Expats Against Bush

Attention ex-North Carolinians and Canadian expats

I received this email from Margo Miller from Democrats Abroad, which you may want to pay attention to if you're an expat of North Carolinian descent:

We have just learned that all North Carolina voters who voted in the primary must submit ANOTHER FPCA in order to get their ballots for the general election. If you are or know a NC voter, please make sure they submit another FPCA in the next week. They can do so using www.OverseasVote2004.com. They will still need to print it out, sign it, date it, and mail it to the address provided.

I also received a plea from a US expat in Ottawa, Canada asking if anyone knew of other Americans or American groups there - she can be contacted here.

RNC Protest: So far so good

I'd just like to post a brief note of thanks to the calmer heads who've prevailed this weekend (and hopefully continuing into the week) and staved off a full-scale confrontation in New York. My worst fears have thankfully not come to pass. Let's get this week's focus back on what it really ought to be: the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot. I'm worried about the latest poll numbers / electoral college standings - we need to get back into a clear lead, especially as this convention rolls to a conclusion and the Bush camp sees a "bounce."

We've still got a good couple months to go, mind.

RNC Protest: 5 days to go

The Guardian has a great piece by Gary Younge today on the runup to the Republican National Convention in New York, looking at all sides of the equation, and giving more time to the New York contingent than other pieces I've seen. There's also a funny public exchange between Norman Mailer and his son about my biggest fear, of violent protest boomeranging on us and delivering votes to the Bushies:

"If I were a voice in top Republican circles, I might be offering this advice: 'What we need for New York is a large-scale riot,' " wrote Norman Mailer in New York magazine recently, in a public written exchange with his son. "I don't have a great deal of hope that most of the people involved are really thinking of this election so much as expressing the need to vent, to gain some self-therapy."

"You do get a sense that the spiritual revolution may be awakening," replied his son, John Mailer, who believes that the protests could provide a focus for a huge anti-corporate movement. "All right," replied Norman. "But if we lose the election, it's going to be a very expensive spiritual education."

Are we oversaucing the goose? Is our fear of unknown consequences really justified?

Also, I'd like to hear from anyone who is planning on being in New York for the protests, or from any New Yorkers, on the runup to these protests. What's the word on the street? What are the concerns being voiced in meetings? How are the moderates faring against the radicals?

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

A display of Karl-Rovian elocution spilled from the lips of Our Dear Leader yesterday, in a half-hearted quasi-condemnation of the very ads that his campaign sponsored. In an attempt to curtail any public backlash against their attacks on Kerry's war record, Bush called Kerry's service in Vietnam "admirable" and said all of the malicious ads on both sides should stop, including the Swift Boat vets one. However the damage to Kerry's reputation has already been done, and Bush did nobody any favors by equating the content of the Swift Boat vets ads with the ones from the 527s. The Swift Boat ads have been roundly discredited whereas the Kerry and 527 ads have been largely truthful. All political attack ads are not created equal - and if Bush is saying he thinks all the attack ads are going to stop now, just as we're coming into the final 10-week home stretch to the elections... well, who does he think he's fooling?

Run Against Bush needs You!

I received this message from Rich Khoe of Run Against Bush yesterday:

Dear Luke and Fellow Expats,

Thanks for the earlier plug about us on the EAB blog. We've grown a lot since then - now standing at 8,000 members in all 50 states with over $225K raised. Our next ambitious goal is to pull off National Run Against Bush Day on September 18. We were hoping you could help us spread the word among your readers, your mailing list, your friends, etc. Also...while we have events set up in Paris and Tokyo, we don't have anything yet in London, Norway, or Australia - hint hint... We'd love it if you could spread around the text below. Thanks again - for what it's worth, I think we're going to win.

Rich

----------------------------

Run Against Bush is a grassroots movement dedicated to the goal of removing George W. Bush from the White House. We literally “run against Bush” by raising money and awareness to support the Kerry/Edwards campaign. Since February, we have signed up almost 8,000 members in all 50 states, raised more than $225,000, and conduct regular runs and group walks in 40 cities. On National Run Against Bush Day on September 18, we will hold runs and group walks in more than 100 cities across the country and around the world!

