CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS DIDN’T ENDORSE KERRY AFTER ALL. Slate misinterpreted him. “If I could choose the person whose attitude toward the immediate foe was nearest to mine, I would pick Bush (and Blair),” he writes, but he goes on to complicate that by saying a number of other things that are, as usual, worth reading.

BOB KERREY’S DEFENSE OF JOHN KERRY ON “MEET THE PRESS.” Read the whole transcript. Overall, it was a bumbling performance, but let me point out two things he said. First:

One thing we know about Osama bin Laden, his whereabouts, he’s not in Iraq. By the way, for the American people, this guy is a mass murderer. You know, he’s Jeffrey Dahmer times a thousand. So nobody should listen to him with any sympathy. Nobody should listen to him and try to make their decision about who they’re going to vote for based upon what he says. We need to track this guy down and arrest him or kill him, one of the two.

This is the old view that bin Laden is a criminal — like Dahmer, but with more victims — who needs to be arrested. Of course, this chimes with recent statements of John Kerry’s.

Second:

MR. RUSSERT: George Bush by going into Iraq has removed Saddam Hussein, has eliminated hundreds of thousands of tons of munitions, and if John Kerry was president, Saddam Hussein may still very well be in power.

MR. KERREY: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: So how can he criticize the president for having munitions that are missing?

MR. KERREY: Well, the problem is 400 tons of HMX and RDX are now in the hands of terrorists and they weren’t before. That’s the central point. Look, I supported the war in Iraq and still do, still believe it was the right thing to do. But, boy, I’m telling you this president tested my support for that war when he stands the Iraqi army down and now has our military over there acting as a police force and border security. You can’t sustain that, Tim. It’s become unpopular.

I was in Galena, Ohio, down in the southeastern part of Ohio. They don’t give a damn about the war in Iraq. They’re terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions. That’s what’s bothering them and then wondering what we’re doing sending out Guardsmen over there to be a police force in Iraq.

I cried out in pain when Kerrey said “They don’t give a damn about the war in Iraq.” What a bunch of selfish louts Kerrey imagines the people of small town Ohio to be! In Galena, those people can’t even imagine the wider world. They’re all about “where’s my money .. where are my benefits?” I know how badly you want to win Ohio — really, Ohio is practically the whole game, now, isn’t it? — but in your eagerness to please them, you reveal your contempt for them!

UPDATE: (Posted by Glenn Reynolds) Several readers send emails like this one:

Mr. Kerrey needs to consult an atlas. Galena, Ohio is about 20 miles north of Columbus which is, the last time I checked, in the middle of the state. Also it is a bedroom community for Columbus with a lot of new homes starting in the $400,000 range.

p .s. I live in Columbus

I looked on MapQuest and, well, it’s true. It’s another “Lambert Field” gaffe.

ANOTHER UPDATE: (Althouse, here) How inconvenient that people who actually live in or around Galena actually exist! Did you not know that you were intended to be a mere rhetorical frill? Since when do figures of speech send email?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: (from Glenn Reynolds) Reader Barry Dauphin emails: “If the Dems can’t find Galena, how can they help find explosives in Iraq?”

AND ANOTHER UPDATE: (Althouse, again) I received an email suggesting that Kerrey had meant to say Gallia, which really is a place in southeastern Ohio. So I went back to my TiVo’d “Meet the Press,” and there really is no “n” in the town name he says. It’s “guh – LEE – uh” on the show, not “Galena” as in the transcript, so I don’t think this is a case of not getting the geography. I do stand by my original point, though, which is that he is assuming that people in a small town in Ohio are only concerned about their personal economic situation.

STILL MORE: (Still Althouse) More email came in from overnight, after I posted that “Gallia” update. I’m told it’s “GAL – yuh” — though I’m not positive I’m not being tricked into mispronouncing it so I’ll look like an outsider, which I am. One emailer, who called herself “a Buckeye” (and you know I’m a Badger), added: “Ohioans have strange ways of pronouncing towns, Versailles is ‘Ver-sales’ and Rio Grande is ‘Rye-oh Grande.’  It’s a secret way to weed out outsiders who speak with a forked tongue. … As a lifelong resident I can tell you we’re all united in one thing around here: we can’t wait for this election to be over so people like Bob Kerrey will stop pretending to care about anything other than our votes.”

