Prozac loaf

Prozac: It's what's for dinner! ...Ohhhhh, I guess she meant they should take it for their moods. Yeah, I bet Marie Antoinette said she was joking, too. I can just hear her ladies-in-waiting, tittering: "'Cake,' she said! 'Let them eat cake!' It is to laugh."

This would probably turn the tide in the election. Stay tuned.

Kerry/Edwards vs Bush/Cheney:

Kerry: 18 years as Senator, plus two years as Lt. Governor under the most fiscally-responsible administration in his state's long history. Term in Senate includes his leading the Kerry Commission on the Iran-Contra scandal, which landed more indictments and convictions of appointed officials than any investigation before or since. Additionally, John Edwards has served five years of a Senate term after leaving a successful law career to serve in government.

Bush: Served five years as Governor of Texas, his first elected position. Governorship of Texas is widely recognized to be a figurehead position, in which the Governor largely presides over dedications and executions. After going AWOL from the National Guard, Bush spent the next twenty years failing at every single business venture he touched. Cheney served ten years as Representative from Wyoming after getting started as an aide in the Nixon White House. His term in the House was unremarkable except for its inconsistency, and included no original legislation.

What's behind that snarl, Dick? Maybe it's a sneer of contempt for the democratic process or the Rule of Law (scroll down a little to Day 86). Or maybe he's still mad that Nelson Mandela got to walk free, or that South Africa's apartheid government got the boot (he voted against measures designed to free Mandela and to eliminate apartheid six times. Six times).


Interesting. Senator Dayton (D-MN) actually read the 9-11 report, and even more interesting: he found a discrepancy between NORAD's version of the events, and the FAA's version. Even more interesting is that the discrepancy involves what NORAD and the FAA say they were doing at the time:
"During the hearing, Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading.
"The [NORAD] chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed."

So, NORAD says that the FAA told them about three of the hijackings while the planes were still in the air, but the (c)Omission found that the opposite was true. Senator Dayton's assessment of the situation is pretty tame: he says that had there been better communication, the fourth plane might have been saved.

No, Senator: the 9-11 Commission found that someone fudged the truth. Maybe the FAA did notify NORAD? That would mean that someone at NORAD lied to the 911 Commission, presumably to cover their ass and protect their job, but for this investigation to be complete, this person must be found and investigated. On the other hand, maybe the FAA did not, after all, notify NORAD. Why, then, would NORAD have published a report stating the opposite?

Publishing such a report, and using that report to publicize a lack of adequate equipment, smecks of bureaucratic budgeteering and blame-shifting. "Oh we just couldn't do our jobs, because the FAA fell down, and our equipment is too old to be able to cover for the FAA...." This is a possible scenario, but equally possible is that the FAA did indeed tell NORAD everything it needed to know, while NORAD operated on Orders from Above.

Too many questions remain.

* * *

Unsubstantiated reports on NPR over the weekend suggested that some European heads of state were in attendance at the DNC, to indicate support for Kerry/Edwards. The talking-head in question actually went so far as to suggest that Italy had said that it would re-deploy troops to Iraq if Kerry wins the election.