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Here’s a paragraph that should have been in John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention. It’s from a campaign speech he delivered yesterday: George Bush's record speaks for itself. 1.6 million lost jobs. The first president in 72 years to actually lose jobs on his watch. 8 million Americans are now looking for work. 45 million have no health insurance -- 5 million more than the day he took office. 4.3 million Americans have slipped into poverty over the last four years -- 1.3 million are children. The average family saw their income fall $1,500, while they saw the cost of health care, child care, gasoline, and tuition rise faster than ever before. 220,000 more Americans did not attend college last year for the simple reason that they could not afford it. This President turned a $5.6 trillion surplus into trillions of debt for our children. George Bush accomplished all this in only four years. Imagine what he could do in another four. I want to be clear: I'm not saying that president wanted these consequences. But I am saying that by his judgments, by his priorities, he has caused these things to happen. And he can't see the error of his ways. I’m no campaign consultant, but I’ve thought that this was the winning message for Kerry from the beginning. He needs to find a similar message on Iraq, I think. Kerry has an op-ed published in today’s Wall Street Journal that makes a similar argument. Usually I’m pretty wishy washy about Kerry, I’m going to vote for him, but my enthusiasm about him fluctuates. However, after reading the op-ed, I feel much better about him as a candidate. His plans for economic policy seem pretty clear and reasonable to me. My great fear is that he will try to impose protectionist trade policies, but I don’t get that sense from the op-ed. In fact, I’ve noticed that while he frequently decries companies shipping jobs overseas, the only thing he plans to do about it is to eliminate a tax loophole that rewards companies for doing so. That seems pretty reasonable to me. ...

The human urge to find things to which we can give our unqualified support never ceases to amaze me. In any dispute, the natural urge is to pick a side and assume that everything done by that side is ethical, just, and sensible. This compulsion is much on my mind lately as I ponder Iraq. One of the hardest things for me, a critic of our efforts in Iraq, has been my failing hope of finding some good guys I can root for, just so I can get to a somewhat comfortable psychological place. When we invaded Iraq, my assumption was that the Sunni Arabs were the bad guys, and the Shiites, Kurds, and Marsh Arabs were the good guys. Saddam Hussein drew his power from the Sunni minority and spent a lot of his time suppressing and murdering Iraq’s other ethnic groups. As it turns out, I was right about the Sunnis, obviously they’re not all bad people, but Sunnis who lost out when their patron was deposed form the backbone of the insurgency. As time has passed, however, my assumptions about the good guys have proven incorrect. Among the Shiites, there are many people (not just followers of Muqtada al-Sadr) who would prefer theocracy to democracy, and who are mostly interested in revenge on their former oppressors. Many of them don’t seem to respect women’s rights, and are downright Taliban-esque when it comes to respect for civil rights in general. I’m not saying they’re bad people, but I can’t give the Shiites my unqualified support. Then there are the Kurds. Brutally oppressed and subjected to mass murder by Saddam’s regime, the Kurds have been sold out and screwed in every country where they reside. They were my early sympathetic favorite. They built a functioning state for themselves in the no fly zone that we enforced after the Gulf War, and there has been no Kurdish insurgency. However, Kurds have been running people out of every town that borders their lands in hopes that those towns will be placed under Kurdish control when Iraq’s federal system is put in place. Kurds are displacing Arabs, Turkmen, and members of Iraq’s Christian minorities and are all too glad to come in and play the toughs when the coalition forces need Iraqis to beat up on their fellow countrymen. The Kurdish leadership is acting out of self interest, and I’m sure Kurds are happy about it given their history of mistreatment, but again, not the good guys. You don’t read much about Iraq’s Turkmen population, maybe they’re the good guys? They were treated badly before the invasion, and other ethnic groups are treating them badly now because they’re not really numerous enough to defend themselves. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be the good guys either, because the US is fighting them right now in the town of Tal Afar. Then there are the coalition forces. I sure wanted to believe that we’re the good guys, but clearly that’s a mixed bag at best as well. Between conducting counterinsurgency via airstrikes, a massive program of torture at various detention centers around Iraq, and a plan for the occupation that wound up sinking Iraq into constant violence, the coalition isn’t worthy of unqualified support, either. And I think that explains why Americans haven’t accepted just how bad things are in Iraq right now. I’ve had to force myself to accept this complex situation in which everyone is tainted. I think most other people have chosen not to. ...

The Washington Post has a terrifying story about the dire consequences of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans dead on. That, of course, very well may happen less than 24 hours from now. I’m from just down the road from New Orleans myself, and so I’ve watched hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico for most of my life. I also consider New Orleans to be something of a spiritual home, so those folks are much on my mind today. I hope we don’t wake up tomorrow morning to find the city washed away. Here are some flickr tags to keep an eye on: nola hurricaneivan neworleans ivan hurricane. ...