THE DEEP ROOTS OF BUSH-HATING. Larry Ribstein overcomes his recent reluctance to blog about politics to remind us that the virulent hatred for President Bush, which during the campaign has found expression in criticism of the war in Iraq, was well in place before the war. He sets out a long quote from a Michael Moore email sent out on September 12, 2001. Moore wrote:

In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race — you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all. . . . .

Ah, I remember on the morning of September 11th being told by one of my colleagues that the attacks were a response to our withdrawal from the Durban conference on racism. Living in Madison for the last twenty years, I’d grown used to hearing strong left-wing opinion without verbally reacting, but that was the moment when I started to say no. It wasn’t a decision I made, but purely instinctive revulsion that this was someone’s first assessment of the events of that terrible day.

What the Iraq war has done, Ribstein suggests, is to give the extreme left an issue that works in discussions with more moderate voters. But I would note that the extreme left lost the candidate it wanted in the primaries. Even among the Democrats, a more moderate position was sought, and Kerry got the nomination. Kerry has made a mush of his positions over the months by trying to keep the extreme left segment of the voters, and though he lost me by doing this, I still am somewhat sympathetic to the problem he faced, which is pretty similar to the problem Bush faces on his extreme right. Like Ribstein, I hope Bush wins and I hope, if he does, the Bush haters settle down. But, by the same token, I hope that if Kerry wins, the Kerry haters settle down. There is difficult work ahead for whoever wins, and he’s going to need our support. I think reasonable, moderate, sensible people are in the great majority in this country, and passionate as things may feel as the election comes down to the wire, when the election is over, we’ll be paying a lot less attention to overheated windbags like Moore.

WELCOME BACK, GLENN. Thanks for letting us hang out over here while you were away, and for saying don’t go away yet. This is a bit like having your parents come back from vacation, after you’ve had the run of the house all week. Do you go to your room or stay downstairs? I have the first thing I want to say this morning, and I’m torn about where to put it, but I’ll go ahead and put it here. It’s about Walter Cronkite on “Larry King Live” last night:

KING: Now, bin Laden, of course, could help Bush in that it reminds people of a terror issue in which he runs strong. It also could hurt Bush in that reminds people he’s still alive. So this could be a double edged sword, right?

CRONKITE: Indeed. Indeed. And the thing that in bringing this threat to us, there is almost, in the fact that he dressed well, that he looked well, he was clean shaven, nearly clean shaven as those folks get. It seemed almost, to me, that he wanted to enter into negotiations, that he was really up — he wants to move into a leadership role in international affairs instead of the role of a brigand. And he spoke calmly about this thing. The threat was there, no question about it. He’s delivering a warning to us, no question about that. And certainly, I don’t think there’s any reason to feel that we can take him to our bosom just because this speech at all. He’s perfectly capable of blowing us up.

Yes, we’ll need some more calm talk from the well-groomed — for him! — old rogue before we clasp him in our arms, won’t we? Thanks, Walter. And considering that OBL has a full beard down to his chest, am I to assume you were cracking an ethnic joke when you said “clean shaven, nearly clean shaven as those folks get”?

UPDATE: Several people have emailed me about this part of the Cronkite interview:

So now the question is basically right now, how will this affect the election? And I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I’m a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing. The advantage to the Republican side is to get rid of, as a principal subject of the campaigns right now, get rid of the whole problem of the al Qaqaa explosive dump. Right now, that, the last couple of days, has, I think, upset the Republican campaign.

I disagree with people who are saying Cronkite is nuts. I think he was joking. The point is, the bin Laden tape is so helpful to Bush that it is as if Bush partisans are behind it.

HALLOWEEN MISCHIEF OF THE POLITICAL KIND. Yeah.

