The antidote to the Swift Boat Veterans ad has made its debut:

Texans for Truth, established by the 20,000-member Texas online activist group, DriveDemocracy.org, has produced a 0:30 second television advertisement, "AWOL." The ad features Robert Mintz, one of many who served in Alabama's 187th Air National Guard -- when Bush claims to have been there -- who have no memory of Bush on the base. In other words, Bush failed to fulfill his military duty while others were dying in Vietnam.

The ad opens with the text, "Was George W. Bush AWOL in Alabama?" You can watch the ad here. The ad script is here. The group is accepting contributions here to get the ad on the air.

Poor Man writes his own version of Bush revelations contained in Kitty Kelly's book. Compare Kelly's revelation of Bush's alleged personal cocaine use, National Guard service and a girlfriend's alleged illegal abortion to these:

• "The reputation of the United States has been demolished over the last four years! We have alienated allies, embarrassed ourselves in front of the UN, and undermined the struggle for human rights around the world by holding secret prisoners, sending innocent people abroad to be tortured, and torturing prisoners to death in Iraq and Afghanistan!"

• "George W. Bush is an idiot! Really! He can't form a coherent sentence, he shows no aptitude for or interest in any intellectual pursuit, and he routinely embarrasses himself and the country with his shocking displays of ignorance! He falls down constantly, and he almost died eating a pretzel!"

• "George W. Bush is a horrible President! When given a daily briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack in the United States", he took no action, went on vacation, and a few weeks later 3,000 people were dead!"

Poor Man says:

Tonight on 60 Minutes, Dan Rather interviewed Ben Barnes, the Texas Speaker of the House during Vietnam who got President Bush in the National Guard. He said he was sorry he had the power he used to decide who would go to Vietnam and who would go to the Guard.

"I've thought about it an awful lot and you walk through the Vietnam memorial, particularly at night like I did a few months ago and, I tell you, you'll think about it a long time. ...I don't think that I had any right to have the power that I had to choose who was going to Vietnam and who was not going to Vietnam. That's power. In some instances, when I looked at those names, I was maybe determining life or death and that's not a power that I want to have. ..."

Rather also outlines four documents he obtained from the personal files of Col. Jerry Killian, Mr. Bush's squadron commander:

Is it my imagination or are our Fourth Amendment protections shrinking? A U.S. District Court in Utah is considering a challenge to searches of the doorknobs to our homes. It's a tactic being used around the country and it's called the Ionscan test. Police swipe a doorknob with a drug-detecting cloth and if the cloth then tests postive for microscopic particles of a controlled substance, they tell a judge they have probable cause to get a search warrant. Do they? It's up in the air right now.

The defense argues the doorknob to one's home is a protected area:

Lawyer Jon Williams, who is representing Troy Miller of South Salt Lake city, said in a brief that the front door is protected from unreasonable searches. He added: "The doorknob is the most sacrosanct part of the [home]. Its sole purpose is to gain entry."

In anticipation of the newest attack ads on John Kerry, I encourage everyone to read Jeffrey Toobin's portrait of Kerry in the May, 2004 New Yorker.

Given his background in the antiwar movement and progressive politics, Kerry might have seemed like a natural for a public defender’s office. “That’s a stereotype of the worst order and a total knee-jerk reaction,” Kerry told me during a recent conversation about his legal career. “I always had a prosecutor’s mind and a prosecutor’s bent. It was always what I wanted to do, even in law school. There was a rule in Massachusetts that allowed law students to prosecute misdemeanor trials in front of six-person juries, and I got an unbelievable amount of experience before I even graduated.” For a politically ambitious young lawyer like Kerry, especially one who was known only as a protester, it also made sense to earn a law-enforcement credential.

After leaving the DA's office, Kerry opened a private practice, for a while.

