Via Body and Soul last week, I learned about about What She Said - an all-female blogger roll (addressing the widespread perception that there aren't many female bloggers). If you're newly visiting from the Left At The Altar profile there, welcome and thanks for your interest! And if you haven't visited What She Said, do check it out.

Debatable --
I caught NPR's "Fresh Air" this afternoon as I was driving back from class, and the substitute host was talking with James Fallows, who analyzed Bush and Kerry's debate styles for a recent feature in the Atlantic Monthly. He played some audio clips, contrasting the Bush of 1994 -- speaking (for him) rather fluently and with fairly complex, well-formed thoughts and words -- with the Bush of today. (He also played a segment of a Kerry debate.) The interviewer asked about the obvious differences in 1994 Bush and 2004 Bush, and Fallows offered up two possibilities: first, that Bush speaks the way he does now on purpose, trying to sound "tough" and "direct," and second, that Bush is more comfortable in his encounters with clearly friendly audiences, and in less formal settings. (Hmm, nothing about the presenile dementia hypothesis.) Today, Krugman and Marshall both remind us where the outcome of any presidential debate is ultimately decided: in the post-debate cable and network spinfest, where the really important things like body language are analyzed.

Bush's hometown paper endorses... Kerry! --
Daily Kos has the story and excerpts.

More (and more) on the Republican "Block the vote!" movement -- Here are parts 3 and 4 of Moving Ideas' series on manipulating elections. The first two parts, which I linked to a little while back, are available there, too.

As long as we're on the subject of Bush Democracy --
Here is a story about the administration's plans to buy off the Iraqi elections.

If you keep a lot of antacid on hand --
You might want to stick this electoral vote count site on your "favorite list." Take note (take heart?) of this observation: "It is becoming increasingly clear that the pollsters are producing the results that the people paying the bills want to hear. Even pollsters who were once thought to be above suspicion are now suspicious. Gallup, for example, is now normalizing its samples to include 40% Republicans, even though the 2000 exit polls showed the partisan distribution to be 39% Democratic, 35% Republican." (Which reminds me, did you see MoveOn.Org's ad in today's NYT paper edition?

While Bush was failing to find oil in Texas --
John Kerry was spending his first term "in the Senate investigating the Iran-Contra drug scandal in Nicaragua, the role of the Panamanian government in drug trafficking and the corrupt activities at the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI)." Read more here and here.

Fewer choices, higher costs --
Um, was this how BushCo advertised the Medicare reforms?

"Seeds represent entire civilizations, miniaturized to fit into the palm of our hand" --
A food historian tries to preserve heritage seeds against agribusiness' monoculture mentality... The article reminds me of a cool preservation group I knew of when I lived in Tucson, Native Seeds/SEARCH; they're still at it.