JEALOUS? Do you think there’s any connection between Osama Bin Laden’s releasing a new videotape after all these years and that asinine “Assam the American” tape of a few days ago? Was Osama jealous? Hey, I want to be the scary terrorist guy who swings the election!

My advice to Americans: Vote for whoever you would have voted for anyway!

CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST IS RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL, according to this report, which quotes Justice Clarence Thomas saying he expects the Chief back “as unforgiving as ever,” the Court being “a place where people work as if they’re paid by the hour.”

A NEW BIN LADEN VIDEO AIRS ON AL-JAZEERA. But you can’t tell from this early report whether there was any material in his statement proving it is a recently made video. There’s also nothing about how sickly he looked.

UPDATE: Now, we have a longer story complete with a screen-grab photo showing OBL — or someone who looks like him — holding up his index finger in lesson-giving style. There is a mention of John Kerry as well as George Bush, which provides some basis for guessing when the tape was made.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Is this an OBL effect?

THE AFTERMATH OF THE KERRY VISIT TO MADISON. You might be picturing a hot political environment here in Madison today, but you would be wrong. I just walked down Bascom Hill, through the Library Mall, and up State Street, and I saw no political activity whatsoever. I started looking even for buttons and stickers and saw just one backpack with a Kerry sticker. There are lots of young people here today. For one thing, the weather is very warm, in the 70s, and people are out and about in sandals and tank tops. For another thing, it’s the big Halloween weekend, which is a major event drawing many people to Madison. I don’t hear people talking about politics on the street or in the restaurants and cafés. Well, for that matter, even at the rally yesterday, I didn’t hear the kids in the crowd talking about politics. The streets are full of young people today, but I think they are in a Halloween-partying frame of mind. To me, the college kids don’t seem that political.

I’m blogging this in a restaurant, where I just opened a fortune cookie that reads: “Be patient, you will hear comforting news.” I’m sitting at a table by the second floor windows, and I’m just starting to see some costumes mixed in with the street clothes. Have fun kids! This may be the most important Halloween of your lifetime. And don’t break anything!

DO I HAVE TO DRAW YOU A PICTURE? IMAO draws you a whole set of pictures to explain who to vote for. Alternatively, there’s this audio.

TWO BUSHBABIES. Here and here.

UPDATE: I’ve removed two updates with bad links. Sorry. Hope that didn’t violate any Instapundit standards and practice!

BUTTONS. Megan and Michael aren’t here yet, and I’ve got to get my notes together for my CivPro2 class, which means I’ve got to start settling my mind around the topic of supplemental jurisdiction. So let me leave this for you, dear Instapundit readers. It’s a collection of buttons displayed in the window of a shop on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin:

DEALING WITH THAT DRAFT RUMOR. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld writes:

To my knowledge, in the time I have served as secretary of Defense, the idea of reinstating draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered, or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration.

But are the people who believe the rumor about the draft going to believe Rumsfeld? I’d like to think people are getting savvier about political manipulation all the time. But I guess then you have to be skeptical of Rumsfeld as well as the people who are selling the draft rumor. Who knows what force drives people down one decisional path or another? I’m glad no one really knows how people decide who and what to believe. It make it harder to manipulate them. That the human mind is a mystery is one of the great safeguards of democracy.

UPDATE: Or is the mystery about to be unlocked?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Several people emailed me a link to this lame Tom Harkin piece, aimed at Minnesota students. But this is the email-of-the-day on the draft, I think:

Short of a hot WWIV in which our borders are overrun with hordes of enemy combatants, there will be no draft and conscription of “cannon fodder”! My husband works very high-level force reconfiguration issues for the Army and I can PROMISE you there is no talk of a military draft. A draft is the last thing our professional armed forces need and want. Draftees are a tremendous drag on the system, training and discipline issues are just for starters, and the military has studied for years how important domestic political goodwill is essential for supporting military ops and campaigns. Drafting unqualified and unhappy warm bodies into the military would degrade our readiness to a tragic degree, and our military from the top brass down to Privates knows this. Viscerally. Remember ‘Nam?

