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Republicans are saying all sorts of things about John Kerry’s voting record on defense programs. Fred Kaplan has a piece that sheds some light on things. The Republicans must tar Kerry as soft on defense because President Bush’s best hope of getting reelected is to make Americans afraid that terrorists will overrun the country if they fire him. So Kerry must be painted as a wimpy Democrat who isn’t serious about defending the country, and believe me, the RNC isn’t going to let the truth get in the way. That said, I’m not too happy with John Kerry today either. I heard a bit of a stump speech today wherein he promised to force companies to give workers three months notice if they’re going to be replaced by offshore workers. Nobody who has worked in the private sector would be impressed by this pledge. The way things work is that when a company needs to improve its bottom line, it often lays off workers. It doesn’t fire them and replace them with people overseas, it just gets rid of them. Then, when more manufacturing capacity is needed or a new IT project is about to get under way, when it comes time to staff up, the company decides whether to hire here or overseas. The three months notice thing just isn’t going to be effective in doing whatever Kerry wants people to think it will do. ...

Declan McCullagh has written a sort of Free Trade 101 column in defense of President Bush’s economic advisor, Greg Mankiw, who made the mistake of pubicly defending outsourcing last week.

OK, I can sleep well tonight knowing that the singing creatures in the Quizno’s ads are called Spongmonkeys. For what it’s worth, I love those ads.

If you’re interested in the Grey Tuesday protest but you don’t want to host MP3s or turn your site grey, another option is to seed the Grey Album through BitTorrent all day. I downloaded the Grey Album a week or so ago just to see what all the fuss was about, but I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet. I’m up for anything that shows the copyright industry that they have less power than they assume that they have. ...

Fred Kaplan published a piece today looking at the details of the budget for the Deparment of Homeland Security. I was surprised at some of the programs that have been cut or eliminated.

Snopes has put together the best summary of the events that led to John Kerry’s being awarded various medals in Vietnam that I’ve seen. I point to this only because I’m seeing more and more emails making various accusations and insinuations about Kerry’s service and the truth should be recorded and disseminated. Updated April 24, 2004: John Kerry has published his service record on his Web site.

Ed Felten is requesting that readers recommend the top five science and technology books every student should read.

Just a little link to welcome Ralph Nader into the Presidential race.

John Covalesky submitted an email to Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list that contained a semi-revolutionary idea that I’d love to see some politician take up. He points out that corporations avoid billions of dollars in taxes every year through various loopholes. He suggests that we should take away these loopholes and provide the same amount in tax incentives to corporations for providing employees with benefits like more paid time off or tuition assistance. If these taxes are going unpaid anyway, it certainly seems like we could change things so that this underpayment better serves society. ...

If you haven’t yet, please read the first hand account of Rex Hammock’s meeting with President Bush before reading this. In it, Hammock says the following: Bottom line: If George W. Bush could spend 25 minutes chatting with everybody in America like he did with me and five other folks today, he would win any election by a landslide. For what it’s worth, I think this is actually true of just about any politician. How do you think politicians get people to donate millions of dollars to their campaigns? As long as a person isn’t dead set against them, they can probably win them over one on one. That’s the key job skill for a career in politics. That said, I think it’s important for people who don’t want to see Bush reelected to mull that sentence over a few times. It’s easy for me and for most other critics of the administration to fall into the trap where we think of Bush as an out and out bad person. Back in November 2002, I watched a documentary called Journeys with George, a network producer’s video diary of her time spent with the 2000 Bush campaign. In it, Bush comes across as quite likeable. It doesn’t surprise me that Hammock came away feeling exactly the same. So I think the key for people who want to see Bush lose is to avoid calling Bush evil, or a fascist, or whatever, and focus on his bad policies and the bad direction he’s taken this country in. Is Bush evil? I don’t think so. Is he wrong nearly all of the time. Yes he is. Take a look at Hammock’s account. Bush spoke to them about how making the tax cuts permanent would help them out and then went out to an audience and explained how hard it is for businesses to plan when the tax code is constantly changing. This entire argument is predicated on the idea that the audience has forgotten that it was the Bush administration that put sunset provisions in for most of the tax cuts to make the future deficit implications seem less bad, even though he intended to later propose that all of the sunset provisions be removed. There’s a lot more to being a good President than being the type of guy who’s fun to watch a football game with. The thing that scares me is that if Democrats take the tack of demonizing President Bush in this campaign, they’ll only appeal to people who already think Bush is a demon. To mangle a phrase Christians frequently use, the better plan for success is to love the politician and hate the politics, at least when it comes to President Bush. ...