Interesting factoid illustrating national priorities at work. Stephen Flynn, author of America the Vulnerable:

We are spending more every three to four days in the war in Iraq than we’ve spent for the last three years in federal grant monies to our 361 commercial seaports and that kind of asymmetry between about three cents on the dollar for defense versus offense I argue doesn’t make much sense when our enemies are not going to take us on, on the traditional force to force.
They’re coming after the non-military elements of our power, the things that underpin our power, our economy and our civil society. That is something that we’re still struggling post 9/11 to come to grips with.

But hey, if Al Qaeda forms an armored column and stages an assault on our Baghdad schools, we’ll be ready.

Never mind this, we’re turning the corner!

Layoffs in the United States occurred at the second-fastest rate on record during the first three years of the Bush administration, a government report has found.
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In the latest survey of how frequently workers are permanently dismissed from their jobs, the layoff rate reached 8.7 percent of all adult jobholders, or 11.4 million men and women age 20 or older. That is nearly equal to the 9 percent rate for the 1981-83 period, which included the steepest contraction in the American economy since the Depression.
. . .
In the latest survey, 56.9 percent of those who said they had been re-employed also said they were earning less in their new jobs than in their old ones. That compared with 46.6 percent in 1991-93, a similar period of recession followed by weak recovery, and 42.2 percent in 1997-99, a boom period.

Now, if we can only get rid of the “death tax” in 2011, all our economic problems will be over.

A flight is sent back to its departing airport and a 60-year-old Japanese man is hauled away in handcuffs after he copied the words “suicide bomb” from a newspaper he was reading.
Just another daily skirmish in the war on error.

The news channels have spend much more time offering mere speculation in the past 24 hours concerning the presumed murder of a Utah woman than they have spend covering the fire which killed over 300 people in Paraguay.

Nice to see the media finally zeroing in on some real issues in the campaign.
Once again, I’m with Kerry on this one. But I’d be willing to explore Bush’s side of the argument if I was suitably equipped.