The scrappy economist from Princeton lands a devistating combination, weaving together all the threads that make this such a worrisome issue for us tender youngins. Feeling the Draft:

Those who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn't drive the budget into deficit - but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won't revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will.
...
Mr. Bush's assurances that this won't happen are based on a denial of reality. Last week, the Republican National Committee sent an angry, threatening letter to Rock the Vote, an organization that has been using the draft issue to mobilize young voters. "This urban myth regarding a draft has been thoroughly debunked," the letter declared, and quoted Mr. Bush: "We don't need the draft. Look, the all-volunteer Army is working."
...
The reality is that the Iraq war, which was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the Bush doctrine, has pushed the U.S. military beyond its limits. Yet there is no sign that Mr. Bush has been chastened. By all accounts, in a second term the architects of that doctrine, like Paul Wolfowitz, would be promoted, not replaced. The only way this makes sense is if Mr. Bush is prepared to seek a much larger Army - and that means reviving the draft.

Just so we know what the deal is here at the "liberal-lovin'" NYT, the guy they hired to explain Allen Greenspan is the only one with the prescience and courage to put two and two together. He's the econ man, and he's the only one bringing the heat. Once again, my hat is off.

Our Vision, Our Future

Billionaires for Bush, at it again. Great stuff!

As I was walking back from the grocery store tonight at about 10pm (just got home from work) with the makings of quesidillas and a quart of high life in my pack, I had the exhillerating little thrill: in two weeks it will be over, and my life will be my own again.

Yeah, I'll probably keep my job and I don't think you ever go back after getting this deep into the whole scene, but a little over a year ago I made a promise to the night -- the kind of promise another Josh in another time would probably have said he made to god or something -- that I would do whatever I could to try and turn this country around, to pull it off the rocks, away from the ledge and what have you...

Once I had a girl on rockey top
Half bear the other half cat
Wild as a mynx but sweeter than soda pop
I still dream about that

Rocky top, you'll always be
Home sweet home to me
Good ol' Rocky top
Rocky top Tennessee

Freedom, baby. It's coming soon. The Reading Rainbow song running strong through my blood: I... can do... anything...

Just want to point out with the emerging reality-based consensus against the Bush administration that my man Britt was blogging about the need for a politically-minded "reality based community" way back when.

That was always a central appeal of the Dean campaign and the core of why I thought (and still maintain) that he was imminantly "electable," and in many ways moreso than John Kerry. If Dean were the nominee, this "realistic empericism vs. blind faith" division would have been front and center for the past several months, rather than being a late (and possibly insigificant) spin in the media cycle.

They call it community plumbing; and you can all me a plumber. This software rules: it's got literally millions of dollars worth of engineering in it, and it's all been done by volunteers. Oh yeah, and it's the basis for the hottest little project in the poli-web.

I'm going to move this website to drupal after this damned election is over; a step upward and outward in projecting myself into the ether.

The really cool thing is that it will let you readers and friends make more of everything. I know so many people who are gifted writers and thinkers who should be recording and sharing more of their genius with the world. I've been thinking of moving to a different domain, because what I want to build is a community site and building a community site around what is essentially an egocentric "brand" is a little bit suspect. Likely I'll stick with OJ.com for a while and then transition the whole thing to something -- a resurrection of Axiomlab.org, perhaps? -- which is more supportive of communal effort. Then I can make outlandishjosh.com into pure personal journal, agenda, and aggregator of my other writings which are feed-able.

Any thoughts from those of you following along at home?

Look Out Your Window! What Time Is It? Awesome Time!!

Found via iTunes radio. It's good. I just listened to a guy play great old rock music, then talk about the great old rock music in language worth of Nick Hornseby, then get upset in a delightfully hipster-esque way about Ohio State loosing to Iowa. It's great. Now they're back to music.

Yeah; it is great. I've got to listen to good radio more often!