Please check out our evolving webpage. While we have Tokyo and Paris lined up, we're trying to get runs set up in at least 20 cities across the globe, and we need your help. Keep in mind that an event will range anywhere from two to [sky's the limit if you're really ambitious] people and doesn't require a lot of time to organize! If you're interested, email ben@runagainstbush.org today. Make your voice count, and show your solidarity with 10,000+ Americans across the globe that Bush does not stand for America and that you're behind Kerry and Edwards!

Well, what're you waiting for? Get running, expats!

RNC Protest: More rumblings

I was in Paris over the weekend, visiting my sister there, and as she normally lives in New York, it didn't take long to get around to discussing the upcoming Republican National Convention. Since she is a card-carrying Hardcore Liberal (as opposed to me being a Pragmatic Liberal, I suppose) I expected a bit of friction between us on the topic, especially as I was expressing my concerns about shooting ourselves in the foot by playing into the hands of the Bush administration. Much to my surprise we actually found ourselves in complete agreement that the anti-Bush movement could be seriously damaged by some of the planned activities during the convention. That gives me some hope that people in New York now preparing for direct action will take a breather, but I'm still gravely concerned.

Once again Salon has come up with the goods on this issue, with another excellent article on the possible repercussions of the planned anti-RNC actions in New York later this month:

[R]age has to be used strategically [... ] or it amounts to little more than a tantrum. "We have to take our own discontent about the horrors this administration is foisting on our world and we have to find a way to productively channel that anger into something that speaks to a larger audience, as opposed to just engaging in personal therapy," [Greenpeace executive director John Passacantando] says. "When you're doing something in front of the cameras, for the cameras, you have to take into account how will this be perceived."

Such thinking makes sense only to those who are worried about alienating American voters. Liberals are, but many anti-RNC activists defiantly are not. Ironically, despite being motivated by a ferocious hatred of George Bush, some of those planning direct-action protests against the convention have grown so disillusioned with electoral politics that they barely seem to care whether he's defeated in November.

Getting Bush out of the White House "is an aesthetic thing -- I won't have to look at him anymore," says the A31 Coalition's David Graeber, explaining his mild preference for Kerry. A 43-year-old anthropology instructor at Yale, Graeber, who lives in Chelsea, says, "Maybe I'll vote for Kerry, maybe I won't."

With the outcome of the election a source of relative indifference to him, he's less interested in communicating with people in swing states than with people abroad. "I want to send a message to someone in Iraq, in China, in Afghanistan," that there are people in America who oppose Bush's foreign policy, he says.

Many liberals find such sentiments so irrational as to make discussion impossible. "I don't know: How do you convince the potential rioters that they're buying Christmas presents for Karl Rove?" Gitlin says.

When I read the bit about sending a message to other people about Bush's foreign policy I nearly spat out my coffee.

People, this is not the forum to help yourself feel better about our actions in the world with some misguided attempt to tell the folks in Iraq that you're angry too. You're talking the talk without walking the walk. Show the people of America why they should be angry with Bush, get him out of the White House, and then, once we have some sanity restored to the White House, then you can redress whatever harm you feel we've done. Don't you think the world will better appreciate you doing everything you can to oust Bush, rather than a vain and immature and ultimately futile gesture? Worry first about your own country, get that sorted out and then go and make nice with everyone else. Let's get our priorities straight.

Osama's laptop

Fascinating reading over at The Atlantic - one of their reporters got their mitts on a discarded al Qaeda laptop in Kabul as the Taliban fled in 2001, and uncovered an amazing number of emails and documents that give a great insight into the day-to-day workings of the terrorist network - and of the incredible thought put into the effects of 9/11 by Osama bin Laden himself, as you can see in this memo to Mullah Omar shortly after those attacks:

To: Mullah Omar
From: Osama bin Laden
Folder: Deleted File (Recovered)
Date: October 3, 2001

Highly esteemed Leader of the Faithful,
Mullah Muhammad Omar, Mujahid,
May God preserve him …

1- We treasure your message, which confirms your generous, heroic position in defending Islam and in standing up to the symbols of infidelity of this time.

