It seems to me that the upshot of Osama bin Laden’s most recent tape is that he really is a politician, and he’s come up with some new talking points that he thinks will win him more supporters. As Hassan Ibrahim, the al-Jazeera journalist in the film Control Room has said, the struggle of the Islamists isn’t about religion, it’s about power and money. Seems to me that Osama bin Laden thinks he’s shored up his base and is now trying to win over some undecideds.

Billmon posts today about the Bush cult of personality. As I’ve said before about John Kerry, one of the things I like best about him is that he doesn’t have one.

Fred Kaplan has a useful piece throwing some water on the estimate of Iraq war dead pubilshed in Lancet this week (and that I discussed yesterday).

So among Bush supporters who I regularly interact with, I often see it expressed that John Kerry just might not be warlike enough to attack our enemies if necessary. They point to his vote on Iraq in 1991, and less plausibly, his stance on the nuclear buildup in the eighties as examples. That begs a serious question, though. Has the United States ever failed to intervene in a war or invade another country when it really needed to? I’m not talking about humanitarian interventions, but actual wars to defend ourselves. The closest I can think of is Afghanistan in the late nineties. There was no way that the public would have supported it or the politicians would have gone for it, but knowing what we know now, we should have taken out the Taliban and al-Qaeda there before they struck us on 9/11.

The real question I’m asking about is whether this is a real concern — that a John Kerry Presidency would mean that we would fail to defend ourselves by not going to war when we should. Historically speaking, I just don’t see it. Anyway, I’ve started a discussion.

I really wish Malcolm Gladwell or someone like him would write an article about why, historically speaking, Democratic electoral fraud has focused on generating fraudulent votes and Republican electoral fraud has focused on vote suppression.

The British medical journal Lancet estimates that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion and occupation. I wonder if George “No Casualties” Bush thinks about that in his quiet moments?

Update: The 100,000 number seemed shockingly high to me. One of the authors of the study explains the methodology to Spencer Ackerman, so you can judge for yourself whether you think the number is accurate.

So I got an email from the local Democratic party telling me which judges to vote for in the non-partisan judicial election, and it also noted that when you vote, if you vote a straight party ticket, you will not vote in the judicial elections because they’re non-partisan (makes sense), or in the Presidential election. Why wouldn’t voting a straight party ticket include the vote for President? I wonder how many votes are lost due to this bizarre provision.

Bush endorsed Kerry today. Here’s the proof straight from the horse’s mouth:

And a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not the person you want as the Commander-in-Chief.

The New Yorker has published an endorsement of John Kerry, or, more accurately, a condemnation of President Bush that is improbably both brief and comprehensive. Read it and bask in the outrage. Yes, it really has been this bad.

A big question many people who’ve been against Bush for a long time must be asking themselves is what to do with the latecomers, the people who once supported President Bush but now see his administration for the ongoing disaster that it is. One reaction is to reject them, but here’s where my religious upbringing helps. At church, when someone rejected sin and sought redemption, you no longer judged them for their past acts. That’s what being “born again” is all about. And I have no problem applying that to people who have recently decided to become fellow travellers in rejecting the Bush administration. I don’t care when people figure out that the Bush administration is bad for America, as long as they do eventually figure it out, preferably before next Tuesday. Go forth and sin no more.