Today, we have the best armed forces in the solar system, with motivated, highly qualified, and super competent personnel. Yes, they are stretched in our current engagements, but not to the breaking point. Redeployments, force reconfigurations and hardware systems coming on line will alleviate and strengthen any strain. Also, re-enlistment rates are quite good. The only people “asking” for a draft are liberal Democrat scaremongers in Congress who have cravenly written up some draft bills that are essentially dead but which are being used to trick our young folk into believing they are at risk of being conscripted. The effect of what they are doing is also to treat even voluntary service as if it were something to be avoided. Dems don’t have to say this directly, only to raise the specter of military time as being one of privation and death.

There is no equivalency between Rumsfeld’s denial about the draft and authoritative word on this issue and that of unethical Democrat partisans using cheap fear tactics in an important election. This situation alone, their unbelievably irresponsible and dishonest abuse of our military and its planners, would compel me never to put Kerry and his DNC in charge of our armed forces. They have gone and are going a lie too far. They don’t care the damage they do to military morale or to citizens’ trust in our military and their policy. And they’re doing this while our amazing men and women are in harm’s way on our account and while they are accomplishing all sorts of “progressive” missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, such as allowing for democratic elections and more civil liberties and building infrastructure in countries that had suffered under regimes deadly dangerous to us and to their own people.

Oh, I forgot. “Progressive” these days doesn’t mean in support of liberation, democracy, security and prosperity for those living under oppressors and madmen opposed to the US. My bad!

TWO STRATEGIES AT THE KERRY RALLY IN MADISON YESTERDAY, as reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. First, campaign workers swirled through the crowd (I saw them) asking who has a cell phone.

Thousands of cards asking people to call and urge others to vote for Kerry were passed out. The cards included a script that people could read, and the crowd was asked to make the rally “the biggest phone bank in political history.” But not many people appeared to be making calls.

This is an interesting study in human behavior. I think people doing a scripted phone call don’t like to be standing around in public being seen and heard. I’m not surprised people weren’t eager to do this. I can also see why campaign people got fired up thinking it would be great: all those kids have cell phones … what if they all called from the big rally? Some high tech ideas just don’t take off. And I wonder if the campaign people realize how sick of phone calls from them at least this person of Wisconsin is.

Here’s the second strategy:

People … were urged to go from the rally to the nearby Madison city clerk’s office to vote early. However, no major surge of people appeared to be doing that. Early and absentee voting has been brisk in Madison and elsewhere in the state. The clerk’s office said it would stay open until 8 p.m. Thursday to accommodate voters.

So that one wasn’t so popular either? I guess part of the idea of early voting is to avoid lines, so when 80,000 people are urged to go over and vote, you’ve really lost the whole attraction. And remember, the crowd was urged to show up at 10 a.m. and the rally ended around 2 in the afternoon. Time to trudge over to another downtown location and stand around. No, maybe time to go get something to eat or do some studying. Yesterday was actually a big mid-term exam day here on the UW campus.

UPDATE: According to this report, fewer people showed up to vote in City Hall yesterday than came in the previous day.

MORE DRINK-RED-WINE ADVICE. Fine, I’m always open to that suggestion. Apparently, white wine makes it worse, and rosé is like running in place. Ah! What the hell? Don’t even go to the link. Just drink red wine. Scientists say it’s good for you. And get on with life. What’s to object to?

THE O’REILLY SETTLEMENT. Beldar has some intriguing speculations.

“BRUCE COME UP FOR A BEER.” So read a sign some UW students hung out on their balcony during the big Kerry/Springsteen rally here in Madison today. And he did drop in, the L.A. Times reports. Punchline: “When asked to name their favorite Springsteen song, the young women looked at each other blankly and dissolved into embarrassed laughter.”

Yesterday, I wrote about a plan, reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for using schoolchildren in a get-out-the-vote effort. Today, the MJS reports that the Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos has suspended the program after the many critical phone calls that came in after the MJS printed its story yesterday.

