Interactive Electoral Votes Map found via Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation., which was linked from Babes Against Bush!, which Jas. discovered.

Cool election day countdown clock from www.babesagainstbush.com:

And my own countdown calendar:
Dump Bush — 2004 Election Countdown

Clark: Bush more concerned with ‘political security’ than national security TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer

Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Tuesday criticized the timing of an investigation of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and suggested President Bush was more concerned with ”political security” than national security.

Campaigning in New Hampshire two weeks before its primary election, Clark called for a full congressional investigation into why the United States went to war in Iraq.

“We don’t know what the motivation was. We just don’t know. We’ve spent $180 billion on it, we’ve lost 480 Americans, we’ve got 2,500 with life-changing injuries,” the retired general told reporters. …

Clark contrasted the speed of the O’Neill investigation with the slow pace of an inquiry into who last summer divulged the name of a CIA official whose husband had criticized the president’s Iraq policy.

“They didn’t wait 24 hours in initiating an investigation on Paul O’Neill,” Clark said. “They’re not concerned about national security. But they’re really concerned about political security. I think they’ve got their priorities upside down.“

Op-Ed Columnist: The Awful Truth By PAUL KRUGMAN, NYTimes

People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren’t sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism.

But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College. …

The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean’s assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn’t made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a “detour” that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O’Neill’s revelations? …

More important, having a few months of good news doesn’t excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.

Challenging Bush: A Journey From a Mill Town Ends With a Run for President By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr., NYTimes

Senator Edwards’s campaign for president, which won the coveted endorsement of The Des Moines Register yesterday, hinges on the notion that he has not forgotten where he comes from. He usually arrives at his events to the blaring sound of John Cougar Mellencamp singing “I was born in a small town.” And it never takes him long to tell his audience he was reared by working-class parents in mill towns of the Carolinas and was the first in his family to go to college.

Op-Ed Contributor: The Vital Republican Center By CHRISTIE WHITMAN

Now … many moderate Republicans feel even less certain of their place in the party. When President Bush, arguably one of the more conservative presidents in recent history, is under attack from the right wing of the party for his proposal regarding immigration and migrant workers, is it any wonder moderates feel out of sync?
It doesn’t seem to matter to conservatives that moderates share their views on the vast majority of those bedrock principles that have always been the foundation of Republicanism: smaller government, the power of free markets, a strong national defense. Because we disagree on a few issues, most notably a woman’s right to choose, many conservatives act as if they wish we moderates would just disappear. …

I also often had to battle extremists within my own party. I remember a Republican leader in Congress telling me not to use the word “balance” when talking about environmental policy — it implied that we were giving too much away to the environmentalists. Moderate voters who are concerned about the environment were often left frustrated.

Former New Jersey governor and EPA head, Christie Whitman is writing about the trouble moderate Republicans have getting acceptance from the Radical Right (whom she incorrectly identifies as conservatives). Tell us about it, Christie. mjh

See also: Conservatives Against Bush
GOP Wins the Hypocrisy Trophy

CNN.com – Cabinet members defend Bush from O’Neill – Jan. 12, 2004

In the book, ”The Price of Loyalty,” by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, scheduled for publication Tuesday, O’Neill says administration officials discussed plans to go to war with Iraq as early as their first weeks in office.

He also compares Bush’s presence at Cabinet meetings to ”a blind man in a room full of deaf people.” …

An interview with O’Neill aired Sunday night on the CBS program “60 Minutes.”

In it, O’Neill said the Bush administration was eyeing an invasion of Iraq “from the very beginning” — months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that administration officials said changed their strategic perspective. …

“For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap,” O’Neill said in the interview.

“We didn’t listen to [O’Neill’s] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now,” said a senior official. The official said he informed Bush of O’Neill’s comments but declined to describe the president’s reaction.

Suskind said he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including several Cabinet members who gave him their accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. …

O’Neill also told Time magazine he never saw evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq –Bush’s primary justification for the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March.

None have been found, although searches have turned up evidence of continuing research on banned weapons.

O’Neill predicted that his former colleagues — one of whom has already tried to paint him as a disgruntled former employee with a “tin ear” for politics — would hit back.

“These people are nasty and they have a long memory,” O’Neill told Time.

More apt would be that Bush is a deaf man in a country full of blind people. mjh

Justices Refuse to Review Case on Secrecy and 9/11 Detentions

The case that the justices declined today to review, Center for National Security Studies v. Justice Department, 03-472, pitted two fundamental values against each other — the right of the public to know details of how its government operates versus the government’s need to keep some information secret to protect national security.

With today’s refusal by the justices, the last word in the case apparently belongs to Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his opinion for the 2-to-1 majority on June 17, he noted that courts had always shown deference to executive branch officials in the field of national security.

“The need for deference in this case is just as strong as in earlier cases,” Judge Sentelle wrote in the opinion that was joined by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson and reversed a lower court finding. “America faces an enemy just as real as its former cold war foes.”

Judge David S. Tatel offered a blistering dissent last June. “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,” he asserted.

Notice a court stacked with Republicans said we should trust the President and the Supreme Court, which appointed this President, agrees. Checks and balances? mjh

Judges
* Judge Sentelle was appointed United States Circuit Judge in October 1987. [by Reagan]
* Judge Henderson was appointed United States Circuit Judge in July 1990. [by Bush’s dad]
* Judge Tatel was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals in October 1994. [by Clinton]