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[However, Kennedy adjusted the numbers to account for undecided black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and said the runoff election currently stands in Blanco's favor. With that adjustment, Blanco would get 53 percent of the vote, compared to Jindal's 47 percent]
Republican Primary Trial Heat (among Republican voters): Cecil Underwood 30% Robin Capehart 8% Sarah Minear 8% Dan Moore 3% Monty Warner 3% Doug McKinney 2% Other 3% Undecided 43%
Democratic Primary Trial Heat (among Democratic voters): Joe Manchin 46% Darrell McGraw 11% John Perdue 5% Jim Humphreys 4% Lloyd Jackson 3% Jim Lees 3% Spike Maynard 2% Robin Davis 2% Other 1% Undecided 25%
Below are two excerpts from speeches given by Colin Powell. The first in 2001, in which he asserts Iraq could not possibly have weapons of mass destruction, and the second in 2003, two years later, asserting that Iraq had plenty of weapons of mass destruction.
And now we know they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction, just like Colin said in 2001.
Did Colin Powell lie to the U.S. and the U.N.? Of course he did!
Secretary Colin L. Powell Cairo, Egypt (Ittihadiya Palace) February 24, 2001
"...the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue."
"Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction."
"Numerous human sources tell us that the Iraqis are moving not just documents and hard drives, but weapons of mass destruction, to keep them from being found by inspectors."
"We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities."
"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he's determined to make more."
George W. Bush is in the worst political trouble of his presidency, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday night. Bush's approval rating now stands at 49 percent, the lowest point of his tenure. Whether Democrats will be able to exploit Bush's woes is unknown, since they are four months away from their first primary, but party activists say they are ever more determined to find the candidate who can go toe to toe with Bush in a debate and reduce his standing to political rubble.
With only 15 months until the general election, the president and his political strategists have their work cut out for them, especially in assuring skittish voters that his plan to stabilize Iraq will work. And, with nearly 9 million Americans unemployed, Bush would also benefit from stronger signs of an economic recovery.
In a new sign of the risks still facing Bush and the economy, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countriesmade a surprise moveWednesday to cut output ahead of the peak winter heating demand season, pushing the price of oil higher.
Ironically, some Bush administration officials had said a few months ago that Iraq would be able to pay for much of the cost of its reconstruction by selling its own oil on world markets.
Sabotage and other problems have kept Iraqi oil production far below its capacity -- saddling the U.S. taxpayer with the burden of paying for Iraqi reconstruction.
On Wednesday, Defense SecretaryDonald Rumsfeld faced hostile questionsfrom Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee as he urged Congress to approve the $87 billion Bush is seeking to pay for Iraqi occupation and rebuilding.
Presented in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll with various options for raising the money to pay for the Iraqi project, 56 percent of respondents said they'd opt for repealing the portion of the tax cuts that Congress passed last May that benefits upper-income taxpayers.
The survey, conducted by pollsters Peter Hart and Bob Teeter, posed questions to 1,007 adults from Saturday through Monday. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percent.
REPEAL THE TAX CUTS
But it is hard to imagine that GOP congressional leaders would ever allow a bill to rescind the upper-income tax cuts to come to a vote.
And for Bush to agree to repeal of any portion of the tax cuts is unthinkable. Politically it would be futile: It would gain him no credit among those voters who are already inclined to boot him out of office. Worse still, it would alienate the core Republican loyalists whose votes he must have in order to win the election.
In other questions from the poll released Wednesday night, 52 percent disapproved of Bush's handling of the economy, his highest disapproval rating ever and the first time it has been above 50 percent. And while 60 percent approve of Bush's handling of the war on terrorism, it's his lowest rating since the question was first asked in April 2002.
Bush might take heart from the thought that previous presidents have been in far worse political jams:
At the start of 1948, only 41 percent of Gallup Poll respondents said they would vote for President Harry Truman. He ended up winning the election with 49 percent of the popular vote and carried 28 states.
At the start of 1980, only 31 percent of Gallup respondents said they'd vote for Republican Ronald Reagan. On Election Day, he crushed incumbent President Carter in a historic landslide.
Many observers wrote off President Clinton as "irrelevant" in early 1995 after Republicans had won control of the House and Senate. Clinton easily defeated Republican challenger Bob Dole to win a second term.
And unlike other recent Republican presidents, Bush at least need not cope with an insurgent candidacy from within GOP ranks. In the early months of 1976, it looked as if President Gerald Ford would be rejected by his own party in favor of Reagan. Ford barely survived the primaries.
