To shouts of “Death to America,” Iran’s parliament unanimously approved the outline of a bill Sunday that would require the government to resume uranium enrichment, legislation likely to deepen an international dispute over Iran’s nuclear activities.

Still, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian told The Associated Press there was a 50 percent chance of a nuclear compromise with European nations.

He ruled out an indefinite suspension of key enrichment activities - a concession that European negotiators have sought - but suggested Iran would consider calling a halt to building more nuclear facilities.- AP

John Kerry on how to deal with Iran as recently as the debates?

“I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes.”

Iran has seen fit to provide the American electorate the final and most urgent reason for not allowing John F. Kerry anywhere near the Oval Office.

(hat-tip: Blogs of War)

As I am sure you have noticed, I have only posted twice in the last two days. This is part of me taking a deeep breath and taking a few steps back from this election.

The was an “incident” at work Thursday morning invloving one member of the Michael Moore crowd that I happen to work with. Needless to say, after seeing a copy of FahrenHype 9/11 on my desk that was his cue to begin a verbal attack on me and my positions.

Needless to say, I blasted his ass with facts and all he could come back with was “Haliburton!” and “Bush lied!”. Although I know I won the argument on the facts - it was an argument and a rather heated on at that - and I decided then I needed to step back a bit.

Posting will be light the rest if the weekend as brassguy and I celebrate his birthday with friends today and have dinner with his parents tomorrow. I advise you all to go out and do some normal things too, away from the computer, away from the internet, away from the TV, and away from this election - if only for a few hours. It will all be here when you get back and after taking a breather myself, so will I.

Full-time blogging starts back on Monday with non-stop election day coverage on Tuesday.

Thanks for understanding and thanks for your loyal reading everyday (you know who you are).

This is what aired on Fox News during O’Reilly tonight. Click to play.

Gee, imagine that. A U.N. agency screwing up.

Oct. 27, 2004 — Iraqi officials may be overstating the amount of explosives reported to have disappeared from a weapons depot, documents obtained by ABC News show.

The Iraqi interim government has told the United States and international weapons inspectors that 377 tons of conventional explosives are missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation, which was supposed to be under U.S. military control.

But International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported.

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on “declaration” from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.

But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency’s inspectors recorded that just over three tons of RDX were stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the United States launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in March 2003.

It also looks like CBS is right smack in the middle of this, collaborating with the NY Times and proving their true intent with this story by pushing the Times to launch it on Sunday night - depriving the public of the truth before choosing their President.

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.
CBS’s Jeff Fager had asked the paper to delay publication one week.

The paper’s front-page story, charging that 377 tons of powerful bomb-making material “vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year,” hit the presidential campaign with explosive force, as Sen. John F. Kerry seized on it for three straight days and President Bush accused Kerry yesterday of making “wild charges.”

The article has also sparked criticism of the two news organizations from some conservatives, who accuse the Times and CBS of orchestrating a late hit against Bush.

Keller said in an interview yesterday that campaigns “attack the messenger” when they do not like the message. “Beating up on the so-called elite media has a nice populist ring to it, and some of it is calculated,” he said. Bush campaign officials thought that “if they barked at us, we would back off. . . . We’ve vetted this every way we can, and we continue to do that.”

Keller said “60 Minutes” executives asked the newspaper to hold the story until this Sunday so they could report it the same day, and “we said we weren’t comfortable doing that because it wouldn’t give the White House a fair opportunity to respond.”

Fager dismissed criticism of the timing as “absurd,” saying “it was a breaking news story and a significant one. It’s impossible to manage these things.” He said “60 Minutes” and correspondent Ed Bradley had planned to break the story this Sunday — two days before the election — only because “the story came to us on relatively short notice” and that was the next available show. The program has a separate staff from “60 Minutes Wednesday.”

Fager said it was “incredibly unfair” to link the ammunition story to the earlier “60 Minutes Wednesday” report on documents about Bush’s National Guard service, which CBS has admitted it cannot authenticate.

And of course, by now you have likely seen the Washinton Times piece that may explain where those 3 tons of explosives actually went - along with quite a few other things. Hmm…is it a stretch to say that some WMD may have made it across the border to Syria with Russia’s help?

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein’s weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, “almost certainly” removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

I’d say that whole explosive things blew right up in the collective face of the Democratic Party and her allies in the MSM. I just hope it is enough to sink them and Kerry.

Hugh Hewitt gives it to Kerry but good in his Weekly Standard article, The Commander-in-Chief

JOHN KERRY now closes his presidential campaign exactly as he opened his political life: Attacking the United States military.