In 1979, John Kerry and a colleague at the D.A.’s office, Roanne Sragow, opened the firm of Kerry & Sragow, at 60 State Street, in downtown Boston. Sragow, who was born in New York and grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, graduated from Tufts and Boston College Law School, and was one of the star assistant district attorneys during Kerry’s tenure in Middlesex County.

Private practice does not a criminal defense lawyer make:

Kerry’s background as a prosecutor made criminal work unappealing to him. “I took a court appointment once in a criminal case, and I realized I just didn’t want the guy out on the street,” Kerry told me. “I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.”

They did take some court appointed cases, and one of them is the one that the anticipated new "Willie Horton" ad will bash him for -- most unjustifiably. The case involved a defendant named George Reissfelder. Reissfelder was serving a life sentence for murder, which happened during a robbery gone bad. While in prison, he got a one day furlough and escaped. After 3 years as a fugitive, he was caught in Florida and sent back to finish his life sentence. At the time of his recapture, he tried to pull a gun on a cop, and Florida got 15 years from him for it.

But, Reissfelder was innocent of the initial robbery/murder. After returning to prison in Massachussetts, a judge appointed him a lawyer for him to assist him in proving his innocence. That lawyer was Roanne Sragow, John Kerry's partner.

The Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo has decided that one detainee is not an enemy combatant and will be released to his home country. Details about the detainee were not released, only that he has been held at Guantanamo since May, 2002 when he was seized in Afghanistan--over 2 years ago.

Out of 30 hearings, this is the only ruling in favor of a detainee.

The Pentagon has defined an enemy combatant as a person "who was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. This includes any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces." The other 29 men whose cases were reviewed by these tribunals, which started last month, were determined to be enemy combatants, England said.

Skippy, our favorite LA Blogger, reports that the Freeway Blogger launched a new ad campaign Tuesday--posting over 100 signs on LA Freeways protesting the War in Iraq and Bush's failure to find Osama.

On Tuesday, Sept. 7th, the Freewayblogger will post one hundred signs on LA area freeways protesting the war in Iraq and the failure to find Osama Bin Laden. The lone activist has posted over 2,000 handpainted signs on California freeways since the war began. According to the Freewayblogger, freeway signposting is the last opportunity open to the average individual to reach out directly to large numbers of their fellow citizens.

Why freeway signs?

When you put a sign on the freeway, people will read it until someone takes it down. Depending on its size, content and placement it can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

Some samples of his work:

And, he says, you can do it too:

Here's what you do:
1) Put paint on cardboard
2) Put cardboard on freeway
3) Repeat

Journalist Bruce Willey spent a day with the Freeway Blogger hanging signs and reports here.

Have you ever wondered why you need a Government-issued ID to board an airplane? It started well before 9/11, but why? John Gilmore sued the Government to find out. The Department of Justice's response? They won't tell. It's a secret.

The Justice Department has asked an appellate court to keep its arguments secret for a case in which privacy advocate John Gilmore is challenging federal requirements to show identification before boarding an airplane. A federal statute and other regulations "prohibit the disclosure of sensitive security information, and that is precisely what is alleged to be at issue here," the government said in court papers filed Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Disclosing the restricted information "would be detrimental to the security of transportation," the government wrote.

Gilmore's response:

We're dealing with the government's review of a secret law that now they want a secret judicial review for," one of Gilmore's attorneys, James Harrison, said in a telephone interview Sunday. "This administration's use of a secret law is more dangerous to the security of the nation than any external threat."

Gilmore, a privacy advocate who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, alleges that the ID requirement "was vague and ineffective and violated his constitutional protections against illegal searches and seizures." His case was dismissed is now in the appeals courts.

[link via Rachel at Alternet.]

Don't miss T.D. Allman in Rolling Stone writing on the curse of Dick Cheney. He details how Cheney's career has been marred by one disaster after another --maybe Bush will be his next failure.

In related news, Vice President Dick Cheney warned Tuesday that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for terrorism. Who can respond to such a dumb assertion? Fafnir of Fafblog can. Read his account of his adventure when Tom Ridge came to his house to seize his absentee ballot because it might aid and abet a terrorist attack on the U.S.

