Subterranean Homepage News

By Sheila Lennon

Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!

November 5, 2004, 6:55 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Politics-free for the weekend!

HOW-TO: Get music OFF your iPod. At Engadget:

Never did we think we’d need to do a How-To on something which should be part of the basic functionality of a portable music player, but once you put your tunes on an iPod unfortunately it’s a one-way sync unless you know the tricks for getting them off. There are already a lot of different ways to copy music off of an iPod, Apple is just choosing to spend a lot of time and resources to make it hard to do. In this How-To we show you several different ways of getting the music off of your iPod and onto both Macs and PCs, all with free tools.

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The Art of War: Vietnam: as seen through the artwork of those who were there

When his platoon was ambushed in a Vietnam jungle on Aug. 2, 1969, 18-year-old Frank Romeo of Bay Shore, Long Island, N.Y., was shot seven times.

When he was 45, the disabled veteran began painting his memories.
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Child's Play: A good idea not happening here - yet: Penny Arcade is an online comic strip about videogames and gamer culture. The organizers conceived the charity -- giving new games to children's hospitals -- "to combat negative portrayals of gamers in the media."

Q: What is Child's Play?

A: Child's Play is a Seattle based, gamer-run organization that holds an annual toy drive for childrens' hospitals. Many of the gifts donated by gamers are, as you might imagine, age appropriate videogames and gaming systems - but they are by no means the only things donated. We received eager donations of coloring books, art supplies, crafts, movies, cartoons, virtually anything a young person could ask for. We asked the world-wide community of gamers, and they gave so much we had to move to larger storage facilities three separate times.

Q: How does Child's Play work?

A: We have partnered with Amazon.com, which hosts a series of “Wish Lists” stocked with toys the hospitals have requested, as well as age appropriate videogames and game systems selected by Child's Play. Simply choose the hospital nearest you from our interactive map at http://www.childsplaycharity.org and the toys you purchase will be delivered directly. We also accept cash donations via Paypal to childsplaycharity@penny-arcade.com, which will be split evenly among the hospitals in this year's event. There are no “administrative fees” or other hidden costs associated with giving to Child's Play – every cent is passed on.

From the FAQ:

Q: I’m a children’s hospital. Can I get involved with Child’s Play?
A: Yes! Contact Robert Khoo (rkhoo@penny-arcade.com) and we’ll create a wishlist and add a link.

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Fan mail for Cruisin' Bruce: Following up on the item about Cruisin' Bruce Palmer (at right), the man behind the Classic Car Cruise Nights and the oldies music that's been the soundtrack for polishing those cars for some 15 years. Bruce and Big John Bina were let go from B101 (WWBB) last month.

Reader John Drake writes:

I find it very rude of the station to not even say on-air that Bruce is off the air. I enjoyed his special features and miss his special personality. I hear no reason to continue listening to B101, especially since they insist on playing more and more songs from the 70's (which I do not consider "oldies" ).

I got a note from Bruce saying he hopes to have a new website up and running soon as a means of distributing car-show info.

I'll let you know about it when it's live.
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Painting with coffee, Just Coffee: It's a watercolor technique developed by Andy Saur and Angel Sarkela. Think sepia.

They first sketch out an idea, then start brewing a really strong pot of coffee that is really dark and thick! From there, water is added to gain the subtle tones of brown. Finally, a clear coat of acrylic is added

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Editor's picks: The best of Modern Humorist: Just what it sounds like. Funny stuff.
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November 4, 2004, 6:45 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Weekend shows to benefit Randy Hien, late bluesman Rick Mendes:

There’s No Place Like Home:The Prodigal Sons Return for the Benefit of Mr. Randy Hien: Hien, longtime owner of The Living Room but better known recently for leading the Lincoln All-Stars to the Little League World Series, was seriously injured in a head-on collision in February with a driver heading the wrong way on Route 10. It's been a long haul physically, and the medical bills are massive.

So, Saturday night features a reunion of some of the bands that played the heydey of the punk and new wave scenes at the first (of three) Living Room locations, on Westminster Street across from the original Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel in the Conrad building, now a condo palace.

David Minehan and Lee Harrington of the Neighborhoods will play as Senior Citizen. The Schemers -- the unofficial house band back then (led by Mark Cutler, now fronting Dino Club), Neutral Nation, Casey Lindstrom (of The New Models and Shake the Faith), WBRU Rock Hunt Champs the Lingo, Newport’s Big World, and Blues Bastard will all perform..