Sometimes I wish I were a psychologist. I’m sure there’s a clinical description of the condition where people begin to feel a sense of ownership of things that are of interest to them, even though they’re not directly involved. For example, people (and by people, I’m referring to myself) spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what kinds of personnel moves their favorite baseball team should make in order to get to the World Series. I find that I’m addicted to this sort of thinking, and I’m not sure it’s a very productive use of my time. I’m always thinking about what John Kerry needs to do to win the Presidential election, or how companies that I like could improve their products, or what we ought to be doing to improve the plight of various people in Africa. Heck, I even spend time thinking about how some TV shows I watch could be better than they are. And really, none of those things are in my sphere of influence, which is obviously small. The entertainment value and mental stimulation of pondering big problems is the reward, but I can’t help but think that it’s probably not the best use of my time. In that sense, I can see why many people simply choose to ignore politics (among other subjects). If you can’t affect something personally, what’s the use in spending much time on it? I ought to be more like that, I think. ...

Colby Buzzell, an infantryman serving in Iraq, has run into problems since his commanders found out about his weblog. It’s a shame. His weblog was one of those things that you read but don’t link to, out of fear that it will be shut down. Looks like it got shut down either way. For what it’s worth, aside from the articles about combat, I found his most interesting feature to be the emails he received from readers and his responses to them. One reader accused him of being a fake because he had a picture of a soldier in Vietnam on his home page, not realizing that the picture was of the cover of The Smiths album “Meat is Murder.” ...

Colin Powell came out and said that the Sudanese government is committing genocide in the Darfur region, leaving us with the question of what to do about it. The Sudanese, of course, reject the idea of international peacekeepers. They want to continue the genocide unmolested. Various countries on the UN Security Council are not on board because getting oil from the Sudan is more important to them than saving the lives of some people in Africa. The US isn’t going to get too heavily involved because we’re too busy turning Iraq into a beacon of liberty and democracy that will give Sudan something to aspire to. My recommendation would be to start training and arming the Darfur refugees, and let the Sudanese government know that we’re doing it. The international community isn’t going to do anything for these people, and with some guns and training they will at least have a fighting chance against the Janjaweed. That may sound like an unorthodox recommendation coming from a liberal such as myself, but given the lack of better options, enabling these people to defend themselves seems like a better alternative than many others. It’s hard not to think back on Rwanda when you look at what’s going on in the Sudan today, and the thing that finally did enable the Tutsis to end their persecution at the hands of the Hutu majority was their willingness and ability to wage a military campaign against them. ...

How come the people responsible for the RSS feeds from MSDN don’t read Chad Dickerson’s column or weblog?

Today, I noticed that you can’t right click on the registration page at projo.com (the site for the Providence Journal) to get a context menu. Why? bugmenot.com. Or at least that’s what I assume, since I was trying to use the bugmenot.com browser extension to find a login for the site. I thwarted their evil scheme by opening bugmenot.com in another window and typing in their URL manually. Take that.

This weekend when I was travelling, I tuned in to CNN Headline News to see how much damage hurricane Frances did to Florida, and what did I see? Footage of John Kerry windsurfing. Windsurfing may be a fun and invigorating activity, and may even be an extreme sport, but when you windsurf, you look like a dork. Or at least you do if you’re not doing flips or other tricks that I assume the extreme windsurfers do. So there’s the Democratic candidate for President, the guy who everybody says is about to get buried by Bush, in the most effete region of the country, dressed in a wetsuit, windsurfing. It was then that I realized that Kerry isn’t afraid of this Bush guy. He never really seemed scared in the Democratic primary when everybody wrote him off, and he hasn’t given the impression of being afraid in the general election, either. I think that’s why so many other Democrats have been panicing – because Kerry hasn’t been. When you look at the circumstances, August was foreordained to be Kerry’s worst month. The Kerry campaign said they weren’t going to spend money in August because the Bush people were able to raise money in August and they were not (due to the intersection of campaign finance laws and convention scheduling), that was going to cost Kerry a few points in the polls. The media’s ugly flirtation with the swiftvets cost Kerry as well. And then the month ended with the RNC smearfest. The situation was ripe for panic. And yet, Kerry was windsurfing. Not clearing brush, or hunting big game, or engaging in some other swing state approved activity to show that he’s manly and decisive and sufficiently serious. Maybe he knows something we don’t, or maybe he doesn’t and he just doesn’t care, or maybe he’s in denial. But if you want to talk about your great acts of political courage, windsurfing off the coast of Nantucket when everybody on TV is dogging you out for not shifting your campaign to Defcon 5 has to be up there. ...

The conventional wisdom for the past month or two has been that we failed to stop terrorists from attacking us on September 11, 2001 because of structural problems with our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus. That’s what the 9/11 Commission told us (or at least, recommended that we change). Now the smart people seem to be saying that the problem wasn’t the rules, or the bureaucracy, but rather the people involved. That makes the most sense to me. ...