Thirty-three years ago, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he indicted the soldiers of Vietnam as war criminals, the heirs of Genghis Khan.

This week he embraced an already discredited account of missing munitions to attack the reputation of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne. Make no mistake, that is exactly what Kerry is doing when he asserts that deadly weapons went unsecured and unreported as these two divisions rushed to liberate Baghdad. And not just these divisions, but every officer and soldier who had a hand in drawing up the war plan. If the negligence that Kerry charges the military with was real, additional troops would not have made a difference. The initial search would still have been conducted by the 3rd I.D. and the site pronounced clear. The 101st would still have spent 24 hours in the munitions complex before moving on. Kerry cannot avoid owning the latest of many slanders he has launched at the military as a means of wounding the president.

It is a must read.

The Democrats in Florida are suffering from premature litigation - hmm…If Democrats have worse sex than Republicans, I wonder what other “premature” conditions they are suffering from.

Democrats in Florida already are pursuing nine election-related lawsuits, accusing state election officials of conspiring to disenfranchise minority voters.

Led by the Florida Democratic Party, the People for the American Way, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the AFL-CIO, the lawsuits target, among others, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush’s brother.

The suits say Republican officials refused to count provisional ballots, improperly disqualified incomplete voter registrations, established overly restrictive rules to disproportionately hurt minority voters and actively sought to disenfranchise blacks…

One suit challenges a ruling by [Florida Secretary of State] Mrs. Hood to throw out forms on which new voters had failed to check a box indicating whether they were U.S. citizens, and another argued that although only 17 percent of the voters in Broward County and 20 percent in Miami-Dade County were black, more than a third of the voter-registration forms that were determined to be incomplete and invalid in both counties involved black voters.

Gee, I guess we’re not supposed to be able to verify that people voting in our elections are U.S. CITIZENS!

I also find it funny and extremely sad that Democrats, who constantly accuse Republicans of racism, more or less come right on out and say “more blacks are convicted felons and the ones that aren’t felons are too dumb to follow the rules”.

What’s more sad? Blacks allowing them to do it.

BTW, posting will be pretty light today barring any big news. Blogger.com seems to be having issues and I have a computer to rebuild this afternoon.

She’s right.

On the basis of their own insane, violent behavior toward Republicans, Democrats demand to be put in the White House – so the violence will stop. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before the Kerry campaign announces that anti-Bush insurgents control most of the Bush-Cheney 2004 headquarters, and that the sooner the U.S. pulls out of those quagmires the better.

If only we could get Democrats to show a little of that manly anger toward the terrorists, maybe Americans would be able to trust them with national security

He should have said this when he announced support for the FMA. He should have made it clear from the start, in no uncertain terms, that the only reason he felt the FMA was necessary was because of activist judges. Well, better late than never.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 - President Bush said in an interview this past weekend that he disagreed with the Republican Party platform opposing civil unions of same-sex couples and that the matter should be left up to the states.

Mr. Bush has previously said that states should be permitted to allow same-sex unions, even though White House officials have said he would not have endorsed such unions as governor of Texas. But Mr. Bush has never before made a point of so publicly disagreeing with his party’s official position on the issue.

In an interview on Sunday with Charles Gibson, an anchor of “Good Morning America” on ABC, Mr. Bush said, “I don’t think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that’s what a state chooses to do so.” ABC, which broadcast part of the interview on Monday, is to broadcast the part about civil unions on Tuesday.

According to an ABC transcript, Mr. Gibson then noted to Mr. Bush that the Republican Party platform opposed civil unions.

“Well, I don’t,” Mr. Bush replied.

He added: “I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights. And I strongly believe that marriage ought to be defined as between a union between a man and a woman. Now, having said that, states ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people to be able to have rights like others.”

Mr. Gibson then asked, “So the Republican platform on that point, as far as you’re concerned, is wrong?”

“Right,” Mr. Bush replied.

Mr. Bush announced in February that he supported an amendment to the Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage, and said at the time that the union of a man and a woman was “the most fundamental institution of civilization.” He acted under enormous pressure from his conservative supporters, who had lobbied the White House to have the president speak out in an election year on a matter of vital importance to them.

But Mr. Bush also said at the time that states should be permitted to have same-sex civil unions if they chose.

Mr. Bush has sought to walk a careful line between pleasing conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage and not alienating more moderate voters who might see bigotry in his views. Mr. Bush’s support for civil unions and his opposition to his party on the issue is in part an effort to reach out to swing voters, whom he needs to win on Nov. 2.

NY Times

Gee, that was fast.

I don’t have the strength to feign surprise.