And Randy and his wife plan to attend.

A Tribute To Rick Mendes: Rick played with bands such as The Probers, The Nightbirds, Blueswagon until his death recently of cancer.

Sunday, his fellow musicians play a fundraiser for Rick's kids from 2-10 p.m.at the Catfish Bar & Grill, 1035 West Shore Road in Warwick.

On the bill: Dave Howard & The High Rollers, Killer Kane & The Blue Fo's, The Automatics (featuring Manny Vincente), Smokestack Lightning, Roger Ceresi and The Urge.

The $15 donation goes to The Mendes Children Scholarship Fund
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Election wrap: E-Voting: Which states use which systems. A clickable map.

My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County on November 2, 2004: By computer scientist Avi Rubin, one of the authors of the original Johns Hopkins study. Rubin also served as an election judge during the primaries, and wrote about that, too. (

DRE, which Rubin uses below, is the acronym for Digital Recording Electronic (voting machines).

Here's the bottom line:

When I arrived home last night, I had several email messages from reporters asking me about my experience. One of them really disturbed me: "After being an election judge, have you changed your opinion at all about these DREs?" I suppose it disturbed me because it implied that somehow my opinion on DREs was based on some superficial measure that could change when I saw them in action. I think the question ignores the expertise of computer scientists, including me, with respect to computer security....

Well, for the record, here is my answer to questions like the ones emailed by that reporter: If we continue to use the kind of insecure DREs that were used in this election, it is only a matter of time before somebody exploits them. And the worst part is that we may never know it....

I worry that whenever we have close elections, paperless DREs will produce a cloud of uncertainty over the election. Without the capability for recounts, there will be little to do to satisfy the public about the outcome.

Related: A lawgeek in Oakland, CA mans a battery of Diebold machines. At the E-voting Experts blog

Election wrap: Oh Canada:

Marry an American:

Ladies and gentlemen, drop your borders

When the provisional Ohio votes are counted and if George W. Bush is re-elected, single, sexy, American liberals - already a threatened species - will be desperate to escape.

These lonely, afraid (did we mention really hot?) progressives will need a safe haven.

You can help. Open your heart, and your home. Marry an American. Legions of Canadians have already pledged to sacrifice their singlehood to save our southern neighbours from four more years of cowboy conservatism.

Canada 2.0: Moving the borders. The map includes Baja Canada, The Tropic of Canada, Mini Willinois and New America -- all formerly parts of The United States of Texas. And look what's happened to Alaska!

A Readers Guide to Expatriating on November 3rd

Election wrap: Counting the votes

Kerry Won: Greg Palast.

Remember Clark County, Ohio, the county chosen by The Guardian for a penpal project with the British? The county's vote totals:

Bush: 34,444 - 50.96%
Kerry: 32,824 - 48.56%

Jack Shafer of Slate and WaPo's Steve Coll on exit polls

About the TV coverage: Nobody had any reporters in key spots breathlessly reporting a live nationwide event -- just talking heads looking at the same numbers streaming onto my laptop as I sat on the couch. It was all spin from the same talking heads that make up the permanent cast of political TV. People could be carrying machines out the back door and we wouldn't see it. Nobody's there.

From Americablog, in the wee hours of Wednesday:

It's 3 a.m. In Ohio And PEOPLE ARE STILL VOTING!:

Yep, ABC News just reported at 3 in the morning that people are still lined up and voting in at least TWO precincts in Ohio -- including predominantly college students at one polling area. With cell phones and portable cameras, it's startling to me that we weren't seeing LIVE FOOTAGE of people lined up and voting in the most hotly contested state in the country, but there you are.

Actually, there is. BoingBoing has a report from Dave Pentecost, a member of Michael Moore's "protect the vote video team" in Ohio. (These are professionals who donated their services; Moore paid their room and board.)

Final: Osama Bin Laden thought the election was about him. Somebody please tell him it was about gay marriage.
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Villagers speak of the small, hairy Ebu Gogo: Richard Roberts, discoverer of the Hobbit, says local tales suggest the species could still exist: Telegraph, UK:

One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw, including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even human meat.

When food was served to them they also ate the plates, made of pumpkin - the original guests from hell (or heaven, if you don't like washing up and don't mind replacing your dinner set every week).

The villagers say that the Ebu Gogo raided their crops, which they tolerated, but decided to chase them away when the Ebu Gogo stole - and ate - one of their babies.

