John Kerry today promised that if he is elected President, there will be no draft. He also said that Bush may reinstate the draft.

If you're young, and you don't want to be forced into military service, get out there and vote. Here's a new site, MustVote.com, that is giving away music from Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Bright Eyes, The Sun, Lisa Loeb and others to those who register to vote through its site.

According to a new report:

Millions of U.S. citizens, including a disproportionate number of black voters, will be blocked from voting in the Nov. 2 presidential election because of legal barriers, faulty procedures or dirty tricks, according to civil rights and legal experts.

From an earlier report on the 2000 election (same link):

The commission, in a report earlier this year, said that in Florida, where President Bush won a bitterly disputed election in 2000 by 537 votes, black voters had been 10 times more likely than non-black voters to have their ballots rejected and were often prevented from voting because their names were erroneously purged from registration lists.

Today, a new report has been released on the suppression of student votes. From the Project Democracy Press Release, received by e-mail:

John Kerry is sticking with his new attack mode on President Bush's failures in Iraq. At a press conference in Florida today, he lobbed criticism after criticism. As Electablog says, his remarks can best be summed up with this line:

The management of this war has been both arrogant, lacking in candor and incompetent. And we need to change the course."

Another good line: "He [Bush] does not have the credibility to lead the world."

On getting rid of Saddam:

Moving Ideas has a new article in their voter protection series, Disenfranchised in America, highlighting segments of our society that regularly are denied the right to vote: students, DC citizens, felons, and non-citizens.

There are 4.7 million adults in the U.S. who are denied the right to vote because of a felony conviction. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia deny felons the right to vote at some point, while 7 states permanently disenfranchise felons and 7 more permanently disenfranchise certain felons. Only Maine and Vermont allow felons to vote even while they are in prison. The “war on drugs” has led to a large population of African Americans being convicted of felony drug crimes resulting in 1.4 million, or 1 in 13, African Americans who are disenfranchised due to felony convictions. Even in those states where rights are restored to felons who have paid their debt to society, election officials and parole officers often misinform felons about their rights. There are a total of 9 million ex-felons, many whom do not know they have the right to vote.

Right to Vote is a campaign to restore the right to vote to felons. Their mission:

Say hello to the Election Toolbar:

Vote121 is an innovative new browser toolbar that brings all the latest campaign news and opinion straight to your browser. Without interrupting your normal browsing routine, you can learn more about the presidential candidates, get an active countdown to the election and an up-to-the-minute display of the projected election results – and it’s all free! Go here to install the The Vote121 Toolbar

What will you get?

John Kerry spoke at NYU Monday. Here's the text of his speech. Here's a snippet:

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.

The President has said that he “miscalculated” in Iraq and that it was a “catastrophic success.” In fact, the President has made a series of catastrophic decisions … from the beginning … in Iraq. At every fork in the road, he has taken the wrong turn and led us in the wrong direction.

As Kerry says, this election is about choices. You have one. Please exercise it on November 2. Register now. Get an absentee ballot. And tell a friend.

The Rocky Mountain News reports:

Fifty-three percent of the 500 registered Colorado voters surveyed picked Salazar as their preferred Senate candidate against 42 percent who said Coors. Only 4 percent of the voters said they were undecided. The poll showed Salazar winning the Hispanic and rural vote -- critical voters blocs in the upcoming election.

Colorado Luis reports on how critical Colorado Springs will be fore the presidential election --and how Colorado Springs for Kerry could make a difference.

They're looking for volunteers to help spread the word in that part of the state, which perhaps more than anywhere else could use a good dose of the message that Bush is not guaranteed victory in Colorado this November. You could end up helping to swing one of the most important battlegrounds in the country to Kerry.

Some more good news...Colorado's Democratic congressional candidates have raised twice as much money as their Republican opponents. It's due to a new kind of campaign financing called "small donor committees." Republicans are not amused.