2- I would like to emphasize the major impact of your statements on the Islamic world. Nothing harms America more than receiving your strong response to its positions and statements. Thus it is very important that the Emirate respond to every threat or demand from America … with demands that America put an end to its support of Israel, and that U.S. forces withdraw from Saudi Arabia. Such responses nullify the effect of the American media on people's morale.

Newspapers mentioned that a recent survey showed that seven out of every ten Americans suffer psychological problems following the attacks on New York and Washington.

Although you have already made strong declarations, we ask you to increase them to equal the opponent's media campaign in quantity and force.

Their threat to invade Afghanistan should be countered by a threat on your part that America will not be able to dream of security until Muslims experience it as reality in Palestine and Afghanistan.

3- Keep in mind that America is currently facing two contradictory problems:

a) If it refrains from responding to jihad operations, its prestige will collapse, thus forcing it to withdraw its troops abroad and restrict itself to U.S. internal affairs. This will transform it from a major power to a third-rate power, similar to Russia.

b) On the other hand, a campaign against Afghanistan will impose great long-term economic burdens, leading to further economic collapse, which will force America, God willing, to resort to the former Soviet Union's only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction.

Thus our plan in the face of this campaign should focus on the following:

—Serving a blow to the American economy, which will lead to:

a) Further weakening of the American economy

b) Shaking the confidence in the American economy. This will lead investors to refrain from investing in America or participating in American companies, thus accelerating the fall of the American economy …

—Conduct a media campaign to fight the enemy's publicity. The campaign should focus on the following important points:

a) Attempt to cause a rift between the American people and their government, by demonstrating the following to the Americans:

—That the U.S. government will lead them into further losses of money and lives.

—That the government is sacrificing the people to serve the interests of the rich, particularly the Jews.

—That the government is leading them to the war front to protect Israel and its security.

—America should withdraw from the current battle between Muslims and Jews.

This plan aims to create pressure from the American people on their government to stop its campaign against Afghanistan, on the grounds that the campaign will cause major losses to the American people.

Obviously America pressed the battle, and widened the front to Iraq, no doubt to Osama's glee ("What a recruiting tool!").

I wonder what he makes of the world's situation today.

Earlier in the article the author ponders the intent of forcing a showdown in Afghanistan:

Al-Qaeda's leaders worried about a military response from the United States, but in such a response they spied opportunity: they had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and they fondly remembered that war as a galvanizing experience, an event that roused the indifferent of the Arab world to fight and win against a technologically superior Western infidel. The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent. Afghanistan would again become a slowly filling graveyard for the imperial ambitions of a superpower.

Replace Afghanistan with Iraq, and you're about there.

RNC Protest: Shooting ourselves in the foot

There's a really comprehensive article in Salon today about all of the forces coming to bear on New York in advance of the Republican National Convention later this month and how they envision events unfolding. On one side you have the RNC planners and delegates and the police and Secret Service protecting them, and on the other you have what appear to be a very well-organized and increasingly militant anti-RNC (and, while we're at it, anti- pretty much whatever you can imagine) protest groups.

"We want to make their stay here as miserable as possible," says Moran, who has sandy hair, a snub nose and a goatee. The son of a retired Queens cop, he's 30 but looks younger. "I'd like to see all the Republican events -- teas, backslapping lunches -- disrupted. I'd like to see people from other states following their delegates, letting them know what they think about Republican policies. I'd like to see impromptu street parties and marches. I'd like to see corporations involved in the Iraq reconstruction get targeted -- anything from occupation to property destruction."

There's a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for George Bush's coronation. The RNC chose New York because it was the site of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which to Bush's opponents and even some ordinary New Yorkers seems a brazen provocation.

