Also, this week's Time Magazine has a pretty cover story regarding the upcoming election, "The Morning After..." (Might be online, fully readable by Wed.)

Synopsis here:

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101041101/story.html

After I read it, I'm even more convinced that Electoral College isn't only a constitutional anachronism, but also highly impractical in today's age... :wink:

Time Magazine and newsweek also have bush up in the polls with almost identical #s like the CNN ones.

Time Magazine is a part of the same corporate network as CNN, Newsweek belongs to the General Electric empire... :wink:

Bush today in Colorado: "Now my opponent is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001, and that our military passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field. "

Washington Post in April 2002:

"U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight
Failure to Send Troops in Pursuit Termed Major Error

By Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page A01

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December"

Article

On a lighter note, this is soooo funny...

http://www.markfiore.com/animation/opposite.html

Enjoy at your own risk, you might hurt yourself from laughing... If you want to see more use back/next for navigation...

That was too real.

The funniest thing is, that in the oppositeland the election would still be a dead heat ;-)

Isn't it???

Here is the database of all his animations, I think he publishes it weekly and it goes back almost two years...

http://www.markfiore.com/animation.html

They all use different pollsters, though.

Here's what my problem with Electoral-vote site is, exemplified:

Eliminating outlier results is a common method in statistics. If you measure Krem's height 10 times and 9 times it says 6 feet tall and one time it says 7 feet tall, you exclude the 7. It's not always done, but it's nothing outrageous, and its a reasonable thing to do when dealing with real world (and therefor less exact) sciences like economics, politics etc.

Here's an electoral vote analysis you might like better, in terms of scientificness and objectivity:

http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/pollcalc.html

And below is another one that I dont think is as good as the one above but still interesting:

http://www.econ.umn.edu/~amoro/Research/presprobs.html

It's not the throwing away of that one poll that bothers me, it's the lack of methodology in that. It "looked" to him that the poll was wrong, so he figured it was.

I love the maps on the first site :-D

I still trust the futures markets over at Iowa Electronic Markets and tradesports.com more than the pollsters.

http://www.bushrelativesforkerry.com/pages/1/index.htm

This site wins "The most marginal and bitter group for Kerry" award.

Yeah that's a good one.

Here's some girls who'd really like to sway your vote.

http://www.liegirls.com/

Well, those explosives are quickly becoming a pivotal issue.



I don't know how I feel about the war in Iraq being broken down into "technical" problems. Understandably an opposing candidate can use some of the scenarios of that candidate thinks Bush hovers in grayscale too much over there. Otherwise, it just becomes ridiculous. Clearly there are only two things that could have happened. 1. U.S. has actually confiscated it and its sitting pretty somewhere in South Dakota, and Bush is simply avoiding the topic for obvious reasons, or 2. Rebels/Terrorists took it. While the second option is far more complicated, it still just coincides with my and many other's previous arguements that they are one step ahead of us, because they are fighting 2004 style and not 1944 style engagements anymore. Its already clear that Bush had made some errors, but even more clear that no one really knows how to calm the situation down over there right now.

I'm still waiting to hear something new from anyone.

-Dolce

He's more than made errors, he's made it so that no one can really succeed there now. It's pretty obvious that when you have a factionalized country you need a strong professional military as a kind of overarching stability point. But the administration was influenced by Ahmed Chalabi who convinced them to disband the military, against former General Jay Garner's advice. Why would Chalabi want the Iraq military disbanded? Could it be because he's in the pay of Iran and that the Gulf War 2 was essentially the final battle of the Iran-Iraq war in which Iran sneakily prevailed? Who knows but there are serious people who really do believe that, it's possible.

As to what to do now, it's probably unsolvable. You can't have a 3 state solution because then the turks would flip out about a kurdistan.

Maybe put Saddam back in power? He'd sort if out quick. And no I don't think they should do that, really, but it might be a good idea for them to start scanning the horizon for a kind of lighter version of Saddam, a strongman who isn't over the top, in case it comes to a point in a year or two where we have to support such a situation to avoid total civil war.

It wouldn't be that big a tragedy anyway, because frankly many women were better off under the secular Saddam than they will be under a possible theocratic dictatorship that might emerge in coming years.

Yeah, nice of you to respect the people of Iraq

That explosives story is a fake, by the way. The weapons were gone before the U.S. Army got to the warehouse.

Option 3: Saddam transferred them to Syria.

Yes I"m being really disrespectful in looking for a solution that doesn't involve tens of thousands dying.

Are you really interested to hear something new, or just something that won't challenge your convictions?

You're right. It appears you're looking for a solution that results in hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dying.