Dan Rather flew to Texas over the weekend to meet with Bill Burkett, and I assume, to convince him to allow CBS to name him as its source. On CBS Evening News tonight, Rather will air his interview of Burkett. The show doesn't air in Denver for another 45 minutes, so East Coasters, let us know what you thought. The rest of us will chime in later.

Update: Burkett said he did not forge or fake the documents. He only misled CBS about the source after he felt pressured. He said he thought CBS was going to authenticate them. Rather acknowledged that this is what CBS should have done but didn't. He also said that initially, it was CBS who contacted Burkett, and not the other way around.

Immediate reaction: Burkett was not particularly credible. He's got to realize he's a sitting duck for a lawsuit from Killian's family....and perhaps a criminal charge if he admits forging the documents. It should be also noted that no one at CBS, or Burkett, has said the documents were faked or forged. Only that they cannot be authenticated.

The Bush and Kerry campaigns have now signed a formal agreement as to the three Presidential debates and one Vice-Presidential debate.

The commission scheduled the first 90-minute debate on Sept. 30 in Coral Gables, Florida, with a second one set for Oct. 8 in St. Louis and a third on Oct. 13 in Tempe, Arizona. A vice presidential debate between incumbent Dick Cheney and Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, was set for Oct. 5 in Cleveland.

The agreement is a concession from Bush, who only wanted to engage in two debates. The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates wanted three, which Kerry agreed to right away.

A few weeks ago, I applied for press credentials for TalkLeft to cover the final debate in Tempe. No word yet. There's a strange twist to the application however....it asks for the race of the applicant. A response is not required to submit the application, but still, what's that all about?

Following up on our most recent post on Rathergate and CBS's planned statement, here are the details:

CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, the reporter of the original story, apologized. In a statement, CBS said former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett "has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents" and "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source." The network did not say the memoranda — purportedly written by one of Mr. Bush's National Guard commanders — were forgeries. But the network did say it could not authenticate the documents and that it should not have reported them.

"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," said the statement by CBS News President Andrew Heyward. "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."

Update: Mary at Left Coaster thinks Karl Rove is behind the leaked Killian memos. [link via Skippy.]

News sources report that CBS will concede it was misled on the Bush National Guard Record memos. The network is trying to get their source for the memos to come foward. Assuming CBS was misled, it's time to move on to the real story here: Bush's National Guard Service.

Two articles delve into Mr. Bush's past service. The first is a New York Times article written by Sara Rimer and other reporters. Military Service: Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time. The second is by Eric Boehlert in todays' Salon Magazine, Bush in the National Guard: A Primer. From Boehlert:

What is also already known is that in the spring of 1972, with 770 days left of required duty, Bush unilaterally decided that he was done fulfilling his military obligation. Also in the spring of 1972, Bush refused to take a physical and quickly cleared out of his Guard base in Houston, heading off to work on the Senate campaign of Winton "Red" Blount in Alabama. Referring to that period, one of Bush's Guard flying buddies remarked to USA Today in 2002, "It was an irrational time in his life."

It may have been an irrational time for him, but Bush managed to focus intently on not serving in the Guard in any significant capacity again. His public records paint a portrait of a Guardsman who, with the cooperation of his Texas Air National Guard superiors, simply flouted regulation after regulation, indifferent to his signed obligation to serve.

Is anyone discussing that the forged Niger-Iraq documents relied upon by the Bush Administration as a grounds for going to war were full of flaws??

Which documents were more important in the grand scheme of things? Clearly, Niger.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. -- President Bush's justification for killing four thousand Iraqi civilians: a fake document

Nonetheless, things don't look good though for CBS. Whose heads do you think will roll? Mary Mapes? Rather? CBS President Andrew Heyward? They must be deep into crisis control talks...who do you think is advising them?

Update: David Neiwert of Orcinus points out no one has actually determined the CBS documents to be fakes. Check this out, and see if you can tell which was typed on a 1972 IBM selectric and which in MS Word?