In 1992, George W. Bush's father had to stamp out a neo-populist brushfire started by insurgent Patrick Buchanan.
Bush ultimately lost the 1992 election to Clinton, but his son, the current occupant of the White House, was there during that miserable year for Republicans. The younger Bush saw firsthand how his father's abandonment of the "read my lips" pledge to impose no new taxes destroyed his standing among GOP conservatives.
Bush's political fortunes depend partly on the image the undecided voters have of him.
Among Democratic activists, when a reporter asks about Bush the emotions one hears expressed are a kind of bewildered anger, even rage. Bush makes Democrats' blood boil as Richard Nixon did 30 years ago.
But among swing voters, the danger point for Bush would be if they felt contempt, if they regarded him as incompetent.
The Democrats' appetite to defeat Bush has been whetted by Gallup poll data published this week showing that if the election were held today Bush would lose to either retired Gen. Wesley Clark or to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.
ELECTORAL VOTE STRATEGY At this point, the 2004 election seems to shape up as a reprise of the 2000 election, in which the electorate was so narrowly divided.
Bush's survival ultimately depends less on national poll data and more on electoral vote strategy that targets specific states.
Since becoming president, Bush has made 22 visits to Pennsylvania, a state he lost to Al Gore by 4 percentage points.
The state has 21 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Its socially conservative older voters are a prime target for GOP strategists. Of all 50 states, Pennsylvania has the second highest percentage of people over age 65 -- all the more reason why GOP strategists would like to see a new prescription drug benefit for seniors on the president's desk soon. - Source
No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by the group looking for them, according to a Bush administration source who has spoken to the BBC.
This will be the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group's interim report, the source told the presenter of BBC television's Daily Politics show, Andrew Neil.
Downing Street branded the story "speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report".
Mr Neil said the draft report - which the source said is due to be published next month - concludes that it is highly unlikely that weapons of mass destruction were shipped out of the country to places like Syria before the US-led war on Iraq.
It will also say that Saddam Hussein mounted a huge programme to deceive and hinder the work of United Nations weapons inspectors, he said.
Mr Neil said that according to the source, the report will say its inspectors have not even unearthed "minute amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material".
They have also not uncovered any laboratories involved in deploying weapons of mass destruction and no delivery systems for the weapons.
But, Mr Neil added, the report would publish computer programmes, files, pictures and paperwork which it says shows that Saddam Hussein's regime was attempting to develop a weapons of mass destruction programme.
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told the Reuters news agency he expected the report would "reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out".
Reuters also quoted a senior US official as saying the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) was expected to report finding "documentary evidence" that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programmes.
"Whether they will find or disclose anything on the weapons themselves, I doubt," said the official.
'Savage blow'
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: "This is speculation on an as yet unpublished report.
"I await the report eagerly from Mr Kay (head of the survey group), as does the international community."
Mr Straw argued that the whole international community had agreed Iraq's weapons programmes had posed - the issue had been what to do about it.
People did not need the ISG report for evidence of that threat, he said. It was already shown in volumes of reports from UN inspectors.
A Number 10 spokesman said "we don't have this text", but asked if the prime minister had seem the report, remarked: "We are not going into details of process."
Mr Neil, a former editor of the Sunday Times, stressed he had not seen the draft report, and was reporting what a single source had said its findings were likely to be.
He said the report was still to be finalised and could undergo some changes, but the source had been told the content of some key passages which were not expected to be substantively altered.
Former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Portillo said if these details of the report were true, it would be a "savage blow" to the prime minister.
'Fake facilities'
The inspectors have uncovered no evidence that any weapons were actually built in the immediate years before the war, the leak of the report suggests.
It is alleged that Saddam Hussein's programme of deception involved fake facilities and infrastructure to deceive and hinder the work of UN weapons inspectors.
Documents have been uncovered showing weapons facilities were concealed as commercial buildings, the report is likely to say.
The ISG took over the job of finding WMD from the US military in June.
The survey group, led by David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector and now a special adviser to the CIA, is a largely US operation, although it includes some British and Australian staff.
Its 1,400 personnel are made up of scientists, military and intelligence experts, and its work is shrouded in secrecy.
Its focus is intelligence, using documents and interviews with Iraqi scientists to build up a picture of the secret world of Iraq's weapons programmes.
The survey group has been under pressure to prove the Bush administration's case that Iraq's weapons posed a significant threat.
