Let's stop complaining that many voters make their decisions based on intuition and emotion instead of a laundry list of issues, and start using it.

Folks, we can slam our heads repeatedly against the (virtual) wall, bemoaning the fact that many who voted for George W. Bush either a) disagree with his policies or b) are harmed by his policies. Why did they do that? How could they be so "stupid"? Well, because gut feelings and emotions matter - and to many voters, they matter more than issues on a checklist.

You don't like that? You want people to be more like you? Then you're never going to run a successful campaign.

People make decisions in different ways. We're never going to change that. Let's stop with the "my way is better" attitude. Even if you think it is. You are never going to change the way an important slice of the American public (low-information swing/centrist voters) makes its decisions. Stop trying. Instead...

I went to Bosnia at the end of March 1996, on a humanitarian aid mission. I believe that was a week or so after Hillary Clinton's alleged harrowing international experience. I did not have Secret Service or other special protection. I did not feel in danger while I was there. In fact....

"I am deeply concerned about skyrocketing prescription drug costs," Hillary Clinton says on her Senate Web site. "I also believe that we need to make drug reimportation safe and legal."

However, a key Clinton campaign strategist's company appears to be working to keep prices high and cut off reimportation.

Experts in voter behavior could not figure out what little New Hampshire was going to do five minutes before the primary. What makes you think you can predict how people in Ohio and Florida are going to feel in November? This is the line of thinking that led us directly to John Kerry.

-- N.Y. Times columnist Gail Collins, A Voter's Guide

I fervently believe that Barack Obama would be the better Democratic candidate in November. My Hillary-supporting friends believe that she'd be a stronger candidate in November.

And you know what? It's all just conjecture. They don't know. I don't know. And you don't know, either.

So if you truly want to be a rational voter, stop pretending that you know what undecided middle-of-the-road voters are going to do nine months from now.

Democrat Deval Patrick has opened a huge lead against Republican Gov. Kerry Healey in the Massachusetts gubernatorial race. A couple of new polls announced today show that Healey's negative ads have "backfired big time," as one local TV analyst put it.

From the Boston Globe:

Democrat Deval Patrick has a commanding 27-point lead in the governor's race as independent voters abandon Republican Kerry Healey because of her negative attacks, according to a new poll released today by 7NEWS and Suffolk University.

Patrick had the support of 53 percent to Healey's 26 percent in the survey of 400 likely voters taken Oct. 20 through Oct. 23.

"The tone of the campaign has moved independents away from Healey," said David Paleologos, Director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. "The tone changed from constructive criticism to negative and really turned off independent voters."

Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said they were unlikely to vote for Healey because of the "tone" of the campaign. Healey has particularly criticized Patrick's record on crime.

And from WBZ:

Here are the questions that someone reporting the story of the alleged Lieberman Web site hack needs to ask.

I know a little something about computer networks and systems. If you want them to be secure and reliable, you need trained professionals not only to set them up, but to oversee and monitor them. One issue that hasn't received nearly enough attention is that execept in the largest of municipalities, the average local voting authority is unlikely to have such trained professionals on hand, which is why they need support contracts. Now here's a "surprise" - not - the Columbus Dispatch says Diebold is charging so much for needed support contracts that a lot of localities in Ohio won't be able to afford them. More below the fold.

I'm really sorry if this has been diaried already, but trying to search on Washington Post brings back a LOT of entries.... Anyway, washingtonpost.com has created an interesting tool for checking on and keeping up with votes by U.S. Senators and House Reps, the Congress votes database. It lets you "browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991" by session, by member and more.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of votes by your reps. You can compare your reps' votes to the official positions of Democrats and Republicans.

"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."
--George Washington, Fairwell Adress

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone."
--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

[more below]

Hopes have been raised before, only to see things return to being as bad as ever. But for the first time in years, there seems to be real progress in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

The New York Times reports that the Israeli army has been ordered to stop all offensive and pre-emptive operations in Gaza, and "scale them back sharply" in the West Bank.

What do the Palestinians think of that? (more below the fold)

(Sorry if this has been posted before, I did try doing a search here but may have missed it.)

Executive summary: Areas with e-voting systems were much more likely to show unexpectedly high voting percentage for Bush than areas with other types of voting systems. The statistical probability of such results being accurate is less than one-tenth of one percent.

This story has already been picked up by Wired, Computerworld and other technology press.

There are a heck of a lot of Bush campaign speeches on whitehouse.gov -- which, as far as I know, is a taxpayer-funded government asset. Isn't there a prohibition against using government assets for an election campaign?

