PRE-9/11 AL QAEDA POLICY
From Rice:

Within a month of taking office, President Bush sent a strong, private message to President Musharraf urging him to use his influence with the Taliban to bring Bin Laden to justice and to close down al-Qaida training camps. Secretary Powell actively urged the Pakistanis, including Musharraf himself, to abandon support for the Taliban. I met with Pakistan's Foreign Minister in my office in June of 2001.

I can't recall what Dick Clarke said about this. Something about doing "nothing", I think. As a counterterrorism expert, I suspect more diplomatic and strategic activities wouldn't have come through his office.

RICE'S BIG DAY
I urge all to listen to Condoleezza Rice's testimony today. You may learn, just as you learned from Sandy Berger, that national security is much more contemplated than the simplistic "on your watch" argument being offered by some opponents of the administration.

JOHN KERRY: TOLERANT AND NON-JUDGMENTAL
John Kerry said today on NPR that Iraqi terrorist leader Muqtada al-Sadr was a "legitimate voice" and it was wrong to shut down his newspaper. Then he retracted the "legitimate" part, saying:

Well, let me ... change the term 'legitimate.' It belongs to a voice — because he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment.

"Sort of a terrorist alignment?" Perhaps it's tolerance of diversity that is confusing Mr. Kerry.

He also doesn't really think that we should kill or even arrest Mr. al-Sadr. Well, at least he's taking a stand on something. For now. I predict that if the media ever notices Mr. Kerry's statements on this matter, he'll be changing that stand.

While I recognize and appreciate differences in political ideology, I don't understand the support for this man and his handlers.

UPDATE: Hey, The Washington Times noticed Kerry's firm, clear, sort of leadership. Here's the full quote:

"It's interesting to hear that when they shut a newspaper that belongs to a legitimate voice in Iraq and, well, let me change the term 'legitimate.' When they shut a newspaper that belongs to a voice, because he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment," Mr. Kerry said.

There's your context. Impressive ability to sort of see things clearly.

WAR ON PORN
I like a good knee jerk argument as much as the next guy, and am inclined to agree with the Stinging-Nettle's attack on Ashcroft's War on Porn. Musn't there be greater priorities?

But then I remembered the Cary, NC resident who got nabbed by Canadian computer forensic experts. Here's an except about the Canadian war on porn:

They are members of the child exploitation branch of the force's sex crimes unit, and last December, they managed to extract information enough from a collection of searing child-porn images posted on an international police website to identify the six-year-old's school.
...
Det. Sgt. Gillespie's rescued little girl, for example, was seen being beaten, urinated and defecated on, sodomized, forced into oral sex, degraded by having such slogans as "Kill me I'm a slut" written on her body and kept in a dog cage.

And here's something you can try. Type a female first name into a search engine and search for images. Remember to take off the safe search setting on the search engine. Now, that's what your kids can do. Maybe an FBI run war on porn isn't necessary to stop this easy availability, but there must be some solution.

And if this war on porn eliminates people like this Cary "man" from society, I'd say that's a good thing.

LET US RID OURSELVES OF THE FICTION. . .
"Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States" said Dick Cheney back in 1984 while proposing an import tax designed to prop up oil prices. Brian's Knee-Jerking Left Wing Blog sees a direct parallel to Kerry's desire to raise gas taxes at the pump by 50 cents.

Cheney was trying to prop up the domestic oil industry when world oil prices had fallen dramatically. The intent was to stabilize the oil economy so that producers, suppliers and others could make plans for the future...which is hard to do in a remarkably unstable oil market as we had at the time. Businesses cannot plan for research or for development when income and expenses cannot be reasonably estimated. A side effect of Cheney's plan would have been increased development of alternative energy sources, which get no attention when prices are low. Gore would have liked that.

This was also at a time when my father, who was employed by the oil industry, became a nomad for work, moving almost yearly because no oil company wanted to take on long term or significant projects because of the low oil prices. It was no longer cost effective to spend the money to develop new oil sources by, for instance, extracting oil from shale. In fact, my father was in Cheney's Wyoming at the time, which was hurt by the low oil prices, so Cheney was looking after his constituents.

So, it is more complex than a simple desire to raise gas taxes at the pump by 50 cents when oil prices weren't low as a method to simply reduce the national debt, as Kerry wanted. But it was also a bad plan that Cheney proposed, because it was nothing more than a subsidy, like those used now to prop up prices of sugar or tobacco (I guess Kerry is opposed to those too, eh?). The question for both Kerry and Cheney today is, do you still believe those were good ideas?

WHAT WAS KENNEDY'S VIETNAM?
"Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, and this country needs a new president," says Ted Kennedy. So, do you reckon he'd have voted against his brother in 1964? If not for Vietnam, how bout because of tax cuts? Or thumbing his nose at America's enemies without waiting for France's approval? Or maybe Teddy Kennedy is just continuing his descent into self-parody.

I can't wait until Teddy campaigns for his guy in North Carolina. Or Ohio. Or Florida. Or Pennsylvania.

COMPOSITE POLL IN THE WORKS
As I continue to tweak the methodology of the FEDERAL REVIEW COMPOSITE POLL™ and Electoral Vote Projection, reviewing it's week to week performance and trying to ensure there is no pro-Bush bias (unlike the rest of this site), I'll go ahead and report the numbers through today, April 5. Kerry leads by the barest of margins, 46.8 to 46.7. Calculating the electoral vote total takes into account the composite poll result, as well as a review of recent state-by-state polls. This results in electoral votes that breakdown as follows: Bush 198, Kerry 182 and Toss Ups 158. Toss Ups are those where the lead is less than 5%. Allocating the toss ups, gives us Bush 278, Kerry 260. I'll call that "too close to call".

Watch this space for a new page dedicated to the FEDERAL REVIEW COMPOSITE POLL™, complete with analysis.

UPDATE: A new Zogby poll (thanks Brian) is out and has been factored into the FEDERAL REVIEW COMPOSITE POLL™. We use the poll with Nader as an option, so the revised composite is Bush 46.6, Kerry 46.4, with electoral votes going to Bush 288, Kerry 250. Still a close one.