More than 50,000 enthusiastic Ohioans attend a rally in West Chester, Ohio. This was the largest rally in Ohio history and the largest of the campaign yet! This rally happend only a few miles from my home. Both Bush and Cheney have been in Southwestern Ohio a dozen times this year alone. I moved here from Orange County, CA, which I thought was conservative. Cincinnati makes Irvine look like Boston.

On September 2, 2004, in New York City, President George W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination for President. In his address, he promised to build on the accomplishments of his first term by building a safer world and more hopeful America for our workers, families, and children.

In an article called Iraq: The Case Against Preemptive War, Paul Schroeder outlines what sounds like a decent "Global Test" for preemptive action:

To justify a resort to preemptive war, a state needs to give reasonable evidence that the step was necessary, forced upon the initiator by its opponents, and also that it represented a lesser evil, i.e., that the dangers and evils averted by war outweighed those caused the international community by initiating it. This requires showing that the threat to be preempted is (a) clear and imminent, such that prompt action is required to meet it; (b) direct, that is, threatening the party initiating the conflict in specific concrete ways, thus entitling that party to act preemptively; (c) critical, in the sense that the vital interests of the initiating party face unacceptable harm and danger; and (d) unmanageable, that is, not capable of being deterred or dealt with by other peaceful means. These criteria are naturally open to interpretation and contest. They represent, however, a consensus of enlightened international opinion, make sense of historical experience, and are easily illustrated with historical examples. They have helped actors in the past judge claims and weigh arguments for preemptive wars and have had some effect in deterring illegitimate resorts to it. They are stringent; most claims made to justify preemptive wars do not pass the test, which is as it should be. But the criteria are not unrealistic or utopian, and do allow for preemptive war in certain particular cases.

In fact, the rhetoric of administration leaders and their supporters urging a preemptive war against Iraq indicates that they are generally aware of these criteria and attempt to justify it on these terms. But they cannot; their arguments everywhere break down.

If you're wondering what Kerry's plan is, or if you want to know what to hold him to if he gets elected, here's the Kerry "Plan for America". I've skimmed it and at least find it interesting that he actually has a plan to make us less dependent on middle-east oil (my #1 national security issue).
He also has some good stuff to say about Federal fiscal responsibility.

Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (“How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested theories (“if the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased?”).

This study attempts to quantify the Liberal or Conservative measure of several prominent media outlets.

Others have critically analyzed their findings and call into question where they draw the line between conservative and liberal.

A good discussion thread on the study can be found at the Dead Parrot Society.

John Chuckman presents an interesting viewpoint on how it doesn't matter if it's Bush or Kerry in 2004. His comments on the US mindset relative to class are on the mark in my opinion.

Bruce Bartlet of The National Review has an interesting article on the accounting issue with our federal government. This is the kind of thing I was referring to in my WeBlog post several weeks back.

Writing in the Nebraska Law Review last year, George Washington University law professor Cheryl Block compared bookkeeping by the federal government to bookkeeping by businesses involved in corporate scandals. She found little difference. Congress, she wrote, “has been guilty of using accounting devices remarkably similar to those used by Enron, WorldCom and others to ‘cook the books’ and to mislead the public with regard to government finances.”

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office explains that the deficit is a virtually meaningless measure of the government’s indebtedness. The main reason for this is that the federal government uses cash accounting rather than accrual accounting. What this means is that the government can acquire massive debts far into the future with virtual impunity. The government can also, in effect, cosign for loans and provide insurance that could potentially cost taxpayers hundreds of billion of dollars without it ever showing up in the budget until a check has to be written.