The U.S. Department of Fear amazingly issued a new warning of terror attacks at an awkward time. Like Howard Dean mentioned a month ago Terror Warnings seem to be a useful political distraction. Every time their seems to be bad news for the President out comes Tom Ridge from behind the curtain to scare the shit out of the common man.

September 7, 2004:

‘U.S. death toll in Iraq passes 1,000 mark’ … 4:27 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004

‘Ridge: Terrorists hope to disrupt election’ … 4:40 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004

From Talking Points Memo.

Today marks the 1000th US Casualty in Iraq and also today the Vice President said vote Bush or look out for more TERROR:

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

So what did we learn today:

I guess the positive is that VP Dick didn’t eat any children. I guess the convention is going good so far, besides the whole flip-flop hand jester (what the fuck was that?) Zell Miller seemed like a raging lunatic and Dich Cheney didn’t seem any more human (even though he mentioned his grand children twice).

VP Dick Cheney made landfall on Ellis Island today in route to the RNC. As you can tell by the photograph there was a good size crowd for his speech which desperately invoked the memory of 9/11. Side note: I suspect we will be hearing a lot about 9/11 this week and how if it wasn’t for the president we would have surrendered to the terrorists, I’d just like to throw this out there FDR never mentioned Pearl Harbor in his 1944 Acceptance Speech (from Mathew Gross). This goes back to the whole “War President” thing. If you’re a War President and you’re at War do you have to keep telling everyone you’re a War President?

At the same time the VP was giving his rousing speech at Ellis Island a lot more people had something bigger to say. This images is from the small uneventful protests of nearly half a Million.

A couple more things
1. Will we hear the name Osama Bin Ladin this week? He is what this is still all about right?
2. This is what Bush said about the war on terror yesterday:

When asked “Can we win?” the war on terror, Bush said, “I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world.
More here from the AP.

One More Thing:
This is My 100th Post…check out the Archive.