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:

The New York Daily News reports Fox News Anchor Bill O'Reilly is thinking of challenging Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate. [link via Say Anything.]

There must have been some good news for John Kerry today. The Bush administration has come out with another pre-election terror warning.

Terrorists still hope to disrupt the U.S. democratic process even though the presidential nominating conventions and other high-profile gatherings this summer went off without incident, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Tuesday. Threat reporting over the last several months has been "consistent, general and credible" and indicated the al-Qaida network is trying to push ahead with its plans, Ridge said.

Is anyone even listening any more? As to good news for Kerry, Daily Kos has some:

This is a sad day. The number of military persons killed in Iraq topped 1,000. That's 1,000 families who will never see their loved ones again, 1,000 lives cut mercilessly short for an unnecessary, ill-conceived war.

And two female Italian aid workers were kidnapped in Baghdad when 20 armed men stormed the aid office.

Say hello to Derelection, 2004 campaign coverage by the superb Cursor.

Also say hello to AltWeeklies, providing news reporting from more than 100 alternative weekly papers.

There's simply no excuse any more for being uninformed.

Now it's not just Michael Moore alleging a White House cover-up of Saudi links to September 11:

Former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers. Graham's charges, made in a new book and at a news conference arranged by the John Kerry campaign, were rejected by Republicans as "bizarre conspiracy theories." The Saudis said Graham's claims were unsubstantiated and reckless.

Kerry has called for an independent investigation into the charges made by Graham, his former rival for the Democratic nomination.....Graham's statements support Kerry's claims that Bush is too close to the Saudi royal family and unwilling to pressure it to crack down on the financing of terrorists.

What about the 9/11 Commission report finding no evidence to support the claim that the Saudi Government financed al Qaida?

Graham said the commission "has given us its conclusions without giving us the facts upon which those conclusions were established."

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

The University of Cincinnati's Center for Law and Justice is being awarded a $1 million endowment from local benefactors Lois and Richard Rosenthal. The gift will be announced today at the start of Innocence Week. Other events include a speech by attorney Barry Scheck, a member of the O.J. Simpson defense team, and the local opening of the play The Exonerated.

The Center for Law and Justice, to be renamed the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Institute for Justice today, was founded at the University of Cincinnati in 2002. The institute approaches many social-welfare projects in the city but is best known for the Ohio Innocence Project started in 2003, which seeks to exonerate wrongly imprisoned inmates by using new information and new technologies such as DNA identification.

"The Innocence Project is truly a passion we have," said Lois Rosenthal. "When you are of (financial) means, you can hire careful representation. But when you are poor or not knowledgeable about the law, you are not represented as well."

At the performance of the Exonerated today, talk-show host and former Cincinnati mayor Jerry Springer will read one of the roles.

Here's an issue we should be talking about more than George Bush's cocaine use--Bush and Kerry's different stances on the death penalty.

Should Sen. John F. Kerry be elected in November, the United States would have as president its strongest opponent of the death penalty in at least the last half-century, capital punishment opponents believe. Kerry would be "the most anti-death penalty president elected in the modern era," according to David Elliot of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

...As governor of Texas, Bush signed off on 152 executions. As president, he has maintained his support for the death penalty. Three men have been executed under federal law while he has been in office, the first federal executions since 1963.

....Kerry has said he opposes capital punishment except in cases involving terrorism. While he may have voted in favor of some omnibus crime bills that included expansions of capital punishment, on stand-alone legislation Kerry has opposed the death penalty in a variety of ways.

The Washington Post takes Ashcroft and the Justice Department to task for it's abysmal handling of the Detroit terror case that ended with DOJ asking the Judge to overturn the convictions. The editorial provides a succinct description of the case and its failures, and then asks,

.... how did errors so fundamental go undiscovered for so long in such a high-profile case? Why were the department's counterterrorism officials not more closely supervising the work of prosecutors in the field? Why were red flags not raised when officials of different agencies -- as the department now reports -- became concerned that Mr. Convertino was interested only in analysis that supported his case? Mr. Ashcroft needs to answer these questions and make sure that future terrorism cases are not plagued by such dangerous errors again.

Law Prof Eric Muller of Is that Legal? picks up on an important glitch in the FBI's computer files, one we mentioned too briefly last March. Eric provides some crucial follow-up and this issue needs to get more attention.

First, the problem as Eric describes it:

...the FBI's computer system has a drive onto which agents dump their raw reports, and from which supervisors upload and review them, and quite possibly edit them, before saving them as the official reports on a different drive. The "official" reports are made available, as required by law, to defendants, but the raw reports on the so-called "I" drive have never been. Indeed, the very existence of the "I" drive has been hidden until very recently.

Now the effect:

...this computer infrastructure is a flagrant violation of the Jencks Act, 18 U.S.C. sec. 3500, which requires that the government turn over to defendants all "recorded statements" of witnesses who testify at trial. Specifically, it requires disclosure of any "stenographic, mechanical, electrical, or other recording, or a transcription thereof, which is a substantially verbatim recital of an oral statement made by" a government trial witness and "recorded contemporaneously with the making of such oral statement."

Eric asks,

Why have we not heard more about this large-scale statutory (and, as to material exculpatory evidence, possibly also constitutional) violation by the FBI?

Maybe now we will.

President Bush's alleged cocaine use was an issue in the 2000 election. It fizzled. He refused to either admit or deny using the drug. Now, bloggers are writing about it because of Kitty Kelly's new book, The Bush Family. Kelly is a tabloid-type biographer who previously has targeted the Reagans, Princess Diana and others. In her book, Kelly claims Bush used cocaine at Camp David when his father was President and in the mid- 60's. Her source is Bush former sister-in-law Sharon Bush.

Personally, I could care less what drugs Bush did in college. College is a time of experimentation, of youthful indiscretions. I mostly share the views of Drug War Rant on the issue.

There is another issue though, and that is, did Bush use cocaine later in life? What does Kelly say about Bush's 40th birthday party at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs? Was he coke-fueled then, dancing on the bar as rumors at the time suggested? It was after this party that he gave up alcohol for good--even though, he says, he wasn't an alcoholic. Did he also give up cocaine then....at the age of 40?

Why is this an issue?