The program was a project of the Wisconsin Citizen Action Fund, whose parent organization has endorsed Kerry. The group’s co-executive director Larry Marx has this to say:

The students are bearing the brunt of a decision based on political pressure that is being brought on the district … This is a project that the district should be proud of. It is outrageous that partisan pressure is brought to bear that is making kids suffer.

Glad to see Marx is such a staunch opponent of political pressure! And that he’s so concerned about the suffering of children who might have experienced the joys of going door-to-door and now will be imprisoned in those dreary classrooms with their books and teachers. At least in Racine and Madison the program continues apace.

ABOUT THAT TAPE. I’ve got to disagree with my co-guestbloggers. Megan and Michael have both said ABC ought to run the tape it has of a hooded man mouthing al Qaeda commonplaces like “it’s your turn to die” and “the streets will run with blood.” That tape is a big nothing. Why should the newsmedia run al Qaeda’s lame advertisements?

UPDATE: I should note that Megan is saying that “if ABC is planning to air this tape at all, it should air it now; there’s no excuse for waiting.” I think there is some excuse for delaying it. The idea would be that it is newsworthy, but that it should not be sprung at the last minute where it can’t be examined and responded to and where it will get way more attention than it deserves.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I saw the portions of the tape that were shown tonight on “Special Report With Brit Hume,” and I got a good laugh at this dumb American jawing his headwrap up and down and flailing his fingers at the camera. I’m willing to believe this clown is dangerous, but he’s nothing special. Anyone can swaddle his cranium in a checkered scarf and make general threats that sound like things we’ve heard before. What difference does it make? We already know there are people who want to kill us. There’s nothing about what I’m seeing here that has anything to do with the difference between idle threats and imminent threats. You’d have to be a fool to change your vote one way or the other based on this!

A MADISON SIDEWALK STENCIL. Found on Bascom Hill, near the Law School:

UPDATE: This emailer has definitely thought more deeply about the meaning of the stencil than I did:

Okay, maybe it’s me: I’m middle-aged and doubtless ossified (or “dirigiste” if I grok Glenn’s delightful turn of phrase in his latest Guardian column), after all. But I really don’t get it. Or I get it, but in more than one way. Or that I don’t get why someone would go to the trouble to produce sucky minimalist agitprop which provides no blindingly obvious and instant recognition, and thus defeats the whole raison of StencilPolitik (at least for the dirigiste among us).

So, is capitalism the gun-guy, and “we” are the victim? Or is it that there is no you-we, and the idea is capitalism means the robbery of nameless, faceless innocents by nameless, faceless guilties? Or that “we”, as the proletarian-intellectual solidarity movement of the PR of Madison, have the Gun Of The Dialectic pointed at the blank, bourgeois head of capitalism? Or that, a la “Fight Club”, fringe Young Republicans are carrying out a secret recruiting drive under the very noses of Badger mainstream by posting cryptic, mocking communiqués known but to those whom they seek? ( “First rule of Madison Capitalist Pig Club; nobody talks about Madison Capitalist Pig Club .”) Please, reveal all.

Man, I so can’t reveal all I didn’t even realize when I posted this how less-than-all I understood about this inscrutable stencil. I think I’m just charmed by inscrutability (like that “Plants Can’t Vote” sign, which an emailer is bringing me down by saying it’s crushingly obviously about medical marijuana). But I can reveal this: I absolutely love the movie “Fight Club.” And wasn’t 1999 a great movie year? I had so much hope then about how cool movies were, and what happened?

PICTURE THAT MOST EXEMPLIFIES THE MOOD OF THE CROWD at the Kerry rally in Madison today:

A Madison point of view:

A glimpse of the candidate:

UPDATE: Lots more pictures at my regular blog.