They ran away with the baby to their cave which was at the foot of the local volcano, some tens of metres up a cliff face. The villagers offered them bales of dry grass as fodder, which they gratefully accepted.

A few days later, the villagers went back with a burning bale of grass which they tossed into the cave. Out ran the Ebu Gogo, singed but not fried, and were last seen heading west, in the direction of Liang Bua, where we found the Hobbit, as it happens.

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November 2, 2004, 7:38 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Election Protection hotline: 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Problems, information, whatever.

Best sources: Links for election night. I'm heading home, leaving you with my best political links. These are are all portals to most of what you'll need to know about the races.

Mainstream media overview: My Way News is a huge portal to the wire services. Here's the politics wire.

Local races will be here at projo.com.

Blogs: Lots of servers going down from the traffic load -- the biggest weakness of the Web. Nevertheless here are links for tonight of the poli-blogging heavies:

Democratic Underground (homepage with results) and Free Republic, as I mentioned earlier today, are the primary cyberhangouts of Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

Other political blogs, ranging roughly from Kerry partisans to Bush partisans, that will still be interesting tomorrow:

Daily Kos
MyDD
PoliticalWire
Atrios
Wonkette
Talk Left

Andrew Sullivan
Buzzmachine

Powerline
Instapundit
Real Clear Politics
NRO - The Corner

Uncategorizable:
Blogging of the President
Tradesports
MSNBC's Bloggers Cafe aka Hardblogger

If things get heavy here, click around some of the blogroll on the right. These aren't political bloggers, but they'll all be linking to the best of the less-traveled blogs. Most of the blogs above have blogrolls full of kindred political spirits as well.

Scroll down for the electoral-vote predictors and maps from yesterday, and how to tell early how it's going.
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The Pledge: I'm not big on these sorts of things, but The Pledge -- the brainchild of Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis -- is going around the blogosphere. (No, we're not Scouts.):

After the election results are in, I promise to:

• Support the President, even if I didn't vote for him.
• Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
• Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
• Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.

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Shafer at Slate: Late afternoon exit-poll update:

In the national exit poll, Kerry leads Bush 51-48. In Wisconsin he's up by three, and in Ohio and Florida he leads by one. For the earlier results, scroll down.

5:46 p.m.
Zogby predicts:

Our Call
Zogby International's 2004 Predictions
(as of Nov. 2, 2004 5:00pm)

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4:12 p.m
Slate's first exit polls show a trend: Jack Shafer has more sensible numbers than the first polls I couldn't bring myself to publish (because they didn't seem real). Let's start with his caveat -- I've added each state's electoral votes in parentheses:

The first wave of exit-poll data reaching my desk comes from a variety of sources. In some states the sources disagree about the specific margin by which a candidate leads, but never about which candidate is out in front. Some of the confusion may stem from the mixing of morning exit-poll numbers with early afternoon numbers. With those provisos and the understanding that the early numbers are predictive of nothing without their accompanying computer model, here's what I've heard:

Florida (27)
Kerry 50
Bush 49

Ohio (20)
Kerry 50
Bush 49

Pennsylvania (21)
Kerry 54
Bush 45

Wisconsin (10)
Kerry 51
Bush 46

Michigan (17)
Kerry 51
Bush 47

Minnesota (10)
Kerry 58
Bush 40

Nevada (5)
Kerry 48
Bush 50

New Mexico (5)
Kerry 50
Bush 48

North Carolina (15)
Kerry 49
Bush 51

Colorado (9)
Kerry 46
Bush 53

Other exit-poll results have arrived in more vague form, with Kerry leading Bush in New Hampshire but trailing him in Arizona and Louisiana.

For an explanation of why Slate is posting exit-poll numbers, see the previous post, below. ... (scroll down).

First alleged exit polls reflected a daytime vote breakdown: 59% women, 41% men: Drudge had them up briefly, but took them down. (over at Free Republic, he's being accused of tanking the stock market).

You can see these alleged early, exit polls here, here or here. They are at best a narrow slice, at worst disinformation.

NYU J-school's Jay Rosen writes too long at BOP about a dustup between Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk and Slate's Jack Shafer et al over releasing exit poll results.
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The Exit Poll Charade: Why Slate is publishing the exit poll numbers. By Jack Shafer.

As this item posts, the first raw exit poll data are streaming from the National Election Pool consortium owned by the Associated Press and the five television networks (CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and CNN) to their news divisions and to the newsrooms of NEP subscribers—big city newspapers and other broadcasters....