On one side are 36,000 cops -- a force that City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. calls "perhaps the world's tenth-largest standing army." On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected to converge on the city from all across the United States and Canada -- a demonstration six times larger than the legendary anti-globlization protests that rocked Seattle in 1999.

The article has a quite lengthy profile and interviews key players on both sides. One thing is made abundantly clear: there will be angry protests, not everybody will be playing by the rules, and there will be inevitable clashes and almost certainly violence.

As a disclaimer, for a while earlier this year I was seriously comtemplating organizing a delegation of us Expats Against Bush to go to New York to participate in the protests. I still support that idea in principle, but everything I've heard seems to indicate that things look to turn quite ugly there - and possibly counter-productive to our ultimate goal of kicking Bush out of power.

Assuming the protests turn into violent clashes and that becomes the story of the Convention later this month, then what is achieved?

The protesters are not going to convince the delegates to the Convention to change their minds and abandon the Republican Party.

Even though many New Yorkers view the selection of New York so close to the 9/11 anniversary as political exploitation, massive disruption to their daily lives and violence in the streets will not bring any new people there into the fold.

Most importantly, televised pictures of radical activists in violent confrontation with the police, screaming into megaphones and frothing at the mouth, may actually alienate the mainstream swing voters that the Kerry campaign is so desperate to woo.

The Salon article addresses this:

"The wilder and more disreputable the demonstrators look, the better for the Republicans," says Paul Berman, a former student organizer and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. "At the height of the antiwar movement, Nixon specifically directed his motorcade to go through the middle of an antiwar riot in California in order to have people throw rocks at him or shout obscenities so that the TV would pose the question that night to the American public: 'Whom do you prefer, President Nixon, or a dope-smoking hippie communist rock thrower?' And the country had no doubt. This was just genius on his part. If Bush ends up winning the election, it will be because of this kind of tactic."

I have to admit that there's something to this argument. I don't remember hearing more than token coverage of anti-Democrat protests in Boston - but here we have talk of following delegates around, harassing them and making "their stay here as miserable as possible." How is Joe Undecided going to react to that sort of tactic? Is he going to sympathize more with the protesters? Or with the delegates?

You may remember when we were organizing the anti-Bush protests here in London in November last year, I made a concerted effort to downplay radicalism in our group, operating on the principle that our target audience would be middle class Americans watching on television back home, who by and large are more likely to identify with a soft-spoken and moderate protester than with a "usual suspect" protester. And in fact that protest by and large was quite moderate, with many first-time demonstrators (myself included). Of course, after the protests a couple of people in Trafalgar Square burned some American flags, and guess what got on television? The flags, of course, and the negative reaction to those scenes from our friends in Americans was both sad and predictable, and totally blown out of proportion to the true message of the protest.

The same thing could easily happen in New York. For all the good intentions, at the end of the day the media will pick the pictures that sell, and if there are 9 peaceful protests and 1 complete riot, it's easy to predict what will be shown on the evening news.

Has this been Karl Rove's plan all along?

Ideologically I am behind the protesters in New York (with some caveats) - but I can't help wondering if it will end up doing more harm than good.

Kerry's Image Problem

Ugh, you hate to wake up and see stuff like this:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Monday he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Taking up a challenge from President Bush, whom he will face in the Nov. 2 election, the Massachusetts senator said: "I'll answer it directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have but I would have used that authority effectively."

That constitutes the first two paragraphs of this article, which is all a lot of people need to read to get the gist of an article.

Admittedly at the very end of his quote on the last line, he qualifies his remarks - "but I would have used that authority effectively" - and I know this means he would have handled Iraq more delicately - but this is splitting hairs and, in my mind, not drawing a strong enough distinction between himself and President Bush.

I know a key meme of the Kerry campaign has been to overturn the trad Democratic tactic of abandoning national security issues to the Republicans, and that there has been a concerted effort to take Bush on on what was once considered his own holy ground - the War on Terror. But it seems lately that Kerry's people have been so eager to play on Bush's turf and court his voters that they are losing the ability to effectively distinguish themselves from Bush, at least on a policy basis.