ANOTHER UPDATE: That “Plants Can’t Vote” sign is drawing a lot of email. One reader wrote:

I dunno…  At my place, Rose, Iris, Basil, Ivy, Petunia, Rosemary and Leland are all wanting to register.  As much as their votes for a beautiful Bush would please me, I’m going to lock the garden gate on Tuesday.  Cheating’s not right, and they’ll just have to wait for plants rights to catch on in our animal based society.  I just wish that certain unscrupulous voter registration activists/profiteers felt the same way.

Another wrote:

I don’t get it. Did Kerry come our for legalizing pot or something? Or is it that she was trying to make a point about the environment, but a marijuana leaf was the only handy example of a plant when poster-making time arrived? I mean, you’d think an environmentalist might have a fern, or an aloe plant, or something like that in her dorm room, or might at least be able to recall the appearance of the leaf of one plant besides marijuana.

That’s what I love about it.

ANOTHER “PLANTS CAN’T VOTE” UPDATE: I like this email:

Have you read “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan? To compress an excellent book into one sentence, his theme is that those plants we have domesticated beyond all recognition have actually, in a sense, used us — our peculiar human desires and biological compulsions — to advance their own species far beyond what could be achieved in nature. One of the four plants on which Pollan focuses is — you guessed it — marijuana.

From this perspective, the idea that humans might be compelled by their marijuana plants to vote a certain way is slightly chilling.

I haven’t read the book (yet), but I used Amazon’s “Look Inside The Book” and found these results for “marijuana.” Fascinating! I guess I’m completely ready to read a book that contains the question “How do you tell when a jaguar is hallucinating?” — which was the first thing I read when I clicked on a “results” page.

BACK FROM THE BIG KERRY/SPRINGSTEEN RALLY IN MADISON. If you’re wondering where I’ve been all day, well, I had to teach at 11, and then “I busted out of class” and made my way over to the Capitol Square to see if I could catch some of the big Kerry rally. How close could I get? The gates opened at 10. I arrived close to 12:30 and there was a huge crowd, so I couldn’t tell how much had already gone on. I talked to a young guy who said all that’s happened so far is that Dave Grohl came out at 12:05 and sang a couple songs, accompanying himself on guitar. I’m told he was “pretty good.” At that point, the loudspeakers were playing Starship-type 80s rock, and it was none too entertaining. I took some pictures and started to walk away, but after a few blocks, I saw a path down a side street to walk in much closer, so I went back and got some more pictures. I turned to walk away again, but then I heard the announcement that Governor Doyle and Bruce Springsteen were about to come on stage. So I put up with Doyle’s groan-inducing speech based on on Springsteen song titles (“John Kerry was born in the USA …”). Then Bruce came out with his accoustic guitar and sang two songs, one of which was “No Surrender.” He proceeded to give a little speech that went like this:

mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble health care mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble folks mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble people mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble John Kerry mumble mumble mumble

All right, enough of that. I walked away again, heading back toward the Law School, and, I saw another nice opening, down a pretty, leafy street, that would take me right up to the back of the stage, so I walked back just as John Kerry was coming out and beginning his speech. Despite the crowd of 80,000 (to take Governor Doyle’s number as the fact), which packed the streets for blocks, I got within 40 feet of John Kerry and was able to photograph him. There was really no visible security presence — aside from a perimeter of loosely hinged-together metal gates and a handful of Madison police lolling about at the road blocks. But the crowd was exceedingly mellow. The people didn’t cheer or chant much. There was no heckling of any kind. No one bothered the few people who held up Bush/Cheney signs. There were tons of students, assorted other folks, and a few Madison characters — and many of them had been standing around for four hours. The speech itself you already know, so there’s nothing to report there. The most notable thing to me about the live experience was how entirely pacific that huge sea of people was.

I’ll have some photos soon.

UPDATE: Bruce seems to share my distaste for the Gov. Doyle’s speech: “I think this will be the governor’s last experience as my opening act.”

HEY, DID YOU JUST COME OVER HERE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES to check out the “hearty praise of the Administration” dished out — with “vitriol”! –for a “fervent readership”? Thanks for linking, New York Times, and I know I’m just a humble guestblogger — my real home is over here — but that doesn’t sound like a very apt description of Glenn’s writings. Anyway, the linked article is about the tradition of Friday catblogging, so if you didn’t just come here from there, you might want to go over there and read about the warm, fuzzy alternative to blogging about politics. But, really, when is MSM going to notice how sound and rational much of the political blogging is?