Gary Samor, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, recently told the BBC that UN inspection teams should have been sent back into Iraq as there would be much scepticism about the ISG's findings. - Source
Southern Methodist University shut down a bake sale Wednesday in which cookies were offered for sale at different prices, depending on the buyer's race or gender.
The sale was organized by the Young Conservatives of Texas, who said it was intended as a protest of affirmative action.
A sign said white males had to pay $1 for a cookie. The price was 75 cents for white women, 50 cents for Hispanics and 25 cents for blacks.
Members of the conservative group said they meant no offense and were only trying to protest the use of race or gender as a factor in college admissions.
Similar sales have been held by College Republican chapters at colleges in at least five other states since February.
A black student filed a complaint with SMU, saying the sale was offensive. SMU officials said they halted the event after 45 minutes because it created a potentially unsafe situation.
"This was not an issue about free speech," Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center, said in a story for Thursday's edition of The Dallas Morning News. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created."
The sale drew a crowd outside the student center and several students engaged in a shouting match, Moore said.
David C. Rushing, 23, a law student and chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas at SMU and for the state, said the event didn't get out of hand. At most, a dozen students gathered around the table of cookies and Rice Krispies treats, he said.
"We copied what's been done at multiple campuses around the country to illustrate our opinion of affirmative action and how we think it's unfair," he said.
Matt Houston, a 19-year-old sophomore, called the group's price list offensive.
"My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students," said Houston, who is black. "They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization."
The group sold three cookies during its protest, raising $1.50.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled universities could use race as a factor in admissions under limited conditions. In Texas, universities had been banned from using race as a factor under a 1996 decision by a lower court. - Source
DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS has brandished lawyers' threats to take down that pesky citizens activist website blackboxvoting.org. It seems they charged copyright infringement regarding materials on other websites that blackboxvoting.org merely linked to, despite such links having been ruled legal by appellate courts in other instances.
This appears to be a public relations gaffe of staggering proportions on Diebold's part. It's not like bunging the terms "Diebold election fraud" into Google brings up only that blackboxvoting.org site -- just it and about 1,889 other hits, including a recent story at Salon, another at Wired, and two pieces here at the INQUIRER, as well as articles in major news publications. What can they be thinking? - Source
After weeks of Democratic assaults that President Bush was a nitwit for declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq during his May 1 landing and victory speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the White House is bidding to set the story straight. The issue should be a simple one: Bush never uttered those words. "The president," argues communications boss Dan Bartlett, "said exactly the opposite: The mission continues." But Bush stood under a banner declaring "mission accomplished." Why? Bartlett says that the Lincoln's captain had the banner made up to thank his crew for the longest-ever carrier tour, not to declare the war over. "It is something the troops are really proud of," says Bartlett. "Of course they can hang the banner." But the picture was all the Demos needed. "On TV," he says, "they never play the [sound] bite of the president, they just show the image with the banner." Democratic polls show that the public buys their spin, which doesn't really surprise Bartlett. "Look, perception becomes reality," he says. "But the facts don't back it up." - Source
All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.
Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.
It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.
The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. We had sources that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator told the world he did not have. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.
Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.
Saddam Hussein was determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. We knew he'd been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believed he had, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. The British government learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources told us that he had attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear-weapons production. When the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied-finally denied access, a report came out of the [International Atomic Energy Agency] that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I didn't know what more evidence we needed.
Facing clear evidence of peril, we could not wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The Iraqi dictator could not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons. Inspections would not work. We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. The burden was on those people who thought he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they were.
We waged a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we fought it, and we prevailed. We fought them and imposed our will on them and we captured or, if necessary, killed them until we had imposed law and order. The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking. Watching them, one could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great support from everywhere.
The people of Iraq knew that every effort was made to spare innocent life, and to help Iraq recover from three decades of totalitarian rule. And plans were in place to provide Iraqis with massive amounts of food, as well as medicine and other essential supplies. The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.
The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve: a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We do not leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and parliaments. We don't take our force and go around the world and try to take other people's real estate or other people's resources, their oil. We never have and we never will.
The United States was not interested in the oil in that region. We were intent on ensuring that Iraq's oil resources remained under national Iraqi control, with the proceeds made available to support Iraqis in all parts of the country. The oil fields belonged to the people of Iraq, the government of Iraq, all of Iraq. We estimated that the potential income to the Iraqi people as a result of their oil could be somewhere in the $20 [billion] to $30 billion a year [range], and obviously, that would be money that would be used for their well-being. In other words, all of Iraq's oil belonged to all the people of Iraq.
