I happened to catch Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" on KQED Saturday night. A wonderfully adapted production, I thought, right up until it veered strangely into a romantic comedy at the end. That was a little jarring. It left the unshakeable impression that Henry had invaded France and sacrificed tens of thousands (of their men, not his) to win Catherine's hand in matrimony. Did I miss something? Or, more likely, forget something about the play? It is sitting on my bookshelf, but I dare not read anything that hasn't been assigned by one of my professors this semester. (I'm not even doing terribly well at that...)

I survived my first midterm in 15+ years, but couldn't summon enough brain cells to organize my various links and post them this weekend. So, apologies for the more jumbled than usual hodge-podge that follows. I've been saving stuff up since Friday.

Without further ado ---

• I know we're all very busy right now, but a little something to think about after November 2? We're using up the planet. Really.
  
  
• I always worry when Nicholas Kristof gets "off topic" and writes about anything other than Africa, because he's such a weeny when he gets on his "liberals-and-conservatives-could-be-friends-if-liberals-would-just-let-conservatives-have-their-way" kick, but he does a decent job discussing biblical cherry-picking.
  
  
• Are you in or around Ohio on November 2? Can you vote early and then help get people to and in and out of the polls? Republicans are paying thousands of recruits $100 to intimidate newly registered voters at the polls. Dems are trying to counter the ploy. Oh, and in Florida, unidentified "partisans" are knocking on doors (of low-income, minority and elderly residents... hmmm...), announcing that they are from the Elections office, and offering to hand deliver the resident's absentee ballot for them.
  
  
• State media conglomerate Sinclair backed down and showed what was apparently a relatively balanced treatment of the anti-Kerry documentary. The power of consumer persuasion! They lost many advertising dollars, but Mark Hyman has probably guaranteed a nice appointment for himself should Bush manage to return to the White House.
  
  
• Here's a great fact sheet to print out and leave in strategic locations.
  
  
• I wanted to link to this when I posted about the US finally seizing Zarqawi's financial assets, but I couldn't find the link. Kevin Drum put it up again, though, noting that it's worth remembering from time to time: the US could have taken out Zarqawi in June 2002, but the administration chose not to, fearing it would undermine its case for attacking Iraq.
  
  
• Another one bites the dust? Scott McConnell tells The American
  Conservative "Kerry's the One:"

  Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations.
  
  The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal - Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it - and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

• The Washington Post attempts to measure progress in the War On Terror:

  As the war on terrorism enters its fourth year, its results are sufficiently diffuse -- and obscured in secrecy -- to resist easy measure.
  
  Interpretations of the public record are also polarized by the claims and counterclaims of the presidential campaign. Bush has staked his reelection on an argument that defense of the U.S. homeland requires unyielding resolve to take the fight to the terrorists. His opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), portrays the Bush strategy as based on false assumptions and poor choices, particularly when it came to Iraq.
  
  The contention that the Iraq invasion was an unwise diversion in confronting terrorism has been central to Kerry's critique of Bush's performance. But this account -- drawn largely from interviews with those who have helped manage Bush's offensive -- shows how the debate over that question has echoed within the ranks of the administration as well, even among those who support much of the president's agenda...

  Now, this wouldn't have anything to do with an upcoming US election, would it? --

  Two months ago, a team of soldiers from a highly classified special operations squadron arrived in the southeastern mountains of Afghanistan, along the Pakistani border. They were back to hunt bin Laden, many of them after a two-year gap...

  Bush told us he eliminated Al Qaeda, but --

  Early this year, the CIA's then-station chief in Kabul reported a resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda forces in three border provinces.

  And then Bush says Kerry doesn't understand the terrorist threat? --

  Jihadists "metastasized into a lot of little cancers in a lot of different countries," Gordon said recently.
  
  They formed "groups, operating under the terms of a movement, who don't have to rely on al Qaeda itself for funding, for training or for authority. [They operate] at a level that doesn't require as many people, doesn't require them to be as well-trained, and it's going to be damned hard to get in front of that."

  Finally, remember how Ron Suskind quoted Rev. Jim Wallis telling Bush about terrorists, "Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism" ? --

  The formal White House strategy for combating terrorism says that the United States will "use every instrument of national power -- diplomatic, economic, law enforcement, financial, information, intelligence, and military" to triumph. A central criticism in the Sept. 11 commission's report is that the efforts at nonmilitary suasion overseas lack funding, energy from top leaders and what the commission's executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, called "gravitas."
  
  Most officials interviewed said Bush has not devised an answer to a problem then-CIA Director George J. Tenet identified publicly on Feb. 11, 2003 -- "the numbers of societies and peoples excluded from the benefits of an expanding global economy, where the daily lot is hunger, disease, and displacement -- and that produce large populations of disaffected youth who are prime recruits for our extremist foes."

• Two especially relevant Nonsequiturs, here and here!
  
  
• Now, about those elevated terror risk announcements the administration has been issuing since August... "Little Evidence of Qaeda Plot Time to Vote"
  
  
• Finally (at least until I catch up on today's news), I'm just curious -- Every single news segment I see of Bush at a campaign event seems to run the same part of his speech: that stupid "he can run, but he can't hide" line. They show it so often I'm starting to think they get paid for it. But my burning question is: does he actually use that line at every single event? Is it really such a crowd pleaser?