...The paid users of exit poll data have signed a blood oath not to divulge it to unauthorized eyes, and the networks have promised not to call any states before their polls close. But the numbers always leak out to other journalists—such as the writers at Slate—and starting at about 5 p.m. ET or so, the news anchors start giving clues about what they've learned from the exit poll results. As John Tierney writes in today's New York Times, the result on television is sometimes like a "version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, in which anchors or correspondents will pretend not to know what's happening in a state but give enough clues for the discerning viewer....

...Slate believes its readers should know as much about the unfolding election as the anchors and other journalists, so given the proviso that the early numbers are no more conclusive than the midpoint score of a baseball game, we're publishing the exit poll numbers as we receive them. Some people say it's irresponsible to publish the numbers—or broadcast early projections of winners—because it may disturb voter turnout. As Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg put it in today's Times, he doesn't want to put the Web site "in the paternalistic position of deciding that our readers aren't mature enough to react in the proper way to truthful information we possess."

Watch this space. …

Nothing but this there yet, although Drudge is trumpeting (Kerry campaign finds comfort in first batch of exit polls),

Election 2004 has been rocked with first wave of exit polls which show Kerry competitive in key states, campaign and media sources tell DRUDGE.... National Election Pool -- representing six major news organization -- shows Kerry in striking distance -- with small lead -- in Florida and Ohio.. MORE...

But there is no more.

Conventional wisdom says the first significant exit poll results come around 3 p.m. But you can see leaks at DU and FR (see below).
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Lola, the town cat, keeps an eye on poll watchers Bryce Muir, right, and Haoard Soloman, as they watch voters in Bowdoinham, Maine today.(AP)
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Electronic town squares on election day: Democratic Underground and Free Republic are the primary cyberhangouts of Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Each has tens of thousands of members posting microlocal voting reports, links to mainstream news reports, fears and hopes, venom and prayers.

DU's "Latest" is the place to see what's incoming. There's also a a blog today of "Noteworthy topics from the DU Discussion Forums" to help keep important threads visible, since posts quickly move down the list and out of sight in the regular discussion boards.

FreeRepublic.com defaults to the News/Activism thread. Others are available in a list on the right side of the page. Here's the link to all the threads mixed together -- again, the most recent post is on top.
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Reference sheet for Election Night 2004: In pdf form, from Sam Wang at Princeton, author of the Electoral College Meta-Analysis.

This document presents
a) A short list of key states to watch to determine who wins;
b) Key states to watch to determine a relative blowout; and
c) A graph to let you see for yourself how much decided-voter polls differ from the final outcome (the biases spoken of so often on my Web site).

Finally, on the last page is a guide, written with slightly different assumptions, for watching the returns as the evening progresses. This was kindly provided by Will DeBello of UC Davis.

Here's the nut:

Canaries in the coalmine
Among decided voters (i.e. in raw polling data), some Eastern states show a mediumsized margin for one candidate or the other. Surprises in any of them would suggest an overall shift of 4 points or more from raw polling data. Therefore, they are early-evening indicators for major effects due to undecided voters, turnout effects, or polling bias. In other words, if a surprise happens in any of these states, then the election can be called very early.

Early warnings for a Kerry blowout: West Virginia (closing time 7:30pm EST; poll margin Bush +6.3%) and Arkansas (8:30pm, Bush +3.2%).

Early warning for a Bush blowout: New Hampshire (closing time 7pm EST; poll margin Kerry +2.9%).

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Added: Full story from China Daily: Qian Qichen: US strategy seriously flawed (Original link is unavailable; this is the captured text.)
Deleted: The iceberg photo. It was created to achieve its effect.

November 1, 2004, 7:47 p.m.

Election Protection hotline: 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Problems, information, whatever.

Election Eve Dreams: The image at right is a detail of a caricature by JR Fred Smith at freesqueeze.com. Click to see it all.
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What have you done to our country?

This map is interesting way to grasp how the electoral college balances population and statehood. Each state's size is distorted to reflect the proportion of electoral votes it holds. Consequently Rhode Island, with 4 , is larger than Wyoming, with 3, because of the population density in the state.

This is from the Electoral College Meta-Analysis from Prof. Sam Wang of Princeton University.

