F@#K YOU NADER!!!

Read this.

Ralph Nader: Subverting Liberal Causes Since 1970.

Abu Ghraib advertisement

It's probably a bit premature, but I think the most effective ad in driving GOP turnout down would be an Abu Ghraib ad that indirectly blames the President for the atrocities (using the Gonzalez memo and other things as evidence). Nothing depresses conservatives more than knowing that their guy presided over this mess*. Today I talked to a Republican consultant and he said he'd heard many of his disheartened Republican friends saying things like, "this is intolerable, let's get rid of this bunch".

I'm not suggesting that these voters will come out and vote for Kerry. I'm suggesting that they might not even bother to vote.

Other issues that might depress turnout amongst conservatives:
1. The budget mess/out of control spending
2. Bush's immigration reform attempt
3. A lack of red meat for social conservatives (besides the FMA)

*some conservatives just don't care about the torture, whether it's performed on terrorists, enemy combatants, or civilians (the latter being the case in Abu Ghraib).

Carson campaign

A few days ago I accepted a job in the Brad Carson for Senate campaign in Oklahoma. I'll be a field coordinator in Shawnee, OK, an eastern suburb of Oklahoma City.

Beautiful Shawnee, Oklahoma is the site of many attractions of note, including Oklahoma Baptist University. This site apparently falls in the center of Carson's former congressional district, so it's solidly Democratic.

Gay marriage

Take a look at this WaPost article.

Then go back and read my post from a few months ago.

It looks like my prediction is coming true. The gay marriage issue is a net plus for the Democrats. It hasn't noticeably fired up Bush's base and it makes Bush look like a bigot.

Undecided voters

This is the best Mickey Kaus post I've seen in a while. I'm posting it in its entirety because he doesn't provide permalinks:

The Fourth Campaign 2004 Debate: Zarqawi vs. Bin Laden? Amir Taheri argues that terrorists in Iraq will ramp up the violence before our November election in order to discourage Americans and drain support for Bush's Iraq project. "In other words, they are dreaming of a 'Spanish scenario'" that would involve "preventing the reelection of President Bush." Sounds plausible.

Meanwhile, the alleged senior U.S. intelligence official who writes as "Anonymous" argues that Bush "is taking the U.S. in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy," according to The Guardian. "Anonymous"

thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.

That sounds plausible too!

Can the terrorists both want Bush defeated and want Bush reelected? Sure, if they're different groups of terrorists. The Zarqawi terrorist faction in Iraq presumably would like Bush replaced, since Bush is less likely than Kerry to withdraw from Iraq--or, more precisely, if U.S. voters are sick of Iraqi violence and want to withdraw they're more likely to vote for Kerry than Bush, so Bush's defeat would be entailed in Zarqawi's plan. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda might place less emphasis on Iraq and more emphasis on a wider war against the West, in which Bush's tendency to lump all terrorists together as enemies in a titanic struggle over values could be just what Bin Laden thinks he wants. ... Implications: a) If, as has been speculated, Zarqawi is split from Bin Laden--"because he disagrees with him on something," as Donald Rumsfeld put it last week--maybe this is the something they disagree on. They can't decide whom to support in the 2004 campaign! b) The prospect ahead of us might not be just competing campaigns for the U.S. presidency but competing terror campaigns for the U.S. presidency, with anti-Bush bombs going off in Baghdad and pro-Bush bombs going off in New York.. ... P.S.: Could terrorists be undecided swing voters? In theory, I don't see why not. True, it takes a long time to plan a terror attack--at least that's what the 9/11 Commission report suggests. But presumably terrorists could set an attack in motion and leave an opening that allowed it to be called off at the last minute. In practice, of course, undecided terror "voters" are unlikely--they will want to screw around with our elections for the same reason Bill Clinton says he preyed on Monica Lewinsky. ... 1:35 A.M.