Various news outlets are reporting this  story, about Iran taking their nuclear development underground (literally):

Well, it's time to come clean. I have been outed as a troll. So I'll confess, and will tell my whole story here.

In early 2003, Karl Rove called me to infiltrate "this blog thing that seemed to rally liberals". Well, when Karl calls, I oblige. So, I started reading a few of them. I mostly stuck with one called "DailyKos". It was a bit primitive, but I was told that the software for it (MovableType) wasn't so hot. I laid low, and didn't post many comments at first. Aside from DailyKos, I also infiltrated the Dean blog, where I successfully posed as a Dutch reader called "Frank in A'dam".

sandra1113 posted this on the open thread. I thought it was very important, so I decided to make a diary out of it. Credit goes to sandra1113 and the folks at georgewbush.org, not me..

This is an email from someone at the Bush campaign asking for updated district information so that they can challenge voters.

Note that the email is Cc-ed to someone at ohio.gov. Are state officials cooperating with an effort obviously aimed at voter suppression?

On Tuesday night, Plutonium Page and I went to the Kerry rally in Albuquerque, NM.

The crowd was big (18,000 according to NM governor Bill Richardson), excited and pumped.

Read on for a more detailed report..

[Yes, one-line diary checks are still broken, so I am adding a filler line once more!]

Today, Plutonium Page and I went door to door for the Kerry campaign in Albuquerque, NM.

Our job was to talk to registered Democrats and undecided, to determine whether they were going to vote.

[I am adding this line because the one-line diary check on dKos is broken, but, read on below].

In the Volkskrant, one of the main Dutch national newspapers, there's a frontpage column which rotates between a few of the paper's writers.

After the debate, Jan Mulder wrote the following frontpage column, which I translated because it's pretty good (and funny):

Things are just wonderful and dandy in Iraq, aren't they? Today,30-40 people died because of bombings in Baghdad, and the oil-producing provinces are considering breaking away from Iraq:

The Dutch news analysis show NOVA is focusing on the  US presidential elections, and will be doing a lot of reporting on the race in the coming weeks.

Today, they had the results of a poll among Dutch people on which candidate they supported. I have no details on the poll, but the results mentioned were:

I noticed a link to Moby's  online journal, from September 1st, in which he gives some thoughts on the campaign. Moby, an early Kerry supporter, suggests that Democrats better learn to understand how a lot of voters think.

I've been wondering what the point of the terror alerts is, or even the whole color code system. Will it really help?

Reading this makes me wonder: what kind of poetry would Bush write? It probably sounds something like this:

I sit here alone
misunderestimated
I want my daddy.

Ok, it looks like Kerry will be the nominee. He's not my favorite candidate, but I want him to win; Bush has to go. But how can he paint a contrast between him and Bush?

It seems that Bush' reelection strategy is taking shape. A blog commenter over at the Dean blog heard on CBS radio that Bush was running on "optimistic compassionate conservatism". In other words: "I'm just a compassionate guy trying to do his job in difficult times of war, and those mean, pessimistic Democrats are unfairly criticizing me".

That sounds probable, since there recently has been an increased use of the word "pessimistic" by Republican pundits and pollsters to describe Democrats.

It also means that they will be rely on short-term memory, since Bush' record is all but "compassionate". They will also rely on the fact that several far-reaching laws were passed "stealthily", i.e. in a nightly session, shortly before a holiday, or buried somewhere in another law.

It's important that the voters are reminded of what Bush' record actually is. The issue for the Democrats is that they must do this without sounding "pessimistic", because uninformed voters will fall for that trick. His record should constantly be compared to the promises he made as a "compassionate conservative" during the 2000 campaign.

One strategy that might work is to remind voter of Bush' actual record by word of mouth, and through 3rd party (527) ads, shielding the nominee him/herself from the "pessimistic" meme.

There are several other things that the voters need to be reminded of, like the fact that Saddam had no connection to 9/11, but that's for another diary entry.