Yet all sorts of campaign speeches are transcribed there in full.

One thing the neocons are ignoring is that "freedom" and "democracy" -- i.e., the end of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship -- will not necessarily lead to a Jeffersonian democracy, even if the insurgency can be overcome.

"Majority rule" is often directly at odds with individual rights and civil liberties. That's why we needed a Bill of Rights added to the U.S. Constitution, to ensure that a majority of citizens would not and could not trample upon the rights of an unpopular minority. It's why we need checks and balances (which, sadly, don't work very well when all branches of government are controlled by one faction of one political party).

What's happening in Iraqi education?

According to NBC Nightly News, many schools are turning away from secular curriculae:

The Los Angeles Times has a damning indictment of dog-eat-dog "self-reliance" economic policies and what they have done to American families.

Their analysis shows that there's more to the economic story than simply how much average income has changed. The volatility of middle-class income has increased sharply.

"Over the last three decades, working families have faced ever-changing -- and, for the most part, increasingly more perilous -- risk-reward bargains," concludes the article, If America Is Richer, Why Are Its Families So Much Less Secure?

"The incomes of American families have grown more unstable over the last generation," said Johns Hopkins University economist Robert A. Moffitt.
(see more in extended entry)

I've never served in the military. I have done some volunteer humanitarian aid work, though. The closest I've come to war was joining an NGO aid mission into a battle zone, a few weeks after fighting  "officially" stopped.

I never had to shoot at someone while I was there; no one shot at me. (I did hear grenades going off a ways away, but I knew they weren't being tossed at me). I walked through areas that weren't properly de-mined yet ("walk right behind us, and don't step off this path"), but I knew that others had picked their way through safely first.

I didn't see anyone's limbs blown off, or anyone's brains blown out, or someone shot dead just a few feet away from me.

But I did see the immediate after-effects of war, first hand, among a civilian population.

And it's different, SO VERY DIFFERENT, from reading about it, or seeing it on TV, or watching it in a movie.

It's not just the fact that 1.6 New Yorkers voted for Al Gore in '00 vs. 363,000 for Bush, that makes it so odd for the Republican Convention to be in New York this year.

It's that conservative Republicans talk so much about the "heartland of America," with the obvious implication being that conservative red states away from the coasts are the "real" America. (Never mind how many Americans actually live in what I suppose must be the "fake" America.)

New York City is so many things that conservative Americans don't want in their America. Teeming with immigrants. Multicultural. Liberal. Cosmopolitan. Multilingual. Filled with both the cultural and intellectual elite and visible low-income people.

Speakers at the DNC referred often to Boston's roots, history and tradition. I'm wondering how the Republicans are going to make their endless references to the heartland while on the island of Manhattan. They'll have to keep switching back and forth, I guess: "heartland -- the real America!" "New York -- 9/11 background prop!" I wonder if there will be ANY references to the host city that won't involve September 11.

In order to stay informed, I know I should. But I don't think I can do it. I'm afraid of bursting a few blood vessels!

Seriously, I don't think I want to be in a continuous yet helpless rage for multiple hours over multiple evenings. I plan to read about it, even if I know that's not the same thing. And maybe I'll tune in to a few minutes here and there. Just wondering about others' plans.

At the end of Nightline last night, Ted Koppel was talking to someone -- I didn't catch who it was, I was channel surfing, but believe it was another ABC guy (I don't watch network TV much) -- about Democratic party unity. Koppel asked whether the party was really as unified as they're trying to portray. The analyst answered, "absolutely not." His proof? The fact that so many of the delegates and so much of the base is anti-war, while both Kerry & Edwards voted for the war.

I suppose the commentators want to somehow show that they're not being taken in by all the party "propaganda" (I'll leave the rant asking where they were in the runup to war for another time). But this shows an astonishing lack of understanding of what "unity" means.

Unity is not everyone having the same exact point of view. Unity does not mean brainwashing. Unity means that people "unite" and "unify" (note the same root here, Nightline) for a cause or outcome they believe in. It often means working together effectively for something. It can mean putting certain differences aside for the greater good.

Bill Clinton talked last night about "a more perfect union [there's that root again]." He meant the United States (and our Founding Fathers didn't expect that all differences among disparate states would be swept aside in order to create a union). But he could have been talking about the Democratic party right now as well.

"The state or quality of being in accord," one dictionary defines unity. What happens after this election, or four years from now, may be open to question. But there can't be any doubt that this party is "in accord" right now not only on the goal of getting George W. Bush out of the White House, but on the means to doing so: Kerry/Edwards.