Another electoral-vote predictor, Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, comes from Andrew Tanenbaum in The Netherlands, who revealed his identity today. Andrew Leonard, who profiles Tanenbaum today in Salon, places him:

In the world of free and open-source software, Tanenbaum is well known for creating a piece of software called Minix, a kind of mini-operating system, that, as the legend goes, inspired a Finnish hacker named Linus Torvalds to write his own operating system, Linux, which anyone can use, modify and share as one wishes.

Finally, if you'd prefer to see a projection of a Bush win, there's another site "strongly biased in favor of George Bush," in Tanenbaum's words: Election Projection 2004.
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Expect long lines: Josh Marshall published an email that touches something deep:

Still in Florida.

This was one of the most moving, meaningful days of my life.

My job is to get people to the polls and, more importantly, to keep them there. Because they’re crazily jammed. Crazily. No one expected this turnout. For me, it’s been a deeply humbling, deeply gratifying experience. At today’s early vote in the College Hill district of East Tampa -- a heavily democratic, 90% African American community — we had 879 voters wait an average of five hours to cast their vote. People were there until four hours after they closed (as long as they’re in line by 5, they can vote).

Here’s what was so moving:

We hardly lost anyone. People stood outside for an hour, in the blazing sun, then inside for another four hours as the line snaked around the library, slowly inching forward. It made Disneyland look like speed-walking. Some waited 6 hours. To cast one vote. And EVERYBODY felt that it was crucial, that their vote was important, and that they were important.

And there were tons of first time voters. Tons.

Aside from some hassles from the Republican election commissioner ( … [ed.note: Here the letter writer describes various shenanigans intended to exacerbate the difficulties of waiting hours in line to vote. I’ve censored this detail to preserve the anonymity of the writer.], I actually had an amazing experience. No, actually, in a way because of that I had an amazing experience. Because these people know that the system that’s in place doesn’t want them voting. And yet they are determined to vote.

The best of all was an 80 year old African American man who said to me: “When I first started I wasn’t even allowed to vote. Then, when I did, they was trying to intimidate me. But now I see all these folks here to make sure that my vote counts. This is the first time in my life that I feel like when I cast my vote it’s actually gonna be heard.”

To see people coming out — elderly, disabled, blind, poor; people who have to hitch rides, take buses, etc — and then staying in line for hours and hours and hours... Well, it’s humbling. And it’s awesome. And it’s kind of beautiful.

Sometimes you forget what America is.

I think there’s hope.

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Amazing iceberg photo:
Updated: 11.2.04 12:30 p.m.

EVER SEE AN ICEBERG FROM TOP TO BOTTOM?
This came from a Rig Manager for Global Marine Drilling in St. Johns, Newfoundland. They have to divert the path of these things away from the rig by towing them with ships. In this case the water was calm and the sun was almost directly overhead so the diver was able to get into the water and click this pic. They estimated the weight at 300,000,000 tons.:

Reader Eric Lilius passes along, from Truth or Fiction,

A photo of an iceberg, showing the portions both above and below the water, is circulated with an explanation of where it came from.

The story is fabricated. The picture was not taken by an oil drilling worker and is not simple, single photograph. TruthOrFiction.com found and communicated with the creator of the picture, underwater photographer Ralph Clevenger.

Mr. Clevenger wrote:

I created the image as a way of illustrating the concept of what you get is not necessarily what you see. As a professional photographer I knew that I couldn't get an actual shot of an iceberg the way I envisioned it so I created the final image by compositing several images I had taken. The two halves of the iceberg are 2 separate shots, one taken in Alaska and one taken in Antarctica (neither is underwater). The only underwater part is the background taken off the coast of California. The sky is the last component. It took a lot of research on lighting and scale to get the berg to look real.

Because the photo was created and has an owner, I've removed it from this site.

This came from RageBoy's site -- RageBoy is Chris Locke, the mad genius of the Cluetrain Manifesto quartet, Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger) .The title of the post is "The Unconscious v. WYSIWYG
or: why what you see is often so much less than what you get and here's the context"

(Locke used the photo to illustrate a psychological concept. You can still see the photo at the last link above.)

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Election officials, disconnect your modems: From BlackBoxVoting.org, the folks who exposed the original problems with electronic voting machines:

Consumer protection for elections:

MONDAY Nov 1 2004: New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes tomorrow. All county elections officials who use modems to transfer votes from polling places to the central vote-counting server should disconnect the modems now.