ACCOMMODATING THE VOTERS. According to the Badger Herald, lots of folks from Illinois will be attending the big rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol Square, where Bruce Springsteen will play some songs and appear alongside John Kerry. The crowd, predicted to be 60,000, will be encouraged to go right over to City Hall (a block away) and vote immediately, and City Hall is going to stay open until 8 p.m. tonight to accommodate the crowd. As I’ve written here, no I.D. is required to vote absentee at City Hall. Knowing that people are flowing in from Illinois, I’m feeling especially nervous about voter fraud today. If the election in the end comes down to a fight over Wisconsin’s electoral votes, that pile of absentee ballots here is going to be the subject of a huge fight, don’t you think?

UPDATE: Chris aptly notes:

You should note that, while I was not asked for my ID when I voted, you would need to show ID if you were not registered to vote. ID is required for registration but not for the actual voting. The risk of people from Illinois voting, therefore, doesn’t seem to be the main concern.

Right. They’d have to be impersonating someone in Wisconsin.

By the way, Slate has a piece today about people double voting. Bottom line:

For all the new concern about double voting, … the odds of getting caught remain minuscule. Comparing voter databases county by county and state by state is a needle-in-haystack undertaking, even with the aid of computers. Why not vote twice then? Michael Moore probably shouldn’t do it. But you probably could.

WHAT WILLIAM SAFIRE SAID ABOUT THE AL QAQAA STORY last night on the Larry King Show:

Let me … see if I can move the story of this story al Qa Qaa forward a little bit.

We now know from CBS’s admission that CBS planned to broadcast this story, which we call in journalism, a keeper, one that’s kept for its greatest impact. They planned to broadcast it next Sunday night, 36 hours before the polls opened. That is known as a roar back. That’s a last-minute, unanswerable story, and it would have been all over the papers Tuesday morning as people went to the polls. Now, I think that’s scandalous.

What happened, because “The New York Times” was working with CBS on the story, and I don’t work on the news side of the “Times” at all, so I’m speculating, the “Times,” either — probably from a combination of ethical and competitive standards decided, no, we’re not going to hold this story. We’re going to go with it now. And they went with it on Monday. And — but just think for a minute, if the plan had gone ahead, we wouldn’t have had this debate this week where it’s possible we could shoot some holes in this story or focus on the attack on the integrity of the examination by the troops that were there.

And instead, we would have had a last-minute manipulation of the election.

That is to say, the Times deserves credit for specifically rejecting the tactic that CBS going to use. I love the phrase “a combination of ethical and competitive standards.” I wrote about the ethics/competition conundrum here two days ago and said I thought the competition between news outlets “might work better than ethics to protect us from outrageous withholding of stories for the purpose of helping a favored candidate.” It’s an old First Amendment tradition to see the competition among speakers as a way to produce good speech. For a newspaper, adhering to strong journalistic ethics is a good business move, and I’m grateful for that. It would be quite disturbing to have to rely on pure ethics!

UPDATE: WaPo’s Howard Kurtz has a much less NYT-flattering version of the story:

On Sunday night, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told Jeff Fager, executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” that the story they had been jointly pursuing on missing Iraqi ammunition was starting to leak on the Internet.

“You know what? We’re going to have to run it Monday,” Keller said.

I guess a little “blog triumphalism” is in order then! And thanks to Soccer Dad for the tip.

ANOTHER UPDATE: An emailer finds it “disturbing that there’s this special vocabulary of manipulative techniques (‘keeper,’ ‘roar back’).” Yes, doesn’t the existence of special insider jargon suggest the practice is common?

AND YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Miller notes the term is actually roorback not “roar back” and explains the meaning and origin of the term.

AND: Here’s a detailed historical description of the Roorback Hoax of 1844.