Maybe I'm overreacting - this campaign, after all, is not being waged for my vote (obviously) - it's for Joe Undecided. But doesn't Joe Undecided need two alternatives to pick between?

Just as an afterthought, I wonder how Dean and Kucinich feel about walking in lockstep with Kerry when he says stuff like this?

Update

Then again, I'm sure Kerry would have said this a little more clearly.

Update 2

Predictably, Bush seized on the opportunity to call Kerry out on his admission:

"After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility, Senator Kerry now agrees with me that even though we have not found the stockpile of weapons we all believe were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power," Mr. Bush told a cheering crowd in Pensacola as he began a five-day cross-country campaign swing. "I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up."

Ugh.

London, Sept 2nd: Diana Kerry Campaign Kickoff

This just in from Democrats Abroad UK:

Save The Date: September 2nd at 7pm

Celebrate the Official Campaign Kick-Off with Diana Kerry and Featured Guests!

Diana Kerry, the Chair of Americans Overseas for Kerry, and others to be confirmed, will be with us to start the sprint toward the mid September deadline for filing for absentee ballots. See Convention speeches that the networks didn't cover. Get your Talking Points for persuading friends and family to support John Kerry. Find out what more you can do to help deliver the vote for the Democrats.

Thursday, September 2nd 7-8:30 pm. Conway Hall Red Lion Square, Holborn. Admission £2 at the door.

rsvp victory@democratsabroad.org.uk

Newsweek: Terror Brewing

Apropos of last week's discussion of terror alerts and their value as political tools, the Bush administration seems to have been somewhat vindicated by the latest accounts of what really happened behind the scenes last week - and Newsweek has the best report:

There can be little doubt that Al Qaeda is trying to strike the American homeland before Nov. 2. "We are in the midst of Al Qaeda efforts to attack the U.S. on a scale as big or larger than 9/11," says John Brennan, chief of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the interagency operation that consolidates threat information (and produces the Putter). The decision to raise the threat level to Code Orange ("high") last week was not, as partisans and conspiracists suggested, a Republican political stunt intended to slow John Kerry as he came out of the Democratic convention. But the announcement was clumsily handled, and the confusing press accounts that followed mostly obscured a larger and more important story.

I was going to post a long diatribe defending my last post on the matter of terror alerts, but Kevin Drum beat me to it:

A quick note to all my Bush-hating homies out there: it's quite possible that (a) al-Qaeda really is planning an attack in the United States sometime soon and (b) that the Bush administration has cynically hyped this to the skies for the basest political reasons.

Both of these things might be true. My guess is that both are true.

So: feel free to beat up on the Bushies for their casual and unserious use of intelligence as little more than a partisan political club. I certainly do. On the other hand, don't assume that just because the Bushies are irresponsible there isn't any actual threat. There probably is. OK?

Well put.

Overseas Vote 2004

Here's a new Useful Site of the Week for you expats: OverseasVote2004.com.

Why is it useful, you ask? Let's let our friend Margo Miller, doyen of voter registration at Democrats Abroad, fill you in:

I want to let you all know about an exciting new tool we have to use in our voter registration efforts. A website wizard now exists that automates much of the voter registration process resulting in a fully populated pdf version of the FPCA and instructions on how to complete the form(signature, notary, etc) and where to send it.

Tres cool, non?

It should be noted that there are now a mere 6 weeks left to get your FCPA applications in for an absentee ballot. So, if for some reason you've been putting it off, sort yourself out pronto!

Remember the magic number that could have swung Florida: 537 votes. Even if you think you are in a so-called "safe" state, your vote counts.

Swift Boat Veterans malarkey

This is all I'm going to say about that incredibly vile group and their ads:

WASHINGTON (AP) Republican Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, called an ad criticizing John Kerry's military service ''dishonest and dishonorable'' and urged the White House on Thursday to condemn it as well.

The White House declined.

Can't it hurry up and be November?

