I urge other people to do similarly. It is entirely possible that Ralph Nader can be blamed, and indeed he has been, for letting George Bush get elected. It’s generally agreed that if he hadn’t run, the people who voted for him would have voted for Al Gore, and if you look at the numbers from the 2000 election, those voters, as few as they may be, would have swung the election to Gore. Had I been eligible at the time, I will admit that I probably would have voted for Nader, but now I know better. Never again can anyone say that their vote doesn’t count.

But, as I said, I intend to vote for John Kerry in November, and it seems like a majority of Americans are starting to go that way as well. Polls are indicating that Kerry is leading Bush nationwide by several points, which makes me very happy. The Bush campaign is already beginning to fight back, and has released several attack ads that peddle some mistruths and just plain lies. The most-touted one is the report that Kerry doesn’t support the intelligence community because he introduced a bill in 1995 to cut spending by $1.5 billion which he couldn’t convince any other Senators to sponsor. It seems like a good argument to make until you actually look at the circumstances and realize that it was a good suggestion to make, and that he wasn’t the only one to introduce a bill on the issue.

The legislation wouldn’t have cut any programs. At all. Not one single dollar that would have been spent was taken back. Kerry’s bill, like the one proposed by Bob Kerrey and Arlen Specter (the latter is a Republican, you can note), would have reduced the budget of the National Reconnaissance Office, which had accumulated over $1 billion in unspent funds over several years, along with several other offices in a similar situation. What was the total of all these unspent funds? Why, it was approximately $1.5 billion! The bills introduced at that time were efforts to spend this money that had been allocated and never used. Seems like a wise move to me.