There is no down side to removing the modems. Simply drive the vote cartridges from each polling place in to the central vote-counting location by car, instead of transmitting by modem. “Turning off” the modems may not be sufficient. Disconnect the central vote counting server from all modems, INCLUDING PHONE LINES, not just Internet.

In a very large county, this will add at most one hour to the vote-counting time, while offering significant protection from outside intrusion.

It appears that such an attack may already have taken place, in a primary election 6 weeks ago in King County, Washington -- a large jurisdiction with over one million registered voters. Documents, including internal audit logs for the central vote-counting computer, along with modem “trouble slips” consistent with hacker activity, show that the system may have been hacked on Sept. 14, 2004. Three hours is now missing from the vote-counting computer's "audit log," an automatically generated record, similar to the black box in an airplane, which registers certain kinds of events.

We all know how easy it is to overwrite a file. If that happens tomorrow, all the campaigning, all the volunteering, all the money and the entire election process could be nullified by one guy with a different set of numbers.

Related: E-Voting experts launch group weblog: Computer Scientists David Dill, Ed Felten, Joe Hall, Avi Rubin, Barbara Simons, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach gang up on those who'd hijack our right to vote and have those votes count.

Its most recent post is a bit alarming: To Disclose Or Not? is from Felten. It begins,

Suppose, hypothetically, that I knew of a vulnerability that would allow someone to corrupt vote counts or interfere with voting on some e-voting system being used in tomorrow’s election. And suppose further that it was too late to get the vulnerability fixed. What should I do?...

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How Bin Laden Got Away: U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight
Failure to Send Troops in Pursuit Termed Major Error. WaPo, from April 2002:

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December....

TopDog04 has the timeline and an exhaustive set of links and chunky excerpts, including from Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack.
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World speaks up: China Lays Into 'Bush Doctrine' Ahead of U.S. Poll: Everybody wants the ear of U.S. voters now.

I think the Guardian guy started it, with his plan to have Brits write to American voters in Clark County, Ohio. Then Osama piped up -- he probably reads news on the Net when he's not downloading our current crop of political movies. Now the Chinese want to talk to us, too!

Iain Katz, editor of the Guardian tabloid G2, look what you started!

Anyhow, here are some quotes from Qian Qichen, "one of the main architects of China's foreign policy," in a commentary in the English-language China Daily newspaper. From Reuters, via WaPo:

"The current U.S. predicament in Iraq serves as another example that when a country's superiority psychology inflates beyond its real capability, a lot of trouble can be caused," Qian wrote.

"But the troubles and disasters the United States has met do not stem from the threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance."

..."The 21st century is not the 'American century'. That does not mean that the United States does not want the dream. Rather it is incapable of realizing the goal," he said.

That sound like a scolding to you?

Today, the administration scolds back: U.S. to Question China About Bush Comment. AP, in its entirety:

The State Department will ask the Chinese government about comments by a former senior Chinese official who accused President Bush of trying to "rule over the whole world."

Spokesman Adam Ereli said Monday the comments by Qian Qichen, a former vice premier and former foreign minister, were not consistent with the views outlined by Chinese officials during a visit to Beijing last week by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Qian's commentary in a state newspaper said the invasion of Iraq "destroyed the hard-won global anti-terror coalition."

Ereli told reporters, "We will be discussing the remarks further with the Chinese government for purposes of clarification."

Full story from China Daily: Qian Qichen: US strategy seriously flawed (Original link is unavailable; this is the captured text.)

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Le Monde: The American Choice. Translated from the French. What is interesting to me here is the French vision of America.

Since at issue is a choice between two visions of the world and of the law. George W. Bush proposes that his countrymen exit the system they had known up until September 11, 2001, the very system for which he campaigned in 2000 when he promised an American foreign policy stamped with the seal of "humility". President Bush's vision is one of a country at war, a new form of war with rules and contours impossible to define. A war so peculiar that the rules of law on which American democracy was founded must be sacrificed to it, the tradition of transparency replaced with opacity and manipulation, and the international architecture which has been the center of a global consensus for over a half century ignored.

Speaking of translations, Al Jazeera has a full of transcript of Bin Laden's Friday tape, not just the excerpts that were originally broadcast and printed.
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Dark Times? From venerable veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas:

There will be only one way to read the election results if Bush wins: The world will see his victory as an affirmation by the American people of his disastrous preemptive war policy, which led the United States to invade Iraq without provocation.

That's truly scary.
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Whatever your worldview, voting is a way to express it. Don't pass on this one.

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