One of the attacks the Bush campaign frequently makes on John Kerry and John Edwards is that they were bad Senators, and attendance is usually the basis of attendance. The most important question for voters when weighing this charge is how their attendance compares to that of other Senators. Is this a valid charge? I haven’t seen it covered in the media. If you have any hard data, please email.

Andrew Brown devotes his column this week to extraordinary rendition, or, if you prefer, outsourced torture. Two debates down, still no questions about torture. I guess the moderators are afraid to ask the really tough question. A simple, “Would you sign a bill making it legal to render terrorist suspects to foreign governments for interrogation with the knowledge and expectation that they will be subjected to torture?” would do nicely.

Obsidian Wings remains the definitive resource on this topic.

I’ve been moving for the past few days. Moving really, really sucks.

Bruce Schneier has a weblog now. It’s about time.

Katherine at Obsidian Wings has another post about the efforts to legalize the outsourcing of torture. I’d like to say that this is one of the defining issues of our time, but we’ve already been doing this for a while and the vast majority of people don’t seem to know or care. The second Presidential debate (October 8) will use a “town hall” format. I sure wish someone would ask a question about torture.

I’m finally trying to get my email in order. I looked this morning and saw that I have over 1400 messages in my inbox. For just one of my email addresses. Looking through them, I see that a fair percentage of them are emails from readers who probably would have liked a response. Often I get such an email, tell myself I’ll get back to it when I get home, or the next day, or whatever, and then forget to reply. It gets buried under the emails from the next day or two, and the next thing you know, I never even see it again (until days like today when I realize my email is out of control). So I’m trying to come up with a better system.

My two spam filters were starting to fall down on me a bit, so I finally bit the bullet and stop forwarding every email to any of my domains to my inbox. The big problem here wasn’t spam, it was bounced messages. Spammers and viruses are always appending random email addresses to my domain names, those emails are being rejected by the receivers’ email server, and my inbox fills with bounce messages. No longer. I’m diverting all that stuff to a separate mail box, and once I can make sure I’m not missing important stuff, it’s going to /dev/null.

The other change is that I’m diverting the email addresses where I usually get feedback from readers to Gmail, which I’m generally better at keeping a handle on. We’ll see how that goes. I think that next week I’m going to upgrade my SpamAssassin install to version 3.0. In any case, with these changes, hopefully I can be better about getting back to people who I should get back to. And I apologize to anyone who I’ve slighted over the past year or so.

My experiment with influence purchasing on the smallest scale continues. The DNC called my wife and asked her for a donation for $2004 the other day, knowing that the easiest people to get money from are those who have already donated. We declined to donate that much, but we did kick in another $100.

I watched the debate tonight. There was a lot of tut-tutting about 32 pages of rules and the game being rigged so that Americans wouldn’t really get a chance to judge the candidates, but thanks in large part to the networks tossing out the rulebook and showing both candidates on a split screen, we got to see everything we needed. There was enough substance there both in what was said, how it was said, and how Kerry and Bush reacted to one another for people to judge the candidates. A firm grasp of current events was a big help, because there were plenty of assertions made that demanded a comparison to events on the ground. I feel pretty mellow about the election right now. The evidence is out there for people to weigh, we’ll wind up with the President that we deserve.

So the President and his friends have been slamming John Kerry for criticizing Iyad Allawi’s speech to Congress last week because Allawi is a key ally and the brave leader of Iraq, and because he’s the leader of the country and is best qualified to talk about it. What then to make of the fact that Bush’s campaign staff worked on Allawi’s speech with him? The truth is that I couldn’t even muster any outrage about this revelation. Everybody already knew that Allawi was here to campaign for Bush.