We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.
We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn't want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We've tried every other means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush.
It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be attributed to poor planning. The number of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region dropped as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. There is a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain--he is no longer a threat to the free world, and the people of Iraq are free. There's no doubt in my mind when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind. - Source
George W. Bush went to the United Nations, with his hat definitely not in his hand. (As we know, he prefers the jauntier flight-helmet-tucked-under-the-arm look.)
This president doesn't beg for help, after all. Even when he asks, it doesn't sound much like the way your mother taught you to do it.
No one expected him to admit any mistakes - hey, we still call 'em freedom fries, dammit - but there might have been something about bygones being bygones. Or, at minimum, as a show of solidarity and just to prove he can, Bush could have used "multi" and "lateral" in the same sentence. Hey, I just did it.
The last time Bush showed up at the United Nations, looking for a little wartime backing, he called the place irrelevant.
This time, when he needs money and troops and possibly even some non-superpower expertise, he didn't exactly come on like the Jerry Lewis telethon.
A headline in Slate, the online magazine, summed up Bush's U.N. appeal nicely: Bush to World, Drop Dead!
The U.N. speech was strange on so many levels, beginning with the central argument - that he was right all along on every count.
That meant Bush had to fall back, once again, on weapons of mass destruction as the rationale for war. This is going to upset a few people, but take a look at today's paper. Look for the story on the long-anticipated report on said weapons. Ask yourself why he'd bring this up.
The New York Times story says that, so far, America has found approximately no nuclear weapons, no chemical weapons, no biological weapons. That leaves only, I guess, the unmanned drone. Somewhere, Hans Blix is smiling.
Just a few weeks ago, we were hearing that this report would be Bush's September surprise. Now the surprise is that, with no surprise, Bush is still out there, fighting the last war, still trying to convince the crowd that Saddam was prepared to hand off these weapons to terrorists. At least there's one mystery solved. Now we know why Tony Blair stayed home.
And yes, Bush once again was accusing Saddam Hussein of "cultivating" terrorists, even though he had just finally admitted Saddam had no connection to 9-11. As I listened to Bush talk, I kept checking the calendar. Did someone hand him the pre-war speech?
To show you how bad things were, Jacques Chirac and his timetable - timed, I'd guess, just to annoy his friend in Washington - got a bigger hand than Bush.
Some people were surprised that in asking countries to pony up either money or troops, Bush didn't feel the need to offer any details as to what role the U.N. might play in Iraq or even how power might eventually be transferred to the Iraqis. All this apparently is on a need-to-know basis, and only Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney need to know.
No wonder the reception was so chilly. And, yes, I saw that Bush and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder were making nice a day later. Let me know how many troops and how much money the Germans offer up and then we'll talk.
But anyone surprised by the speech must not have read Bob Woodward's Bush at War, in which he quoted Bush as saying (OK, in context of Cabinet meetings, but still): "I'm the commander. See, I don't have to explain why I say things . . . Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
And yet, if you trust the polls, it isn't just Ted Kennedy who wants an explanation. Or Howard Dean. Or Kofi Annan.
In the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, it shows that there are a lot of people looking for an explanation. Only 50 percent said they thought the war in Iraq was worthwhile, while 48 percent said it wasn't. This is startling, given that support for the war was 76 percent in April. But it fits in neatly with Bush's approval rating, which is down to 50 percent. And then there's the presidential race to come. The poll showed Clark and Kerry slightly ahead of Bush; Dean, Gephardt and Lieberman slightly behind.
It also fits in neatly with the reaction to the $87 billion price tag no one had thought to mention before. Remember when they were saying that Iraqi oil would pay for this? Remember Iraqi oil?
And even the governing council in Iraq - hand-picked by the Bush administration - is growing restive and lobbying for a greater role in the country's affairs.
I've been reading the complaints about the coverage of postwar Iraq being unduly bleak, as if the media were somehow responsible for the continued guerilla attacks and for the complaints about the slow rebuilding of services.
Simply by going to the United Nations, Bush admitted the obvious, that all was not going as planned in Iraq.
He just couldn't find it in him to actually say so. - Source
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Sun Tzu Files 
and 
indicate whether the poll numbers are up or down from the previous poll. Incumbents are in italics. (prior results in '()')