the Swift Boat ads go unanswered, and then, crucially, by responding to the ads in a far too focused and limited way. Kerry has insisted that the ads are untrue, that Bush is behind them, that they should be withdrawn, etc. What he should have done was denounce the ads, declare them false, and then quickly said something like, "But of course this is typical of the Republicans, they are distracting Americans from the issues that matter," and then he should have gone on to make new, powerful, damning attacks on GOP policies--attacks that would have made headlines, and taken the focus off the goddamn Swift Boat ads.

Now the debate about the ads is front and center. But people aren't very interested in a debate about the ads. They may not like them, but they are not interested in following a debate that gets bogged down in the nitty gritty of who did what in which battle, etc. They'll just say, "Both sides are wrong." This response is what Bush wants, because it takes attention away from his own failed policies and keeps Kerry from running an offensive campaign. And, much more importantly, now that Vietnam has become an issue, the GOP is allowed to spend far more time on Kerry's Vietnam years as a whole, and especially Kerry's antiwar testimony.

It was Kerry who screwed up by letting Vietnam be the central issue. It was fine to make a big deal of his heroism, but he focused on it so intensely that he downplayed his other qualifications. Making his heroism the centerpiece of his campaign invited the GOP to make his activities during that whole period, the war and after, a matter for debate. If Kerry had been more aggressive, if he had grabbed the headlines with more potent attacks and proposals, it would have been impossible for Bush to bog him down in Vietnam. But now the key questions--which Kerry spent a large part of the DNC inviting--are, "Are Kerry's service and subsequent antiwar activities admirable? Do you think they qualify him for the Presidency?"

A lot of people will answer "no" because of his congressional testimony, and a lot of people might say that they admire him, but are wondering what Vietnam has to do with the war on terrorism. This last response is the one that is really dangerous: the more of a focus there is on Vietnam controversies, to the exclusion of the Iraq and terror questions and the other questions posed by Bush's failed leadership, the greater the chance that Bush slips into the White House again through the back door.

by Stand Up and Holla!

Although Silverlake is a popular neighborhood with L.A.'s arts community and many of the city's gay activists, first and foremost it's a Latino neighborhood where the majority of residents are Mexicans. Anyways, it was fun to see 2 different organizations out there pushing for Latino support right across from one another.



Although the "Viva Bush" tent didn't seem to get a single visitor the whole day (maybe the cops assigned to keep people from trashing the tent scared any prospective recruits away?), the Rough Trade Home Video tent -- featuring a Mexican porn star named "Mario" hawking his latest feature (I shit you not: "Pokin' in the Boys Room") -- was a mob scene the entire afternoon.



Bush should clearly rethink his plan to attract Latin voters if he wants to woo them by November.

I walked around and checked out the rest of the booths after watching a set by an excellent L.A. band called Dengue Fever, which is a quirky indie-rock band fronted by a Cambodian pop star.

These baby outfits were selling like hotcakes,



which was inspiring, until I noticed that the tent next door was doing almost as well as Mario's.

Go here to sign the petition (whatever the fuck that does) and watch the Kerry campaign's new "Old Tricks" ad. It consists solely of a clip of McCain rebuking Bush in a debate in 2000, telling him he should be ashamed. Bush's pathetic response is priceless. Unfortunately--and who knows why--this clearly effective ad is being circulated on the Web, not shown on TV.

Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed: A Small Lesson in Conservatism

By Katharine DeBrecht

The story of two boys who dream about opening a lemonade stand when a strange thing happens...

Their dream gets stuck in Liberaland!

"Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! A Small Lesson in Conservatism" is a wonderful way to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. In simple text, parents and children follow Tommy and Lou on their quest to earn money for a swing set their parents cannot afford. As their dream gets stuck in Liberaland, Tommy and Lou’s lemonade stand is hit with many obstacles.

Liberals keep appearing from behind their lemon tree, taking half of their money in taxes, forbidding them to hang a picture of Jesus atop their stand, and making them give broccoli with each glass sold.

Law after law instituted by the press-hungry liberals finally results in the liberals taking over Tommy and Lou’s stand and offering sour lemonade at astronomical prices to the customers.

Buy it here!

In case anyone missed this memorable response to a shameless Bush campaign ad, currently airing nationally, that not only exploits the Olympics but crassly offers up Iraq and Afghanistan as "two new democracies," as though they were proud notches in Bush's personal democracy-speading belt (or bedpost, or whatever):

"Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. "He can find another way to advertise himself."

Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush's TV advertisement. "How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?" Manajid told me. "He has committed so many crimes."

"The ad simply talks about President Bush's optimism and how democracy has triumphed over terror," said Scott Stanzel, a spokesperson for Bush's campaign. "Twenty-five million people in Iraq are free as a result of the actions of the coalition."

An amazing story about Abu Ghraib whistleblower Joe Darby. Candlelight vigils for torturers, gag orders, sinister military vans whisking people off to "protective custody," all of it.