Wouldn't it be great if we could coax Neal Pollack out of retirement and do an interview with him or get him to write us an editorial or something? I miss that guy's sense of humor.

Wow. Check this newspaper editorial from Kentuckey:

For nearly 50 years, I considered myself a Republican. I usually voted for Republicans, and I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. I have deep family roots in the Republican Party. My father, Thruston Morton, served as a Republican U. S. senator from Kentucky and also served as national chairman of the Republican Party. My uncle, Rogers Morton, also served as national chairman of the Republican Party, served as a Republican in the U. S. House of Representatives, and served in the cabinet under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

I cannot in good conscience vote for President Bush in this election. What he has done since his election in 2000 goes against the values I treasure both in terms of leadership and in our nation. He has not done what he said he would do. He has lost my trust and my respect.

He is not a strong leader. He is a creature of the neoconservative ideologues who surround him. He chose to go to war in Iraq under false pretenses, turning responsibility over to the military with no plan to win the peace. He refuses to admit mistakes, let alone learn from them. His campaign is based on fear.

The name Ballard Morton carries weight in KY politics, so this isn't just some random weird ranting.

There are a lot of things I respect about the Republican party, man. And it's really a good thing to see some of them taking the risk of turning against Bush. Depending on how all this goes, people have to know that their future careers may be hurt by being associated with support of this administration. It's getting harder and harder for me to see how people can wholeheartedly support the guy, to be a partisan without reservation, to believe in George W. Bush the way I had believed in Howard Dean.

Those people are out there, though. Oh Yeah:

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

Just so you know, reality is on the ballot in a couple weeks.

The New York Times Magazine: Without a Doubt

I'll write more on this, but this NYT magazine article is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how we got here and why the Bush administration must be removed from power.

Read it. It's usually something of a comfort to inhabit the world of mainstream politics, where there are all kinds of stories and "reasonable explanations" for things. There are ways to rationalize horrible news of death and destruction -- a few marines here, a score of Iraqis there -- and other ways to gloss over sometimes more horrific statistics -- several million people living in proverty. There are ways to believe that all this business with our country lately is just little rough water, that nothing is seriously amiss or going wrong.

But as my mother quipped in a comment somewhere below: "I was tear-gassed by Nixon. Bush makes him look like a saint." Read the article.

This isn't "Bush Hatred" (which by the way is a made-up idea created by the spinmeisters in the west wing to supress reasonable dissent), it is the truth; and there's a fear that comes with that truth that all of this -- the faith-based president, the debased state of journalism, the world of 24-hour talking heads jacked up on the sickeningly stimulating death-juice of 9/11 -- it all might just be more that our country can handle. I do believe we run the risk of coming apart at the seams. I do, really, but I don't like to think about it because it's very frightening.

The article is very frightening. Here are some things we can do:

Voter X
MfA Get Out The Vote
ACT (massive grown-up GOTV)
Where's my polling place?

Please vote; and please tell everyone you know that you're doing it. Send an email to all your friends and let them know how you feel. Call everyone you know on November 2nd. Call them next week and tell them to vote early.

The most important motivator for new and unlikely voters is being asked to vote by a friend or peer. Do it. Lobby your friends and your family. There are no good reasons not to vote, and a million and one really important things on the line in this election.

Interesting:

And finally, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that BC04 is simply freaking out at Kerry's exposure, deliberate or inadvertant, of a vulnerability in their base-first strategy, which depends heavily on piggy-backing battleground state referenda on gay marriage.

This makes sense, and I find it interesting. It was clearly in effect in Michigan when I was there, but it's a spectacularly short-sighted strategy for the GOP. Younger conservatives (they're out there) aren't fired up about banning gay marriage. Most of them, in fact, are fine with it -- or with civil unions or some equivalent solution -- and don't want to be strongly associated with outright homophobia.

By tying their base-mobilization strategy to bigotry and religious fundimentalism, Rove's GOP is narrowing their base and turning off younger party activists.