Bush approval rating / terror alert correspondence

JuliusBlog has created a great timeline and accompanying graph showing the correlation between Bush's ever-dwindling approval ratings and the frequency of terror alerts issued over time - it's quite striking, really.

Now at the risk of talking like one of the tin foil hat brigade, and acknowledging that a majority of these terror alerts would not have been politically-motivated, the evidence is hard to ignore the suggestion that at least a fraction of these alerts were used to Wag the Dog and boost Bush's ratings at least temporarily.

Iraq: Here we go again.

I know Iraq's been out of the headlines a little bit the last couple of the weeks what with convention-mania and all of that, but it appears events have continued to unfold there regardless:

The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for a national uprising against American and coalition forces today as a two-month truce between Mr. Sadr and the United States military appeared to collapsing.

In Baghdad and Basra, the largest city in southern Iraq, insurgents loyal to Mr. Sadr prepared for clashes with American and British troops.

In fairness, the article goes on to say:

But heavy fighting appeared confined to Najaf, a Shiite holy city 100 miles south of Baghdad that is a Sadr stronghold. An American marine helicopter was shot down in Najaf this morning, although the crew was reported rescued.

[...]

"Fight the blasphemous, fight the Americans," Mr. Sadr said in a statement issued in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

Whether Mr. Sadr's call for rebellion will provoke clashes nationwide, as it did in April, or fizzle out, as it did last October, is unclear.

I hope for our sake that it is the latter.

But Robert Fisk, writing rather alarmingly from Iraq yesterday, seems to think the situation there is pretty grim. Very grim. Doom and gloom prognostications about Iraq are nothing new, and many tut-tut the naysayers and take them to task for not writing about the many positive aspects of post-Saddam Iraq, but Fisk is on the ground there and his piece is pretty hard to dismiss out of hand.

I would dearly hope that Iraq does not implode, as Fisk seems to fear. Putting aside (for now) the question of how it got into this state in the first place, it is clearly in our interests to focus all our energies on making sure that Iraq survives as a state, even if that state does not take exactly the form we would like in a best-case scenario. A failed state, racked by civil war and with less-than-angelic neighbors, is not going to help us out in the long run.

CIA Asks Bush to discontinue blog

Heh. You have to love the Onion sometimes:

WASHINGTON, DC—In the interest of national security, President Bush has been asked to stop posting entries on his three-month-old personal web log, acting CIA director John E. McLaughlin said Monday.

According to McLaughlin, several recent entries on PrezGeorgeW. typepad.com have compromised military operations, while other posts may have seriously undercut the PR efforts of White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

Kerry Bounce?

According to our friends over at Electoral-Vote.com, the facts seem to support the conclusion that Kerry didn't receive a massive boost from the Democratic Convention last week - but he's still in the lead and would be well over the magic 270 electoral votes needed to be elected President were the election to be held today - whereas Bush has not even gotten his head above water in that respect since late June.

Of course, we still have 3 months to go in which a number of factors could swing the tide in Bush's favor:

• The Republican National Convention


• Bush & Co having 1 extra month for fundraising due to the above


• Any "major captures" coming out of Afghanistan

Then again, the RNC could end up being as much of a drag on Bush as a boost - from all available evidence the size of the protests in New York later this month will defy all reasoning. The question is, will protesters change the minds of any swing voters, or alienate them? As I said when we were doing our big protests in London last year, I believe the key to reaching mainstream Americans is to protest in a dignified manner and try to avoid the kind of screaming hystrionics typically associated with the radical left - that kind of display makes it extremely hard for Joe Swing Voter to identify with the people protesting. What you want is a dignified display of ordinary people who feel they have no other choice but to speak out.

In other news, you may have noticed the new graphic on the right hand side displaying the current state of play of the electoral vote balance. This is a new feature from Electoral-Vote.com and will automatically be updated as they update the electoral vote data from state polls. Hopefully 3 months from now the current balance (Kerry well in the lead) will carry through to the general election, and Bush will be out. At which point we all pop champagne. Knock on wood.