Official Homeland Security Department ballot-sniffin dogs sniff my apartment an find my absentee ballot. "Aha!" says Tom Ridge. "Fafnir, by the authority placed in me by the Government and Jesus and many other large things, I'm placing you under arrest!"
"Oh no!" says me. "What for?"
"For plotting to vote for John Kerry!" says Tom Ridge. "As Vice President Cheney noted today, if John Kerry gets elected in November, 'we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.' That means the election of John Kerry is the election of another terrorist attack. That means by voting for John Kerry you've participated in a terrorist conspiracy to attack the United States of America!"

[links via Avedon Carol at Sideshow.]

Check out this article by Stephen Hass on Bush's non-accomplishments and scare tactics. Some snippets:

In short, Bush has done absolutely nothing for this country, other than to convince way too many suckers that they were in imminent danger from somebody or other. Somebody really scary. Somebody really scary who speaks Arabic. Bush's other memorable accomplishment was to destroy numerous international alliances that we spent decades building. He has also destroyed two nations (one of which - Iraq - had nothing at all to do with anything).

We decide our own fate every four years in this country. If you vote for Bush, keep your mouth shut when you see that we're still in Iraq for at least four more years, and thousands more of our nation's youth are still being slaughtered and maimed there. Keep your mouth shut about everywhere else Bush sends our nation's youth to die and be ripped apart - and he most definitely will sacrifice them elsewhere. Keep your mouth shut about your grandchildren who will still be paying for Bush's preemptive escapades around the globe.

More on how the War on Terror has not stopped terrorism from Green Left Weekly

What's the difference between Kerry and Bush on the Patriot Act? The Associated Press asked each. Portions of their responses:

Bush: The Patriot Act has already been used to help break up terror cells in New York, Oregon, and Virginia. Safeguards for civil liberties, including traditional judicial review, are built into the Patriot Act. Not a single civil liberties violation associated with the Patriot Act has been cited by the inspector general. Because it has been used effectively and responsibly, I have called upon the United States Congress to promptly renew the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act."

Kerry: As president, I will defend our liberty and our security at home as well as abroad. I will appoint an attorney general who values and protects constitutional freedoms. I believe some provisions of the Patriot Act - like the money laundering provisions - must be made stronger. Others - like the library and 'sneak-and-peek' search provisions - must be made smarter, to better protect the freedom of law-abiding patriotic Americans while allowing our government to do everything necessary to track down terrorists and defend America. As president, I will ensure that the American government is open and responsive to the needs and inquiries of Congress and the public, offering enough information to hold the government accountable without compromising our security."

Actually, Kerry is far better on limiting the excesses of the Patriot than the AP article makes him out to be. He is a co-sponsor and supporter of the SAFE Act. Here's what Senator Durbin (D-IL) said about Kerry's position in a Senate Floor Statement on April 20, 2004, the day Durbin introduced the SAFE Act:

Additional National Guard Records of President Bush were revealed today as a result of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit (background here) requesting same. They show a mediocre peformance by Bush, but more significantly:

A six-month historical record of his 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, also turned over to the AP on Tuesday, shows some of the training Bush missed with his colleagues during that time. Significantly, it showed the unit joined a "24-hour active alert mission to safeguard against surprise attack" in the southern United State beginning on Oct. 6, 1972, a time when Bush did not report for duty, according to his pay records.

Reaction:

"For months George Bush told the nation that all his military records were public," [Democratic National Committee communications director Jano Cabrera ] said. "Now we know why Bush was trying so hard to withhold these records. When his nation asked him to be on call against possible surprise attacks, Bush wasn't there."

Oliver Willis:

So, when his country needed him to be ready, Bush was nowhere to be found. Talk about 'Unfit to Serve'.

Check out Nicholas Kristof in Wednesday's New York Times: